My father and I in about 1966. My 1960s.
This blog deals a lot with the very early 20th Century, but strays here and there into other decades. The last two years, it's dealt with the
1960s quite a bit as we passed fifty year anniversaries for events falling in
1968 and
1969. We tracked those, as opposed, let's say, to
1967 or 1964, because
68 in particular was a seminal year in the history of the world in ways that are still very difficult to define. Frankly, we think we've discerned much of the root cause of what occurred in those years only very recently.
Few would doubt that
68 was as ground shaking year, and that
69 was its follow up quake. And the turmoil and changes that came about in the 60s are of course not only well known and history, but they've become legend. For a lot of people, "the 60s" are
1968 and
1969, and when almost anyone mentions "the 60s", they mean the years from 65 to 73, really. People don't dwell on the 1960s in the same way in regard to earlier years, although there were certainly very well recalled events that happened in them.
The Cuban Missile Crisis, the Bay of Pigs Invasion, the (American portion of the)
Vietnam War, the Prague Spring, Woodstock, the
Stonewall Riots, two Kennedy assassinations, the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King. . . all of these are things that remain fresh in the nation's memory and as long as there is a member of the Baby Boom generation still with us, they will continue to. Youth rebellion in the United States and Europe, particularly in Germany and France, combined with a rejection of conventional morality by some of that demographic combined with the introduction of "the pill" also reach back as long influential developments. Finally, in our list, the Second Vatican Council concluded making changes of debated nature to the practices of the Catholic Church, impacting the 2,000 year old foundational Christian religion in ways that are still being sorted out and which are still hotly debated as to their merits.
So that all must have really been something growing up, right?
Well, that's another topic, isn't it?
We're all impacted by the years in which we grow up. It cannot be denied. I've often noted here that a person's personality is basically fixed by the time they're five, and they're going back to that personality, one way or another, sooner or later. And part of what influences that personality is the era in which we are young.
But only part, and perhaps not in the way we might imagine.
Being a history buff, I once asked my father what he recalled about the
Spanish Civil War. "Not much. . . I was a kid" was his reply. Now, he knew a lot about the
Spanish Civil War, as did my mother, but he didn't remember the war as news of the day. And why would have he? He was pretty young when it ended. World War Two was different. He was a teenager during much of it, and had a first hand recollection of it from the home front angle. He had memories, of course, of the 1930s, but they weren't historians memories, they were personal recollections.
I was a kid in the 1960s.
Specifically, I entered my appearance on our watery planet in May, 1963 and therefore was one of the folks who experienced the 60s, in some fashion, for seven years. But not like the real Baby Boomers experienced it.* Being a kid in the 60s, wasn't the same thing as being an adult or a teenager in the 60s.
Me in about 1966 or so. My father's 1956 Chevrolet pickup is behind me. He traded that truck away in 1968. I can still recall riding in it. I was told later that I cried when he sold it.
Indeed, it's worth recalling the experience a person has in any one decade varies not only by your age, but your station, and your locality. Recently I happened to view A Bronx Tale which is set in the Bronx during the 1960s. It had an excellent line in it, and it was based upon the recollections of one of the actors who really grew up in the Bronx in the 60s and 70s, about how everything was changing all over the country but the Bronx stayed the same. I suspect that was pretty true.
Anyhow, the "what did you do in the 60s" line is something that, like society at large, has been captured by the Baby Boom generation but it's worth recalling that there were millions of Americans who experienced the 1960s as young children or as middle aged and old people for whom that personal experience was not only very real, but very different. It was the most different for children.
So the question is, what was it like growing up in the 1960s?
We can give that answer, of course, only for ourselves.
As noted, I was born in 63 and I entered grade school in 1968. Because of when I entered, if you do the math, that means that I was there until the Spring of 1975, outside of the period I'm defining as the 60s. I was first taken to school in the fall of 1968. That's one of my earliest memories. I can recall being taken to the grade school by my mother. I was in tears. At that time, well before my mother fell ill, I was a happy kid and happy at home. I was also an only child, which doesn't mean anything like what people like to pretend it does. But it does mean that I wasn't used to being around a lot of strangers and I was most comfortable with my family, by which I mean my mother and father and my numerous cousins and uncles, and the few friends who lived in my neighborhood. School was something I didn't look forward to doing, but you don't get any choice in that.
