I Remember JFK: A Baby Boomer's Pleasant Reminiscing Spot

My older brothers grew up with the presence of a horrible, random terror that caused near-hysteria. It could strike absolutely anyone, but seemed particularly fond of children. Perfectly healthy, active kids could be transformed in a matter of days into paralyzed individuals who might require confinement in an "iron lung" just to take their next breath.

The scourge was poliomyelitis, commonly known as polio.

A series of outbreaks took place in 1921. Among those infected was a young adult named Franklin Delano Roosevelt. His strong legs were turned into paralyzed vestiges of what they once were.

Roosevelt was determined to press on despite his malady, and tried to always arrange to be photographed away from his ever-nearby wheelchair. But the American public knew that the man who would come to be their most beloved President was a victim of polio, and FDR spearheaded a drive to find a cure, or at least a prevention, for the disease.

Back in the days when there were three networks, what they chose to show had a much greater effect on the masses than in the present day. I might watch one or two network television shows per week, spending the rest of my time gleaning gems recorded by my DVR from The History Channel, TLC, and the like.

However, in the early-to-mid 60's, you watched what NBC, ABC, or CBS had to offer. And that meant seeing certain movies year after year.

It almost became a treasured annual observance. Certain films were so good that they needed to be brought out and dusted off again so that they could be re-enjoyed.

In reality, it was probably a matter of a studio holding copyright on a particular film so that the paying of royalties that might have otherwise cut into profits were skipped. But I didn't think about such mundane matters when I was a child. Instead, I just savored the annual showing of The Great Escape over two nights each summer.

You want to hear something weird? While pondering column ideas this morning, the thought of Buddy Holly popped into my head. Being a Don McLean fan, I thought "why not write about the the day the music died?" So I set out to go to work.

It was after I had invested a half hour of my time that I finally realized that the infamous plane crash occurred 49 years this very day (Feb. 3, presstime).

Strange, wouldn't you say?

Anyhow, rock and roll music, still in its infancy, received a shot in the arm of pure immortality that unfortunate day so long ago when three talented musicians, as well as a pilot, gave up their lives in a frozen Iowa cornfield. Many of us were too young to remember it, but the genre, which might have passed the way of other musical crazes, was cemented in place as the voice of not only the current generation, but that of future ones as well.

An interesting thing about the generations that come and go is the way each one adopts a word that means "good." That word positively identifies the user of said adjective as a member of a certain social and/or historical group. Either that, or it makes them look foolish. You see, the descriptive terms sound right coming from the appropriate societal member, silly coming from anyone else.

Case in point: "groovy." The qualifier, which is appropriate for anyone who protested anything during the 60's, takes on a ridiculous connotation when used in, say, advertising.

Of course, the same could be said for practically ANYTHING used in advertising.

But the fact is that generations have long had the habit of defining their own language, especially when it comes to adjectives with a positive meaning. It's part of what identifies them as unique.

The year was 1945. The United States had just won World War II, but had already seen the writing on the wall for the next potential conflict. The Russians had proven to be valuable allies during war against the Axis powers, but now that it was over, the basic philosophical differences between the two nations were standing out more and more. Russia was now considered the Next Big Threat.

The B-29 had won the war with Japan, both figuratively and literally. Besides carpeting Japan and Japanese-held islands with conventional ordinance, B-29's also dropped the two atomic bombs which caused the Japanese, for whom surrender was not an option, to give up.

But the Powers that Be were looking ahead. They had already commissioned a replacement for the B-29, the B-50. But they wanted a bomber with enough range to reach anywhere in the world from United States bases. They wanted the Russians to be afraid, VERY afraid, of what might rain down from above should they cause any threat to democracy.

In the vast closet of my memory banks, I recall a kid in the neighborhood who was always asking if our parents would be interested in reading Grit. It was a dime, as I recall, and my folks weren't interested. But many other parents were, and the kid had nice stuff that he had obtained for himself as a result of his entrepreneurship.

He plied his trade hard. While the rest of us were of playing, this kid might be parked outside of Moonwink Grocery with his cloth bag full of Grits, patiently racking up the occasional sale.

Grit prospered for many years with the aid of its preteen sales force. Founded as a local Williamsport, PA newspaper in 1882, it slowly but surely increased its readership until, by the late 1950's, it was close to a million with a local, a Pennsylvania, and a national edition.

Not many knew what anorexia nervosa was back in 1970. However, everyone was aware of what an angel's voice sounded like.

