Cakes and Ale

In my dream, I am in an Air Force dormitory room surveying my clutter. My clothing is strewn around the floor and black socks and white boxers tumble out dresser drawers. I am anxious because this is the day I will be discharged from the Air Force and I need to have the room cleared for inspection. Vaguely, I know I have to be wearing my blue uniform to be discharged but I don’t see it in the closet.

Sometimes, in my dream, I am searching for a supply store where I might purchase a uniform so I can be properly dressed when the squadron commander tells me I can leave.

In another dream, I am told I owe the Air Force one more month of service because, years ago, I was relieved of duty at the end of August to begin college in September. When I arrive at some undefined Air Force installation, post-pubescent airmen stare at me in puzzlement.

If the dream continues, I’m told my one-month extension is over but I’ll have to wait until my discharge can be processed and that might take, well, years …

It’s not unusual to dream about the past. “A pension,” wrote Eric Hoffer, the stevedore poet, “is pay for the work we keep doing in our dreams after we retire.”

But how long must the dreams continue?

I was discharged from the Air Force in 1968 and immediately began classes at Eastern University (then Eastern Baptist College). In the ensuing decades I became an editor for American Baptist Churches in the USA, reported for two daily newspapers, became a communication officer for the World Council of Churches and finally retired as a media relations officer for the U.S. National Council of Churches.

Chronologically, the four years I spent in the Air Force (1964-1968) were a tiny portion of my three score and thirteen. My college years were as momentous as my military years but I rarely have the archetypal academic anxiety dream, i.e., that I am about to take a final exam for a course I have cut all semester. Clearly, if my dreams mean anything, my Air Force years stick in my unconscious craw.

I’m not sure why this is because my military experience was unexceptional and, for the most part, pleasant. I was a chaplain’s assistant serving in England and Kansas and, when the time came, my leaving did not resemble the anxious foreboding of my dreams. I just left. I walked out the door of the McConnell Air Force Base chapel one morning and stepped into a large camper driven by my father and, like that, my Air Force days were over. (My parents and siblings were touring the west because brother Larry was visiting the University of Colorado and they arranged their return trip to pick me up on the way home.)

Clearly, though, my Air Force days were not over “like that” and that is why I have these dreams every few months.

I blog incessantly about my Air Force experiences. Reading back over those blogs (links below), it’s obvious my military years were exceedingly ordinary. When people ask me if I flew an airplane in the Air Force, I reply, “I flew a desk.” I typed my way to victory in the Cold War.

But I think it’s the ordinariness of my military experiences that place them so firmly in my unconscious. In a modest sense, they have melded with the larger American experience.

I only saw my grandmother cry once. Goldie was a stalwart and generally unemotional woman who raised my father and his three siblings with determined common sense. It so happened she was visiting us when the time came for me to fly to England for a three-year Air Force assignment. My parents drove me to the Syracuse airport, and when the time came for me to board Dad shook my hand. Mom hugged me tightly. And Grandma, when she hugged me, had tears in her eyes.

I was stunned because she was not the crying type. And because I was a callow 18 year old I thought she was crying for me.

As the years passed, however, I realized she was crying because my departure in uniform brought back agonizing memories. A quarter of a century earlier she had bade good-bye to two sons who went to the Pacific Theater of the Second World War. Both were heading toward a treacherous and uncertain future and she must have been scared to death. In contrast, I was heading for a desk in a chapel.

Dad and my Uncle Stan returned safely from their wartime duties. Their experience has been shared by millions of men and women since the inception of the American colonies: the call to uniform, the saying good-by, the return – if God willed – to civilian life. It continues today with no end in sight.

It’s a part of the collective consciousness of America. And I’m not the only veteran who will dream about their military experiences, however traumatic or however ordinary, for the rest of their lives.

