Old times there are forgotten? Or not?

February 16th, 2008 at 10:44pm Chuck Sweeny

While waiting Saturday for Hillary Clinton to speak in Kenosha’s Brat Stop night spot, I had a conversation with Betty Phillips of Racine, and we were talking about how times have changed.

For we have come very far as a nation, and it is historic, to have the Democratic race for president now down to two candidates — a black man and a woman. And BarackObama, the black man, carried the white vote in Virginia, the seat of the old Confederacy.

(As I write this I remember how ironic it is that the Democrats were the pro-slavery party before the Civil War, and the Southern Democrats, including Sen. Al Gore, Sr., and Sen. J. William Fulbright, Bill Clinton’s mentor, were segregationists as late as the 1960s.)

Mrs. Phillips’ husband, she said, played in the minor leagues in the old Milwaukee Braves organization, in the South, during the 1950s.

At the beginning of the games, she told me, the sound system did not play the National Anthem.

“They always played Dixie,” she said.

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