Installment # 5

I was 7 years old in 1951, listening with my parents to radio updates on the Korean War.  It of course meant very little to me, but I remember my Dad teasing me, saying that the war was expected to last another ten years, at which time I would be 17 years and old enough to go fight in the war.  I was old enough to know I didn’t want to do that; and isn’t it interesting that I remember that incident?  It probably traumatized me.  Parents – be careful how you tease your kids!  I’ve been told that the sub conscience doesn’t have a sense of humor. 

My generation also lived through the Vietnam War and related campus riots, the Watergate scandal and related impeachment of President Nixon; Desert Storm, the September 11, 2001 (“9/11”) attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and subsequent declaration of the War on Terror.  We saw the U.S. invasion of Iraq on the pretext of destroying non-existent “weapons of mass destruction.”  I had never heard of Vietnam before the Vietnam War, and at twenty probably couldn’t have told you why America was getting involved.  I had to look the country up on a world map – probably typical of the average American.

On a lighter note, in 1958 we had the introduction and famous “flop” of the Ford Edsel, named after Henry Ford’s son Edsel, who served as the president of Ford Motor Company from 1919 to his death in 1943.  I was only 14 then, but still was aware of how amazed the adults were about a huge, successful company making such a colossal mistake in judgment in terms of what the buying public would respond to.  I was a bit older when some comedian said that an example of a three-time loser would be “a pregnant prostitute, driving an Edsel, with a Nixon sticker on the back.”  I thought that was pretty clever. 

Nixon, who had been vice president of the U.S. for eight years, narrowly lost to John F. Kennedy in the 1960 presidential election, and then, in a stunning fall from grace, lost a race for Governor or California in 1962.  I don’t recall whether it was after the 1960 race or the 1962 race that the comedian made his remark, but it sure seemed appropriate to compare the public’s rejection of Nixon with their rejection of the Edsel.  The pregnant prostitute part speaks for itself.

The 1960s were characterized by (among other things) the “hippie” movement.  Teenagers were leaving their parents’ homes in the cities and travelling to places mainly in the Southwest to join hippie communes.  These were said to promote peaceful, cooperative coexistence, complete with “free love” (casual sex) and hallucinatory drugs.  Living in the Bay Area, we heard a lot about the “flower children” who were coming from all over the country to live in an area of San Francisco known as the Haight-Ashbury District.  Eventually the tourist groups began to include bus rides through Haight-Ashbury where visitors could see the hippies first hand.  I remember a picture in the newspaper of a few hippies running alongside a tour bus holding up mirrors so the people would see themselves, instead of the young people living in Haight-Ashbury.  I thought that was brilliant irony.

If there was a single anthem for the counterculture movement is was: “Turn on, tune in, drop out,” popularized by Timothy Leary, who later credited it to Marshall McLuhan.  I have seen the phrase explained in various ways, but it always seemed to me to say: “Take psychedelic drugs (primarily LSD); pay attention to what is going on around you (what is going wrong with society); detach yourself from the existing conventions and hierarchies of society (opt out).”  I will leave it to social scientists, et al, to explain the forces that gave rise to the movement.  Disillusionment over the war in Vietnam and the presidency of Richard Nixon were no doubt important aspects of it. 

During that era we read books like The Greening of America and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test that either promoted, supported or explained the rise of the counterculture; as well as books like Future Shock that attempted to predict or explain the future based on life in 1960s America.  Marshall McLuhan, by the way, was noted for statements such as: “The medium is the message,” and “The electric light is pure information,” whatever that means.  The other aspect of this era was the popularity of what are called “protest songs,” by artists such as Marvin Gay, Sam Cook and Peter, Paul and Mary.  Many of their songs are still heard today, especially on the singing competition shows.

In his inaugural address in 1960, President John F. Kennedy (JFK) set a goal for the United States to land a man on the moon by the end of that decade.  In July 1969 we witnessed this incredible achievement live on television.  My vivid memories of the event include that we were standing in the living room of a Pan Am coworker, Steve Claus.  Sandy was wearing a light summer dress, but it was a maternity dress!  She was visibly pregnant with our first child, Michelle, who was due before Thanksgiving that year, but arrived on December 6^th.

The other thing that sticks out (no pun intended) is how we marveled, not only at the achievement of the Space program, but at the fact that we could stand there in our own homes and witness the whole thing on television!  It was as much a telecommunications achievement as an aeronautical achievement.  Within our own lifetimes we could remember when television could barely bring us simple, fuzzy black and white images.  Now look what could be done!

We took it more or less in stride when we could watch an actual war taking place half-way around the world in early 1991 (Desert Storm – the invasion of Iraq by a coalition of nations led by the United States).  The advances here had more to do with how the military could tolerate imbedding journalists within their advance positions on the battle field and how the major networks could risk putting their top journalists in harm’s way.  Finding journalists to do that was the easy part: There are always people with more courage than sense.

My grandparents and Sandy’s grandparents, of course, lived through World War I, and then the Great Depression, then World War II, plus saw the introduction of the telephone, the automobile, television and air travel.  They probably thought that the pace of change they had witnessed was incredible and would just naturally need to slow down.  Our parents were raised during the depression; they were young adults during World War II, and they were the first generation of Americans for whom owning and driving an automobile was commonplace.  Surely being raised by parents and grandparents of that vintage yields a much different person (me) than does, say, being raised by my generation and my children’s generation.

