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"…Sail on, O Ship of State...

Humanity with all its fears…

Is hanging breathless on thy fate."

When our fifth grade teacher read these lines of Henry Longfellow to us at Spring Street School in Atlanta, their meaning left an indelible mark on my mind.

America is the land that empowers individualism with its greatest opportunity and simultaneously remains the source of common strength from which we all may draw.

I was raised with a strong sense of gratitude for being born an American.

In classrooms and scout meetings, we recited together the "allegiance to the flag, and to the republic for which it stands." A great love of home and country pervaded my Georgia background.

Our pride of country intended no denigration of other countries, and we expected that citizens of all nations would feel about their countries the way we felt about "the good old U.S.A."

Who can forget James Cagney as George M. Cohan singing, "I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy/A Yankee Doodle, do or die"?

My father, a fine scholar, was a U.S. Army infantry officer in France in World War I. When I volunteered in the Navy the day after Pearl Harbor, my father dropped everything, went to Washington, D.C., and talked Sen. Walter F. George into paving the way for Dad to join the Navy despite his advanced age.

We are the land that opens its arms to those who have lost their freedoms elsewhere.

In all my years of living and singing in Europe, I never met anyone who had given up U.S. citizenship to live in another country. No matter how long one stayed and worked in Europe, there was always America, the home that beckoned us beyond the shining sea.

We live in a day when it may be out of style to kiss your wife in public or to put your hand over your heart and stand at attention when you hear, "The Star Spangled Banner" being played, but it is our family and our land that provide us with our exhilarating qualities of existence.

At age 17, when I first walked across Harvard Yard to Weld Hall where I lived, I could not help imagining the generations of young men who had preceded me in my steps and left a tradition of scholarship and love of country since 1636.

Freshman year, I drove my old Pontiac the few miles out to Lexington and Concord. I walked across Concord Bridge, and paused at the top, thinking of Ralph Emerson's words: "Here once the embattled farmers stood and fired the shot heard round the world."

Those Yankee farmers sent a message of freedom across the Atlantic to Europe, where, a few years later, the French revolted against a despotic and corrupt royalty.

Where 'er he be, the human animal has a predilection to put aside the past from which he sprang.

However, I am fortunate to have known a great-grandfather who fought in the Civil War, and lived on to make a long and rewarding career.

Tradition survives....