It’s always gratifying for an author on a speaking tour to fill a ballroom. More than 300 people attended the Friends of Saddlebrooke Libraries luncheon in Tuscon, Arizona, where I spoke about The Longest Road and read excerpts from the book on Friday, Nov. 22d. Afterward, I signed about 100 copies of TLR, along with my novels, Acts of Faith and Crossers, and my Vietnam memoir, A Rumor of War. All very soothing to the writerly ego — one writes to be read, after all — but what was most gratifying was to see so many people turn out in support of libraries and the written word. Maybe the printed book and those who create them are not yet extinct species. I was introduced by Karen Shickendanz (maiden name Karen Daigle), who was a cub reporter with me on the Chicago Tribune in 1968. I credit Karen with launching my career. On my first day on the job, I was assigned to write an obituary, and froze at my typewriter (you of a certain age may remember that instrument) because, having had no formal journalism training, I had no idea how to write one. Karen, a graduate of the University of Missouri journalism school, walked me through it. I’ll always feel indebted to her. I might have been fired before I even got started.

This event took place on the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination, almost exactly to the hour when Lee Harvey Oswald fired his mail-order rifle in Dallas, changing the course of history. That moment was in the back of my mind as I spoke and signed and answered questions from the audience. Like most Americans my age, I’d been swept up by the glamor of the Kennedy era — the so-called Camelot — and Kennedy’s challenge to ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country, was among the reasons I joined the U.S. Marine Corps. Unlike most Americans my age, I cannot remember what I was doing or where I was when I heard of his assassination. I know that I was living in a student apartment on Farwell Avenue on Chicago at the time, and that I was attending Loyola University, but that’s all I can say. I may have been in class, walking across campus, or in my apartment. This lapse of memory embarrasses me, it seems almost shameful when the subject comes up in conversation and I hear someone recall in the minutest detail the moment when he or she heard the news. 

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