__________

More of my Air Force memories are posted here:

https://cakesandale.org/2019/11/20/chapel-thanksgiving/
https://cakesandale.org/2019/11/11/cold-war-cartoonist/
https://cakesandale.org/2019/11/10/memoirs-of-a-good-conduct-medalist/
https://cakesandale.org/2019/10/25/on-humility/
https://cakesandale.org/2019/07/11/old-times-there-are-not-forgotten/
https://cakesandale.org/2019/05/04/memoir-ten-commandment-patio-break/
https://cakesandale.org/2018/09/10/cold-war-vet-the-rainbow-days/
https://cakesandale.org/2017/01/12/once-again-my-holy-day-january-12/
https://cakesandale.org/2016/01/13/january-12/
https://cakesandale.org/2016/04/28/gis-gypsies-and-hitlers-house/
https://cakesandale.org/2014/03/04/the-pope-and-the-patriarch/

Here it is again.

I’ve told this story many times and I can’t resist telling it each year at Epiphany. It helps me understand the awe that must have been generated by the three magi when they traversed rural Palestine to stand so ostentatiously before the ragged occupants of a stinking stable.

Yes, awe. Awe in the purest sense.

That must have been how the residents of the hamlet of Morrisville, N.Y. my hometown, reacted to a brief manifestation of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1930.

Morrisville is not completely isolated.  Its location on U.S. route 20, which connects Albany with Utica, Syracuse, and points west, places it directly in the flow of intellectual and cultural currents. In 1930, Governor Roosevelt motored up route 20 to pay his respects to I.M. Charleton (standing right in the photograph below), the director of the Morrisville Institute (now Morrisville State College).

This little known event suggests Morrisville was not the least among the hamlets of Upstate New York. A future world leader discerned the importance of cultivating village intellectuals like I.M. (who, if not a Republican, was one of the few persons in the village who wasn’t.) History does not say whether Morrisville was at the top of FDR’s itinerary, or why he appears to have left the engine running as he sat in his car and charmed the local gentry. The important thing is, he came.

The family of Julie FitzSimmons Bookhout, one of my classmates at Morrisville-Eaton Central School in the early 1960s, had a special involvement in FDR’s visit. “Since my grandfather, George FitzSimmons, was a car dealer in town, he had the best car with which to fetch FDR at the train station in Utica and bring him back to Morrisville,” Julie wrote a few years ago. “My Aunt Anne FitzSimmons Kelley, who must have been 9 at the time, and is now 94, got to ride along in the car with FDR himself!”

In 1930, no one knew what Franklin Roosevelt’s future held. Still, he was important enough that I.M. Charleton thought it good to stand on the curb and chat with the Gov as he sat in the luxurious car. We know now, of course, that FDR’s paralyzed legs made it necessary for him to sit while I.M. stood, but in 1930 no one thought it was odd. The governor had perfected the art of charismatic sitting.

FDR’s visit may have been the most historic thing that happened in Morrisville during the Depression and possibly for all time.  My mother said the whole town turned out to watch South Pole explorer Admiral Richard E. Byrd roll special ice breaking equipment up Main street (and, as Central New Yorkers know, the harsh winters of Morrisville make it a good place to test arctic gear). Some say they glimpsed Lieutenant Governor Malcolm Wilson at Sautter’s Diner in 1964, but Wilson is virtually unknown except to those who crossed the erstwhile Tappanzee Bridge which was named for Wilson until it was torn down this year. The new and improved bridge is named for Governor Mario Cuomo.

I surmise that FDR’s visit was unequaled by anything else that happened in Morrisville and someday a plaque may be placed in the pavement where his oil pan leaked 90 years ago.

I surmise all this for two reasons. One, FDR’s visit was as memorable to Morrisvillians as if exotic kings from the east had dropped by for coffee and pie. It gives chronic bible readers an emotional point of reference for what it must have been like to wake up in a barn in Bethlehem and see three kings stepping delicately over sheep shit.

