Sock it to meee?”

That awkward query by presidential candidate Richard Milhous Nixon (on the September 16, 1968, episode of “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In”) was probably haunting my mind on August 8, 1974.

On the afternoon of that fateful day, I tagged along as my flea-marketeer mother purchased antiques from farm couple Gerald and Kate Killingsworth. On the Killingsworths’ TV, the usual game shows and soap operas were interrupted by newscasters speculating about the next move by one Richard M. Nixon, the law-and-order president who had been impeached days earlier for the cover-up of the Watergate Hotel break-in.

(The broadcast journalists rehashed countless then-familiar names and terms: Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Liddy, White House Plumbers, Nixon’s Enemies List, Deep Throat, 18-and-a-half-minute gap and so forth.)

That evening, our family attended a church party at the home of Duard Earl and Gladys Jean Foster. I was in........

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