Although I was only 13, I guess you could say I had a pretty high opinion of myself when it came to being independent. My parents, whom were the greatest, worked in retailing and were seldom home during the day, leaving me pretty much to fend for myself.

Given that we lived in a large city and in a “not so nice” neighborhood, learning the ways of the “street” was probably on a par with mastering the three r’s. Since my mom was an outspoken champion of just about every politically incorrect cause of the time, I felt I could probably handle anything life could throw at me. Man, was I ever wrong!

Although I was somewhat aware of the racial divide infecting the nation at the time, it wasn’t something at the forefront of my thinking. My neighborhood could best be described as a “Little United Nations,” populated by representatives of just about every race, religion and ethnic group one could imagine. So I couldn’t really get my head around what was happening as close as a couple of hundred miles away.

The road trip itself was pretty much a blur, probably because all I could think about was the adventure ahead. A whole weekend at Fort Knox visiting my big brother, a member of the famed Third Armor Division about to leave for an overseas assignment. Damn, what could be cooler than that?

I must have dozed off when we passed through Cincinnati and crossed the Ohio River into Kentucky. But I couldn’t be more awake when I noticed the sign announcing that we were about to enter the city limits of Louisville, home of the famed Kentucky Derby, beautiful women, great whiskey, and Fort Knox the sign read.

It wasn’t long before we entered the Greyhound station grounds, parked at our assigned gate and let passengers disembark. As I walked through the door and entered the lobby, what I saw has stayed with me since that day.

The passenger waiting room was divided into two sections with signs indicating that one set of seats was for “whites only”and the other for “colored.” And it didn’t stop there. It was the same for the bathrooms, water fountains, snack bar and barber shop.

While the “white” section of the waiting room had nice chairs with padded seats, the seats in the “colored” section were bare metal. To enter the “whites only” bathroom one passed through an attractive smoke glass door while the entrance to the “colored” bathroom could only be described as a chipped out hole in the wall with a shower curtain for a door. Everywhere I looked it was the same. Two different realities.

I remember catching a glimpse of my brother out of the corner of my eye and rushing to meet him, temporarily putting what I had just experienced somewhere in the deep recesses of my mind.

The rest of the weekend was everything I had hoped it would be and more. I got to watch my brother march in a parade, sit on a real tank, sleep in an army barracks, eat in the chow hall and have my picture taken in front of a rifle rack.

It was all over too quickly and we had to rush to the station for me to catch the bus. As we hustled through the terminal to the departure area, I tried my hardest to look straight ahead to avoid remembering what I had seen when I first arrived, thinking that if I didn’t see it it didn’t exist. A quick “thank you and goodbye” was about all I had time for before boarding the Greyhound.

The trip back seemed longer and when the bus pulled into the Dayton terminal a strange feeling of relief came over me. Not necessarily because I was back home or would soon see my parents, but because I knew that what I saw in Louisville I wouldn’t see here. Although they say that time has a way of dulling bad memories, it hasn’t worked for me. It was something I will never forget and has shaped my life ever since.

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During the intervening years I have seen and done a lot;

my own Army experience, marriage, kids, and a long and rewarding academic career. Whenever I’m asked to sort through the far reaches of my mind and select a single experience that helped to shape who I am today, there’s never a moments hesitation — It was that time when I visited my brother at Fort Knox and encountered a whole new world — THE SEGREGATED SOUTH. I’ve tried, over the years, to turn what I had encountered into a teaching moment for my students and those closest to me but I fear I have fallen far below the mark. While overt segregation and racial inequality might be a little harder to spot now, it’s still there — just read your local newspaper or watch television news. Perhaps the answer is for each of us in our own way to confront racism whenever we encounter it, rather than burying it in the deep recesses of of our minds, as I tried to do. We must always remember that sometimes “the only thing necessary for bad things to happen is for good people to say or do nothing.”

Richard Goodman is a Dunkirk resident.