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pick up his papers on 17th Street. He would buy me a delicious donut and a Coke. We would sit on the curb and eat the donut and roll the papers. We would read the stories about the Korean War that began on June 25, 1950, and ended in July 1953. That’s really the age when I was obsessed with reading the news.
My sister, now called Beth, and I had the opportunity to live with our aunt, uncle, and cousin in Los Alamos, New Mexico for a year. I was a junior at Los Alamos High School. What an interesting year that was; learning about how the laboratory developing the atomic bomb was kept secret from the town’s residents and how the families managed. One interesting tidbit was when the mothers wanted to order from a Sears catalog; the company refused to send 30 Sears & Roebuck catalogs to one Post Office Box in Santa Fe!
Then there was the unforgettable Vietnam War, in what is considered the Cold War era. This was a war between North Vietnam and South Vietnam—a conflict in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. It was known as the Second Indochina War. In Vietnam, it was known as the “Resistance War Against America.” It began November 1, 1955, and ended with the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975. I was a sophomore at James Madison College (JMU now). This was a time when you can remember where you were and what you were doing while this war was raging. This was a time when some of the students had family or friends in this conflict.
COVID-19
There was one day in my very long life that I shall never forget. It was Sunday, March 1, 2020. On every information medium there was the acceleration of news about
a virus outbreak that was
moving around the globe beginning in Wuhan, China in 2019.
The shock of the numbers accumulating each hour on the hour, I decided to keep a log each day since March 1, 2020—the time of
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