Fighter pilots on bicycles, Roy Rogers cap pistols, toy soldiers, the gut wrenching sixties, it's a family tradition.
Fighter pilots on bicycles, Roy Rogers cap pistols, toy soldiers, the gut wrenching sixties, it's a family tradition.
As the summer of ’63 approached, I knew my parent’s little Florida bakery was failing. Dad went to work for a local contractor as a carpenter, during the day, while continuing to bake bread, rolls and pies in the pre-dawn hours. When all else failed, he could usually get work pounding nails, repairing plaster walls or painting. But carpentering didn’t pay much in Florida, anti-union state that it was and is.
Reality set in. It was time to load up and move back to Illinois. Staying a few nights in Tuscola with this aunt and uncle, then that aunt and uncle. Thank God for stable relatives with spare bedrooms or couches. Then a cheap rental once our used furniture arrived from Florida.
Dad found a little work once again as a carpenter and my brother and I started school in the fall of ’63. Five-foot, one inch, one hundred-seventeen- pound freshman, fourth-string halfback for the mighty Tuscola Warriors. I wasn’t the shortest nor lightest football player, but damn close. That honor belonged to Mouse, who towered in at 4’11” and 89 pounds
My budding if inauspicious, football career ended three weeks later when my Dad got a union job at Caterpillar Tractor Company three hours north in Aurora, Illinois. Since, I never played a down, never got in a game, but successfully warmed the bench, our move to Sandwich, Illinois, had little impact on the fortunes of Coach Butkovich’s brusiers.
We moved to a drafty, two story farm rent house a couple of miles north of Sandwich. Since I had to ride the bus with the farm kids to school and with only one car, which my dad drove to his night shift on the assembly line, I didn’t try to play football for the Sandwich Indians. Other kids who lived on our rural county road did, but I didn’t know any of them so I couldn’t ask for a ride home from practice.
The last Friday before Thanksgiving kids were beginning to anticipate the coming Thanksgiving weekend and Christmas break soon to follow. Shortly after lunch the entire student body, all four hundred or so kids, freshmen through seniors, were summoned to the gymnasium.
I don’t know what the politics of the area were at the time, but since Sandwich is in the same Congressional district that sent the longest serving, now disgraced child molester, Republican Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert to Congress, I think it’s safe to assume that it was a Republican area. As we settled into the hardwood bleachers, the portly, bespectacled principal made a strange announcement. “I have a something very important to say and I don’t want to hear any laughing or cheering,” he said. His odd choice of words held our attention. “What in the world is this about?” I thought.
“President Kennedy has been assassinated in Dallas, Texas. This is a sad day in American history. School has been cancelled for the remainder of the day. You are dismissed to go quietly to your lockers,” came his solemn words.
The news stunned us all. The look of grief on the principal’s face clear to us all. The handsome young president with beautiful wife, delightful children and the promise of a bright future gone. Three years after his 1960 election, I still had the Kennedy pin, although the school binder with the red, white and blue Kennedy bumper sticker gone but in memory. Thus, began for me the tumult of the sixties.
Civil rights demonstrations had been going on in the south for several years and four little girls were killed in a bomb blast at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, on September 15th of that year, the violence would only accelerate. Political assassinations, civil rights murders, racial strife, anti-war protests and the war in Viet Nam, with its fifty-eight thousand American deaths would forever alter the American political discourse. The first school mass murder shooting spree, the University of Texas clock tower shooting, was three years into the future, August 1, 1966, when a disaffected student and veteran, named Charles Whitman took perch in a clock tower overlooking the campus and murdered fourteen students, wounding thirty-one others, after earlier in the day murdering his wife and mother.
Although Viet Nam eventually ended with the signing of the Paris Peace Accords in 1973, the last US servicemembers to die there would not occur until April 29, 1975, when two Marines were killed in a rocket attack one day before Saigon, the capital of South Viet Nam, fell to the North Vietnamese.
From Walter Cronkite, the iconic CBS network anchorman, weeping on television announcing Kennedy’s assassination to President Barack Obama wiping tears from his eyes on nation-wide television while speaking of the deaths of twenty schoolchildren and six adults at the Sandy Hook school massacre, we have seen six decades of violence saturated media.
The litany goes on. Police murdered. Unarmed blacks killed by police. Innocent schoolchildren gunned down. Servicemembers bodies in flag covered caskets delivered in gray planes to saluting soldiers, flag pin wearing politicians and weeping families, in America’s never-ending wars.
The violence didn’t begin with the sixties. Cain and Able. Robespierre. John Wilkes Booth. Hitler. Stalin. Names drenched in blood. Names known to those with the slightest grasp of history. How have the last six decades been any different? Television. The rise of immediacy. The stark images of a President shot before our very eyes. The images of broken and bleeding soldiers, the images of children, arms raised fleeing from the schools, brought in to our very living rooms in living, and now dying, color.
I began that decade playing with toy soldiers in the black dirt of Illinois, blowing them up with accurately aimed clods of dirt. Summer afternoons spent riding bicycles at each other pretending to be fighter pilots firing machine guns from the wings of P-51 Mustangs. Firing cap pistols, quick drawn from the Roy Rogers leather double holsters strapped to our sides. All the while shooting bad guys, marauding Indians or Nazis.
The decade would end on a United States Air Force C9A Nightingale, as a nineteen-year-old enlisted airman, serving in the 375th Aeromedical Evacuation Wing, helping fly wounded servicemembers to a hospital specializing in treating their wounds, or for those less seriously injured, one near their home. The planes named in honor of Florence Nightingale, a British nurse, who pioneered wartime medical treatment during the Crimean War, in the mid-1800’s.
Growing up in the decade after World War II, turning eighteen during the draft-fueled Viet Nam war and being of working class origins, it was only natural that my brother and I, indeed all the neighborhood boys played with toy soldiers, cap guns and pretended to be fighter pilots on our battered single speed bicycles.
My brother, father and I served a total of sixty-six years in the American military. As Hank Williams, Jr., sang: “It’s a family tradition.“
(c) William L. Enyart