I saw an autobiography entitled My Life So Far.  Well, duh, as long as you are still alive, your story is your life so far, whether you are fifty or a hundred years old. I made a couple of earlier attempts to write along the lines of “lessons learned” or “what my life has meant”, etc, including one I saved in a folder called “Sessions with Grandpa” or something like that.  Not very original – sort of like Tuesdays with Morey or Travels with Charlie or something.  In it, I had a grandson who was deciding on a college major and ultimate career direction asking me a series of questions, and I would hold forth on my latest thoughts on the subjects.  Of course I chose the subjects, since the grandson was fictitious (a literary device, I think).  To my surprise and dismay, I found that nothing I had to say was particularly insightful or helpful.  It was rather trite, actually. 

I read a Benjamin Franklin Reader that included his autobiography, and he simply related the major events in his life.  He didn’t try to make any particular points; he just told his story.  Granted, his story is much more important and instructive than mine, but I am writing essentially for my family and their families.  Surely some in that group will be interested enough to read it and maybe tell their children about my life and what it was like to live in my time.  Sandy’s grandfather, Jack Fitzhenry, was a teenager in San Francisco at the time of the 1906 earthquake.  He was interviewed by a newspaper, and we have a copy of his firsthand account of what it was like.  We wish we had more of his life in writing. 

By way of introduction, “Sandy” is Sandra Jean Moulton (Zades), born on June 4, 1945 along with her twin sister, Pamela Ann Moulton (Rotner).  They were about two months premature, their combined weights of 3lbs 11 ounces and 3lbs 13 ounces equaling that of one full-term baby. Sandy and Pam announced their double engagements to the family on the evening of their parents’ 25^th wedding anniversary party in September 1965.  Pam’s wedding came first in June 1966 and ours was in October 1966.  Their older sister, Kathleen – 18 months their senior – was married the following February, and their father’s greatest financial fear was realized: He had to pay for three weddings within the space of less than a year.  In those days there was no question that the family of the bride paid for just about everything, whether the groom’s family had money or not.  The father of the bride would never ask for help from the groom’s family, and the father of the groom would be very hesitant to offer help for fear of insulting and offending the bride’s family.  People married so young in those days that often the one set of parents didn’t know the other set all that well, and wouldn’t know how to broach such a subject.

The young couple was either still in college or just getting out or, as in my case, just getting started with an entry-level blue collar job, so they could not chip in and help the situation even if they wanted to.  Thirty years later when our eldest, Michelle, started planning her wedding, her intended was 33 years old, already successful in his career, with significant resources (significant compared to us, anyway!).   They took it right in stride that we were not going to be able to help much with their wedding plans.  Same thing happened a year or so later when Amy and Jimmy got married.  He was around 34 and Amy was 24.  We couldn’t help much, and they didn’t expect much.  Possibly when couples live together for a significant period of time before getting married it changes the whole dynamic of the situation.  There seems to be an unspoken understanding that if you are going to set up house together just as if you were married, then the eventual wedding is just a detail or legality.  Why should parents or anyone else pay for that?

That’s certainly something that has changed since my courting days. It would have been an act of disrespect and defiance to live with a man’s daughter without being married to her.  I couldn’t have looked Sandy’s Dad in the eye if we were living together out of wedlock.  Strangely, when it was my daughters, it didn’t seem so terrible, partly, I guess because they were older, out of college and working; and partly because times had changed.  The important thing to Sandy and me was that they had found love and happiness.  The rest was just paperwork.

Speaking of our children, Michelle was born in December 1969, Bobby was born in May 1971, and Amy was born in April 1974.  We haven’t talked about it much, but there was one pregnancy after Bobby and before Amy that didn’t go well and ended in a quasi-abortion.  That is, Sandy went in to have the pregnancy terminated, and the doctor told her that there was something wrong with the fetus and the pregnancy would have had to be terminated, anyway.  This was the only pregnancy that was unplanned.  Sandy had been using a diaphragm that somehow didn’t work.  Birth control pills were fairly new, but did exist in those days, but Sandy has never liked taking pills. 

Anyway, to complete the overview, Michelle was married in 1997, Amy in 1998 and Bobby in 2000.  The reader can do the math on how old they were when they got married.  We have 8 grandchildren.  Brianna was only 4 years old when Amy and Jimmy divorced, so we were hoping that Amy would remarry and have one or two more children, but it was not to be.  So Amy has one child, Michelle has three and Bobby has four.

Michelle and Kevin’s children, Ryan, Alexandria (“Alex”) and Justin, were born in July 1998, July 2000, and March 2002, respectively.  Bobby and Paulette’s children, Gianna (“Gigi”), Ezra and the twins – Seth and Elijah – were born in September 2001, August 2003, and October 2005, respectively.  If I recall correctly between Bobby and Paulette, one of them wanted 2 children and the other wanted 4, and they compromised on 3, which is exactly what Sandy and I did, except that Paulette’s third pregnancy resulted in twin boys, bringing their total to four.  I think Bobby subscribed to the theory, “Don’t let the kids out-number the parents,” which sounds like something I might have advised him.