My Life in a Changing America

Book excerpt: This book “My Life in a Changing America” is autobiographical and relates the episodes that changed my life. Rather than a time line of continuity, the book is divided into stories of events, people and unseen forces that were important at different times in the grand adventure of life and the pursuit of the American Dream. In my lifetime I was fortunate enough to go from growing up as a poor farm boy to traveling the world as an educator and a university professor. I have lived much of my life during the period of what might have been the Golden Age of America. As a youngster growing up in an isolated village in the middle of the peninsula that separates the Chesapeake Bay from the Atlantic Ocean, I had naively believed that I was invulnerable to the fates of others around me. Now at age 88, I have come to the realization that the adventure of life is much like the trajectory of a shooting star flashing across the night sky. No matter how high it may fly nor how bright the trail it leaves behind, it soon vanishes into the unseen depths of space and time. . I have written this autobiography to leave a trace of my shooting star.