I'll just pretend, for now, that I have acquired the address of a new pen pal[located in some 'exotic' place like Roanoke, VA], since you have carefully inscribed these words above the address:WRITING E-MAILS ONLY.

I was born on the East side of Atlanta, GA[once the 'suburb' of Atlanta's elite; like Aza Candler of Coca Cola fame & FORTUNE], in 1950. These days were paradisaical compared to any since; I grew up with television[also growing up].

Was growing up in SW VA so different? When about three, we moved into a 1910-era dwelling that my father[& mother] elected to purchase via a bank mortgage[the American Dream manifesting itself unto the white middle class]. My 'little' sister was two; next door was a three-year-old girl[just for me] & her 'baby' brother, just two. They had a Negro maid. Soon, their father bought the first volkswagen seen in Georgia; on rainy days the four of us kids squeezed into it & were driven to school.

In 1963, I became a sub-freshman at the High School in Little Five Points; it was the year that they began to integrate the public schools in Atlanta. The few African-American[NOT what we called them] children who showed up at Bass High this first year, were hand-picked to best succeed while integrating with the white students. White-Flight soon began in earnest; what had been an average attendance near 1400, in five years sank below 700 on a 'good' day. The smartest & brightest were soon enrolled in the County Schools. Due to the utter lack of competition from those who stuck it out, I was made the Star Student in 1968 with only a disappointing 1200-something score on my entrance exams.

The blacks were greatly admired by the young teenagers for their manner of dress & their 'Detroit Cool;' we all tried hard to master the 'talk' and find 'better' clothing in order to be accepted by them. The anxiety about how things would go, lived on in the imaginations of our principal[a total jerk; well past his first retirement opportunity] & several of the 'old school' teachers[also avoiding the idleness retirement represented to them].

At one point, two VISTA[volunteers in service to America] volunteers moved into the neighborhood; two very sexy college women[from Minnesota; they'd never seen a black person in-the-flesh before coming South] who began interacting with the High School kids in order to 'ease' the incendiary transition. They'd attended workshops before heading down to Georga, where they were taught, along with the 'balletic' hand gestures[like drawing an imaginary tree as if a hula-dancer] to encourage our 'correct' pronunciation:"Ne, as the tree...  groes." All this would have been wildly comical, if we had not been pursuing these girls like hound-dogs in rut!

My pen pal, in New Zealand was always trying to understand the violent reaction to all this that was headline news down under; The Maori, dark-skinned Native New Zealanders, never underwent any such inequality in the society she had grown up in. I don't think I was able to settle her mind with my written words; little of what was going on continued to make any sense to us, here in America, nor does it now make any more.

My father was on a three-man film crew, that covered the rioting that occurred in the deep South; he was an electrician, and stood in the middle of the violence being directed at 'whitey,' holding two bright 'sun guns[battery-operated photographic lighting]' aloft to light the 'criminal acivity' being filmed for CBS Evening News. He was 'following' one of the greatest photojournalists of our time; Lawrence Pierce saw the world only through his lens and with his head pressed firmly against the eyepiece where he viewed that world, charged bravely in where Angels feared to tread! Leroy Rollins, the sound technician on this crew, designed a special plug for the connection that was to be made between his microphone & Pierce's camera; it would quickly disconnect from the camera, anytime this intrepid journalist went where Leroy was hesitant to follow! There was plenty of film fro Selma, Montgomery & Birmingham that had no soundtrack!

I can remember a number of evenings when the film captured at one of these history-making events would be aired for the first time; evenings when my father would be home having supper with his wife & two kids[a rare occurrence], and watching television when this news programming came on; evenings when I watched my father's face as he fought to hold back the tears that wanted to fall, when he saw how the editing process had 'bent' the truth so severely, that it did not look much like the place he'd been in with those other two men; risking their lives to record what they saw!