Nothing Like Sunshine: A Story in the Aftermath of the MLK Assassination

“I was protecting you, man”

| 83 I awoke to a typical, blustery November day in downtown Cincinnati. Today I would see my longtime friend Steve, with whom I walked to Woodward High School regularly over forty years earlier, for the first time in nearly two decades. Looking out from my hotel window onto the city’s trademark Fountain Square, it seemed that there weren’t even any ghosts lingering above the one-time piazza of Cincinnati Transit buses and the venerable Tyler Davidson Fountain. The square Steve and I remember was being more than repaved. A $42.6 million renovation was underway, of the fountain area and the attached parking garage facility. The surrounding area of grand hotels and department stores was being retenanted. A third generation of retro sports stadiums, one for baseball and one for football, had replaced the all-purpose Riverfront Stadium, which had uprooted the wooden and grassy Crosley Field 6. “I was protecting you, man” 84| CHAPTER SIX of our childhood. Nearby Government Square—where Steve and I used to disembark from the BR43 bus to spend hours at the Cincinnati Public Library with real books and small pencils, note pads, wooden drawer catalogs, and the Dewey decimal filing system—an expansive multipurpose rink was being completed, over which a colossal outdoor flat television screen hovered with continuous football replays and summaries. The groan of cement trucks, the shrieking of moving scaffolds, the din of debris, the hauling, drilling, and remounting all smothered the quick footsteps of two high school boys who were looking for a few history volumes and then some chocolates at the nearby Mabley & Carew department store—which is now Macy’s. ThatNovember,ahistoricmidtermelectionhadrebuffedtheadministration and Iraq war policy of President George W. Bush. The sore allegory of Vietnam hung over the land, not meshing completely but resonating nonetheless. On Thanksgiving, a motion picture entitled Bobby was opening across the nation. The New York Times mused: “The sound of Kennedy’s voice, even as it takes you out of the movie, throws you into a past that seems both terribly remote and uncannily alive.” In Washington, a tearful Jesse Jackson and an overcome Andrew Young led hundreds of dignitaries in the groundbreaking ceremonies for the Martin Luther King Memorial, the only such federal site dedicated to a non-president and African American in our history. The comedian Michael Richards, “Kramer” of Seinfeld fame, burst out with a guttural, gushing spray of racial invective during a performance at a Los Angeles comedy club. He faced rehabilitation and court action. A leading law journal inveighed against the continuing bias hampering accomplished African American attorneys who are still denied partnerships in the better firms. The construction noise in postmodern Cincinnati could not drown out the undeniable echo of the war, politics, prejudices, music, and shouts of the 1960s. Looking out my hotel window that gray morning, I thought about a girl whom Steve and I both knew back at Woodward High School. I could imagine her skating gracefully across the rink below. Debby Siegel, diminutive, rhapsodic, and supremely athletic, graduated with us and then disappeared, “I WAS PROTECTING YOU, MAN”| 85 on quixotic wings, into the new world of divorce, Gulf War misadventures, and national materialism. How Debby, a cheerleader, performer, artist, and editor, thrived within the atmosphere of that high school! Short, with a wide, appealing mouth virtually always in a smile, Debby walked briskly through the halls of Woodward with a certain good-natured innocence that defied any hostility or anger present along the walls. “I can’t believe how much work I have to do—oh my God I am so freaked about the four exams I have in two days that I haven’t even started studying for, but I know I just know it will all be okay!” She gulped the air as she seized me in the hall one morning and spilled her soul to me, the world swirling around her but unable to divert her from the full throttle of her angst and exultation. Debby blessed the chaos and then flew above it. Long, frizzy, dark hair that seemed airborne, an oval face with forgiving eyes that declared absolute belief in humankind—I often teased this power-packed little figure that she was “the world’s first hippie.” She was not, nor was Woodward Woodstock or Bedford-Stuyvesant. She was, however, a nearly utopian free spirit who personified what we, in our best moments, genuinely strove to be in that time and place...