Newsday's Paul Vitello describes one son's Father's Day memory. This one goes out to the 'It Can't Happen Here' crowd - just a reminder that it already did happen here once before.
In those days (as today), parents did not reveal a lot about their lives to the kids. Richard, an only child, knew almost nothing about his parents' childhoods or their lives before him except that both had gone to college and become teachers, and that both taught English. His mother, Tillie, taught in a junior high school.Beyond that, the boy's world was the Brooklyn Dodgers, his friends, his school, a vague awareness of a president named Eisenhower, and an even vaguer awareness of some problem in the country with the communists ... or the columnists. At 13, he got those words mixed up.
The trip to Princeton, N.J., to see Einstein in that year of 1953 - a year of the Korean War, the Cold War, the Hollywood Blacklist, the execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg for espionage - was the boy's first inkling that the world out there had anything to do with him and his family.
And his father, as it turned out, was in trouble with that world.
