Fifty years ago a new word entered my vocabulary as our nation celebrated our bicentennial, the 200th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. I was 12 years old entering the seventh grade at Melrose School, where our class would finally join the eighth-graders in the junior high wing. We had just spent a year tucked away in a room in the old high school building that’s long since been torn down.