Hands Across America

In Spring of 1986, we started hearing about Hands Across America, a benefit to raise money to fight hunger, homelessness and poverty. Attendants would hold hands from New York City's Battery Park to the Queen Mary's pier in Long Beach, California. We went to the public library and consulted newspaper publications to look for the closest strand to Tallahassee and found it to be in Memphis, Tennessee.

My recollection is that it took eleven hours to get there. Peter and I left Tallahassee with three others in a 1975 Ford LTD late Saturday evening after work on May 24, 1986, and made very few stops on the way to Memphis on Sunday. It was scary driving in the rain in mountainous northern Alabama. We drove until we saw the line of people in downtown Memphis and parked as close to them as we could with only minutes to spare.

We linked arms with the other participants and although we weren't sure what they were singing, we hummed along. Fifteen minutes after we arrived, we had completed our mission. We spent the next several hours on Beale Street in Memphis and went to at least a dozen bars whose names are now lost to time. At one of the last bars we visited, Percy Sledge was live on stage, and we stayed through his entire set, during which he sang "When a Man Loves a Woman."

It was a momentous day in Memphis, Tennessee, and one we knew we would never forget. Shortly before midnight, we got back into the car and took a short ride over the Mississippi River on the Memphis & Arkansas Bridge into West Memphis Arkansas, so we could say we visited Arkansas, and then we traveled home.