You are Invited to Our Virtual Declaration of Independence Party Tomorrow, July 1!
It’s party time! The Notgrass History team cordially invites you to celebrate with us tomorrow morning at 11:00 a.m. Central Time. Go to this link and tap the REGISTER NOW button to sign up. I hope you can come!!
DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE PARTY
Hosted by Notgrass History
Wednesday, July 1 at 11:00 A.M. Central
Ray and I had been married a year and a half when America celebrated its bicentennial in 1976. We were living in Lexington, Kentucky, at the time while Ray was getting his master’s in history. One weekend in 1976, we traveled to Philadelphia with Christian college students to attend a conference. Late on Saturday afternoon, Ray and I visited the Liberty Bell and saw the outside of Independence Hall.
Pardon the poor quality of these 50-year-old pictures taken with our Kodak Instamatic camera.
Little did we know then that visiting historic sites would become a lifetime hobby for us.
Now towns across America decorate their downtown light poles for holidays. I took this photo in Gainesboro yesterday.
However, as far as I know, decorating light poles, except perhaps at Christmas time, was a new idea in 1976. The patriotic light pole decorations we saw in Philadelphia that year are the first I remember seeing.
At a time when just about the only men wearing beards were hippies, both Ray and his dad made a bold move and grew beards—one brown and one white—in honor of the bicentennial. Ray’s dad was in a bicentennial play that year, and we drove down to Tennessee to see it.
Here is a 1976 photo of the three of us in Lexington during one of Ray’s dad’s visits to see us there (Ray’s mother had passed away the year before).
The following year, Ray’s dad—who was not officially a minister, but who filled in occasionally—preached a sermon in remembrance of the bicentennial. It is as appropriate for the 250th anniversary as it was for the 200th. Ray read his dad’s sermon to our church this past Sunday. As he said then, it is too wonderful to sit in a file folder. I plan to share it with you over the next two days. The title is the first line of this verse from Proverbs:
Righteousness exalts a nation,
But sin is a disgrace to any people.
Proverbs 14:34
Ray’s daddy quoted the verse from the King James Version. I know that his words from 1977 will bless you tremendously. Look forward to reading them July 1 and 2:
Righteousness exalteth a nation:
but sin is a reproach to any people.
Proverbs 14:34
I hope you can join us tomorrow!