And, two, I like to make it clear that my home town was not intellectually or culturally isolated, despite our Central New York accents that make us sound like lethargic North Dakotans. This stems from my frequent discomfort, decades after leaving Morrisville, to discover no one else pronounces words the way I was taught. One teacher pronounced the name of the ancient queen of Egypt as Klayo-PAY-tra, and also said the name of the Communist leader of China was pronounced the way it was spelled: Mayo Tissie Tongue.

Also in the seventh grade, when we were introduced to the short stories of William Sydney Porter, who wrote under the name of O. Henry, I was entranced by a story I thought was entitled, “The Gift of the Magee.” In my defense (and on behalf of Morrisvillians), I assert that it is very difficult to see the word m-a-g-i and quickly grasp that it is pronounced with a long a and a long i. The dictionary pronouncing hint is even less clear and looks like a logo for a foreign car: mæda. Moreover, the word magi was never used in the United Church of Morrisville.

We knew about the itinerant kings, of course, because each year we built a manger scene on the front lawn of the church. But I was 10 before I realized they weren’t from a place called Orientar. And I was 15 before I realized they were magi, not magees.

Ideally, my digression should end here, but I’m still transfixed by the unexpected visit of Franklin Delano Roosevelt to my home town. Like FDR’s visit to the Morrisville Ag and Tech institute, the visit of three kings to Bethlehem was calculated to make everyone feel important. If something was happening that warranted the appearance of the future president or the ancient kings, it had to be taken seriously. On January 6, Christians around the world celebrate the Feast of the Epiphany, the twelfth day of Christmas that, along with twelve drummers drumming, marks the arrival of the Magi at the manger where Jesus was born.

In our household, we observe the traditional Latino celebration of El Día de los Reyes and exchange small gifts in honor of their kingly largesse. But this is not a practice I grew up with in Morrisville, and it is not a universal observance.

Views as to who the kings were, in fact, are as varied as the Christian church itself. Some sects, including Jehovah’s Witnesses, excise references to the Kings because they were regarded as sorcerers of Satan. That’s a minority viewpoint, but it does tempt you to look a little closer at these guys.

A handful of scholars believe los tres reyes were precocious astronomers who mapped the stars and studied the passage of planets. If so, that would have placed them several hundred years ahead of their time. Most observers are convinced the kings were garden variety astrologers, a possibility supported by the fact that they not only looked at stars but believed that celestial bodies had something to tell them – and, more than that, they  followed one star for hundreds of miles to find out what it wanted them to know.

Of course, the moving star of Bethlehem was more likely a migrating planet than a fixed star, but who knew about such realities of astrophysics back then? One thing seems certain: the first thing the kings would have checked in Entertainment Weekly was their horoscope.

The term magi, from magus, is a reference to the priests of Zoroastrianism, who studied the stars and planets and made elaborate charts to work out what their movements portended in the currents of human life below. The three magicians from the east didn’t become “wise men” until the 16th and 17th century, when scholars who wrote the King James Version of the bible decided to call the magi “Wise Men.”

Elsewhere, the drafters of the bible used the same word to denote “sorcerer” or “sorcery,” notably in reference to Elymas in Acts 13:6-11, or Simon Magus in Acts 8:9-13. Matthew does not identify the three kings, or magicians, or wise men, but thanks to long standing church tradition, we call them by name: Melchior a Babylonian scholar; Caspar (also Gaspar, Jaspar, Jaspas, Gathaspa, and other variations), a Persian scholar; and Balthazar (also Balthasar, Balthassar, and Bithisarea), an Arab scholar.

Everything else we know about the kings is circumstantial. One reason we know they were important is that when they dropped by the palace to pay their respects to King Herod, the King took time to meet with them. This was either a professional courtesy to his fellow kings, or – as Matthew tells it – Herod had heard the rumors that a king of the Jews was about to the born and he invited the three sorcerers in to find out what they knew. The wily Herod asked the three to let him know when they found the lad, “so that I may go and pay him homage.”

