A child’s 1962 letter to Kennedy symbolized open-space loss anxiety

Evidence

In 1962, seven-year-old Scott Turner sent a plea for help to President John Kennedy, and the boy’s handwritten letter soon became a symbol of the growing concern that fewer and fewer Americans would grow up with any appreciation for nature. The letter was reproduced in several books about the threat to open space. — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 1532

Categorization

• CANDY: A charming, tweetable detail: a seven-year-old’s plea to JFK over vanishing nature became a national symbol.
• XREF: connects to: Open-space preservation seeded the local grassroots activism of the postwar environmental movement — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside:…, 559