NEW SMYRNA BEACH -- The assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. seems like a lifetime ago -- 44 years ago to be precise. I was 6 years old and saw the news on TV with Walter Cronkite.
I had been following King since I could read and write at the age of 3. I remember the marches. Though I was a little kid, I was interested in the Vietnam War, all of the civil unrest and I enjoyed the music on the radio. It was the assassinations of King and Bobby Kennedy two months later that led me to my dream job growing up: I was going to be a reporter.
Monday was a national holiday celebrating King's birthday: He was born Jan. 15, 1929, in Atlanta, and was killed April 4, 1968, while standing on the balcony of a Memphis hotel from a bullet wound to his neck. He was 39 years old.
Aside from his "Dream Speech in 1963, King's words the night before while in Memphis to support sanitation workers in a garbage strike, would prove prophetic: “We got some difficult days ahead, but it really doesn't matter with me now, because I've been to the mountain top. I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land.”
Like millions of American families, I watched the news unfolding with mine in Connecticut as told by Walter Cronkite. While most children my age were entering school, I was very interested in what was going on in the world. I remember watching Bobby Kennedy on the news trying to calm an angry and divided nation over King's death and the raging war in Vietnam. Kennedy, too, would fall to an assassin's bullet two months later. The news with Walter Cronkite and the Dion song, "Abraham, Martin and John," helped form my politics. That year, I told my family and friends I wanted to be a reporter when I grow up. All these years later, as I near the age of 50, the life and death of Martin Luther King Jr. had an astounding impact in helping to shape my life and career. I have no regrets. It's ironic how the signs of King would follow me. There is a statue of King on Stanley Street in New Britain, Conn., and when I graduated from Central Connecticut State University in 1984, I stood next to commencement speaker Julian Bond, one of King's advisers. In each of the last three years, I have covered the MLK festivities in New Smyrna Beach, including Sunday's commemoration.
