Recalling Bitter/Better Days

This appeared on Sunday, April 8, 2007

It was one of the oddest stories I have ever covered.

In August 1988, my editor dispatched me to Valley Forge National Park, where the Ku Klux Klan was holding a hate rally.

I remember being miserable, and not simply because I would have to spend several hours covering what essentially was a non-event. It was a typical summer afternoon in northeast Chester County — hot and muggy, or what we journalists like to refer to as ”sun drenched“ — the type of afternoon I‘d rather spend sitting in an air conditioned theater watching the latest Scorsese.

I say non-event because there really was no news taking place that afternoon, in the sense that no one was being elected, no flooding had occurred, no politicians were being indicted. The news had already passed, after the Klan announced that they were going to rally at the park and the Park Service let them.

What remained was a bunch of slightly overweight white men dressed in the strange garb of the Klan, standing on an amphitheater that bore a vague resemblance to Stonehenge (prompting more than one droll aside from reporters about the intelligence of those participating in the rally), and saying not really much of anything.

If I dug out the story I wrote that day I could find a quote or two to share with you — something dealing with superiority or separation or subjugation or some such. But what struck me at the time was the lack of interest the Klan folks who spoke seemed to have for what they themselves were saying. They didn‘t put much passion into their declarations, and they drifted from one subject to another haphazardly.

Their main interest came from getting a reaction from the few people who gathered to protest their appearance. The crowd, such as it was, was separated from the Klansmen by a storm fence the park people had erected to keep the sides apart. The fence was 50 or more feet from the stage, I recall, so you had two groups yelling at one another from a block away. Not much excitement there.

The whole situation quickly became ridiculous, and I stayed only as long as I needed to, filling up about less than half my notebook before flipping it shut.

The scene came back to me last week after I took an afternoon drive to Valley Forge, hoping to see the park‘s flowering trees in full blossom. They weren‘t, so instead my mind wandered back to other days spent there.

I remember touring the historical aspects of the park with my mother, who never met a vacation that didn‘t involve some educational opportunity. I also remember a summer picnic with a young woman I was enamored with at the time, and who I thought would be impressed with my ability to wrap cold chicken in Saran Wrap and open a bottle of white wine with a corkscrew. (She wasn‘t.) I remember also seeing the flowering trees on Gulph Road Hill tinted with snow after a freak storm one late April morning.

And I felt better letting those memories overtake all that hate I had seen, that one hot summer day in August 1988.