Although life for me was wonderful, 1963-1966 was smack dab in the middle of difficulties in America.  Beaufort was 72% Negro, and their conditions were deplorable.  I had never been exposed to such poverty and hopelessness.  There were no jobs.  A white mob burned down their school while I was in Beaufort--I think it was to send a message that "they" better not get any ideas?  Martin Luther King was trying to rectify conditions for black people, but it wasn't helping them in Beaufort.

Many of the black people lived across the bridge in Frogmore, an island where some of the people still spoke a dialect--that supposedly came from Africa--called "Gullah." The going wage at the time for blacks was fifty cents an hour.  $4.00 a day.  Deplorable.

I drove to Oklahoma a couple of times with my three kids when Ken was deployed.  One time I stayed all night in Montgomery, Alabama with a friend.  The next day as I was leaving was the day of the Montgomery march.   I learned first hand--those three years I was in Beaufort--exactly what black people were marching and dying for.  It was so sad.  It was awful, and if I hadn't had my three kids, I would have marched with them.  There was a bad cloud over the South.

Another  cloud that loomed over my life was the fact that Ken was practicing delivering A-bombs.  America wasn't supposed to know that.  The government placed a verbal restriction on the squadron--but I couldn't help but know, from the way they did, and said, things "differently."  And the places they went.  Cuba had just been a big deal: we had lost a landing force, the Russians had just backed down from delivering nuclear launching pads to Cuba, we were in the middle of a cold war with Russia, and the guys kept going down to Roosevelt Roads to practice maneuvers.  Duh.

I asked Ken one day, "Say that you had to deliver an Atom Bomb--just saying...how would you deliver it and how would you get out of it.  "Well," he answered, "If a fella had to do such a thing, he would go in fast and low to keep from getting hit by ground fire, and at the last minute, he would jack it straight up as fast as he could fly.  And when he had almost stalled out, fire the thing straight up, do a flip and head home."  I asked, "And what are the chances a person would make it," I asked?  "Well, if he was lucky and everything went as it should, it would be about fifty fifty."  I didn't ask anything else.  What was the point.  So even though it was good for me in Beaufort, it was really bad as well.