Within Arm's Length: A Secret Service Agent's Definitive Inside Account of Protecting the President Read Free

together in their fifty-nine years of marriage. That partnership ended only after Dad passed away in 1999, with Mother following him in 2013.
    My father was a very serious, self-made man who never really had a childhood. The son of a cotton mill worker who was also a Baptist minister, Dad was forced to drop out of high school at the age of sixteen in order to help support his family of two brothers and four sisters by working in the mill.
    Partial to dark suits with white shirts and dark, thin ties, he greatly resembled former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, complete with wire-rimmed glasses and swept-back dark hair. A World War II veteran of the Pacific theater of operations, he was extremely patriotic and was an active member of both the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars. Dad loved God first, his family second, and baseball third, although the order could vary at times depending on what teams were in the World Series.
    After marrying my mother in 1940, Dad discovered, largely as the result of her promptings, that he possessed a talent for business, and he escaped his dead-end career as a millworker by becoming a furniture salesman. In 1950, Dad started his own furniture business, appropriately named Emmett Furniture Company, which he owned for over sixteen years prior to moving on to other successful business ventures.
    My mother was the quintessential mom of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Always perfectly attired, she vacuumed and cleaned our immaculate home while dressed somewhat like June Cleaver. In spite of her hectic schedule, she always had dinner on the table each evening promptly at six o’clock when my father arrived home from work.
    As a child, I spent a lot of time at Dad’s furniture store—“the store,” as we referred to it. Most days during the school year, Dad dispatched one of his two deliverymen, Robert or Reeves, to pick me up from school and transport me to the store, where I would do homework, play in the large area of the rug department, or watch the newest Philco black-and-white TVs until it was time to go home. I remember one of the best parts of being at the store was the drink machine, which, for a dime, provided to me by Dad from the cash drawer, would produce the coldest Cokes and 7Ups in the world in wonderful glass bottles.
    The old building that housed Emmett Furniture was built in the 1920s and smelled of new furniture and fresh floor wax. There were always a lot of interesting people coming and going, including policemen, local politicians, businessmen, and just about anyone you could think of. Dad was a friend of Congressman Phil Landrum from our Ninth Congressional District, and one day as I sat watching cartoons, he appeared. This was during the early 1960s. Unlike today, constituents generally held congressmen in high esteem, and I recall feeling very special as this important man sat and talked with me for a few minutes.
    Other days one of Dad’s deliverymen would drop me off after school at the public library, where my mother worked part-time. There I would do homework and immerse myself in books about World War II or anything else I could find related to the military or guns. Considered cute at the time, I was fussed over by Mom’s coworkers, who loved to give me dinner-spoiling treats and seemed to delight in patting me on my blond crew-cut head.
    I attended Enota Elementary School within the Gainesville, Georgia, city school system. The quality education found within this system has over the years produced two astronauts and many doctors, lawyers, and engineers, as well as a couple of Secret Service agents. It was a time in America when, due to lack of government interference, many public schools provided a quality education found only today in private schools. Corporal punishment was still alive and well within the public schools, and disciplinary transgressions were met with a ruler impacting the palm of the hand or the principal’s pledge paddle