DALLAS, Feb. 3, 1976 (UPI) - Patrick Roper and his friends have a Bicentennial dream - a human chain of 4 million people linking the East Coast to the West Coast on July 4. "The idea is that there would be a man standing in the surf on the beach at Boston getting his feet wet," Roper said. "He'll be holding hands with a man standing next to him, and that man to another man - and for 15 minutes on the Fourth of July he'll be linked to a man standing in the surf off the coast of Los Angeles.
"The President would be part of the chain. And we could have the whole country singing 'God Bless America' at the same time. There'd be national news coverage and pictures from blimps, airplanes and satellites.
Roper, a member of the Texas Chapter of the Hands Across America Committee, says the biggest problem is the logistics involved in lining up the participants.
He estimates it will take 780,000 people to stretch the 600 miles across Texas alone.
"If we can get the 780,000 people, I'm sure we can arrange the other details."
To those who would call such a project frivolous, Roper says, "It's sort of a national pep rally. It's something to show the world that we're a united family and we're tied together.
"It's a national ego-boost. After Watergate and Vietnam, we got a national inferiority complex, and this would just be our way of looking back and saying 'Hey, we've been doing a pretty good job, so let's celebrate.'"
Roper, 32, a Dallas businessman, became interested in the project last summer when he read an article in a Sunday supplement magazine mentioning a half-dozen Bicentennial projects. Among them was the "Hands Across America" idea of Marvin Rosenblum of Chicago.
"It hit me that that would be absolutely beautiful," Roper said. "It was an idea like the mating of the railroad in Provo, Utah."
National promoters estimate it will take about 4 million people to stretch along the route from Boston to New York, Philadelphia, Washington, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Indianapolis, Chicago, St. Louis, Tulsa, Dallas and across Texas and New Mexico to Phoenix and Los Angeles.
