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would give me a sense of focus and a goal that I would pursue for the rest of my childhood. Believe it or not, it came while watching
The Mickey Mouse Club
.
    For those too young to remember,
The Mickey Mouse Club
was a variety show with cartoons and skits involving a group of wholesome young boys and girls known as the Mouseketeers. I’d often watch it after school. One day not long after my twelfth birthday, the program went to Washington, D.C., to visit the headquarters of the FBI.
    Those who didn’t live through the 1950s and early 1960s would have a hard time understanding the respect with which most Americans treated their government institutions at this time. This was well before campus protests and counterculture movements dominated the news, an era in which rock-and-roll stars such as Elvis Presley and the Everly Brothers were in uniform, Jimmy Stewart starred as an FBI agent fighting the Ku Klux Klan in
The FBI Story
, and the Bureau was revered as our society’s first line of defense against both crime and subversion.
    The Mickey Mouse Club’s producers reflected this, approaching the FBI with palpable, almost worshipful respect. What I remember most from that show was a segment in which a Mouseketeer spoke with J. Edgar Hoover, the legendary director who had headed the Bureau since 1924. Seated on the steel-framed butterfly chair in our family room, I was utterly transfixed. Hoover looked the young host firmly in the eye and spoke about the FBI’s mission; he talked about the high caliber of its agents and told stories of these agents chasing gangsters during the Roaring Twenties and tracking down German spies during World War II. It was like a boy’s adventure novel come to life! But what really sealed the deal was when the host was taken to a firing range and allowed to shoot a Thompson submachine gun, the weapon of choice for both G-men and Al Capone. I was hooked.
    When my mom came home from work that day, I could speak of nothing else. Being a good mom, she went out and got me a kids’ book about the FBI, which amplified and further dramatized all the stories of derring-do that Hoover had only hinted at. The book contained stories of agents tracking down dangerous fugitives, arresting bank robbers, and securing the release of kidnap victims. From that time forward I never wanted to do anything else.
    Of course, life was not as simple and sweet as it was portrayed on television, particularly if you lived in the segregated South, as I did. Throughout my childhood I would be reminded regularly that there were people who lived near me in Florida who had a very different kind of life. My first memory of this came on a shoe-buying expedition to Jacksonville, when I first noticed the omnipresent signs indicating separatewater fountains, building entrances, and the like. I had never really appreciated the ugly face of discrimination before then, and I didn’t like what I saw. I remember my parents sitting me down and telling me that segregation was not right, and emphasizing that we had a responsibility to look out for others less fortunate than us, regardless of their skin color.
    During my senior year at Florida Southern College, I took secondary education courses and did a teaching internship in history and sociology at Lakeland High School. This was 1972. School busing was causing protests as far north as Boston, and down in Florida, when Lakeland’s all-black high school was closed and its students merged into two formerly all-white schools, it did not sit well with many people. During my internship at Lakeland High School, there were frequent altercations in the hallways between white and black students. Whenever the school siren rang at an unscheduled time, all the male teachers were expected to rush out to break up those fights. I had always been a kind of mediator and peacemaker among my friends, but this was my first exposure to crisis containment as an adult. These were kids, technically, but not