The New Citizens Press

                        
    I don’t really remember just how my oldest and dearest friend, Barbara Jean Baker Vinson VanBuren and I met.  It’s been over fifty years ago!  We met at Lincoln Elementary School in Gary, Indiana.  She lived in the projects on one side of the school, just beyond the sand dunes.  I lived on the other side of the school in a new house that one of my father’s friends had helped him buy after my first born brother had been released from the hospital, suffering pneumonia as we had lived in a cold basement apartment! Mr. Montgomery and my father both worked in the Gary Works Steel Mills, as did Barbara’s father, Mr. Edwin Baker.  I was the oldest of eight children and Barbara was in the middle of her family’s seven children.  We hooked up in grade school and continued our relationship through graduation at Froebel High School in 1961.  Oh, how the years have flown!  For I can remember when…..