I wrote a poem about it, fifty years ago.

It was a good poem, still is.

It was one of a series of American poems celebrating the Bi-Centennial.

I wrote one about the Vikings after Leif Erickson. That one was published in Poet Lore, Vol. 73, No. 4, Winter 1979.

I wrote one on Sir Walter Raleigh and the Roanoke Colony. And one on Thomas Jefferson’s world influence. And one on the Pioneers and the Westward Movement. And one on the French and Indian War. And later a series of Native American poems somewhat widely published. And, of course, the aforementioned one on “Columbus and the Indian.”

I was teaching fifth grade at Longfellow School in Pasadena. I joked that all I knew about American history was from the Social Studies textbook. That was almost true.

I thought of putting together a little volume of such related poems. I was prolific.

But teaching for me was so time-consuming that I had little extra to pursue a concurrent literary career, or my quest to become an operatic baritone, or a ranked tennis player, or an international chef, or a Presidential advisor, or a chess player beyond the chess tournament I established, or a theologian overseeing the Jesuit Order in the Catholic church, or a college advisor establishing entrance requirements, or the developer of libraries beyond the one I created for the school, or the culture critic for the newspaper, or the complexities of scheduling screen test auditions for the movie roles, to name just a few of my activities during that early period of my life.

I had difficulty going in all directions at once with too little sleep and too much coffee, and a waiting period for publication in those days of submission by mail, sometimes exceeding a year, which may partly explain why you may never have heard of me.

But the Columbus poem, which I recently unearthed, is pretty good (I know you’ll want to read it) and I may try again to submit it somewhere before I give up and just post it in my blog, before probably including it in a projected magnum opus on all things teacher.

I guess I mention it here because of the news coverage regarding the current re-writing of history.

To which I can simply say, “Been there, done that.”