Some gathering of cousins in about
So I was in school in the last three years of the decadal 1960s, but in reality I was in school for most of the 1960s, as the 1960s really ran from our commitment of ground forces to Vietnam until Nixon's resignation on August 8, 1974. That was the period of turmoil that people really recall as the 60s. I suppose if you really want to you can stretch it back to Kennedy's assassination in Dallas in November 1963 But early 1960s events, like the Bay of Pigs landing and the Cuban Missile Crisis, really belong to some sort of introductory heavy Cold War era that came on with the armistice in Korea in 1954 and which ran until the Cold War became warm again in 1965, with Marines landing at Danang.
That grade school experience was a lot like the one depicted in
A Christmas Story, which is a bit odd if we consider that the movie is set in the 1940s and based on the author's actual recollections of growing up in the 1930s. I'm not sure what that tells us, and the answer to that question might in part be found with more recent generations and whether or not they find the movie strongly recalling their own childhood. If that's the case, it means something completely other than what I think it might here.
While its an aside, in terms of depictions of the era featuring childhood, I'd also note that
The Wonder Years, which was set mostly in the 1970s, was remarkably accurate for the era. Other depictions roughly set in the era hit and miss.
Stand By Me, set in rural Oregon in 1959 would precede these experiences by about a decade, but they are remarkably accurate for our lives in rural Wyoming in the 1960s.
The Sand Lot, set in 1962, doesn't seem familiar at all, however.
What I think that all of this might mean is that our childhoods were much more like those of the immediate prior generation, save for the economic deprivation of the Great Depression, than life today. The schools we went to here were old brick buildings, built in the 1920s or 1930s and then added on to in the 1950s. The teachers were all women, universally, and to some extent a person can really question if they were fully qualified for their jobs. A lot of them had been doing that job for a very long time. The classrooms lacked electronics, of course, as they really didn't exist in the modern form. For something absolutely huge (and I'm recalling one of the later moon landings in this context) a television might be rounded up for live coverage. Occasionally we'd be shown a film, but something called film strips, which were slide shows in series, were used a fair amount for assemblies when they occurred.
When they occurred, they were often musical in nature. We learned songs from what today people call "the American songbook", which isn't an actual songbook but a set of common American songs. This isn't done at all anymore. The songs we learned included folk songs, like Jimmy Crack Corn, patriotic songs, and occasionally Protestant religious songs that had acquired folk song status, like Little Brown Church In The Dale. I can easily recall quite a few of them.
We learned to play music as well, recorders being a mandatory part of our education. I had my recorder into my adult years when I gave it to a highly musical friend who collects them. He's lost his.
Most of us also learned a musical instrument in school, which is still the case. I learned to play t he trumpet. My son later played the same trumpet.
Our general education was set and routine. There were no "advanced classes" of any kind. To the extent we got any advanced training, it was outside of the school. I don't recall anyone receiving tutoring, but quite a few of us received close attention to our schooling at home, myself included.
While the teachers may not have been fully qualified, by and large they did a fairly good job or at least an adequate one. I recall my mother, whose early education had been in a Parish school in Quebec, being upset by the fact that I didn't seem to be learning mathematics adequately and going to visit the school about it. She was informed that it was up to the parents to make sure that this was going on, which seemed to her to be a dereliction of duty. Be that as it may, may parents rose to the task. That doesn't make me home schooled or anything like that, but it does mean that our schooling was part of an era in which parents were required to be engaged. The problem with that is that it makes for an uneven education. I never have been really comfortable with match even though my father was super prolific with it and I myself had up through Calculus III in university.
One thing about math at that time is that the "New Math" had come in, and thankfully has gone. This proved to be a problem as in the school the teacher would teach math in the New Math style and at home, when my father assisted me, it was in the fashion he'd learned math in the 30s and 40s. His method was better, but two methods is confusing.
The exception to the general good or at least adequate quality of our teachers was the principal. She was harsh and in my recollection a little bizarrely so. We rarely encountered her but dreaded doing so if we had to. Once a year a really bizarre ritual happened on our birthday when we were called to the principal's office and given some small gift, but also spanked ritually with a paddle the number of years of that natal anniversary. That's flat out weird, and struck me as so at the time. Perhaps because of that, I didn't like our principal and even today I don't have any fond memories of her. That a principal was allowed to get away with this weird ritual says something about the leeway given to officialdom at the time.