Matthew states explicitly that when the triumvirate found the baby Jesus laying in the manger, they gave him three symbolic gifts, gold, frankincense and myrrh. But the kings were smart enough to know Herod was setting a trap for the baby – Matthew says they were warned in a dream – and they “left for their own country by another road,” evading Herod and his agents. Herod realized he had been duped by the kings and, according to Matthew, ordered the death of every new born male child in Bethlehem.

No one knows what happened to the kings after they returned home, although there are many interesting legends. Some believe one of the magi was baptized by St. Thomas, the “doubting Thomas” of Scripture, while he was en route to his missionary tasks in India. Both the Mar Thoma Church and the Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church of India trace their origins to the first century visit of St. Thomas to South Asia.

But it was Saint Gregory the Great, who reigned as pope from 590 to 604 A.D., who placed the traveling wise men in their proper historic perspective. In one of those rare sermons that is remembered for 1,500 years, Gregory stressed the fact that the wise men, having searched for and discovered the Christ, took a different road and never retraced their route.  “Having come to know Jesus,” he said, “we are forbidden to return by the way we came.”

Despite all the mystery and speculation about whom they really were, the three magi continue to preach a powerful message across the millennia. They were three non-Jews whose minds and spirits were open to powerful spiritual currents, including cryptic indications that a powerful monarch was about to be born to the Jews, a group they might have dismissed as a relatively minor sect in the Roman and eastern worlds. When the three sorcerers perceived a unique sign in the heavens, a bright object that appeared to move ahead of them, they followed it out of intellectual and metaphysical curiosity.

As they pondered the heavenly sign that moved before them, they consulted their charts and concluded it was leading them to a rendezvous with a infant whose power and significance exceeded all they ever knew. En route to Bethlehem, they decided to mark the occasion with significant gifts to the baby king: gold as a symbol of kingship on earth, frankincense as a reminder of God’s presence, and myrrh, an embalming oil, as a symbol of the death that would be required to bring the prophecy to fruition. When they arrived at the end of their journey, these wise men born to riches did not hesitate to enter a rude, odiferous barn, because they knew the power and glory that resided in the human baby resting in an old feeding troth.

They came from afar and they knew who they were seeking and when they arrived, they worshipped the baby in the troth. When they had met Jesus, they knew their lives must be changed forever. And they chose a new road for passage, having decided that they must never again retrace the steps that had brought them to this radical encounter with the son of a God they were only just beginning to know.

The very presence of these three splendid strangers must have amazed the parents of Jesus and astonished other witnesses in area. The visit of the obviously important Magi would have been regarded as a sign that something big was happening – just as Franklin Roosevelt’s 1930 appearance in Morrisville was a sign of something big.

But the glistening kings knew something that may have temporarily eluded others: they knew the magi were not the most important presence in the tiny barn. That honor belonged to the smallest person in the room, the feeble infant still struggling to find the strength to lift his head.

It was the baby that the wise men came to see, and once they had seen him, their lives were changed forever. And as we watch them in our minds eye, three kings stepping out on history’s stage, choosing a new route of enlightenment and understanding, may we all be eager to follow them and the star that brought them to God’s salvation, westward leading, still proceeding, guide us to thy perfect light.

Venerable Archbishop Fulton Sheen’s remains were transferred last June from the Archdiocese of New York to Peoria, Illinois.

The move came after three years of sometimes bitter wrangling between Bishop Daniel Jenky of Peoria, Ill., who wanted Sheen’s body to repose in the town of Sheen’s birth, and New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan, who said he was a great admirer of Sheen and wanted him to rest in New York.

The issue was finally settled in Peoria’s favor, clearing the way for the former archbishop’s sainthood cause to go forward.

Earlier it was reported that Sheen’s beatification – the final step before sainthood – would be delayed because Catholic hierarchs couldn’t agree where his body should end up.

For many non-Catholics, this dispute over a body seems as unseemly as the revelation that Masterpiece Theatre host Alistair Cooke’s bones had been fileted from his body by rogue morticians so it could be sold for transplant tissue.

