A piece of personal history

As I have been pondering how I would present items from my life story, I have returned to a basic question, most likely one of many, that has plagued me for some time.

While I was born and raised in Arizona, when I was a youngster my father and mom and I left to begin a new life in the deep South to Huntsville, Alabama.

What has been confusing me was my exact age and the dates when we actually moved. I recently recalled that while we were on our trip to the South, we stopped somewhere in the state of Arkansas and talked about a headline in a newspaper that concerned a midair collision of two airliners that had just taken place over the Grand Canyon .

With the incredible resource of today's Internet I just Googled "airline disasters" and "the Grand Canyon" and discovered that the crashes took  place on June 30, 1956. I am guessing that we must've left Flagstaff two or three days prior to that date.

Frankly, I am flabbergasted that I was only eight years old when we left Arizona! In reality I was about one month away from my ninth birthday! I really did think that I was closer to 11 years old and was in the fifth or sixth grade when I first moved into Huntsville but it does not appear that that was the case at all.

With that in mind, I found this link to a  National Public Radio story that was broadcast in 2006 on the 50th anniversary of the plane crash (or should I say plane crashes) in Grand Canyon. The events on June 30 of 1956 occurred as I rode in the back seat of a car heading to what might as well have been another planet in another part of the universe in a very frightening time in my life.

Here's the link to the actual radio broadcast.

Here is another link with pictures.