Today is Father's Day, and in honor of this I am featuring a photo (and yes, I have used it before, but tough toenails, as we used to say) of my father Nelson that I took at the top of Lookout Mountain, Tennessee back in August of 1963. I was 10 at the time, while my father was a mere 54 years old, 15 years younger than I am now. Which for some reason I find kind of scary. In any case, along with my mother Mary and Grandmother Louise Spillard, we were heading from our home in Chicago to Pompano Beach, Florida for a vacation at the Sun Castle, a hotel right on the beach that was charging bargain rates during the summer. This was a very memorable trip for me, not least because the South was still segregated, and even at gas stations along the way, there were separate washrooms for blacks and whites, which was quite an eye-opening experience. I also noticed black people living in shacks right out of the Beverly Hillbillies TV show just a few blocks from the beach in Pompano. But mostly it was a fun family trip, although my father called me back when I started to run down the side of the mountain at the Lookout Mountain Civil War Park. He told me he was too old to walk back up the mountain. Personally, I think he could have, but that's just my opinion.
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