Opinion: Abe Lincoln and me

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One November, about 15 year ago, on my KCET program ‘Life & Times,’ I commemorated the anniversary of the Gettysburg Address by reading the speech on the air.

It’s perfect for modern soundbite television -- fewer than 300 words, and deliverable in under two minutes.

The Gettysburg Address, like Abraham Lincoln himself, can be whatever you want it to be, depending on the delivery and the emphasis you choose. Many people who say it aloud stress the prepositions: ‘of the people, by the people, for the people....’

I felt otherwise. When I read it on the air, I emphasized the word ‘people’: ‘of the people, by the people, for the people....’ I don’t know why -- it just felt right, somehow.

Within a day or so, I got a call from an elderly man. He had watched the program and heard me reading the address, he said. Decades earlier, when he was a little boy, his family had had a guest at its Thanksgiving dinner table. It was an elderly man who had been there in Pennsylvania that afternoon, at the new soldiers’ cemetery in Gettysburg, when President Lincoln read that address.

The man who called me said his family’s elderly guest had remembered everything about that day and that speech -- he had committed it to memory easily, it was so short. The old man at that Thanksgiving table had recited it just the way he heard Lincoln do. And, my caller told me, Lincoln had put his emphasis exactly where I had chosen to: ‘’of the people, by the people, for the people.... ‘’

I was so overcome that I cried. In that moment, Lincoln wasn’t just the face on the penny and the five-dollar-bill, the vast whited memorial in Washington, D.C. There was a tenuous, living spark of connection, across more than 130 years, between the Great Emancipator and me.