We had recess twice a day, and for boys a routine game was the playing of war. But not the war that existed, the Vietnam War. The battles that raged on the schoolyard were from the Second World War, and usually against the Germans. Occasionally a battle from the Pacific would be played out. All of the mock soldiers on both sides carried fully automatic weapons all the time. Not once in the time I was in grade school do I recall anyone suggesting that we play at the Vietnam War. . . or even the Korean War. Other games included things like dodge ball, Red Rover and the like. The school yard, completely covered with gravel, had a swing set, a jungle gym, and in the later period there, a couple of large heavy equipment tires.
Regarding war, one of the things that come up frequently in people's related stories about going to school in this area is being taught what to do in the case of a nuclear strike. Maybe our school district was an exception but I don't recall a single instance of that. Not one. I recall television of the era having scary station interruptions that completely interrupted television with tests of the emergency broadcasting system and being told that this was done in case of a nuclear war, and I recall buildings having Fallout Shelters that were very clearly so designated in case of a nuclear war. I recall our grade school was designated as a Fallout Shelter. But I don't recall any instance, not one, of being taught to "duck and cover" or anything like that whatsoever.
I do recall tornado drills, although not many. Indeed, I can recall being told that a Fallout Shelter doubled as good protection in case of a tornado. The reason that I mention all of these is because I'm not only certain that drills for nuclear war are something I don't recall, there something that in my experience in the 1960s flat out didn't occur. I'll note the nature of false and constructed memories just below, and I think there's a definite element of that in the widespread recollections of "duck and cover" drills here.
Most of us walked to school. If the weather was nice, we might ride bikes to school. Parents didn't drive kids to school. A few kids rode a bus if they lived on the other side of a really busy street. My good lifelong friend Ralph rode the bus.
We took our lunches to school with us, or came home if the weather was nice and we wanted to. For a lot of the year, until it turned colder, I walked home about a mile, more or less, to eat lunch at home. We had an hour, and as odd as that may seem to many folks now, that's not that great of distance. There's enough time to walk home, eat lunch, and walk back. Indeed, when I was first practicing law and living in my parents old house, I walked home at noon every day for the same reason and it was over a mile.
If I took a lunch, I took it in my uncle's old lunch box from the 1940s and 1950s. Most kids had newer lunch boxes, but as we had that one that's what I used. The newer ones were usually decorated with scenes from cartoons of the day or the like. I did have a Peanuts thermos that fit in my lunch box that I took with me and I recall my mother was big on making soup for it. I've never liked soup and didn't then.
There were no school prepared meals at all, save for the occasional "Hot Lunch" days. When those occurred women, and they were always women, from one of the post grade school, schools would come up and serve hot dogs. Only hot dogs. You could put relish, mustard and ketchup on your hot dogs, but that was your option. You also could buy a pint of milk to go with it. Hot Lunch days were really big deals for some reason, with the hot lunch served in the school gym. We looked forward to Hot Lunch days.
At school we wore the same clothes we wore for everything else, which for the most part were some variant of t-shirt. We might wear sweaters in the winter. We wore jeans as trousers. All of this, of course, if we were boys. I can barely recall what the girls wore in grade school other than that in my recollection they often wore skirts.
In the warm months, we wore canvas tennis shoes, usually Keds. I felt lucky if I had Converse tennis shoes (which were really basketball shoes), as they were nicer and rarer. I always tried for high tops, but didn't always get them. In the winter boys wore boots. You switched from one to the other with the winter and then the spring. The outdoor writer Patrick McManus has a short story in which he mentions this in regards to the 40s or 50s, so this had been going on for a long time. The boots we wore in winter were always a model of Red Wings made for children and constructed with a moccasin toe. They came with a little compass that was mounted in rubber device that looked like a tractor tire. I used to have a zillion of those from the annual boot purchase, but managed to lose them some time after my early 20s.
When we were very young, our parents might try to buy us a dressier pair of shoes of the type called Buster Browns, but we didn't like them. Part of that may have been that the shoe company that produced them was still using an image from a very early 20th Century cartoon which was downright creepy by the 1960s.
An example of the creepy imagry associated with Buster Brown. This is from the early 20th Century, but the 1960s shoe trademark image still featured the boy dressed in rather feminie attire and the big dog. It was off putting.
When it snowed we wore rubber overshoes at first. Late in this period hiking boots became fashionable for adults and it spread down to kids and we started to wear "Waffle Stompers", i.e., hiking boots with Vibram soles, if our parents would buy them. When they came in we started to try to avoid overshoes. We also frequently wore a sort of rubber boot that I never seen at all anymore that are close to farmers irrigation boots or English wellies, but which had the lower section constructed to mimic L. L. Bean shoe packs. Indeed, my father always referred to them as shoe packs, although those boots, more commonly called Main Hunting Shoes, actually have leather uppers. These always had green tops and frankly they were really miserable to walk in. Walk in them we did, however, as we didn't get rides to school no matter what the weather was.
