Seems almost unimaginable that both Sputnik and Leave it To Beaver were
launched on the very same day, but that distinction does go to October 4, 1957. October 4 is now the official start of World Space Week, inaugurated in 1999 by the United Nations-sponsored Office of Outer Space Affairs.
This day is universally recognized as having launched the Space Age, and in keeping with that theme, one could argue that “the Beav” might easily be considered the very first space cadet.
While it wasn’t until 1983 that the term “nuclear winter” was coined by American physicist Richard P. Turco (a cohort of Carl Sagan, who literally wrote the book on the subject), no Boomer had been untouched by the whole idea of nuclear war and its concomitant MAD philosophy (not to be confused with the computer game of the same name). Who among us hasn’t hidden under a desk to avoid being annihilated by an atom bomb? I would guess the real driving force behind MAD and the eventual fear of a nuclear winter came about on a lovely fall day in 1949, when President Harry Truman announced to a shocked nation: "We have evidence that within recent weeks an atomic explosion occurred in the USSR." The race was on! I grew up in quite a small town planted pretty much right smack in the middle of nowhere (which turns out to be a good place to park ammunition dumps and nuclear power plants, by the way), so we didn’t have much of an airport. I can still remember trembling in my bed whenever I heard an airplane fly overhead for fear that it would be the one that brought a big bomb home to me. I realize now that this doesn’t make sense, but like most little girls, I had a big imagination and only a little strategic defense education. It took 47 years, but on Sept. 24, 1996, the U.S., along with a bunch of the world's other nuclear powers (though not all), signed the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty to end all testing and development of nuclear weapons. (Go to article.) While I applaud this effort, like so much of what we do, this treaty looks like too little, too late. OK, maybe not too late. I’m really the eternal optimist—if an optimist can also be a cynic. I suspect a lot of people who get a little power can’t see the trees for the forest, but I also think most people are really pretty decent; they don’t look forward to wars or even rumors of wars. I suspect that, like me, most of them just want to eat, have a roof over their heads and have happy children—and grandchildren. I know I want my grandchildren to be happy. I sure as heck don’t want them lying awake at night wondering if the airplane droning overhead is going to drop a bomb on them! So I guess I’ll keep walking and talking the peace and love walk and talk, all the while maintaining a little low-key constituent pressure on those elected officials who claim to represent me among those powerful people who are lost in the woods. Hope they find their way home before winter.
It was during this week in 1972 that both “The Bob Newhart Show'' and M*A*S*H premiered on CBS. I’ll bet execs at that network long for the good old days!
Having grown up with Bob Newhart, I did take to his show fairly quickly. I remember listening to his albums as a youngster, and even trying to put together a telephone routine to entertain my friends! It was a bust, but I still dream of doing standup comedy, and I believe I can trace that desire back to that early failed effort.
M*A*S*H, on the other hand, I didn’t especially care for right off. In those days, of course, popular movies might still be showing at smaller local theaters for years after their release, and even if they had run their course there weren’t so many new releases that we couldn’t remember what we saw last year, much less last week! As
the TV show was first broadcast only two years after the movie was released, I found it too easy to make comparisons between Donald Sutherland and Alan Alda, between Elliot Gould and Wayne Rogers, between Robert Duvall and Larry Linville, and between Sally Kellerman and Loretta Swit. And there was Robert Altman, who has directed more than one of my all-time favorite films. However, as the show progressed and grew, I became totally addicted to it. By 1979, I was watching up to five reruns a day, trying to catch up on episodes I hadn’t seen. I still occasionally run across an episode that I’m pretty sure is new to me, but it’s likely that I’ve only seen it once, rather than the 10 times I’ve seen almost all other episodes. My view of M*A*S*H changed subtly after having acquired a Korean daughter-in-law. Though I still think it’s an excellent television series, I now find the paternalism of many of the episodes more noticeable, which has turned me into a more critical fan—but still a fan! Among lines that found their way into our family lexicon due to years of M*A*S*H indoctrination is Father Mulcahy’s “Jocularity, jocularity.”
Speaking of jocularity and other silliness, this week also marks the anniversary of the barring of Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev from visiting Disneyland in 1959. That’s right – he was refused admission. The story is that U.S. government officials feared for his safety, but I suspect Walt was afraid to let a Commie see Tomorrowland.
