John de Graaf

I was walking on 1st Avenue, south of the Pike Place Market, when I heard two men talking loudly. They were close enough to make me turn and look. The guys were burly, not in the best of shape, not old, but not young; it’s hard to tell someone’s age. What caught me by surprise was that they were making disparaging remarks about my city.  

The third song to be sung in the Super Bowl pre-game program is “America the Beautiful,” a perennial favorite in the nation’s canon of patriotic music. The Woman Behind America the Beautiful is an unsung hero. The song was written first as a poem by Katharine Lee Bates, a young Wellesley College professor.