One kid, and only one, had a pair of U.S. Army Tropical Combat Boots when I was in about 6th Grade. I was stunned at the time as I'd never seen such a thing. A relative of his had bought them for him. I recall being so impressed, even though they aren't very good boots, that I mentioned it to my father. It stands out in part due to what I've noted here about kids and war games. That kid was wearing a pair of boots that were in fact in use in Indochina at that very time, but which were hugely exotic from our point of view. He must have thought so as well as he wore them in snowy weather, and they're an absolutely lousy pair of boots for lousy weather.
When the cold set in we wore heavy coats. The modern habit of omitting coats didn't exist. I can't recall my individual coats very well from grade school, but I can recall that two of my classmates had U.S. Air Force winter coats, one having a parka and the other having a high altitude flight jacket. These were the type which was then issued. I don't know where they'd gotten them, but they were distinct enough to stand out.
We also always wore hats in the winter when going to school and they were all wool knit hats, or "stocking hats". I haven't worn a wool knit hat since I was a National Guardsmen and I don't like them, but always wore them in the winter. There was no earthly way that our parents would have let us out of the house in the winter without a wool knit hat.
This isn't true, however, of being in town in the summer. In things like The Sandlot kids are always shown wearing baseball caps, but we didn't. I don't recall the first baseball cap I owned, but I may have actually been in Little League baseball before I had one. If Cub Scout caps count, that would have almost certainly have been the first one I owned, but I never wore my Cub Scout uniform to school. In nice weather, I went to class bareheaded.
If I was out in the sticks, however, I wore a hat. My parents were adamant about this and they were 100% correct. Modern parents slather their children with sun screen. No such thing existed in my youth but long sleeve shirts and hats did, and we wore them. I can find photos of myself when very young wearing a cowboy hat. I strongly believe that my parents were more on the mark on this then than most are now, and indeed, their outdoor experience was far more vast than most modern outdoorsmen today, particularly in the case of my father.
Probably 100% of the kids in the grade school I went to came from homes where two married parents were present, at first. There were no "single mothers" or "single dads" for most of my grade school years. Late in grade school there was a vague exception to that in one instance in which the parents had divorced and it was vaguely hinted at that the father was violent. There was also one other kid who moved into the grade school from another town in the later years who had two parents at home, but the father was a step father. He never seemed to be around. And in addition to that, there was a long time friend of mine from the neighborhood who we went to school with whose mother was also divorced and remarried, but that stepfather was around, and the actual father was as well. In that second instance the situation seemed fairly accepted. In the first, it was clearly strained.
In grade school there was one kid in my class who was Hispanic and there were none who were any other "race" other than white. There was no segregation, but kids went to grade school in the town based upon where they lived. The area that included the school I went to was a pretty big geographic area, and while it was mostly middle class, it included a few families that were upper middle class and a few that were poor. It was pretty balanced economically.
Nearly 100% of the students were of some Protestant background. One other kid, the Hispanic one, was Catholic. None were Jewish. One was a Jehovah's Witness which was instantly known every day as his religious affiliation kept him from standing for, or saying, the Pledge of Allegiance. This placed me in the category of being a religious minority, but I was only vaguely aware of that at the time.
In the summer we played with the same set of kids we went to grade school with, as everyone in the grade school was from the same geographic area. Even Ralph, who lived on the edge of the district far enough away to be bused, was somebody I got together with frequently, simply riding my bike to his house (Ralph never learned to ride a bike, making him a real exception to the rule in this way). Summer games were pretty similar to recess ones in part because nobody's parents like them hanging around indoors. You were sent outside as a rule.
My folks house, probably around 1958.
During the summer we were normally involved in some sort of athletic activity, however. We definitely were in my house. I played baseball when I was old enough to play in Little League. And in my family we swam a lot.
Both of my parents were ardent swimmers and in the summer we visited the outdoor pool a lot. Indeed, I was enrolled in swimming lessons as soon as I was old enough to do that, and I took indoor and outdoor lessons, so I advanced in swimming all year long. In addition, during the summer the norm was for us to go swimming at one of the outdoor pools every day after my father came home from work. We'd go swim, and then come home for dinner after that.