More foolishness ensued in 1973, when Bobbie Riggs took on Billie Jean King in a tennis match in Houston, Texas, billed as a "Battle of the Sexes." I know Billie Jean King won the match and the $100,000, but I think she lost a bit of dignity in responding to Riggs’ buffoonery in the first place.
And speaking of buffoonery, this week also presents all of us—Boomer or not—an opportunity to enjoy International Talk Like a Pirate Day. This is an especially endearing event for me, as it originated on September
19, 1995, exactly one year to the day after my father died. Somehow, this seems such a fitting memorial to him. I can just imagine him finding particular joy in drinking up some grog and shouting, “Ahoy, me hearties!” Ah, Dad, I'm still a-missin' ye!
Like most Boomers, I know the name of Ralph Nader, I have long been vaguely aware that his fame is based on consumer product safety and that the blame for the 2000 election of George W. as president has been laid at his doorstep by more than a few bitter Democrats. But I had forgotten that it was his indictment of the U.S. auto industry in the book Unsafe at Any Speed that led to the passage of the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act, which was signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson on September 9, 1966. But I didn’t need to read any book to know that the Corvair—which he included as one of his more memorable suspects—is a truly unsafe vehicle. How do I know? We owned one.
I’m guessing most Americans have at least one stand-out story of a car they’ve owned. We have a few, but stories about our Corvair sink deepest into the muck. It was a cute car, but if you’ve never been in one, let me start by saying that it had an automatic transmission with no parking gear. Just take a minute to think about that... The gear shift was a switch that went from drive to neutral to reverse. Get it? Does anyone know WHO came up with this idea? Or WHY? Did it just cost more to put the P on the shifter? To add another notch? It’s a puzzler for sure. Here’s the kicker for us: our Corvair, which we bought used, had a parking brake that didn’t work. In other words, it could quite easily be rolled anywhere with just the slightest push, even when the engine was turned off. We had a brick we’d throw under the front tire when we parked on an incline. (We never parked on a hill.) Once, the car rolled over the brick and nearly got away from me. I’d probably have just let it roll back into the pond at the bottom of that parking area, but my 2-year-old son was in the car, and I wanted to keep him.
This car was a two-door, which we now think of as inconvenient, though not necessarily unsafe. Nevertheless, these were definitely unsafe. As many Boomers and their parents may recall, the seat backs on the bucket seats in the two-door vehicles of the day—and that includes the Corvair—had no mechanism to hold them in place. If you stopped too fast, they just flipped forward. In the early 70s, when we owned ours (note that Nader had condemned them in the mid-60s, and we obviously hadn’t got that message), we also didn’t have rules for keeping kids safe in cars—mind, the cars were long, wide and weighed about as much as a tank, giving them the heft to withstand a pretty heavy beating without the passengers feeling too much pain—so kids often sat in the front seat. Our 2-year-old, for example, sat in a car seat that wasn’t much different than the child seat on a shopping cart—a platform with two leg holes and a bar that ran around it at about waist height—but it had two arms to hook it over the seat back. Imagine what happened when you braked suddenly! Well, instead of flipping our son forward through the windshield, I hooked one of the arms of that chair over the driver’s seat back in order to hold it in place. He was practically sitting on my shoulder while I drove. I believe most of us who learned to drive in those days still at least occasionally throw our right arm out to block passengers from pitching forward when we have to hit the brakes.
The other interesting aspect of the Corvair was that the engine was in the back and the trunk was in the front. This actually turned out to be a good thing for us when we had to drive over the mountain roads in the winter. Having the weight in the back was, I’m sure, the only thing that kept us on the road in that vehicle. I believe our Corvair was also a later model (that is, post-1965), meaning it didn’t have some of the suspension problems of the earlier models.
I could go on to tell you about having to crawl underneath the car with a screwdriver, which we used to cross the poles and get it started, because when we owned it, we couldn’t afford to have repairs done--but that wasn’t necessarily a design flaw. Still, the whole “no parking brake/no parking gear” issue did make what might have been a little peccadillo into a daily life-threatening challenge. Good thing we were still young and immortal!
