Forty Years Ago Today

On March 6, 1967 my mother,my father and yours truly departed from Dulles airport outside Washington D.C. bound for Saudi Arabia. My dad had been assigned to the American embassy in Jeddah. We did not know when we would return to America.

We flew on Pan Am 2 to London, then Frankfurt, then Istanbul, then Beirut. We landed in Beirut in a heavy rainstorm after lightning hit one wing of the plane. It took us so long to get our things together we went into the airport on the crew bus. We arrived in darkness and rain at the Phoenicia Hotel where we were staying. The next day we woke up to the beautiful Mediterranean sunlight.