November 23, 1966 – It’s 1:30 and I’m standing in line at the Alexandria City Hall utilities office waiting to pay deposits necessary to get service turned on in apartment we’re moving into after our wedding in three days.
(Why and how I’m doing it the day before Thanksgiving is another story).
There’s quite a hubbub in the adjacent hall separating the city offices from Convention Hall meeting area.
Reaching the head of the line, I ask the clerk what’s going on next door.
Oh, she answers, that King guy is having some sort of meeting. I pay, get receipt and go toward the hallway leading to the Murray Street exit.
At the access door in the glass panels then in place two of the largest men I had ever seen point me back toward Third Street. Turning, I see Dr. King and another man ushered in to the crowded hall from Murray Street.
(King was shorter than I expected, perhaps result of only having seen him on television.)
Thinking back, I believe the other was Dr. J.K. Haynes Sr., then executive director of the Louisiana Education Association and a legendary figure in his own right.
The LEA was the organization of black teachers. The Louisiana Teachers Association was its white counterpart. It would a decade or so before the two merged as the Louisiana Association of Educators.
We never were in hurry about such things.
King was in town to speak to the LEA and public at a packed parish Coliseum that night. The afternoon gathering was apparently one of association officials and annual meeting delegates.
Don’t recall seeing uniformed law enforcement officers. Not that there weren’t any, just don’t recall noticing, and no reason to have done so.
November 13, 1967 – First day as worker on Town Talk telegraph/wire desk. Shift started at 4 a.m., stripping overnight wire service transmissions, sorting by topic – world, national, Washington, etc- for desk editors’ use when they arrived at 5 a.m. to begin putting the afternoon’s edition together.
April 5, 1968 – On the teletype as my day began:
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MEMPHIS, TENN., APRIL 4 (AP) – Nobel Laureate Martin Luther King Jr., father of non-violence in the American civil rights movement, was killed by an assassin’s bullet Thursday night.
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During the rest of that turbulent year and five more newspapering decades nothing would shock me so.