My mother additionally like tennis and we'd occasionally play tennis. Both of my parents knew how to play tennis and in my mother's case her parents had been excellent tennis players. I never really managed to pick it up, but oddly my daughter has.
My mother also loved golfing, and she introduced me to that as well. One summer I golfed a lot. But something about it never took with me either, perhaps because when she got around to that I was likely about twelve and my habits were becoming increasingly fixed. I.e., it was just too late.
My mother also liked skiing and we'd do that a few times each summer. I didn't really learn how to do it well until junior high, however, at which point I dropped it after breaking a leg. I took it up again, cross country, in law school, but that's another story.
Football deserves mention here as my father was a big football fan his entire life. While he was only marginally taller than me, he had played high school football in Nebraska and in Wyoming, and he loved the game. As a small boy I loved it too and we'd play yard football on one of our friend's big front yards the same way that movies like to depict baseball being played by children. And we picked favorite teams. When I was in 5th Grade or so I was old enough for "Midget Football", which was what the youth football organisation was called at the time. I was very small compared to many of the kids in it and I absolutely hated it as I was beat up so routinely simply playing the game. I played the 5th Grade season and then refused to play the 6th, after a practice or two. My mother backed me on that but it did upset my father, as I'd started the season and he didn't like what quitting something meant. There's a lot to his view there, but frankly as time has gone by the damage football imparts upon its youthful players has become clearer and clearer. In any event, getting beat up playing football as a 5th Grader was like flipping a switch with me and I lost interest in the game completely and profoundly and I've never recovered it.
We were very outdoorsy in a day trip sort of way. My father was a great fisherman and we fished a lot until the weather grew cool. We also hunted birds when the fall season began. All of us boys hunted rabbits. My father didn't hunt big game during these years and I now know that this is something he dropped when he was first married as he didn't have time, and he didn't' pick it up again until I was older. He probably started again when I was about twelve, more or less, when he started antelope hunting again. We added deer when I was old enough to hunt. He never hunted elk or moose. Indeed, we didn't camp, even though we had some old camping equipment.
We didn't travel much either. If we did, it was usually by car and to somewhere with in a day's drive. My father didn't like traveling, but the burdens of being self employed kept him from traveling as well. My mother liked traveling, but traveling with my mother always meant a destination where there were relatives or occasionally her very close friends. This mean that when I was young we, my mother and I, traveled to Ontario, Alberta, Quebec, and Hawaii, all of which were destinations in which we had relatives save for Alberta, where she had very close friends. My father never went to those places and indeed my Uncle Ed, whom I visited in Toronto when there on work, related to me that he had never met my father.
We of course went to Mass on Sunday. One family whose sons I was friends with nearby always went to a Lutheran Church on Sunday. Ralph's family went to the Baptist Church near our grade school on Sunday. A friend who moved into our town in about 4th Grade lived right across from the Mormon Church, there being only one at that time, and always went there, even though he claimed he was a "Jack Mormon", something I had to ask my parents as to its meaning. He wasn't a Jack Mormon.
I'll turn here to the big social changes of the 1960s here for the first time, really as this is a place where I logically have to do it. As noted, we went to Mass on Sunday and that means rather obviously that I'm Catholic, something that those who read this blog would otherwise be rather aware of anyhow. A lot of times when people recall the 60s in this sort of essay, if they're Catholic they'll note the big changes that the Second Vatican Council brought about in the Catholic Church, or at least the claimed big changes, and wax on them. Their recollections tend to vary with their views, but frankly, I think a lot of those recollections are manufactured, a controversial thing to say I know.
One of the big changes that occurred was the end of the Latin Mass as the usual form of the Mass and the use of the vernacular. That' stands out as a big change in people's minds, but I don't recall the Latin Mass at all. That may be because the Mass went into the vernacular in the mid 1960s and I was still a baby when it occurred, or at least very young. I've no doubt been to Latin Masses as a tiny child, but I don't recall them at all. I also don't recall anyone being hugely upset about it, or even really discussing it.
Photograph on the occasion of my baptism in 1963. The fact that I was baptized in 1963 means that the sacrament would have been performed at least partially in Latin.
Indeed, the fact that I have no recollection of the Latin Mass is one of those things that causes me to be skeptical of how people otherwise recall things. People tend to have a lot of improbable personal recollections. In this area, there are people my age who lament this change and claim to have experienced it personally, which I really doubt. I don't know how old a person would really need to be to have a personal recollection of the Latin Mass, but my guess is that bare minimum you'd need to be in your 60s.
