I’m watching golf today.  I recognize more of the players on the Senior Tour than in the Rocket Loans Championship.  On the news recently they featured the New York Mets celebrating 50 years since their 1969 World Series Championship with a parade.  The players who are still alive rode in vintage Ford Mustang convertibles.  Fifty years ago the Apollo 11 Crew were in their final days of preparation for the first Moon landing.  There are more anniversaries that are happening than I want to admit remembering. 

Bear with me, those of you who are younger.  Your year will come.  This year is exceptionally significant for me.  I graduated in 1969 from the University of Missouri, Distinguished Military Graduate, on the way to Fort Sam Houston, TX.  Fifty years ago, I was in Fayettville, North Carolina, a newly minted Second Lieutenant in the US Army.  As the Officer in Charge (OIC) of the First Aid Range for the Basic Training Course at Fort Bragg, I was on my first assignment.  My first wife was pregnant, we were expecting our first child. 

A month later, Apollo 11 would achieve the first Moon landing.  The astronauts would emerge from isolation (to protect us from any Moon germs), on the birthday of my daughter.  The recent TV review of the Moon landing was interesting to watch. 

Later that year I would receive my orders for Viet Nam.  About that time my parents would adopt a young girl of American/Korean parentage as their fourth and final child.  She was an aunt to my daughter but only a few years older.  She helped raise my daughter and I think my daughter helped her learn English.  The two are inseparable today.

Louise had just completed her first year of teaching and was a newlywed living with her first husband.  Richard Nixon was in the White-House, Spiro Agnew was Vice-President of the United States. 

 Looking back, fifty years seems to have passed so quickly.