It's amazing how close we are to history -- and how rapidly our first-hand participants are leaving us.

Alistair Cooke was fond of telling people who shook his hand that, "You've just shaken the hand that shook the hand that shook hands with Abraham Lincoln."

It seems that when the Brit was a young correspondent, he was introduced to Oliver Wendell Homes. Holmes, a Civil War officer in the Union Army before he was a Supreme Court Justice, shook the Great Emancipator's hand.

My grandfather, who lived from 1896 to 1977, experienced tremendous social and technological changes, and was my living history lesson. A veteran of WWI, he talked often of his years in the cavalry before and after the War, but not of his combat in France.

I knew him only as an old man, crippled by arthritis, but I prefer to remember him as a Doughboy, striding across fields with a grin on his face and his Springfield slung over his shoulder.