For many Catholics, the dispute over Sheen’s body was more ethereal. It meant the late, beloved television preacher would have to wait for the official recognition that he is doing saintly things in heaven along with newly installed Saints Pope John XXIII, Pope Paul VI, and Pope John Paul II.

For Christians with a broader view of sainthood, the dispute makes little sense. Most Protestant denominations regard a saint as anyone who has faith in Jesus Christ. Some are born again, others make decisions to find Jesus, and Lutherans believe Jesus has found them. Luther himself declared simul justus et peccator – we are all simultaneously sinners and saints. Can I get an Amen?

In short, one does not even have to be dead to qualify for sainthood.  The Apostle Paul, himself long recognized by the Catholic Church as an official saint, agreed. To Paul a saint was any member of the body of Christ, quick or dead. Note, for example, his salutation to the church at Corinth, “to those who are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints, together with all those who in every place call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. (I Corinthians 1:2).”

That should have settled the issue for Saint Fulton of Peoria. In his lifetime, he not only knew Jesus in faith; he also embarked on a career that led millions to know Jesus.

For those of us of a certain age (Boomers in our fifties and sixties), Sheen was one of the first stars of 1950s television. His show Life is Worth Living (1951 to 1957) sometimes attracted more viewers than “Mr. Television,” Milton Berle, who hosted the first nationally broadcast variety show on the small screen. Berle liked to be called “Uncle Milty,” and soon Sheen’s fans were calling him “Uncle Fulty.”

I was a devoted fan of both Milty and Fulty. I remember one show in which Sheen read a letter from a nine-year-old (someone my age) who expressed fondness for the bishop’s skullcap. Sheen removed the cap from his head and announced he would send it to the child. I was thrilled by Sheen’s recognition of the kids in his audience. And a little jealous that I didn’t think to ask for his hat.

[For younger readers who have never heard of Sheen, there are dozens of examples of his television preaching on YouTube. Here’s an example.]

In 1957, a spiteful New York Cardinal Francis Spellman forced Life is Worth Living off the air. Yet Sheen always spoke forgivingly of Spellman, which is a collateral sign of his saintliness. And to be sure, Sheen’s saintly career abounded as director of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, bishop of Rochester, N.Y., and titular bishop of Neoportus (New Port, Wales).

I shook Sheen’s hand in October 1967 when I was in Rome attending an Air Force religious retreat. Pope Paul VI (now beatified but until recently stuck in the airless anteroom of indecision while the church determined his saintliness) was hosting Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras I in a historic confab. Church hierarchs and celebrities came from all over the world to watch.  We Americans standing in St. Peters immediately recognized Fulton Sheen in the procession. Uncle Fulty, his white hair set off by his purple cap, reached out to our extended hands, smiling, winking, repeating, “Hi ya, how are ya, hi ya.” His charisma was irresistible.

Sheen died in 1979 and, despite his stated wishes to be buried in Calvary Cemetery Queens, he was entombed in a crypt at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan while the bishops argued over his bones.

Bishop Daniel R. Jenky of Sheen’s hometown of Peoria, Ill., asked New York Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan to fulfill a verbal promise by his predecessor to send the bones to Peoria for burial. Jenky apparently foressaw great possibilities for the consecrated body as a spiritual attraction for midwest pilgrims.

But Cardinal Dolan, a lifelong admirer of Sheen, said no way. He insisted the bones will remain in New York City where Sheen spent a large part of his life. The impasse – for reasons that mystify non-Catholics –halted the canonization process for three years.

What, non-liturgical Christians ask around their communion tables, slurping their Welches and noshing neat squares of white bread, does a corpse have to do with sainthood? Recognizing that the road to Catholic sainthood doesn’t always translate well within the Protestant yahootude, the New York Times  explained that this is not an unprecedented stalemate. “To be sure,” wrote the Times’ Sharon Otterman, “disputes over remains of saints are nothing new in the Roman Catholic Church, and in the past the resolution has sometimes been to divide the body. St. Catherine of Siena is enshrined in Rome, but her head is revered in a basilica in Siena, Italy. St. Francis Xavier, the 16th-century missionary, is entombed in Goa, India, but his right arm is in Rome, in a reliquary at the Church of the Gesu.”

