All THAT History! PART ONE (1949 – 1969)
On Monday, May 19th, I completed my 76th orbit around the sun and started my 77th year. I was born in the first half of the LAST century --- which sounds pretty cool, I think. Surpassing three-quarters of a century (plus one) provoked a revelation: I’ve lived through quite a bit of interesting history. Starting around age six I have very clear recollections of some events & occurrences and, moving forward, I remember more and more. I thought it would be interesting, then, to do a tour, a travelogue of sorts, of the history I’ve lived through --- and what I’ve actually experienced/lived firsthand.
Being born in 1949 means the United States, with the exception of the U.S. Armed Forces and Major League Baseball, was a segregated nation. That changed, legally, two days before I turned five (May 17, 1954) with the landmark Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision ---- which reversed the hideous “separate but equal” Plessy v. Ferguson case of 1896. Quite honestly, I have no recollection of that event but, as I grew older, I certainly became more and more aware of the Civil Rights struggle and became active in the crusade for equality. What I remember most from the mid-1950s, as I think back, is television. In particular I remember Walt Disney’s Sunday night show --- which introduced us to Davy Crockett (“King of the Wild Frontier”) as well as The Mickey Mouse Club - a daily program (M-F) which produced spin-offs my brother and I consumed ravenously (The Hardy Boys, Spin and Marty). Beyond that, I remember moving in 1955-56 from Babylon to Bay Shore (on Long Island) via Bethpage (a short stay at Grandma’s while our new house was completed) and going to three different schools for first grade. While I do have a vague memory of my Mother at the ironing board while watching the 1955 World Series (the Dodgers finally beat the Yankees!) as I came home from school that Fall, there’s not a lot of other memories until 1957.
Two traumatic events occurred in the same week of October, 1957 --- and I clearly remember both. On October 4th the Soviet Union successfully launched Sputnik --- the first man-made satellite to orbit the Earth, meaning the Evil Empire was winning the Space Race. And then, on October 8th, the Brooklyn Dodgers officially announced they were leaving the borough of my birth to take up residence in Los Angeles! Their departure was a poorly kept secret, as I remember my Dad saying to me, “You’re going to see Ebbets Field before these guys leave town” and getting Box Seat tickets behind first base for a Labor Day double-header against the Philadelphia Phillies. The uptown Giants also left for San Francisco that winter and New York, which had been the Capital of Baseball in the 1950s (see the Ken Burns “Baseball” Documentary), now only had the Yankees (until 1962, when the Mets were created as a National League “expansion” team). The point here is simple: the world --- at least my world --- was undergoing some big changes! If my life was a novel, 1957 would have been a year of foreshadowing.
1960 begins clear memories of the world, and my life. I started 6th grade at the Bay Shore Junior High School and there was a big Presidential election that fall --- the sitting U.S. Vice President, Richard Nixon, against the junior Senator from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy. I am in possession (somewhere) of campaign buttons from both parties and I do remember that we watched (on our black and white tv) the First ever televised Presidential Debate. YouTube now allows everyone to see what it was like, but I certainly remember that my Mom --- the far more political of our parents --- was very impressed with the handsome young Senator. I also remember the other big story of 1960 was American pilot Francis Gary Powers being shot down over the U.S.S.R., pouring gasoline on the Cold War fire.
Kennedy’s inauguration on January 20, 1961 was a snow day from school so we were able to not only watch the event but hear the famous “Ask not what your country can do for you” Inaugural Address. I also clearly remember the difficulty Robert Frost had reading the poem he had written for the occasion (“Dedication”) --- even with the new President trying to block the glare of the winter sun with his top hat. Frost, who was 86 and looked every year of it, gave up the attempt and recited, from memory, “The Gift Outright,” an earlier homage to white American settlers. ’61 picked up steam with the horrendous failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion in April --- an attempt at dislodging Fidel Castro from power in Cuba --- and the beginning of Freedom Rides that summer, where primarily white college students allied with Black civil rights advocates traveled into Southern states to challenge a ruling that bus terminals and their facilities (rest rooms, lunch counters, etc.) were legally allowed to segregate Blacks from whites. Often met with violent white backlash in Southern States, the images of that violence was the beginning of a new phase of the Civil Rights activism that started with Brown v. Board of Ed, Rosa Parks, and Dr. King’s Birmingham busy boycott. It was a movement I would become more and more involved in as the decade proceeded. I would be remiss, as an athlete and sports fan, if I failed to mention Roger Maris’s pursuit of Babe Ruth’s 60 home run record that summer. Along with his (more beloved) New York Yankee teammate Mickey Mantle, the sports story of the year was their incredible home run battle that summer. My brother and I actually saw two of Maris’s home runs (#’s 47 & 48) in August, 1961, sitting in Mezzanine seats at Yankee Stadium. Maris did, of course, break Ruth’s mark, hitting 61 (though he did do it in 8 more games because of league expansion) and Mantle, injured in September, finished with 54. Nonetheless, we were witnesses to a sterling moment of U.S. sports history.
