In the fall of 1964, my father pushed back from the dining room table and announced that he was taking my sister and me to Washington, D.C.

Stunning news. We did not take vacations. Dad worked at the power plant, and Mom worked at stretching his paycheck for a family of six stuffed into a two-bedroom rental house in small-town Ohio. Our big trip was the annual fall drive into Pennsylvania "to watch the leaves change."

My father never had visited our nation's capital, b ...

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