But that macabre solution was ruled out for Sheen, and the late archbishop remained in that stale anteroom of indecision. That might seem very sad, unless you look at it from the point of view of millions of Protestants who knew they were saints as soon as they reached out in faith to Jesus.

And – if I may do so without offending millions of faithful Catholics who embrace the uncompromising requirements for sainthood that have been followed for centuries – perhaps I can offer a few words of comfort.

Saint Fulton of Peoria is not interred with his moldering bones. He has long since flown free to the saintly realm God arranged for him when he first encountered Jesus.

And with very little effort, I can imagine him chatting daily with some of the saints I knew so well: Saints Bertha and Goldie of Oneonta and Saint Doris of Sacketts Harbor, Saints Mary and Elmore of Morrisville, and Santo Beny de la Habana.

The fortunate thing for these saints is that they did not have to pass an unreasonably strident inquisition to prove their saintliness. I knew them well enough to doubt most of them could have advanced past the first step.

But I also know they joined the throng of saints the moment they reached out in faith to Jesus. It was at that moment they walked through the door into the bright light and pure air enjoyed by all God’s saints.

And – bones or no bones – it is in that magnificent mansion that Saint Fulton dwells, too. Now and forever.

Gerrit Smith’s mighty shadow over Peterboro, N.Y., did not fade after his death in 1874. All of us who grew up in or near the tiny Madison County village knew who he was.

Peterboro, where Smith lived, was an outpost of the Underground Rail Road that assisted run-away slaves on their trek to freedom in Canada. Smith was an aggressive abolitionist who provided financial assistance for slaves who attempted to challenge their re-capture under the Fugitive Slave Act, and he financially supported John Brown’s anti-slavery campaign. He was a member of the “Secret Six” who supported Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, though he denied knowing Brown intended a violent attack on the outpost.

Gerrit Smith was a three-time candidate for president of the United States on the Liberty and Free Soil tickets and a member of Congress for one year. He was an active social reformer who opposed the monopoly of land and gave many poor families 50 acres of land to farm.

Smith supported the Civil War as the only means of eradicating slavery from the U.S. but – like President Lincoln – favored a moderate policy toward former Confederate states.

Gerrit Smith was also an evangelist and an active temperance campaigner who claimed to be the first to deliver an anti-alcohol speech to the New York legislature in 1824.

Smith was clean-shaven during his active political years but grew a full beard in later life. Staring sternly at the camera in his maturity, he looks like his contemporary, Karl Marx. But unlike Marx, whose revolutionary activities were restricted to thinking and writing, Gerrit Smith was at the vanguard of the radical movement that eradicated slavery from his land. He was also personally involved in the freeing of thousands of his fellow human beings.

Ever since I left Central New York in 1964, I have been puzzled that Gerrit Smith is not better known. For those of us who grew up in the environs of Peterboro, he will never be forgotten.

The Divine Doc M and I binged our way through season 3 of the Netflix miniseries The Crown.

The series purports to make reasonable guesses about what Queen Elizabeth II, the Royals, and a succession of prime ministers said to each other behind closed doors. How close they came to replicating actual conversations is anyone’s guess. My guess is: not very.

The opening episodes of season three corresponded to the years I spent on a U.S. Air Force base in England (1965-68) and I followed the drama with special interest. In 1967 (I think it was) I stood in a London crowd watching the Royals process in carriages and on horseback toward the Trooping of the Color ceremony (I think it was). The Queen herself, dressed in a red tunic and mounted side-saddle, passed close to my vantage point. Barely 40 years old, she looked younger and prettier than I expected. She smiled at the crowd as her horse loped and she held her right hand aloft in a rigid wave.

But I must admit I had little interest in the Royals back then. I was very interested in following the Labour government of Harold Wilson, who was prime minister during all my three years in the U.K.

