50 years ago today President Lyndon Johnson, in a nationwide speech on TV, stunned the nation by announcing that he would not seek, nor would he accept, the nomination of his party for the office of President of the United States.

Coupled with the increasing number of protests against the Vietnam war Johnson’s speech set off a chain reaction of violence and upheaval in America. Four days later, Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis. Two months to the day after that, Senator Robert Kennedy, a candidate for the U.S. Presidency was murdered in Los Angeles. This, less than five years after his brother, President John F. Kennedy, was shot and killed in Dallas, led me to seriously wonder in what kind of world I was living.  I was just 18 years of age.  Four years later, under Richard Nixon’s leadership,  the Vietnam war still had not ended and I found myself enlisting in the Navy.

Fact:  When I enlisted in the Navy I was given a choice:  be a photographer or a meteorologist.  I ended up working in a Navy photo lab.

Even through all of that I maintained my interest in the weather and still do to this day.  Not much has changed.  We still talk about the weather, but nobody does anything about it!

People now talk about climate change and watch the Weather Channel incessantly.  We still blame the weatherman when he’s wrong, but fail to acknowledge the many times that he/she is right.  We just don’t see people getting killed anymore.  Oh, wait.  Maybe we do!  Come to think of it, we do.

We will see more sunshine today with temperatures approaching 60 degrees.