A flight instructor's annoyance brings a gift

[Sailor Steve]

In my response I mentioned American Heritage. 'My Brush With History' is a section in which readers contribute stories of how they met history face-to-face. Al Capone, John F. Kennedy, Nikita Kruschev, Woodrow Wilson - all famous people of course meet the rest of us, and most of these stories tell of some common soldier, sailor or civilian meeting someone famous.

One of my favorites is anonymous, and your story made me think of it, so I had to go the their website and look through the archives until I found it. I was aided by the fact that I remember where I was when I read the story, so I could isolate the time frame pretty closely.

TWO HANDSHAKES AWAY


My mother loved parades and early on imbued me with a love of same. An incident at one sticks in my mind. I believe it was in 1926 or 1927. I can’t be sure as I was only a small boy then.

While standing on the curb in Newark, New Jersey, watching a Decoration Day parade pass by, I found myself near a group of seven or eight ancient Civil War veterans. I looked over their beards, their blue Grand Army of the Republic coats and broadbrimmed campaign hats, and I wished I could grow a beard like one of theirs. One old soldier called, “Sonny, come over here,” and “Sonny” obediently did. He said, “Shake my hand,” and I did. “Now,” he said, “you’re only two handshakes from the Revolution.” When he was about my age, six or seven, he had shaken hands with a veteran of that war.

I fully intend someday to pass on this membership in an exclusive club to another young hand. He’ll be three shakes from the great event. We certainly are a young country.

—John Clark Alberts, Lt. CoL, U.S. Air Force (Ret.), lives in North Barrington, Illinois.

American Heritage, October 1996
http://www.americanheritage.com/arti...996_6_34.shtml