Then It Got Real

Then It Got Real – Part 2

“Trump World” is approaching 500 Essays since February of 2017. I’m sure it’s clear where I stand now, but I wanted to let you see the “development of a political mind.” Here’s Part Two.

I was nine in 1965 when we moved from Cincinnati to Dayton, Ohio. Dad was the new General Manager of WLW-D TV (now WDTN) Channel 2.  It was one of the two stations in Dayton, WHIO Channel 7 was the other.  My school buddy Marc’s Dad was the manager there, so we compared notes.  One of the advantages of being the “manager’s kid” was we got us into exciting things, like when President Lyndon Johnson came and spoke at the Montgomery County Fairgrounds.  It was 1966, and  Vietnam was just becoming an issue.  

Our seats in the stands were pretty good, but Johnson was still a far away figure with a Southern accent.  I was shocked to see young protestors in black turtleneck shirts from Antioch College in nearby Yellow Springs, standing below the podium and chanting against the War as he spoke.  They were quite “tame” but today’s standards, but at the time I was amazed that someone would dare to interrupt the President.  

My sisters and I were exposed to a lot of politics in those years.  Dad started a news/talk show at the station, with Phil Donahue as the host. Phil brought the eras most controversial people to Dayton, and often they ended up at our house the night before the show.  Most memorably was Tommy Smothers of the Smothers Brothers comedy duo.  I was thirteen, on the last year of being the “house bartender” (Dad must have thought I would start sampling the stuff as I got older) and Tommy came in late one night before the Donahue show. Mom woke me up, and said to get the bar ready.

MY biggest impression of Tommy, was that he was an older guy who told dirty jokes to kids.  The most memorable part of the evening was has girlfriend; she wore a dress that was slashed to her navel.  Dad’s sales manager, Chuck McFadden and I marveled at how the sides managed to stay up covering, well, most of what needed to be covered.  Sticky pads I guessed.  

Tommy and his brother Dick were soon cancelled from their successful TV show on CBS.  They had great ratings, but the network thought they were too controversial.  Their casual comedy songs were often critical of the War, and their guests invariably had an undercurrent of anti-war conversation.

Another Kennedy, Senator Robert Kennedy, entered the Presidential race.  He wasn’t the first candidate opposed to the Vietnam War; but he was my candidate. He favored Civil Rights and Martin Luther King, Workers Rights and Cesar Chavez, and wanted to make the United States a fairer and better place. And he was Bobby Kennedy, inheritor of the mantle of his brother’s leadership.

That spring, my radio alarm clock was set for 7 am to get me up for school.  The bus came at 7:45 a couple blocks away, but if I cut through the neighbor’s yard and jumped over the wall, it only took a minute.  I always woke up to the latest news headlines.  

On April 5th, the alarm clock clicked, and the announcer read that Martin Luther King had been assassinated in Memphis the evening before.  Riots broke out in Dayton; we watched buildings burn on Dad’s station.  Mayor Hall “read the riot act” and the National Guard moved in to protect the streets.

Two months later, the alarm clicked again, and I found that my hero, Bobby Kennedy, running for President and against the Vietnam War, was dead.  He was shot and killed by an assassin after winning the California primary; his candidacy gained momentum and might well have won the convention.  But he was gone; a long funeral train procession, a heartfelt speech by Ted Kennedy, a final burial next to his brother in Arlington.  His, and for a while my, dream of changing the world was ended. Bobby said; “…some men see things as they are and ask why, I see things that never were and ask, why not.”  I was asking why.

But my ultimate political “moment” of that year started out with a mistake.   My bike had a flat tire, and Dad helped me fix it.  One of us (I blamed him) didn’t manage to tighten the front fork bolts, and when I hit a bump in the neighbor’s driveway, the front wheel flew off.  I flipped over the handlebars, and when I finally landed, my right wrist had an odd bump. I quickly diagnosed it as a broken arm.

That wrecked my chance to be a “swim star” in the next day’s championships, and the doctor ordered me to lay low with my cast elevated for the next week.

It was August of 1968, and as I sat on the couch in the family room with my cast perched on a green beer box I painted for summer camp, I watched in “living color” the Democratic convention in Chicago.  It was the riot convention:  the party leaders, “Johnson Democrats” supported the war and Vice President Hubert Humphrey.  The anti-war Democrats, led by Gene McCarthy and George McGovern as a replacement for Bobby, protested on the floor of the convention.  Students marched in the streets.  Mayor Dick Daley of Chicago was firmly in the Johnson camp, and wasn’t going to let protests mar his convention.  He sent the police to clear the streets.

Protestors were tear gassed and beaten.  Reporters were chased into their hotels, and pummeled with nightsticks in the hall.  It was all on TV.  I listened to the politicians on the stage say that the violence was necessary for “law and order,” and I heard the opposition rail against the unprovoked attacks. “The whole world is watching” the protestors chanted, and later, “the whole world f**king” as well. 

That experience put me firmly in the anti-war camp.  Despite the fact that I was a Democrat and we got to meet Humphrey, the Democratic nominee, at the Dayton airport, I was never a big fan.  It wasn’t until years later in college, that I had the chance to study the liberalism that Humphrey espoused, and changed my mind about him.  In 1968 he was in an impossible position though, the Vice President, unable to “buck” his President Johnson’s war, and prevented from reaching out to the anti-war vote.  

The election was close enough it took until Wednesday to decide who won.  They announced Nixon’s victory over the PA at Van Buren Junior High School in Kettering, Ohio.  The school burst out in cheers and applause, and I put my head down on the desk.  How could we live with four years of Richard Nixon?