1968 - A Summer of Discontent
For those of us old enough to remember 1968, it was a wretched year. Two political assassinations, inter-cities burning due to unresolved racial strive, an angry presidential election season, a war bitterly dividing a nation and the resulting tragedy of hundreds of young Americans and Vietnamese dying weekly.
I was thin as a rail, newly married, just graduated from college and headed for graduate school in history. Current events intervened and Uncle Sam called me (read drafted) for military duty. That July 1968, my young wife, Lynn, and I traveled to Gadsden, Alabama from our home in Tennessee where I boarded a bus, traveled to Montgomery's military receiving station and passed my physical. In August, I stepped across a line swearing to defend the Constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic. Six months later I was in Vietnam.
Below, left to right, Motie, Ralph's wife, myself,
Lynn and my sister, Becky, all of 18 in the background.
That July, 1968 E.C. and Mary Daly Herrin opened their home and spacious grounds for a Holliman family reunion. Grandpa Uylss Holliman had died in 1965, and three years later a number of his children and their offspring gathered in Irondale, Alabama. This was a happy respite for me, facing a difficult immediate future. I remember the picnic as it was yesterday and not a half century ago.
Patti Holliman Hairston, Melton and Ida's daughter, was present with her first child, Holly.
Virginia Holliman Cornelius in the foreground. In 1968, Virginia was an up and coming banker en route career-wise to become in her time the highest ranking female banking executive in Alabama history. My mother, Gerry, stands behind her and E.C. Herrin in background.
For some reason Charles and Loudelle Holliman Ferrell and Ralph Holliman posed with arms folded. Ralph's daughter Kathy, holds his arm. Something about Holliman formality. It was a time with men dressed in white shirts and ties for a picnic. That would change in a generation.
Vena Holliman Daly, the matriarch of the family at that time, below with her niece, Carol Cornelius. Carol now lives with her husband Chuck Morton in retirement village for North Americans in Mexico.
For some reason fate decried that of all the male cousins, I drew the straw to go to blighted war in South East Asia. As a result of passing my physical (half in my group failed), I was soon at Fort Benning, Georgia. The brief Alabama reunion in the rear view mirror, it was a time of testing and maturing.
Funny, I still feel naive and still trying to develop a bit of wisdom, this being 50 plus years later. I wonder if the many grandchildren of Ulyss and Pearl Caine Holliman have similar thoughts as we climb remorselessly into our very senior years?
By late October 1968, basic training was over (above), and even thinner, I was soon en route to advanced training at Ft. Dix, New Jersey and Ft. Hamilton, New York. By February 1, 1969, I was with the 1st Infantry Division north of Saigon, along with another 500,000 young Americans in an ill-fated attempt to intervene in an Asian civil war.
Next posting, back to World War II, and how our Alabama family held up during the crushing year of 1944.
