I was in the seventh grade, ready for the end of school and the beginning of summer. I had struggled through a tough year of algebra and I had finally busted my tail enough to get a C in the class.
The year was 1968, and my father was the traveling freight and passenger agent for Southern Pacific Railroad in Merced. A fancy title for a guy who spent a lot of time driving around the tiny towns of Mendota, Firebaugh, Planada and Dos Palos, making sure farmers got their crops of sugar beets, sweet potatoes and cantaloupes loaded into box cars and gondola cars.
At the end of May, my dad came home with the news that presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy was going to be coming through town on the train, on a whistle-stop trip through the San Joaquin Valley. My dad was in charge of making sure everything went well in Merced, and he asked me if I wanted to go to the station with him.
I was thrilled. I adored Robert F. Kennedy - I was one of those pre-teens who was infatuated with the entire Kennedy clan. I bragged about getting to see Kennedy to my friends as we all played Chinese jump rope. They were insanely jealous, and I gloated.
My dad and I went down to the train station on 16th Street early that hot day in late May, where people had already started to gather. The parking lot at the Branding Iron Restaurant was almost filled with cars, and more autos were waiting to pull in.
I went inside the station with my dad, and listened as he talked on the radio to the engineer on the train with Kennedy on it. As the train got closer, the crowd got thicker and thicker. My dad and I went outside, and he helped me climb up on an old hand truck for luggage, above the crowd.
We could hear the train whistle before we saw the train. Everyone started cheering, and then there he was. The brother of John Kennedy, the guy who was going to stop the Vietnam War, the coolest presidential candidate of the year.
I don’t remember what Kennedy said that year, and I don’t remember what anyone else on the train had to say. I took pictures with the little Kodak camera that we brought out every holiday, and I snapped away as the dignitaries talked.
Too quickly, the train chugged away, and the crowd slowly broke up. Everyone was a bit giddy, even my staunchly Republican father. I couldn’t wait to get home and tell my mom about seeing the man who was going to be President.
Just a few days later, on the last day of school, a group of seventh and eighth graders huddled in the parking lot of and elementary school and waited for the bus that would take us for the last time to our classes. We were all in shock, everyone had heard about the shooting in Los Angeles the night before of Robert F. Kennedy, the candidate whose campaign button most of were wearing.
Kennedy was supposedly still alive at that time, and when we got to school, no one wanted to talk about anything else. In our first period class that day, my math teacher, the man who had caused us so much pain all year, told the class of stunned 12-year-olds that Kennedy was going to be fine, he was in surgery and would be back on the campaign trail soon.
The rest of the day is a fog, but I remember being relieved that Kennedy was going to be OK. Adults were in charge, they knew the truth, and I believed that teacher. When I got home from school that day, I came in the house smug with the knowledge that my candidate was going to be president.
My mom told me the grim news, and I learned that last day of my seventh grade year that not all adults can be trusted. I learned that a man could stand up on the back of a train, with his hair mussed and his smile as bright as the sun, telling us that he, like us, thought that Vietnam was a mistake.
And I learned that the man that I adored, the man who stopped for just a few minutes in a small, dusty farm town on a hot May day, could make a whole lot of people believe in a brighter, better future.
And that year that I was 12, the year I got good at Chinese jump rope and played on a trophy-winning softball team, I learned that a good man could be struck down in a second.
I don’t remember the election that year, my candidate was dead. When I got old enough to vote, I consistently picked losers, until Clinton finally won.
I still have those pictures of Kennedy and his wife, standing on the back of the train with a couple of county supervisors and some other locals. When I see the pictures, I think of what could have been. I remember being 12 years old, and believing that one man could make a difference. I still think he could have.