Gifts Given

Letter #3 ….Pop had already had his heart broken when he lost his son Buddy in an airplane accident during World War II. I marveled at the picture of my Uncle Buddy in his Army uniform in their home in Etowah. …I have never seen a more handsome man. His face was some unnerving perfection with the dark eyes and hair of his Indian heritage, framing a perfect symmetry of such exquisite refinement. He would not age. No wrinkle would mar his perfection. No affliction would cloud his countenance. His youth is eternal. His joy ever undiminished. His magnetic presence the greatest pleasure memory can give. Buddy died training pilots in the state of Washington, far from home where his father’s heart would be broken, where Pop would soon latch onto his first grandchild born one year after Pearl Harbor. Maybe little Sid Jr.’s greatest accomplishment in a most triumphant life was to aid a father through a time of impenetrable grief. One, who was loved by everyone, had lost his greatest joy, and I hope found some solace in a small child’s discovery of the world. ….I was too small to remember anything of our first year in the new house, but I was told that it was at this time that I showed my propensity to damage myself. The story goes that in addition to mounds of dirt and three boys, there was a large dog, a collie or shepherd named King. In the racing about among the mounds and forest, I managed to execute a precise, if not elegant, half-gainer that produced a face-up landing on the stob of a tree. I’ve never heard the word stob except in the context of this story. My guess is that it’s the remains of a young tree, no thicker than a middle finger and certainly sticking up no higher than a middle finger might, if fully extended. I’m sure there was an instant when this landing took my breath away. The good news is the scream that followed. Looking at the sky now skewered by a stob made medical attention a likely next step. Having a wooden middle finger stuck in your back has a variety of consequences depending on its exact placement. This fact was made emphatically clear by the medical experts examining the now face-down Doug. “Squeeze my hand. Wiggle your toes.” Seems like a middle finger in your spine is even worse than a blood clot in your brain…. Thank God I’m lucky…if a touch self-destructive. Letter #24 ….Russia’s Sputnik was circling the globe and was sending its clear signal that we Americans now have some fierce competition. Little did the Soviet leaders know that their technological advance would eventually lead to their demise. Sure, my generation had to learn some “duck and cover” drills and avoid staring in the direction of a nuclear explosion, but the “beep” of Sputnik played into the American strategy that needed an enemy to assure our continuing economic surge. …The irony of Russia’s “surge into the forefront as starting their demise” was mirrored by the Civil Rights struggles in the South. The more vehement the outrage against the court-ordered integration, the clearer it became to the vast majority that the country could not tolerate, much less coexist with such bigotry. For Clinton, the attack of Reverend Paul Turner on December 4, 1956 after leading the 12 black students to Clinton High would bring the national media to our community to document and investigate the incident and its cause on Edward R. Murrow’s “See It Now.” In 1957, Governor Faubus of Arkansas positions himself in open defiance of the court, and Little Rock, Arkansas becomes the breaking news as bigots are caught on cameras bragging about their aim as they threw rocks at black families. And on October 5, 1958, a final clarification is added as Clinton High School is dynamited to the ground. Integration’s fiercest enemies had assured its eventual triumph. The two sides of this issue had a right and wrong that was as obvious to most Americans as being for or against Hitler…. We, the people, were fed up with the Southern intransigence. Maybe “freedom and equality for all” was going to finally get its due. Letter #12 It was on this trip, our first family vacation to Florida, (and as a 6-year-old, the first vacation I remember) that my Dad decided to take up golf. Eleanor’s sister, Aunt Tyke, had started playing the game and thought golf would give my Dad a new outlet to help focus his double vision and regain some of his physical prowess. I’m sure Tyke never imagined that Dad would decide while vacationing in Florida to take his family of five out for his first 18 holes of golf. The concept of going into the pro shop and asking how much it cost for the entire family to play 18 holes, and then discovering he was going to have to rent four sets of clubs in addition might give some pause. I’m sure the staggering cost and the obvious naïve audacity of this sun-burnt family wearing shorts and sandals made the clerk or assistant pro confident that this ill-prepared, out-of-place family would soon be heading toward the beach after a somewhat embarrassed exit when my Dad replied, “Fine.” My Dad loved it when someone thought they had stacked the deck against him. Backing down was only a tactic before surprise attack. So there we were, Sid and Eleanor with their newly rented clubs that they would have to carry for 18 holes in the mid-summer Florida heat and humidity, and I’m sure a men’s set was rented for the 5’5”, 12-year-old Sid Jr. and surely a child’s set for the 9-year-old Harry, both sets of sufficient weight to be beyond reasonable.….. It’s as if a family flew in on vacation, grabbed some gear and started walking from base camp toward the summit of Mt. Everest. Letter #38 My parents, Eleanor and Sidney, had weathered many storms by 1960. Twenty years of marriage had survived the War, the wreck, children and miscarriages, a complete reinvention of the human endocrine system, a first round of golf with three pre-teenage whiners, a town and school blown apart by integration, a lost election and suspected betrayal by friends, battles fought and won for others rewarded with at best amnesia and at worse callous ingratitude. Sid and Eleanor had each other and had proven they could weather those “slings and arrows” of misfortune told by “some writer man,” but as Emily Dickinson states, “the least Fan stirred by a friend’s Hand, Cools like the Rain.” Letter #24 The story of Oak Ridge is a humdinger. By 1939, it was known that splitting uranium atoms releases a humongous amount of energy. Einstein clarifies to President Roosevelt that the scientists around the world are now savvy to this process called fission and somebody’s going to harness this potential into a weapon. Seems like the Germans have their own form of “blitz” in 1939 and most everybody is paying attention. Roosevelt asked a Congressional committee where he might hide a massive outlay of cash for a building project and gets the answer, “Where in Tennessee do you want to build it?” December 7, 1941, the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor. A few months later, the principal at an Oliver Springs school gets a call from Senator McKellar of Tennessee that he should close school and send the kids home to tell their parents that they need to prepare to move from their homes. Soon thereafter, people received letters from the government telling them that they had only a few weeks to relocate their families…. …The community known in 1942 as the Clinton Engineering Works swelled to the size of 75,000. To keep the needed isolation, secrecy, and control, everyone was bused to and from work, giving the community the 6th largest bus transit system in the nation during World War II. Once the plans were online, they were using 13% of the entire United States electrical output. Inside the community, everyone had only a fragment of understanding of what was going on. Outside the community, hardly anyone knew it existed. Four years after World War II, the city of Oak Ridge first appeared o