Child's eye view of the world

 

A child’s world is fairly narrow.  My family, my neighborhood:  it seemed like it held so much yet there was more going on that I only gradually became aware of. 

Politically, 1960 was a turning point for the United States.  John F. Kennedy is the first president I remember, and I was aware of him as a young man with a young family who brought “vigor” to the White House.  My brother would imitate JFK saying “With great vigor!” in what we imagined was a Boston accent.  We also imitated the breathy voice of Jackie Kennedy.  Their oldest child, Caroline, was just two years younger than me and someone I could relate to in the First Family. 

As far as national or international news, I was aware of things only as they impacted me.  I remember the Cuban “missile crisis” (October of 1962) mostly because my mother’s aunt and uncle (Uncle Dave and Aunt Maggie) were visiting from their farm in Montana, and they got so nervous they left and went back home.  I don’t recall being nervous; at 7, I had very little grasp of what was going on. 

My memories of the president in 1963 include a trip he made to San Diego in early June.  He was going to be the commencement speaker at the San Diego State College graduation, and he appeared in a motorcade down one of the main business districts in town.  There are people who talk about their entire class at school being taken to line the route of the motorcade, but I must have been out of school already (Catholic schools had a different schedule than the public schools, and I usually got out a week or so before my friends in public school.)   My mom took me to the parade route that day, and although he drove past us with his back to us (he was facing, and waving to, the other side of the street at that moment) I was far more fascinated with watching my mother’s reaction than I was interested in viewing this man.  She was jumping up and down and cheering loudly.  I can’t remember ever seeing her that excited, at any point in the 80+ years I knew her. 

My sister Kathie was already in the airlines and traveling about the country as a stewardess (as they were called then) for Delta.  One night when she and the rest of the crew checked into a hotel, the desk clerk told them that Kennedy was on his way.  Tired as they were, they stayed in the lobby for a couple of hours and were rewarded with the sight of JFK coming through: “So handsome!” Kathie said later.  “And tan, even though it was winter time.” 

Of course, like most people in my generation, I have clear memories of the Kennedy assassination (November 1963).  I was in the third grade at Holy Family.  The nuns were distraught, as he was hugely popular with them as the first Catholic U.S. President.  The second-grade teacher came in and made an announcement to our class, and I don’t recall that any of us 8-year-olds had much of a reaction.  When I got home that day, I walked in the kitchen door and saw my mom sitting on the living room floor in front of the television set, crying.  She turned to look at me and I grinned uneasily; not sure exactly what was going on or how I was supposed to feel about it.  I did take the newspaper from the next day and slip the front page into a paper bag and put it away, in fact, I still have it.    

  

Of course, unfortunately, this was not the only assassination of a political figure in the 60s.  In April of 1968 we lost Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and just two months later Bobby Kennedy, JFK’s younger brother and a front-runner for the Democratic nomination for president.  Once again, it was early June and I was out of school.  The phone rang very early in the morning and I heard my mom answer it.  “Dead??”  she said.  Turns out, no, he wasn’t dead yet but it would not be long. 

The Vietnam war, similarly, was both very impactful and kind of hazy in my life.  Each night as the evening news played on the television, a body count would be enumerated.  It seemed odd to me then and it does now.  The numbers also seemed very lopsided, and how could it still be going on after so many years of “U.S. troops dead, 24.  Enemy troops dead, 2346.”  (This is not an exact quote, but the way I remember the numbers going.)  My brother went into the Army in the late 60’s, as his mysterious “lottery number” was coming up and a recruiter had promised to keep him out of Vietnam if he joined for 4 years instead of the 2 he could be drafted for. 

The last big news event of the 1960s was the “space race” and the moon landing.  The astronauts were national heroes throughout the 60s.  The first manned space flights, John Glenn, Neil Armstrong.  My sister Kathie, the Delta stewardess, once wrote me that she had astronauts on one of her flights out of Houston, “and one of them is named Armstrong”.  That was only notable because we lived hear the corner of Blix Street and Armstrong; he was not yet the first man to have walked on the moon. 

I had a vivid dream around that time that I was an astronaut and was being told to get aboard the rocket for blast off.  I was not at all willing to do so; I recall the feeling of dread and horror at the thought of getting into the rocket.

I had a vivid imagination as a child, and not in a good way.  I was quite introverted and pondered things in my head rather than aloud, so I had a great many fears and worries that were probably needless had someone explained the world to me better.

I was afraid of Communists, for example, with little (or no) idea of what that signified.  My dad had a hardback book on our shelves entitled something like “What you Need to Know about Communism”.  The dust jacket featured a vivid splash resembling a blood stain, which went from the front of the book to the spine.  I watched over the years as the part on the spine, exposed to sunlight, faded to a pale pink while the section on the cover maintained its bright redness. 

The Catholic school teachings about the martyrs being persecuted for their faith in the early days of Christianity got confused in my head with Communists.  I expected that, at any time, “they” could come down my street, demand I deny my faith, and kill me if I refused.  I must have seen news footage of the Berlin Wall, including people trying to escape from “the communists” and being shot by the guards. 

Catholic school teachings in the 1960s also included the concept of a guardian angel.  This was not presented as an allegory but as an actual entity.  We were taught a prayer to recite regularly:

     Angel of god, my guardian dear
    To whom God’s love commits me here
    Ever this day be at my side
    To light and guard, to rule and guide.  Amen. 

The idea was not comforting to me, but unsettling and somewhat creepy.  The thought of something/someone always watching?  What about in the bathroom??  Can I request privacy at any point, please?

One day my brother and I were riding bikes to the store when he pointed out an odd-shaped cloud on the horizon.  “See how that kinda looks like a mushroom?  Mushroom clouds mean there will be an atomic bomb dropped on us.”  I knew about “the bomb”, of course:  we had drills at school for national disasters, and there was a civil defense siren that was tested one day a week at 12 noon exactly.  My mother called it the “12 o’clock noon whistle”, so that is what I thought it was called.  I always checked the time because if the clock showed one minute before or after noon, then clearly the bad guys were brilliantly waiting to drop the atomic bomb until the siren was going off anyway.  We had a lot of planes overhead since we lived just a few miles from the Miramar Naval Air Station (now a Marines Corps base).  I spent a lot of time nervously waiting to die as the jets screamed overhead.