July/August 2004

Forget the Speeches

Rogers and Hammerstein already said it best

If you live long enough, your memory bank is filled with happy Fourth of July deposits: fireworks exploding in the night sky like exotic, electric flowers ... band concerts on the mall in Washington where toddlers danced with their parents to the brassy, patriotic music ... a white dog surfing on a bay beach with a red, white, and blue surfboard ... the bayfront condominiums with an Old Glory fluttering from nearly every balcony...

I must have listened to hundreds of Fourth of July speeches in my lifetimeÑgiven by presidents, members of congress, military brass, county commissioners, whoever. And I don’t remember one of them. Not even a line.

The subject was just too big for them, I guess.

If someone asked me to make a Fourth of July speech, I believe I’d quote a line from Rogers and Hammerstein’s musical Oklahoma: “We know we belong to the land, and the land we belong to is grand.”

Then I’d sit down.

I believe if a person wanted to capture the spirit of July 4Ñtouch the pulse beating from our national heartÑthen he or she would be more likely to feel it at Monticello.

I’ve never been to Thomas Jefferson’s home on that holiday, but whenever I go there it seems like Independence Day.

Jefferson’s ghost seems to linger in the stately porches and magnificent rooms of Monticello. He drew his last breath there. And he died on July 4. That’s a fact about the author of our Declaration of Independence that I’ve always found more than extraordinary. It’s haunting.

We have a lot more to thank Jefferson for than the Declaration. I always associate the holiday with the arrival of vine-ripened tomatoes and usually have a tomato sandwichÑwith mayo on white breadÑfor lunch on the Fourth.

Jefferson is credited with advocating the tomato as a food and raised them on his plantation. He was the first AmericanÑor among the firstÑto do that. Before his time, Americans called them “love apples” and thought they were poisonous.

Odd how my memory clings to little things like that but forgets the speeches.

I do remember something as good as a speechÑjust something I heard, really, on a July Fourth when serving with the U.S. Army, near the end of the Korean War, in a town named Chunchon.

That day the mess hall had a big cake with an American flag on it, served in pieces to the enlisted men. I shared a quonset hut with a master sergeant named Cullis. The two of us carried our cake back to the quonset to eat it and fell into conversation.

His dad was a West Virginia coal miner. The sergeant said his family had been poor as dirt and couldn’t afford cakes when he was a boy.

And he told me I didn’t know how lucky I was to be in the army, wearing clean new uniforms and polished boots.

I told him I didn’t feel that lucky myself. Then he recalled a very touching episode from his past. He said he’d been so poor that one day while crossing a field near his house he saw a scarecrow that was wearing clothes better than his. So he just shucked his ragged overalls right there in the field. And exchanged duds with the scarecrow.

“The army put clothes on my back and food in my stomach. I’m proud to be part of it. And proud to fight for my country,” he said.

I don’t know where Cullis is on this July Fourth. But I hope he’s alive, well and happy.

For the rest of this story, you can order the July/August 2004 issue of Hampton Roads Magazine.