It may seem difficult to believe in this age of hyperpartisan politicians, but there was a time - not too long ago - when the visit of a sitting president was not the subject of political arm wrestling.

And so it was in the summer of 1996 when Bill Clinton’s train came to town. Clinton, of course, was running for reelection and our fine president was trying to wake up the echoes of Harry Truman. “Let’s take a train trip,” someone in the campaign must have said. And the governor-turned-chief-executive was soon riding the rails.

A presidential train trip was an event not to be missed, so I packed up the car with a picnic lunch and headed out to the crossing at Dixie Highway near I-75.

When I arrived, I could feel the growing sense of excitement. “Do you think he’ll give a speech?” someone asked. “Oh, sure, with this many people. No politician could resist,” I answered. As I scanned the crowd, there seemed to be hundreds of curious Monroe onlookers.

Soon, we heard the whoosh of copter blades as the secret service scanned the tracks. It is almost difficult to believe in this day of terrorism, but a middle-schooler came up with the great idea of placing some pocket change onto the tracks. And so it was that hundreds of God-fearing Americans began to place hundreds of tiny silver obstacles onto the very tracks that a sitting commander-in-chief would soon pass over.

Suddenly, a loud horn blew. “He’s almost here,” someone yelled. The crowd pushed forward, just in time to hear several of Bill Clinton’s trademarked Southern “Thank Yew’s” with Senator Carl Levin standing right by his side. The train passed quickly. There would be no speech today. But our disappointment was greatly outmatched by our brief brush with glory. “Ain’t that something,” someone nearby remarked.

It took a moment, but the crowd’s focus soon turned to the coins that had been scattered in a thousand different directions. Like beachcombers looking for a treasure, we all bent over to scan the grass below our feet. With a sense of history, I picked up my nickel and headed back to my little Ford Festiva. “I’m going to tell my kids about this one,” I thought to myself.

And so it was that Bill Clinton met Thomas Jefferson in the beautiful Monroe summer of ‘96.

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