PREFACE
It was the year in which I was rapidly moving from eleven to twelve years of age. Mrs.Corbett, my sixth-grade teacher, was astonished when I emerged victorious in our elementary school's sixth-grade history bee. My success meant that I was eligible to compete in a city-wide radio history contest, which would pit me against the sixth-grade winners from five other elementary schools. The prospect of being on Poplar Bluff's only radio station at the time made for even more anticipation on my part.
Mrs. Corbett was eager for a win for Kinyon Elementary School. Her enthusiasm, in fact, exceeded my own; and, consequently, she sequestered me for the next several weeks to pour over history books in Kinyon's small library, while my classmates continued to labor on in math, science and English. As I much preferred history to other subjects, my isolation in the library was not an unwelcome development.
Finally, the day of reckoning arrived. I nervously presented myself, along with five other sixth-grade winners, in the studios of radio station KWOC. To my history-saturated mind, the preliminary questions fired at us by announcer and moderator Jerry Higley seemed fairly undemanding, and my nerves quickly settled down.
Midway in the hour-long contest, however, the complexity of the questions began to increase. My heart sank when I saw a girl from Mark Twain Elementary, whom I thought was one of the brightest contestants, bow out on a question concerning John Quincy Adams' drafting of the Monroe Doctrine. Immediately following her departure, I was queried about President Theodore Roosevelt's role in the building of the Panama Canal and somehow uttered the correct answer. At that point, I began to sense the possibility of going the distance.
At the five-minute mark, it had come down to the representative of the sixth-graders of Williamson-Kennedy Elementary School and myself. Finally, as onlookers and the radio audience were caught up in the tenseness of the moment, the entire contest hinged on the person of John Rolfe and the cultivation of tobacco. My adversary drew a blank. There it was. The championship was mine for the taking.
Happily, from a trip into Arkansas, I recalled one of my father's employees there pulling from his shirt pocket a pack of cigarettes which carried the John Rolfe label. And that was all I needed to come up with the prize-winning answer. I had won and, in doing so, had fulfilled Mrs. Corbett's hope for a victory for good old Kinyon Elementary School!
With no little parental pride, my father came to the conclusion that I should be rewarded with a family trip that would expose me to various and sundry historical sites. Since our family's American origins lay in Virginia, he suggested a trek to the East Coast, with stopovers at Williamsburg and Richmond, as well as visits to battlefields which had been frequented by our Confederate ancestors. However, because during the previous summer a good friend's cousin from Texas had been visiting Poplar Bluff and could not desist from constantly extolling the praises of Travis, Bowie, Crockett, the Alamo and innumerable Texas Rangers, I interjected that perhaps we should travel instead to Texas and also see a bit of Mexico. My father acquiesced, and we began making plans to make tracks for the Lone Star State and the Republic of Mexico during my next Christmas vacation. Little did I know then that our trip would permanently alter my view of the world and of history in general.
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