Fort Knox, Kentucky, Summer of 1972
The summer at Fort Knox stretched on in a way that felt timeless.
We had just arrived in June of 1972, after my father returned from Vietnam. His final military orders brought us to Fort Knox, Kentucky. By February of the following year, after twenty years in the Army, he would retire and take us back home to Opelousas, Louisiana. But that summer existed in its own space, untouched by what came before or what would come after.
I was surrounded once again by military kids. It was what I knew and what I loved. There was an unspoken understanding among us. We knew what it meant to be new, to start over, to make friends quickly because time was never guaranteed. Acceptance came easy in that world.
We lived in the Prichard Place housing area, just across the highway from the gold vault. My best friend that summer was Pam, who was my age. She was visiting her sister, Theresa, and her family for the season. From the beginning, Pam and I were inseparable.
There was a grassy corner near our apartments, marked by a large oak tree. That is where we spent most of our days. Later, after we each had a boyfriend, the four of us gathered there often, sitting beneath the branches, talking, laughing, and stretching out the hours for as long as we could. That tree became our place. Before long, it had a name. It was the kissing tree.
Not long after we arrived, my brother Glenn took Pam and me to a fair. On the way, a song played on the car radio, “Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress.” I did not know then that a song could hold a memory, but I learned it that day. Even now, whenever I hear it, I am back in that car, on that road, heading toward something I could not yet define.
At the fair, I came home with a stuffed animal. It was a small thing, but like so many small things from that summer, it stayed with me.
There was a boy I had noticed before we ever spoke. He lived in the building behind ours and would be outside watering a garden. For a while, we only passed each other. Then, a few weeks later, we finally met. His name was Ric, and he became my first boyfriend.
One evening, Ric and his friend Sam stood outside my apartment window, tossing small rocks to get my attention. It was a simple gesture, but to me, it felt like everything. Sam soon became Pam’s boyfriend, and the four of us spent much of that summer together.
The days stretched into evenings. In Fort Knox, it stayed light until around nine o’clock during the summer. Groups of kids from Prichard Place would gather under the oak tree, singing, talking, and sometimes pairing off in quiet corners. Ric would often bring his guitar and play “Love Is All Around” by the Troggs. He tried to teach me how to play, but I never quite managed to learn.
Music was always there. “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl),” “Saturday in the Park,” “Clair,” and so many others filled the air. Pam knew how much I loved the band Chicago, and that summer she gave me my first Chicago album. I did not realize it then, but she was giving me something that would last far beyond that season.
One day, wanting a closer look at the gold vault, the three of us walked across the highway. We made it partway up the hill before hesitation set in. Ric took a quick photograph, and we turned around, laughing as we hurried back, as if we had ventured somewhere we were not quite supposed to be.
There were other routines that shaped our days. We went to the movies and bowling with friends. Ric and I would walk to the small PX in Prichard Place, sometimes with Pam, sometimes alone. When it was just the two of us, we often lingered on the walk back. The chapel was nearby, and at times we walked there together for Sunday Mass.
By the time school started, everything began to shift. It always did.
Military life had a way of bringing familiar faces back into your world. That year, I saw Jesse again, someone I had known when we lived in Hanau, Germany. I had also seen him once before at a football game in Worms. Robert, who had been my friend Jane’s boyfriend in Worms, was now in my study hall. The world felt both large and strangely small at the same time.
As the years passed, life carried all of us in different directions.
Pam and I lost touch for nearly twenty years before reconnecting in 1999. Since then, we have visited in person a few times, picking up threads that never truly disappeared. In 2011, I reconnected with Ric after coming across something about him online. More recently, I learned that another friend from that time now lives just a few miles from me.
Years later, after visiting my stepdaughter Colleen in Michigan, my husband Larry and I made a stop to see Pam. From there, we went on to Fort Knox.
The Army post was still there, but Prichard Place was not the same. The apartment buildings had been replaced with different housing. The small PX and the chapel remained, along with a school building nearby, but the landscape of memory had shifted.
The oak tree was gone.
The kissing tree no longer stood in that grassy corner, but the summer it held remains unchanged. The friendships, the music, the first feelings of something new and undefined, they are all still there, as vivid as they were in 1972.
Some places disappear. Some moments do not.
And that summer at Fort Knox will always be mine.
