A Time For Patriots
A Time for Patriots — by David Eugene Perry When I was a boy, I would give tours of the Virginia State Capitol in Richmond. I sat in front of the TV with my cassette player and recorded the audio to Walter Cronkite’s “Bicentennial Minutes” in 1976. My mother and grandmother fed my wide eyes and horizons by traipsing through enough Revolutionary and Civil War and Native American sites in the Commonwealth to generate blisters and a bookshelf groaning with books and curators’ addresses. As a child, I was a precocious patriot. My first letter to the editor was in defense of Betty Ford’s 60 Minutes interview in August 1975 in which she candidly discussed topics such as premarital sex, marijuana use, abortion rights, and her own breast cancer battle. I called those who opposed her openness as “shallow minded.” The editor of the Richmond Times Dispatch called my mother (who didn’t know I had submitted something to the paper) to inquire: “Are you sure a 13 year old wrote this?” “Yes.” I’m...