There are a lot things like this, I'd note, in terms of recollections. I've heard people discuss Catholic education in ways that really describe stories handed down to them by parents or grandparents and are not their own, really. And they're probably not entirely accurate to start with. The "we ate this. . . " stories relating to childhood menus is another one. I've heard, for example, a person my age who grew up in a very wealthy family that has agricultural interests lament all the mutton he had to eat as a child. I don't believe it. At one point some time ago, and frankly its a long time ago, people with sheep no doubt ate a lot of mutton, but it isn't recently.***
In terms of changes at the Church, the one thing I really recall from the era, but I can't really quite place as to time, was
the removal of the alter rail.
I hate the fact that the alter rail was removed, and I can very distinctly recall it. I don't know when it was removed however. My guess is that it was in the 1970s, but it was a long time ago.
Alter rails were present in all Catholic Churches up until the mid 1960s, and they came out following Vatican II from almost all of them. This topic was controversial at the time, and it still is, but frankly I don't recall it strongly. I recall it being there, and then I know it wasn't. It hasn't been there for a very long time.
I will note, however that this too plays into the way we recall things. Now, I'm genuinely upset that the alter rail was removed all those years ago as it did architectural violence to a beautiful structure. And it wasn't the only insult to the structure. I don't know what occurred in the decades prior to the 1960s to a structure built in 1921, but starting in the 1960s it seemed that priests routinely caused alterations to the original structure and almost all of them, in my view, were negatives. The angling of the pews, the removal of one row, the addition of speaker systems, the adding of screens for slides, all of it should be reversed, but won't be.
However, my opinion on that really came about in mid life. Before that, as an adult, I mildly disapproved of what was done to the building. Now I strongly do. As a kid in the 1960s, I would barely have noticed. In the 70s I would have noticed, and I would have known (as I do recall) that my parents and his siblings were not approving, but it wasn't a major matter to me at the time.
An honest recollection works that way. Which gets back to my point. School games, family, pets, and daily life as a child are stronger recollections for most people than the big events of the day.
If it seems like I've skipped the politics of this era, 1968 through 1975, when I was in grade school, I have.
That's because I barely remember them in any personal fashion.
And that makes sense. At age 4, when I went into Kindergarten, I wasn't thinking much about what was going on in 1968. And if it was in the background then, and it must have been to some extent, I don't recall it. My parents got their first television that year, 1968, and I can recall that. And I can recall that my father watched the news every night when he came home from work, but that didn't make a big impression on me early on, although as I'll note below, I do have some memories that stem from that. And my father subscribed to Time, Newsweek, Life and Look for his office, as well ast he local newspaper. He additionally bought the Rocky Mountain News every day. So I certainly had ready access to the news.
So don't I recall anything?
Well, yes.
I've already discussed the first moon landing. That and subsequent moon landings were huge deals, so I can recall them.
Beyond that, I recall that every night the national news gave the casualty figures from the Vietnam War. That remains fixed in my mind. Not much of the fighting in the war itself does, but some things do.
The April 1970 American and ARVN incursion into Cambodia remains oddly fixed in my mind. The reason that I regard this odd, is that that they way I recall it is distinct. When I was that age I had the habit for awhile of watching television late in the afternoon until my father came home. Wha was usually on at that time were reruns of
McHale's Navy and
Gilligan's Island, both of which are awful. I never finished watching them as by that time we had more than one television channel in town and my father would turn on the news when he came home. When he did that, and I think I was watching
McHale's Navy, it went right to footage of armored vehicles crossing a large water course in Vietnam.
Now, at that time any school age boy was familiar with the big amphibious landings of World War Two, particularly the June 6, 1944 landings in Normandy, which had only occurred twenty five years prior. The film
The Longest Day was such a big deal that it was advertised days in advance on whichever major network played it and it was sometimes shown over two consecutive nights, when shown. So that was our idea of what that sort of thing looked like. This looked oddly familiar, and not, at the same time. I immediately asked my father what was going on and he explained, although only briefly, that the US had entered Cambodia.
The next things I recall about the Vietnam War are the 1972 NVA invasion of South Vietnam and the 1972 mining of Haiphong Harbor. The 72 crossing of the DMZ and the resulting near collapse of the South Vietnamese Army was a shock. I recall it being a topic at school and we older boys were watching it, if we were in the group that had an interest in history. I recall that my teacher at the time, Mrs. Stafford, voicing her opinion to me that we were going to lose the war, which I disagreed with. The U.S. never lost wars and was always in the right. The thought was inconceivable.
