Eulogy for a soldier of freedom, October 18, 2014
| Autor: | Stewart Burns |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2015 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | Leadership and the Humanities. 3:5-9 |
| ISSN: | 2050-8735 2050-8727 |
| DOI: | 10.4337/lath.2015.01.01 |
| Popis: | This chapel has special meaning for me not only because my father was required to attend weekly chapel service here when he was a Williams undergrad in the late 1930s, and I have worshipped here many times myself, but when I was 12 years old, I heard Dr Martin Luther King Jr preach from this pulpit, the only time I met the man whose life and leadership I became immersed in, as my father had become immersed in the life and leadership of Franklin D. Roosevelt in a different time. My formal education began when I was four, when my father took me to my first day of kindergarten at the old Grant School. When he left, he said to me, ‘kindergarten means a child’s garden.’ As both he and my mother grew luscious gardens at our home at the bottom of Park Street, a child’s garden was where I wanted to be. On my sixth birthday my father gave me a wooden desk he had built for me over many weeks, hiding away in an attic room in the evenings. I guess I had spent too much time, when he was away, typing stories on his Royal electric typewriter in his study and borrowing desk supplies that I kept. He knew that I needed a desk of my own. My father always loved to tell the story of the evening in the 1950s when Senator John F. Kennedy came to our home on Park Street to fetch him for a campaign event they were sharing. Jim knew that his friend Jack Kennedy was always impatient and rushed. But he wanted his two little boys, my older brother David and me, to wave to the senator from our porch. When Kennedy’s limousine pulled into our driveway, Jim greeted him and asked if he would wave to us up on the porch. ‘Bring ’em on down!’ the senator called out. So David and I ran down the lawn in our pajamas to be greeted by the next president of the United States. Jim brought our family to visit Senator Kennedy and his wife in their home in Georgetown in the heady spring of 1960. Sitting next to him, he in his rocking chair, I asked him if he had any hobbies. He told me he loved to sail, but that he didn’t have much time for that anymore. My father’s life became entwined with John Kennedy’s, as did mine, in my childhood dreams. When Kennedy was running for re-election in 1958 he actively campaigned with and for my father, the Democratic candidate for Congress from this rock-solid Republican district – how times have changed! Years later Jim recalled that, already a prominent political scientist at Williams with his first volume biography of FDR published to great acclaim, finalist for a Pulitzer, and a best seller, he decided he wanted to become more of a political activist. And he wanted to put into practice his deep knowledge of political campaigns and electioneering. Leadership and the Humanities, Vol. 3 No. 1, 2015, pp. 5–9 |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
| Externí odkaz: |
|