By Derek Spellman

dspellman@joplinglobe.com

ANDERSON, Mo. — As she fingers the bracelet, Dee Wood is transported back almost 40 years and into the Kansas hinterland.

She’s a teenager again living in a small town. It’s the late 1960s. There is war going on in a place called Vietnam. Wood has friends serving overseas.

And people at school have been talking about these new bracelets they can buy with the names of American prisoners of war or servicemen who are missing in action. The bracelets were worn in a gesture of solidarity with the troops.

Wood is about to buy her bracelet in a town called Council Grove, about 66 miles southwest of Topeka. She is looking into a box of them. Her friend has just plucked hers from the top, so Wood decides to plunge her hand into the bottom.

The one she draws is etched with the words “LCDR John McCain III.” The name is underscored by a date: Oct. 26, 1967.

“Back then, who would have thought,” she recalled during a Friday interview at the Golden Living Center in Anderson, where she works.

Wood said she didn’t know McCain or his specific story when she first purchased the bracelet, let alone predict that he would be the Republican Party’s nominee for president.

Almost 40 years later, the bracelet has become not just a piece of historical memorabilia but also a conduit into “a whole other era,” Wood said.

When she shows the bracelet to those who, like her, lived through that time period, the bracelet triggers memories, she said. When she shows it to young people like her son or her students in her teakwood class, it triggers questions.

“It’s really been a great learning experience for him,” she said, referring to her son’s interest in the bracelet and the history surrounding it.

Wood is still undecided about whether she will vote for McCain or his Democratic rival Sen. Barack Obama.

“I am actually not a political person at all,” she said. “I like things about both candidates.”

But Wood remembers and was glad to have worn the bracelet.