Dispatch From Disneyland
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DFD - Mr. Lincoln, I presume?

Lots of parents use a trip to Disneyland as a reward for doing something good. Perhaps it’s getting high marks at school, doing all your chores, or just finishing an important project. For ten-year-old Johnny Guest the thought of visiting Disneyland was more than enough inspiration to help him memorize a speech for school.

Thumbing through the choices with his Mom they decided he would learn Abraham Lincoln’s most famous speech - ‘The Gettysburg Address’. It was relatively short, which Johnny liked, but covered some important issues, which Johnny’s mother liked.

Each day as a reward for memorizing a few more lines, Johnny and his Mom would sit down and plan out a little bit of the upcoming trip. By the time Johnny had the speech memorized, they had planned out most of the day. Together they decided that an appropriate start to the day would be for them to visit - Great Moments With Mr. Lincoln.

Finally the big day was here. Johnny would give his speech at school and then the following Saturday they would head out for a day trip to Disneyland.

•   •   •

The long walk to school was made just that much more difficult by his self-designed costume. The black Sunday coat he borrowed from his older brother’s closet fit him like a tent. Even with the sleeves rolled up and the waist-line taped in, the weight of the heavy wool material was beginning to slow him down. The stove-pipe top hat he had fashioned out of a coffee tin and black paper threatened to blow off at the slightest breeze. But the worst of it was the way his fake beard and mustache scratched his face and drove him to itch everywhere. Not very presidential, he thought.

Somehow he made it to school in one piece and rested in the shelter of the school’s main entrance. It didn’t take long before he caught a few students giving him odd looks, but he noticed that most just shook their heads and moved on, already used to his playful antics.

He timed his entrance to the fifth grade classroom to the exact second of the warning bell. The teacher turned around to see who had just avoided a tardy slip and, judging by the look on her face, nearly broke out into laughter. Controlling herself, she directed the Lincoln imitator to his chair.

Now that he was in his seat he really felt the scratchiness of the beard, the heat of the wool jacket, and the challenge of keeping that hat on his head. Thankfully his was to be the first speech of the day. So he didn’t have to wait long before his teacher called him to the front of the class.

Standing up straight and addressing his teacher the boy announced, "I will now recite Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address."

"Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. "

He had wanted this speech to be realistic as possible. So he tracked down the town’s one war veteran who had been at Gettysburg and heard the speech. He quizzed the man on what Mr. Lincoln had sounded like, how thick his beard was, did he stand still? Gesture with his hands? Did he ever refer to his notes?

Based on what the veteran said, the boy now repeated in the classroom. He used his arms to gesture from side to side. He had notes in his hand, but did not once refer to them. He sported a thick (albeit artificial) beard, like the one Lincoln himself wore that day.