That was the year Carpenters released their second album, Close to You. Two gold record hits sprang from the release, the title track and We've Only Just Begun.

Indeed, things had only just begun for the brother-sister duo. Before the dark days of disco would change the public's fickle tastes, Karen's sweet voice would be a staple of both AM and FM airplay, and she would also be heard on frequent television appearances (including The Carpenter's own variety show).

But sadly, Karen isn't remembered so much for her golden pipes, but for her falling victim to a disease few were aware of before she thrust it into the limelight with lots of help from trashy tabloids in particular and the media in general.

In 1969, the dream wasn't over, but the closing credits were playing. However, as is frequently the case in the movie theater, the music that was playing during the closing credits was pretty wonderful stuff.

The 1967 death of Brian Epstein was the beginning of the end of the incredible pooled talent of what we knew as The Beatles. Epstein was a manager that the group respected, whose decisions weren't always perfect, but weren't disastrous either. On August 27 of that year, the day before I turned eight years old, Epstein died of an overdose of sleeping pills.

The Beatles muddled on under McCartney's taking the lead for awhile, but Paul's decision to commit the group to the film Magical Mystery Tour effectively ended the rest of the boys listening to him. While the accompanying album was a success, the film was a critical and financial flop.

By 1968, and the recording of the White Album, all four members of the band were thinking much more in terms of themselves as individuals rather than as members of the greatest pop/rock band in history.

When I was eight years old, I managed to convince my thrifty father that I needed to be a Cub Scout.

The lure was irresistible. After all, I had spent two entire years at Nichols School in Miami, Oklahoma watching older kids parade around in their Cub Scout uniforms. The beautiful blue outfits, complete with those sharp blue-and-gold neckerchiefs and that cool metal device that the ends threaded through that fit up against the uniform collar . . . what seven-year-old kid wouldn't be green with envy at the thought of actually donning such an outfit?

I'm not sure what kind of age requirements the Cub scouts have today, but back in the 60's, you had to be eight to join. That meant I had to wait until third grade before I was eligible. But when I crossed that magical eight-year point shortly before the 1967 school year began, I began relentlessly hounding my parents to let me become a Cub Scout.

To my delight, they agreed that it would be a good idea.

I was a fortunate kid. I spent the first eight years of my life living in the same home. In kid years, that's about four entire lifetimes.

But just before I turned nine, we packed everything up and moved seventy miles away.

It might as well have been seven thousand.

My parents had lived in our modest Miami, Oklahoma home since the early 1950's. Dad had a yearning to move out to the country. So in 1968, he sold his truck garage and our house and bought a 250 acre farm in southwest Missouri.

We went from comfortable small-town life, where a milkman would bring us fresh dairy products two mornings a week, to living three miles up a rough dirt road without a telephone.

In 1892, Angelo Siciliano was born in in Calabria, Italy. Thirteen years later, he and his family moved to Brooklyn. Like many Italianos, he Americanized his name. He became known as Charles, and became a leatherworker.

Charles was on the scrawny side. One day, on a visit to the zoo, he noted that big cats stayed extremely muscular, even in the confines of cages, without the luxury of running free. He concluded that the animals gained and maintained their strength by pitting muscle against muscle.

He tested his theory by devising exercises that did the same thing. They worked. Adding muscle mass as he stayed with his program, he eventually took the name "Charles Atlas" after a friend told him he resembled the statue of Atlas on top of a hotel in Coney Island.

Atlas had just achieved the title of The World's Most Perfectly Developed Man by Physical Culture magazine. That was big stuff in 1922. So Atlas began marketing his secret workout routine to the general public. It sold like, well, Edsels.

Kids have things to worry about now, for sure. In the 50's and 60's, we didn't know what ozone was. Global warming? Never heard of it. Gas stations were fighting to gain the business of our parents, not putting surly clerks behind bulletproof glass to sell them fuel at per-gallon prices approaching the minimum wage.

But today's children have never felt the paralysing fear that an air raid siren would cause, as a kid would scramble to get underneath a desk in a futile effort to cover up from the effects of a nuclear blast.

Some communitites would sound the awful siren, some would simply rely on the schools to conduct the air raid drills as they saw fit. But the schools were required to do so by many city and state governments.

And this was a source of contention for many. You see, the proactive nature of ducking and covering implied that the practicers of such a tactic might have a snowball's chance in a very hot place of surviving an actual nuclear blast.