The big event I recall from 1962 was The Cuban Missile Crisis. As an eighth grader, I was lucky to have a Social Studies teacher (Alan Van Nostrand) who, by October, had us paying close attention to “current events.” We knew that this was a serious, serious situation, with the possibility of nuclear catastrophe in the offing. That all the adults we knew were clearly concerned and nervous added to our own “hope for the best, prepare for the worst” mentality. As 13-year old’s, I believe the Missile Crisis provided an accelerated boost into adolescence and adulthood. Contemplating that the world, as we knew it, might actually end is pretty heavy duty for people who have just entered their teen years ---- and I don’t think it was lost on my generation. And I believe it may help explain why Baby Boomers became such an activist group in the Sixties, adding energy to both the Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam War issues.
1963 was a famous, and infamous, year. On August 28th, the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom produced MLK’s famous “I have a Dream” speech ---- maybe the most inspiring piece of American oratory in the nation’s history. A few short months later, of course, JFK was assassinated in Dallas on November 22. What makes these events indelible to people in my age group is that we were barely into our teens, and we saw all this on television, again and again. There had not been a generation of people who were genuine witnesses to history the way we were! While today’s world is inundated with too much content and people cannot discern reality from fiction or conspiracy, our world was right there for us to see --- and it had a stark and lasting impression on us.
1964: More than anything in the world of teen-agers, was the Year of the Beatles and the “British Invasion.” Yes, there was a Presidential election (LBJ vs. Barry Goldwater --- and the beginning of today’s right-wing extremists). And there was the Gulf of Tonkin incident, resulting in escalating U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. But overriding all else, starting with their appearance on the Sunday night Ed Sullivan Show, was the arrival of The Beatles. It is difficult to explain, 61 years after the fact, the shift in the cultural landscape of the United States that was seismic. It was as if all the tectonic plates connected to “popular music” and “youth culture” had collided and an entirely new Continent of Youth Culture had risen where the North America once stood.
1963 to 1967 were the years I attended high school. It’s difficult to capture how interesting and exciting those years were. Politically, the Civil Rights movement continued to gain momentum and Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” passed the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts (as well as Medicare!). Johnson’s Achilles Heel, of course, was the Vietnam War --- as he continued to increase the U.S. presence in Southeast Asia from ’63 to ’67. Other notable events were the assassination of Malcolm X (1965) and the creation of the Black Panther Party (1966). Culturally, The Beatles not only ushered in a musical revolution but led an explosive, revolutionary trend in fashion, arts, literature, cinema, and social consciousness. Experimentation in the arts, with the use of drugs, in recording techniques were all initiated by The Beatles. Once Bob Dylan “crossed over” from acoustic folk music to electric rock, the integration of art and political/social consciousness was complete! By 1967 clothes, hairstyles, the subjects and styles of movies and television were shifting dramatically ---- never to return to the 1950s “Man in the Grey Flannel Suit.” Even the sports world was shifting: the first “Super Bowl” was played in January of 1967 (and, yes, I’ve seen every Super Bowl!), the American Basketball League was founded to compete with the NBA, and MLB considered further expansion (which would happen by 1969). The NHL doubled its size, from 6 to 12 teams in 1967! By the time I was leaving high school for college the America of 1967 was already radically different from the America of the fall of 1963, when I started high school.
Many of us, in the Sixties, learned to drive in a manual transmission car. For those too young to understand what that is: it’s an automobile that requires the driver to shift gears (2 or 3 times) to accelerate from zero to 40 or 50 miles per hour. This required not only manual dexterity but also coordination with your feet, as you needed to engage and disengage a clutch foot pedal along with the accelerator. I bring this up because I believe people my age started 9th grade in First Gear and graduated in Second Gear ---- unaware that, by the time we were halfway through college, we would accelerate through Third to Fourth Gear ---- picking up speed as we headed toward the Seventies!