Wilson had willowy white hair and dressed elegantly like the Oxford Don he was. He had a flat, nasally voice and a tendency to repeat catch phrases which made it easy for comedians to imitate him on the BBC. He liked to say, “I think we must be perfectly clear” as a preface to his esoteric and often turgid comments on economics, which satirists found very funny.

As a loyal American airman, I kept quiet about my admiration for Wilson’s strong views opposing the U.S. war in Vietnam. I tried to find ways of seeing him whenever I was in London. I managed to be in the city the night the House of Commons scheduled a debate on whether to support the U.S. war and sat in the visitors’ gallery. I was probably expecting a quietly genteel exchange of views and was surprised when Wilson had to shout over jeering comments from the Tory opposition. Then the Tory leader, Edward Heath, stood to speak and the Labour benches jeered him. It was as entertaining as a football match.

In season three of The Crown, Wilson (Jason Watkins) admits to the Queen (Olivia Colman) that he really doesn’t like to smoke a pipe. He said he really prefers cigars, but his working class constituency considered cigars the vice of choice of capitalist aristocrats.

I’m not sure that’s right. It’s hard to find a picture of Harold Wilson without a pipe in his hand or in his mouth.

One spring day when I was in London, I notice a small crowd of reporters and others gathered outside  Number 10 Downing Street. I decided to join the crowd to see what would happen. After twenty minutes or so, the famous door opened and Harold Wilson stepped outside. He held a large meerschaum between his uneven teeth but quickly removed it to hold it high over his head. The reporters snapped pictures and I joined the crowd in applauding the P.M. He smiled and nodded politely as he jumped into a smallish black car and sped away.

“’Ad ‘is pipe, din’tee, old ‘Arold?” said a man who had been standing beside me. Looking back, I think we would have been appalled if he had been smoking a Churchillian cigar.

I continued to follow British politics after I returned to the U.S. Edward Heath replaced Wilson as prime minister after the Tory victory of 1970. Wilson returned to office in 1974 as the head of a coalition government.

On March 16, 1976, Wilson unexpectedly announced his resignation as prime minister. He explained – unconvincingly – that he had always planned to retire at 60. More likely – as he is shown telling the Queen in a poignant scene of the mini-series – he had become aware that he was suffering early signs of Alzheimers.

The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh bestowed a special honor on Wilson by dining with the Wilsons at 10 Downing Street shortly after his resignation was announced. The only other time she had bestowed this special honor was for Winston Churchill when he resigned in 1955. In 1983 he was granted a life peerage as Baron Wilson of Rievaulx, after Rievaulx Abbey in his native Yorkshire. He died in May 1995.

The dramatists of The Crown suggest Queen Elizabeth liked Wilson and despised Heath.

That I tend to believe. It’s exactly how I felt about them.

Thanks to a file of old clippings in my bookshelf, I know exactly what I was doing 52 years ago.

I was sitting at my gray desk in the base chapel at RAF Station Woodbridge, England, pressing a special pencil against specially treated paper to produce a drawing for the base daily bulletin.

The daily bulletin, or DB as it was economically dubbed, was printed each day at the base publications office. It went to each duty section on each of the twin bases – RAF Bentwaters and Woodbridge – and it was usually filled with unclassified military esoterica, often to remind officers to remind their NCOs to remind their airmen to shine their shoes and wear the proper seasonal uniform. We wore 1505 short-sleeved tan uniforms in the summer, and blues in the winter, and the DB told us when to where what.

On rare occasions the top brass permitted special advertisements to be attached to the bulletin, sometimes to promote attendance at Bentwaters football games or other morale building activities. As the base’s resident cartoonist, I was occasionally invited to provide drawings for such advertisements – at least until the Wing Commander, Colonel Robin Olds, complained to my supervisor that my cartoons made officers look too fat and too goofy.

A safe outlet for my drawings was the promotion of chapel programs and worship services because the senior chaplain kept a close eye on my efforts. When it was decided that all the chaplains would cooperate in an “interfaith” service to celebrate Thanksgiving, the chaplain asked me to draw something to encourage base airmen and their families to attend. “Be nice,” he said. “And show me what you drew before you send it to base pubs.”

