My father was a life-long Republican.
This was not easy for him because my grandmother, a foundation stone of our family, was a life-long Democrat. Both were South Carolinians to their core--my grandmother a first-grade school teacher for half a century, traveling widely, but always most comfortable in her southern home; my father a military man in WWII, later a vice president for Allstate Insurance Company, and still later an Arabian horse and Black Angus cattle rancher, but only after returning to his beloved state of South Carolina.
Thomas Wolfe's admonition about not going home never appealed to my father.
My grandmother died at the Darlington, South Carolina Baptist Home, beloved of those kind and generous people for her more than 70 years of service to her Baptist Church. I miss her greatly even today. My father passed away in December of 2007 after telling the head nurse at his full-care facility, "You people make it too g-d hard to die."
But before my father died, he spoke some profound words about the state of politics in South Carolina.
