It was 1969. I was fresh out of Georgetown Law School, and my new boss, Lt. Gov. Paul Simon, gave me my first assignment: Cairo.
Cairo (affectionately mispronounced “Caro”) is at the southern tip of our state and almost 400 miles from Chicago. Part of an area known as Little Egypt, Simon aptly described it as the land of “grits and gospel music.” The rich delta soil surrounding it produced many crops including, I was surprised to see, fields of cotton.