I don’t remember all the drawings I made for the DB, but I remember this one: sitting at my desk, sipping black coffee, smoking unfiltered cigarettes, using thick-leaded pencils to draw bold outlines and smaller pencils for the painstaking process of minute shading. I stylized my signature on the drawing as “E.K. Jenks,” harking back to my youthful predilection to add a “K” to my name in honor of my idol, John F. Kennedy.

The drawing suggests an idealized – and Americanized – image of Thanksgiving, and the scenery was probably inspired by my recent visits to Berchtesgaden, Germany. A half-century on, reflecting now as a seasoned ecumenist, I might point out that it was not an “interfaith” service because the only faith represented was Christianity. But it was certainly an ecumenical service in the best spirit of interdenominational cooperation: Roman Catholic, United Methodist, Presbyterian, and Southern Baptist.

The drawing survives today as a token of a long-past Thanksgiving when I was taking my first steps on what would become a life-long ecumenical adventure.

And it is a precious souvenir of a particularly happy time of my youth.

Perhaps it’s the shallow sentiment of age. Perhaps it’s nostalgia for an era that seems far brighter than the dark political gloom that engulfs us now. Perhaps it’s because I loved him from afar though I never met him. Whatever the reason, for the last fifty-five Novembers I have thought of John F. Kennedy when the twenty-second of the month draws near.

There is little need to point out that was the day in 1963 he was assassinated in Dallas. None of my adult children were alive on that day and nearly 70 percent of Americans living now were not yet born. But people know about it because the Kennedy assassination has become part of American folk lore.

My adult children have been very patient – even sympathetic – about my propensity to mourn a politician who seems as far removed from them as Chester A. Arthur.

And this year it’s beginning to seem a bit silly to me, too. John Fitzgerald Kennedy was one of the most complicated and compartmentalized politicians ever to sit in the Oval Office. The dry, statesmanlike JFK we saw in his televised press conferences was one of many JFK’s we rarely saw.

There was also the rich white JFK of privilege who lived through but never experienced the Great Depression.

There was the self-absorbed JFK who was short on human empathy. When one of his girlfriends pointed out poor people in a decaying neighborhood, he shrugged and said, “Poor bastards.”

There was the calculating “Mick politician” JFK (as his aide Kenneth O’Donnell put it) who could be ruthless in dealing with political opponents and dismissive of his friends when they no longer suited his purposes.

There was the crass political strategist JFK who hesitated becoming involved in the Civil Rights movement because he feared losing votes in the South.

There was the philandering sex addict JFK who told British Prime Minister Harold McMillan that if he didn’t have sex with a different woman every two or three days he would get “terrible head-aches.”

All of which is appalling.

But there were other more positive JFK’s lurking in his many compartments, and they make him worth remembering.

There was the idealist JFK who inspired a generation of Boomers to join the Peace Corps, serve in their country’s armed forces, and pursue careers in politics and public service.

There was the quick-witted JFK who could crack a joke or tell an anecdote that made his audiences laugh.

There was the poetic JFK who could interpose in his speeches inspiring verse from memory.

There was the courageous JFK who ignored General LeMay, Dean Acheson, Lyndon Johnson, and other hawks who advised him to invade Cuba in 1962 to remove offensive missiles.

Perhaps it is that last item – his hesitation to go to war – that makes him worthy of remembering. As we know now, there were Soviet lieutenant colonels in Cuba authorized to launch the nuclear missiles at the first sign of an invasion. And that would certainly have triggered a massive nuclear conflagration.

As complicated and compartmentalized as he was, that is one thing we can all thank JFK for: he stood up against the warmongers and kept us all alive.

So as November 22 approaches again, I do my best to remember John Kennedy for all he was, his great strengths and horrendous weaknesses.

And like many in my generation, this will continue to be so until I have no memory left.