THE McCAIN CONNECTION: His family moved to Orange Park in 1966.

It was a different time and a different John McCain.
Jessie-Lynne Kerr

It was a different time and a different John McCain.
There were no spotlights, no three-piece suits, no standing before voters asking them to elect him president.
Just McCain, a garbage can for a seat, directing movers along Fatio Lane in Orange Park where to put the furniture in his family's new home.
Mae Ogden remembers. ( The former owner, evidently a well respected and loved resident of our new home )
"He was a real personable person and we'd chat out in the street," said Ogden, who lived across the street. "The kids were so little, but they were really darling."
McCain, his first wife, Carol, and their children moved there in 1966 and spent about a dozen years during a time that saw some of the heights and depths of his life: His plane being shot down during Vietnam, his spending 5? years as a prisoner of war in Hanoi, his joyful return home.
It just might have marked the start of the future senator and presidential candidate's passion for politics.
Ralph Lake, who with his wife, Dulce, has owned the McCains' house since 1996, recalled stripping off wallpaper around the kitchen phone and finding numbers scribbled on the wall beneath.
"Including one for Ronald and Nancy Reagan in California," he said.
John and Carol McCain became friends of the Reagans when Ronald Reagan was governor of California. In 1979, Carol McCain was Reagan's Clay County director for his presidential campaign. After Reagan was elected president in 1980, Carol McCain was director of the inaugural balls and then in charge of the White House Visitors Office.
"I thought that was pretty neat," Lake said of the Reagans' number, "but then I painted over them."
Now there are few physical reminders of the McCains' time here.
But there are plenty of memories.
Watching and waiting
Retired Navy Lt. Cmdr. George Nichols saw his military action in wars before McCain's times. But he knew the family - his daughter, Nancy, baby-sat the McCain children - and he like many other neighbors watched and waited for word when McCain was being held prisoner.
When he was released, it was a cause for celebration throughout the neighborhood, which held a block party in his honor.
"He was as skinny as hell when he got back, but his mind was fully functioning," Nichols recalled. "I was proud of his guts."
McCain has called his Orange Park neighbors the mainstay of support for his wife and children, sons Doug and Andy and daughter Sidney, while he was captured.
Neighbors help family
Doug was 7, Andy was 5 and Sidney was just 6 months old when their father left for Vietnam. He was shot down Oct. 26, 1967.
Neighbors "helped with the maintenance of our home, took my children to sporting events, offered whatever counsel and support was needed and generally helped keep my family together, body and soul, until I could get back to them," McCain recalled during a campaign stop here in April.
Because many of those who lived in the neighborhood had Navy ties, they also had a sense of the realities of life during wartime.
"I can still remember sitting in class at Orange Park Elementary with Todd Crumpler when his mother came to tell him his father was alive and a POW. 'He's on the list,' she shouted to us," Doug McCain remembered.
Air Force Col. Carl Crumpler had been shot down and captured July 5, 1968, eight months after John McCain. Because John McCain's father was a top Navy admiral, the North Vietnamese had shared his fate within months of his capture. But the Crumpler family, who lived across the street, had to wait nearly two years before learning their loved one was alive and a POW.
School days
The McCain children attended Orange Park Elementary School with the boys going on to Jacksonville Episcopal High School starting in the seventh grade.
There, Doug McCain played soccer and spent a lot of time surfing and water skiing.
"He was always fun to be with," said classmate Lon Walton, who recalled that the John McCain POW bracelet was a popular adornment at Episcopal.
McCain returned to Orange Park in 1973. Walton recalled that John McCain was a graduation speaker at Episcopal High School in 1977 when he and Doug graduated, although he couldn't remember the subject of the speech.
Walton, who is in the real estate business, has kept in touch with Doug McCain over the years.
"We ... talk every couple of weeks," he said.
Prelude to politics
Tom Slade, a former state senator and GOP state chairman, remembers how when McCain was still a POW, Carol McCain and the children would go to the Club Continental in Orange Park. After John McCain's homecoming, Slade said he joined the family in their visits.
"John told me he wanted to run for Congress," Slade recalled. "I remember telling him he'd have a hard fight because no one could beat [popular Democratic incumbent] Charlie Bennett."
He didn't challenge Bennett. But about six years later - and three years after the McCains sold their Orange Park home - John McCain the Navy hero became John McCain the politican, winning a seat in Congress representing Arizona.
jessie-lynne.kerr@jacksonville.com,
(904) 359-4374