Although it's been 52 years, local resident Don Williams can still remember-right down to the weather-marching in front of President Lyndon Johnson during the Jan. 20, 1965, presidential inauguration.
"It was nice, sunny and mild weather," Williams said while looking at the very same personal copy of the inaugural invitation he received more than half a century ago. "I can still remember seeing the president standing up in the parade review stand with his wife and daughter. They were all about 20 to 30 feet away from us and standing behind bulletproof glass windows."
As a 24-year-old Army staff sergeant, serving with the 82nd Airborne Division at that time, Williams remembered the day offering far more pleasant weather than the more typical winter months in Washington, D.C.
"The place was festive and we were able to hear the U.S. Army Band's music," he said. "D.C. was crowded with masses of people on both sides of Pennsylvania Avenue, where we marched, but everyone treated us like royalty."
Prior to 1965's inauguration, President John F. Kennedy's Jan. 20, 1961, inauguration received a winter cold blast that brought the temperature down to 22 degrees-a chill strengthened even more by gusty winds that day, according to news reports from that time.
Just before the military parade, Williams, now 76, said he received a marching prop that, at the time, had become the military's newest carrying weapon-an M-16 fully automatic combat rifle, replacing the armed services' short-lived M-14.
Unlike inaugural parades of the past, Williams said the 1965 parade, to some degree, broke with normal tradition by including more military personnel than military hardware (tanks, trucks, artillery pieces).
For Williams, the occasion was his first time in Washington, D.C. Since then, he's traveled back to the U.S. capital only once (in July 2015) to attend a wedding and to visit.
Born in Whitney, Texas, Williams lived most of his life in Hubbard, Texas, before graduating high school and joining the Army in 1959.
After serving his first four years with the 3rd Infantry Division, stationed mostly in Germany, Williams joined the 82nd Airborne Division, finishing jump school at Fort Benning, Ga., in October 1964. He became one of 200 members of the 82nd to be selected to represent the division in the inaugural parade.
Four months after the inaugural, Williams received deployment to a civil war brewing in the Dominican Republic in April 1965. However, his stationing in the Caribbean became brief when he received reassignment to the 173rd Parachute Brigade, stationed in South Vietnam. There, he served until June 1966 before returning to the U.S. He went on to make a career out his military service until his retirement as a command sergeant major in 1980.
Besides seeing Johnson, Williams said he also saw President Ronald Reagan during a visit the president made to Norman, Okla.,in the 1980s. He added that he also met former President George W. Bush in 1994 while Bush was campaigning in Longview, Texas to become governor.
However, Williams added that getting to participate in an actual presidential inaugural has been life-long memory.
"If I could do it all over again, I would," he said. "It was a once-in-a-lifetime chance and one of the highlights of my military career and of my life."