1967 – Second Gear – the transition. Just before high school graduation in June of 1967 The Beatles released Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and the press proclaimed we were headed into “The Summer of Love,” as “hippies” descended upon San Francisco. It was becoming more and more clear that we were moving into a new phase of U.S. history. Shortly after I arrived in New Haven that Fall, the massive anti-War March on Washington (immortalized in Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night – a wonderful piece of “The New Journalism”) was the first shot across the government’s bow that the populace was becoming more and more disenchanted with our involvement in Southeast Asia. Another significant event heralding transition was the appointment of Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court. The lead attorney in the Brown v. Board of Education case during the previous decade, Marshall was the first African American appointed to the high Court and was, by all measures, a brilliant jurist.
The euphoria of “The Summer of Love” was quickly erased in 1968, as we shifted into Third Gear and the North Vietnamese & Viet Cong launched The Tet Offensive in late January. While the South Vietnamese and U.S. forces ultimately prevailed, the nightly news visuals began to shift public opinion against the U.S.’s commitment to the war. Over the next five years there would be more and more pressure to “get out of Vietnam.” The wheels really began to fall off the cultural wagon with LBJ’s shocking withdrawal from the Presidential race in late March, to dedicate himself to ending the war in Vietnam. Even more shocking was the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. on April 4th. Robert Kennedy, now a Senator from New York, was challenging VP Hubert Humphrey for the Democratic nomination, was running on an anti-war platform when he was assassinated after the California primary in June. That was followed by the disastrous Democratic Convention in Chicago in August, where anti-war activists created havoc and the Chicago Police Force, under orders from (Dem.) Mayor Richard Daley, fomented what was later categorized as a “Police Riot.” Again, we witnessed the history, watching the CPD descend on protesters with shields and night sticks, beating unarmed citizens in plain sight on tv, night after night.
Humphrey did win the nomination in the aftermath and, ultimately, lost a close election to Richard Nixon ---- whose “Southern Strategy,” a tactic wooing racist/segregationist Southern Democrats to support his “Silent Majority” (citizens who, purportedly, supported the war, and his more “conservative” --- read segregationist --- policies) became a blueprint for the future of the Republican Party. As we shifted into Fourth Gear and 1969 the nation was dividing more extremely and the year itself was replete with high and low moments.
1969. As the Nixon Administration began to take charge a series of events, starting in June, characterized the shifting dynamics of American society. In late June, the Stonewall Inn Riots in New York City mark the beginning of what has been labeled as The Gay Rights movement. It represented the shifting cultural values that were emerging as a result of the Civil Rights and Countercultural movements of the Sixties. In the early ‘60’s JFK promised to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade and, ironically, Richard Nixon’s administration oversaw the July Moonwalk. August saw the high-water mark of the Counterculture as anywhere from a quarter to a half million people showed up at Max Yasgur’s farm in upstate New York for the Woodstock Music and Arts Festival, to peacefully listen to some of the foremost musical artists of the era. In September, Nixon’s administration flexed its muscles in the Chicago 8 (later 7) Trial in Chicago, charging a disparate group of anti-war and countercultural leaders with conspiring to foment the riots at the Democratic Convention. The group --- Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, David Dellinger, Bobby Seale, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Lee Weiner, and John Froines and their lawyers, William Kunstler and Leonard Weinglass --- gained notoriety and celebrity from the trial. (If you care to investigate the event, a 2020 film, The Trial of the Chicago 7, is worth a look). On October 15th approximately 200,000 people showed up in Washington, D.C. demanding a Moratorium on the War in Vietnam and dramatically illustrated the growing opposition to the War. As someone who watched the Moonwalk, went to Woodstock, and was in Washington on October 15th, I can attest to the growing energy and acceleration of U.S. history at the end of the decade. As it was the end of my second decade, I was well-primed, moving into the next two decades “with a headful of ideas, drivin’ me insane.” (Bob Dylan, Maggie’s Farm)
Postscript: As a New York Sports Fan, I would remiss if I failed to mention two other shocking events from 1969:
January 12th – the NY Jets win the 3rd Super Bowl, as the first AFL team to do so.
October 16th - the (formerly) lowly NY Mets defeat the Baltimore Orioles to win the World Series.
Happy birthday, Bil!
Thanks...for the memories!