It was nineteen seventy something or other when I remember driving right onto the West Point campus and climbing on the rocks while my father enjoyed mother’s famous Swiss Miss and bourbon “Cappucino” from a Thermos while waiting for the Black Knights to sink Navy, or beat Colgate. (Real men fight wars not cavities!) We would walk the parade grounds, run freely around all the statues, or check out the huge links of the Great Chain used to keep the British Navy from sailing up the Hudson.

Dad’s alumni ring probably helped us gain backstage campus access back then, but he’d probably need a lot more than that now to go anywhere other than on the guided bus tour. If he were alive, that is. But he’s not, so I had just had to return to West Point and check on another memory from my Right Coast childhood. But thanks to security initiatives put in place since 9/11, the public is no longer given free range among the cadets and pleebs.

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