Epistle 7 – Sputnik

I recently learned the remarkable fact that Sputnik, the Russian missile that was the first to orbit the earth, was launched on the same day as Leave It To Beaver. Surely that couldn’t be a coincidence. It must have been all part of the diabolical scheme by the Evil Empire, to “bury us”, as Nikita Khrushchev so delicately put it when he wasn’t pounding his shoe on a poor, unsuspecting UN table. What a classy guy.

Anyway, as the Russians were rocketing into space while we launched several mighty missiles into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Florida–or worse yet, just had them tip over without ever making it to the beach–the Boomers of America were taught that every other family except theirs behaved like the Cleavers or the Andersons in Father Knows Best. Ward Cleaver’s casual Friday attire was a sweater and a tie.

He smoked a pipe and gave sage advice on everything to his sons, Wally and the Beaver, while June Cleaver toiled away in the kitchen with a flouncy dress, high heels and a lacy apron that never got stained. Wally and the Beaver had neat rooms and actually communicated with each other despite their age difference. They even talked about life with their parents, for God’s sake! If that wasn’t a subversive Russian plot to destroy the fabric of the American family, I don’t know what is.

Well, none of that nonsense in my family, no sir. Children were meant to be seen and not heard, and the seeing part was kept to a bare minimum. If my mother had a flouncy dress, which I doubt, it was carefully stored away for Easter and Christmas, and my father smoked Lucky Strike cigarettes.

My brother was not put on this earth to help guide me through life like Wally did for the Beaver. He was put on this earth to torment me beyond human endurance. For the first several years, my brother and I slept in bunk beds, him on top and me on the bottom so he could accidentally step on me as he climbed up.

I suppose there are still doubters who fail to accept that our idyllic version of the American family was a worthy target for Communist propaganda. Okay, maybe the Beaver wasn’t a Cold War pawn. Maybe every other family really did live like that. Ozzie and Harriett and David and Ricky were the normal ones.

It’s a shame Khrushchev didn’t have more shoes.

We Will Win

Epistle 2 – The 50’s

Prototype Boomers were gangly kids in the 50’s, and we learned current events from Movietone News at the Saturday afternoon serials of Lash LaRue, Roy Rogers and the Durango Kid (my favorite). How current could the Movietone News be, I wonder?

By the time it got produced and distributed, it was downright historic by today’s real time standards. Nevertheless, from that media I learned that Joseph Stalin had died. When I told my mother, she refused to believe me, and she bought a newspaper everyday for a nickel from the neighborhood drug store. I guess by 50’s standards, Movietone was about as current as it got. Or my mother bought really old newspapers at a discount.

The 50’s have always been remembered with disgusting nostalgia, at least by pre-Boomers. But I know the truth because my brother was a leather-jacketed, motorcycle-booted, high school greaser who firmly believed along with his peers that there was no place in civilized society for anyone with good grades. Today, those people wouldn’t miss a class reunion to save their lives. Curious. The 60’s generation of kids can’t even remember where they went to school.

Anyway, back to the 50’s where us grade schoolers were taught to survive a nuclear attack by sitting under our desks. Can you believe it? Granted, desks back then were more substantial pieces of furniture than those plastic tray contraptions kids have today. They were made of steel and you could actually store things in them, everything from Crayolas to Lucky Strike cigarettes, depending on how warped you had become between the second and eighth grades.

The desk tops were made of real wood with ink wells (pits full of black stuff sucked up into pens to make them write) that featured years of carved graffiti, a Rosetta Stone that enlightened our path with the accumulated wisdom of all those who had gone before.

But as marvelous as those desks were, could they really protect us when the Russians dropped an atomic bomb on our school? C’mon, I was born at night but it wasn’t last night. On second thought, maybe they could. The military used to have soldiers observe an atomic blast shielded only by their shirtsleeves and sunglasses. They didn’t even have desks with tops that could tilt up and down. (I liked mine in the middle setting.)

Nobody in our neighborhood could afford an honest-to-God bomb shelter, but I remember someone who buried cases of liquor in a dirt cellar to ride out the holocaust. clearly a brilliant chap who, unfortunately, died before he could prove the wisdom of his plan. Fortunately, another kid and I discovered this treasure during our Saturday part-time jobs to expand the cellar. Thus began my training for staying stoned throughout the 60’s, a daunting responsibility, let me tell you.

God moves in mysterious ways. Real mysterious.

We Will Win

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