Sweat trickled down my back and across my forehead as I ran up to kick the ball hearing the smack on my foot and feeling the tingle and soft sting as the rubber of the kickball hit off of my exposed ankle skin and tennis shoe. The ball skidded and bounced and I made it safely to first base. The day was hot and humid and not unlike any other of that summer in 1972. The sun blazed over head at our day camp as we played kick ball, out favorite activity.

The next kid got up and my heart sank, he was a certain out. There were already two outs that inning, and I wanted more than anything to score. I wanted to win.

The first pitch came and he missed it completely. The second came and he managed to tap it with his foot reversing its motion and setting it at a snail’s pace back to the pitcher. Knowing that this would no doubt be an out anyway, I set off sprinting to second base. You could see the pleasure in the boy’s face, for once actually making contact with the ball, as he sauntered off towards first base. The ball was fielded and thrown and somehow miraculously reached first base at seemingly the same instant he did. An argument broke out and we all turned to the counselors to make the call if he was safe or out.

I looked around, but no counselor could be found. Still standing on second base, I called over to my friend waiting in the kicking line if she knew where all the counselors were.

By now, all the kids were standing puzzled, wondering as to where the camp counselors, who were supposed to be keeping track of us, could have gotten to.

Just then, someone spotted them: “they are over there! All crammed into that car!”

This was annoying, here we were trying to play a game of kickball and all the counselors were ignoring us and were instead packing in a Volkswagen listening to a crackling radio.

I jogged over and asked them what we should do about the disputed call but they didn’t answer. I asked again but all they did was stare open mouthed at the tiny car radio that was speaking to them. I figured that whatever they were listening to must be pretty important so I paused in my attempts to gain their attention and listened to what the fuzzy voice on the radio was saying.

I caught something about the president resigning from office. Who was the president? Oh yeah, some guy named Nixon, I remember my parents saying they were going to vote for him. Yup, they said his name: “Richard M. Nixon, the 37th president of the United States”. I guess mom and dad must have voted for the wrong guy.

The radio crackled to a stop and the counselors blinked their eyes and started murmuring to one another and finally, they noticed us. One of them asked if we had been listening to the news but we said that all we wanted to know was if the boy was safe or out. Saying that that wasn’t important right now, the counselors called us all over and told us that our president of the United States, Richard Nixon, had resigned—that means given up—his job as the president of our country.

Apparently, this was pretty big news. One of the counselors even started flipping the radio dial again attempting to find another station covering the story. The one talking to us kept going on about the importance of what was happening and how no president before had ever resigned. The interest of the group of us 10 and 11 year olds however was in no way on the information he was dishing out to us. It was fine with us if they all wanted to sit in the car and listen to the drone of the news, but we wanted to keep playing.

Finally after he was done droning on about Nixon and something I had heard my parents discussing called the Watergate scandal, we were allowed to go back to play. It was decided that the kid was safe at first base and we continued our game on that summer’s afternoon while the counselors remained jammed in the Volkswagen.