Grooming the kiddies 150 years later, with ‘Lincoln never dies’

WASHINGTON (AP) - In the reading room overlooking Pennsylvania Avenue, Karen Needles mostly works alone - but always in good company.

Grooming the kiddies 150 years later, with ‘Lincoln never dies’ E76ceb15f2f1330f730f6a7067009d0c_c0-132-3150-1968_s561x327

Five mornings a week, she arrives at the National Archives, often wearing an Abraham Lincoln T-shirt. Beside her laptop with its Lincoln mouse pad, she sometimes stations an Honest Abe bobblehead, seemingly nodding approval.
Here, three blocks from where, 150 years ago this week, Lincoln was killed, Needles works to bring him to life, scanning every original record she can from Lincoln’s administration and posting them online.
To Needles, raised in small town Kansas and first in her family to go to college, Lincoln has long been a role model. But we could all use some Lincoln, the former history teacher says, relishing the notion of his statue at the Lincoln Memorial taking today’s politicians over his knee.
“Lincoln never dies,” she says.
Soon after John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln on April 14, 1865, the country embarked on a 1,700-mile funeral from Washington to Springfield, Illinois. Day and night, crowds lined the rails in a cathartic outpouring that has never been rivaled.
Today, the commemoration stirs the voices of Lincoln’s modern-day admirers, some connecting with him in almost personal terms, while searching anew for his relevance to the republic he left behind.
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When tourists queue in front of Ford’s Theatre on a recent blustery morning, 9-year-old Luke Ring is near the front, wearing the blue cap of a Union soldier.
“I like that he was president during the Civil War and he wanted freedom for the slaves,” says the boy, here with his family from Franklin, Tennessee, to see the theater box, draped in bunting, where Booth drew his pistol.
Lincoln’s death elevated him to martyrdom, says Richard Wightman Fox, author of “Lincoln’s Body: A Cultural History.” Today, he still embodies the American ideal that anyone can reach the pinnacle. But with Lincoln now used to market auto insurance and barbecue sauce, the aura of sainthood has faded.
Instead, for many, he is the approachable president, a “model for what it means to be a leader,” Fox says.
“He was very real,” says Sherri Bell of Indianapolis, after reading Lincoln’s second Inaugural engraved in the memorial’s limestone. “He was president, but he seemed liked a regular person, with all the pain and suffering and decisions…”

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Grooming the kiddies 150 years later, with ‘Lincoln never dies’

Grooming the kiddies 150 years later, with ‘Lincoln never dies’

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