Dr. King was assassinated in 1968. It was a tough decade for our country during which President Kennedy and then Robert Kennedy had been assassinated as well. As Forry and I have talked about it all, it reminds us that this was the era we lived our young adulthood through. Some of it seemed quite remote to us as we watched it all on television. Some of it seemed very close to home. And none of it seems to have happened over fifty years ago!
I had no idea how the rest of the world was perceiving the United States until we were in Costa Rica a couple of years later. We had gone on a Flying Farmer trip through Central America led by Hoyt Walkup. (Hoyt Walkup, a Flying Farmer, was a flight instructor at the University of Oklahoma and had taught many of the pilots in the Air Forces of the Central American countries.) If I remember right, there were seventeen small airplanes including our Piper 180.
The Costa Ricans treated us royally (after they got over their disappointment that Forry, with a German name like Hardt, did not speak German). As we were eating dinner one evening, the conversation turned to a discussion of democracies. The Costa Ricans expressed their concern about how long the democracy in the United States would be able to continue given all the mayhem, murder and bloodshed!
I can remember being totally shocked. How could anyone think about my country like that? It certainly raised my level of consciousness about the rest of the world and the US. That's when I started paying more attention to world affairs...
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