This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2015, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

I planned to have three sons when I got married. Pretty hilarious, huh? Like it was totally up to me. Five seconds after it happened, I discovered that nothing about being married was entirely up to me.

My plan — which began sounding less smart as soon as my wife learned of it — involved us having three sons named Longstreet, Jackson and Lee.

My wife solved the problem by having only girls. She graciously allowed the vanquished (me) to choose the middle names. I got Lee, but had to settle for Georgia and Virginia.

I'd been a committed Civil War buff since the third grade. It probably goes without saying that I was fanatically Confederate. Defiance, rebellion and lost causes were part of my DNA.

By the time I hit junior high school I could reel off the correct order of march for both sides at Gettysburg, Chickamauga, Chancellorsville, and Shiloh. If you taught American History, especially the part about the Civil War, you didn't want me in your class.

My brothers and I thought nothing then of sporting the Confederate flag on everything we owned. When war board games were developed, we would argue — occasionally to the point of violence — over who had the ignominious task of playing the Union side.

I didn't exactly grow out of my interest in the military actions of the Civil War so much as I became more circumspect about flaunting it. Oddly enough, it had nothing to do with the Civil War. It happened at Disneyland.

The Magic Kingdom in the summer of 1975 was ugly — crowded and hot enough to fry meat on human foreheads. The lines for rides turned back and forth under a merciless sun. It was like a march in a death camp.

During the switchbacks we kept passing the same people, each time looking more dehydrated and irritable. For some reason, I focused on one old lady in particular. She plodded after her family, never complaining and never looking like she was ready to explode.

At a turn in the line, the old lady put out her arm to steady herself. That's when I saw the blue numbers tattooed on the inside of her arm, and realized that this innocent old lady knew more about death camps and standing in line than I ever would.

I thought about her a lot over the years, wondering how she processed the reminders of her terrible ordeal in places like Auschwitz and Treblinka. Every time she saw a swastika, or stood in line, did it remind her that her people had once been slated for extermination?

Later, I began to wonder the same thing about my Confederate flag T-shirt, bumper sticker, notebook cover, and shoulder patches. Was I rubbing something ugly in someone else's face?

I certainly didn't mean to. I was only interested in the history, or at least part of it. I was well aware that the Civil War wasn't just about slavery any more than World War II was just about the Jews.

It could also be argued that the swastika predates the Nazis by a couple of thousand years at least, and is still used by Hindus today as a sign of auspiciousness.

But this isn't how Jews and blacks tend to see things, probably because the tragedies they suffered aren't entirely over yet. Some still want Jews dead, and racism isn't exactly a dead issue in America today.

Robert Kirby can be reached at rkirby@sltrib.com or facebook.com/stillnotpatbagley. Find his past columns at http://www.sltrib.com/lifestyle/kirby.