From the River to the Sea: Reflections from the Personal Journey of Karen Jones Porter

Upon graduation from Kewanee High School in May 1960, I was a very sheltered young girl from a small town. I filled my three white, hard-sided Samsonite pieces of luggage with dreams and headed off to Iowa City to begin my nursing career. The Sixties Decade would be a turbulent ride.

Sometime in 2017 I wrote the following email to my five children: "It's a World gone mad you say? I will tell you that I have seen it all before. Watts, Chicago 7, Kent State shootings, and the Black Panthers breaking into surgery while dad took bullets out of their guy. They demanded he hand them over as he pulled from the wound. Martin Luther King's assassination was followed by Bobby Kennedy's as we sat on the edge of our chairs listening to the daily Vietnam body count...."

Their history is not my history. Mine began at the end of the 19th Century with the arrival of my seven-year-old grandfather on a ship from England. Theirs began at the time when the United States went to war in Vietnam and protests began. Civil Rights. Women's Rights. Political Upheaval. This memoir is but a small window of reflections over several decades. It is not about politics or protests. It is about the life of a small-town girl growing up very fast.