History has been made. Surprisingly so. In a surprisingly short time.

It’s hard to imagine 45 years ago tonight I had a train ticket to Washington, D. C., for the historic March on Washington.

At the time I was working as the assistant to the editor of the Bridgeport Sunday Post, now the Connecticut Post. I was told by the editor that I could not take the day off and should not to go to Washington.

But I had my train ticket and I was ready to go.

However, that evening my first wife, Susanna, felt the first pains of the coming birth of our second child. So it seemed I would miss the March anyway. As was the practice in those days, I returned home to wait. At 1 a.m. she called from the hospital and said that we had a baby boy. Come up and see him and you can still make the train, which I think left Bridgeport, Ct., at something like 3 a.m. I went up to Bridgeport Hospital, saw my wife and son, Todd, whose 45th birthday it is today.

I was tired but took the train and did march in Washington. I did see Martin Luther King, Jr. make his historic speech. Yet I don’t remember where I stood and as I look at film of that day I wonder about that. Now my memory is more of the television footage of that historic “I have a dream” speech than anything I personally remember of being there.

Tonight so much of that period’s hope – and King’s dream - will be realized as Barack Obama accepts the nomination of the Democratic Party for the Presidency of the United States.

It’s an almost unbelievable realization that a black man possibly could in my lifetime ascend to nominee and possibly to be our President.
It seems a long time – 1963 to 2008. Yet it also seems quite a short period given the circumstances of race in America for such an incredible change.

I don’t know what I will feel tonight as I hear Obama but I know the emotions will be right on the surface. I can’t imagine what it will be like for a black man of my age.