Later that same year came the mining of Haiphong's harbor, which was told to the nation in the form of a very rare interruption of regular television broadcasting with an announcement by President Nixon on that topic. I recall watching that, sitting at the kitchen table. Our television was located in the kitchen.
Following that came the U.S. full withdrawal from Vietnam. By 1972 we were well on our way out anyway, and as we now know, the Nixon Administration regarded the war as unwinnable and was looking for a decent interval, so to speak, to get out and let South Vietnam collapse. The final months of that I can well recall as the U.S. looked forward to POWs returning home, and the news covered their return.
Of course during the entire time the news ran casualty counts every night as a short snippet. That featured a silhouette of a U.S. soldier and an announcement on the number killed and wounded that day. You got used to that as a kid. I don't know if adults did.
Around 1972 my recollection is that my father, a Korean War veteran, was of the view that the United States should never have gotten involved in Vietnam. I don't know when he first had that view, but I suspect he always did. That placed him counter to me, as boys old enough to had an opinion had one formed by the movie image of war. I recall being surprised that was his view, but it was. The only other views held by an adult I can recall came from the house of a friend whose father was very active in Democratic politics. Their front door had an anti war poster on it which stated that "War his harmful to children and other living things", which is an obvious and sappy thing to say. The fact that they had an anti war poster on their front door was extraordinarily unusual.
The war took on a slightly personal feature in the very late 1970s when my father received an official letter from the Air Force notifying him that he was released from the Individual Ready Reserve. Up until then I don't think we had any idea that he was in the IRR or that there even was such a thing as the IRR.
My father at home some time during his service in the Air Force in the 1950s.
I know what the IRR is now because of my time in the National Guard, and what basically occurred is that a person retained a service obligation if they'd been in the service for less than six years. A person in that situation was called an "obligor", and under the Selective Service laws of the time any American man retained a six year military obligation. Men who hadn't served at all retained the full six years. Men who had served, but less than six years, retained the remainder on the six years. My father had served four years so he retained a two year obligation. When I finished my service with the Guard my entire six years had been used.
Anyhow, during the Cold War the service assigned some people when they were released from active service to the reserves. In my father's case, he was assigned to the IRR. In one of my uncle's cases, he was assigned to the local active Army Reserve unit.
In just about 1972 or so the Air Force informed him that his assignment to the Individual Ready Reserve was over. This was likely due to an internal readjustment due to the draw down at the end of the Vietnam War, or it may have been because his age demographic had aged out of the IRR.
Anyhow, it was a bit of a shock to realize that he could have been called up at any time, although he maintained, and quite correctly, that this simply wasn't going to happen due to the Vietnam War. In another example of how inaccurately we recall history, there were never manpower shortages during the Vietnam War and up until 1968 there were sufficient volunteers that most of those serving in Indochina were in fact volunteers. That changed after 1968, and frankly the Army suffered its only really significant collapse of internal discipline post 1968 (followed by a fairly close in one in the Marine Corps as well) but there were always plenty of troops to fill unit requirements and this was very much the case for those in the medical branch of any of the services.
The 1972 Presidential Election is also something that I can recall from this period on the larger national political scene. Our state went overwhelmingly for Nixon, although it had gone for Johnson in 64. Again, the assumption by kids was that our parents were voting for Nixon, but my father wouldn't tell me who he voted for. Looking back, he was of a highly independent political mind, and he may well have voted for McGovern. I have no idea.
The 72 Election was followed by the Watergate scandal, and nobody could possibly ignore that. It was gigantic and on the news constantly. The hearings on it were on the television daily and they preempted my mother's soap opera. It was drama, but it was fatiguing drama. Adults entered a point of high cynicism about the country and its future. That feeling was impossible to ignore.
Another shock was the impact of inflation, which was really ramping up. In 1970 Nixon froze price and wage increases under a national statute authorizing that as an emergency matter. That was a topic at our home as it really hurt us budget wise. As a kid, and even into my early years, the impact of things on that on the psyche of adults was lost to me, but that inflation was bad was inescapable and it too had a real dispiriting impact on the nation.
In some ways that story, which really played out in the 1970s (we'll right about that later) had a huge permanent impact on anyone enduring it. I think it likely as big of impact on my generation as the economic woes of the 1930s were on the "Greatest Generation". It impacted everything about how we viewed economics for those of us who endured it.
