My earliest political memory: 35 years ago today

Recently, I was conversing with some fellow Atriots in our "chat room," and we began discussing our earliest political memories. At first, I said it was Watergate for me, which of course dominated the headlines and the TV news reports through much of 1973 and 1974, around when I was in third grade. But then I recalled the 1972 presidential election, of which I have vague memories ... and then I remembered the assassination attempt on Democratic presidential contender and former Alabama governor George Wallace.

Man, I'm getting old.

Wallace was shot 35 years ago today, in a shopping center parking lot in Laurel, Maryland, outside of Washington, D.C. I was six years old at the time, and it remains today my earliest specific political memory.

Because I was not even three when Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were killed, and of course I wasn't yet born when JFK was assassinated, the Wallace shooting became a sort of marker for me, my earliest awareness of an intersection between politics and violence.

I don't want to place greater emphasis on this event than it deserves, although in historical terms it was significant because it derailed what was a strengthening presidential campaign for the former segregationist known best for barring black students from the University of Alabama. Needless to say, we'll never know if Wallace could have won the Democratic nomination (the eventual nominee was, of course, George McGovern), let alone thwart Richard Nixon's re-election bid. The shooting left Wallace paralyzed and wheelchair-bound for the rest of his life; he died in 1998.

It was, however, precisely the sort of occurrence that stuck in the mind of a certain impressionable six-year-old in suburban Detroit, and that remains to this day an important, albeit ever fading, snapshot in the album of my mind.