Sunday, November 05, 2023

November 5, 1999

In August 1993, the late David Brian Wallace and I visited St. Augustine and St. Johns County, twice, on the way to and from visiting South Florida.  I was exhausted after the sixteen day trial in the whistleblower case of C.D. Varnadore v. Oak Ridge National Laboratory. 

That month, we both fell in love with St. Augustine and St. Johns County and its history and nature.  Georgio Moroder's "From Here to Eternity" was playing on Brian's fancy-bears CD player in his pale baby-blue 1984 Toyota lift- back automobile, an almost-antique, one that was substantially unencumbered by air conditioning (and the AC conversion kits, which the Maryland or D.C. used car salesman told him about during my absence while trying the Varnadore v. ORNL trial no longer existed).

On November 5, 1999, we moved together to St. Augustine.  That was 24 years ago.  Glad we did.  So much history, some of it documented on this blog.  Corruption exposed, wrongdoers punished, American values protected and defended against the formidable forces of fascism in our town and our time, in a place that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called "the most lawless" in America.

Earlier today tonight, several fine St. Augustine friends and I attended a Democratic fundraiser in St. Johns, Florida, in a neighborhood bordering Jacksonville and Duval County.  

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt said at Franklin Field, in Philadelphia, in 1944, "I felt the crowd, and it warmed me." I was not yet born. My father was recovering from Nazi shrapnel that hit is knee in Normandy, recovering in Army hospitals, including Amarillo, Texas. 

A year from tonight is the 2024 General Election.


What's next?

To be continued..... 

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