Part of that was the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo which commenced a major economic boom in my state. While jobs flooded in with oil exploration resulting from that shock, the accompanying shock that hte United States was now an oil importer was at first hard to endure and then a real crisis. Gasoline prices at the pump shot up constantly, and it made an impact on simply being able to live.
This photo must have been taken right about 1967 or so. My father's 1965 Chevrolet pickup truck is in the background and this would have been right about the time he bought it. He kept the truck right up until about 1976 or so, so we owned it during the early part of the oil crisis. It was a nice pickup when he bought it, and was a 1/2 ton "camper special" with a white tarp on the back. It was getting pretty rough when it was traded away a decade later when it had about 65,000 miles on it. That's about all the further a car of that vintage usually made it before it had really significant problems.
That came, of course, in the wake of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. While that Arab Israeli War was just one of a series, it was one in which nearly all Americans rejoiced in the outcome of, as in the middle of our final agonizing failure in Vietnam, what seemed to us to be a western nation triumphing at war was incredibly welcome. But here we really begin to trail into the story of the 1970s.
The turmoil of the 60s spilled out into the arts, society and the streets, and you'd think that would have had a big impact on us, but it really didn't as children. In terms of protests, for example, I can recall watching one scene on the news of a light tank rolling through an American city at night. I definitely recall it, but I can't recall the year or what protest it was. I know that tanks were called out in 1967 in Detroit by President Johnson, but I don't know for sure if that's what I'm recalling. I recall that scene being really disorienting.
I also vaguely recall the rioting surrounding the 1968 Democratic Convention, but not well enough to really be impressed by it. I was left with the impression that it was odd to see guys in hard hats wanting to confront young people.
The 1971 prison riot at Attica also really stands out. It was such an impression that I can recall discussing it on the playground at my grade school after scenes of the aftermath made the nightly news. It looked like a war had been fought there, which in a way, one had.
And I recall the controversy of the 1968 Olympic protests in which three black athletes raised their fists in the black power salute. Everyone where I lived was universally appalled by that act and thought it disloyal to the nation.
Everyone now seemingly recalls the music of the 1960s as overwhelmingly counter culture but at the time, that's not how things really came across at all. Music locally was mostly heard on the radio on one of the local radio stations, of which there were two major ones. One was a Country & Western station that came in at some point, but my parents never listened to it. The other one played pop music of the day and it varied widely. My father was never much of a pop music fan but my mother liked music. Popular songs that I recall her liking varied from such songs as Downtown to country ballads of the time. I can recall that station playing Jimi Hendrix's Purple Haze on one occasion. My mother liked Joan Baez, Sonny and Cher and Peter, Paul & Mary, but didn't buy their music. She remained a huge Elvis Presley fan. I can't recall my father liking any particular music artists of the day but I do recall that he didn't like Janet Joplin, save for her song Me and Bobby McGee. Oddly, I really like Joplin and Hendrix, something I obviously picked up elsewhere.
On Hendrix, one additional memory I have is the news showing Hendrix at Woodstock on its final day, playing the Star Spangled Banner. It looked like a Civil War battlefield. Pretty impressive news footage to a young kid.
Maybe that's as good of place to conclude this as any other.
Well, maybe with one addition.
Looking back, it's clear to me that my parents were better people than I am. They were certainly better parents. The central characters last words in The Cowboys, as he lay dying, was "Every man wants his children to be better than he is, you are". Well, I'm not better than my parents, even though my children are undoubtedly better than me. That doesn't have much to do with this entry overall, but that's certainly the truth of it.
And do our early years leave lasting impacts upon our personalities later? Undoubtedly they do, but can we tell what they are? That's harder thing to do in our own cases. Certainly, however, our parents examples were very good ones.
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*I've noted this before, but generational assignments are often really inaccurate, and the upper and lower ages in various generations are subject to very blurred lines. In my case I may or may not be assigned to the Baby Boom Generation, but the assignment is really a false one and in some instances it isn't there. Indeed, for a while there was an effort to assign people born in the very early 1960s to their own generation, but as time as gone on that effort has receded as the Baby Boomer remain very much in the news as it is, and later generations have now come up in later years making any focus on a notch in a generation pretty pointless except for specific purposes.
***I've eaten mutton. . .once. I hear people claim that they ate mutton all the time as kids, but they didn't. Unless a person is in fact closely associated with sheep mutton his hard to find, and in the West, lamb is expensive and certainly not daily table fare.
