Cut to common cloth

America was shaped for sinners, not saints | Mindy Belz

Illustration by Krieg Barrie

As a child of the '60s my heroes came from television. Andy Griffith, Rob and Laura Petrie, Michael Landon's Little Joe and Hoss molded for someone who'd never left the South the image of what it meant to be an American. For a time I wore a POW bracelet bearing the name of Adm. Jeremiah Denton that also fired my imagination. During Denton's seven years' captivity in the Hanoi Hilton, Girl Scout meetings were consumed with learning Morse code after he gave his famous interview, blinking with his eyes the word "t-o-r-t-u-r-e" as he spoke to the camera.

Then came Watergate, and what it meant to be an American got interesting: As the presidency crumbled I remained glued to hearings of the Senate select committee conducted under the chairmanship of the plain-spoken senator from North Carolina, Sam Ervin. Cheeks warbling as if in the clutch of a phantom chaw of tobacco, Ervin quoted long passages from the Old and New Testaments, Mark Twain, or Shakespeare as suited the moment, without note or teleprompter.