(This is Chapter VII of a series that I started but never really finished…let me know if you want more because there’s plenty).

Listen, I know times are tough. After I checked my retirement and college savings accounts yesterday, I had to reach for my inhaler and start playing the Taizé chants on my iPod in a continual loop.

But a little perspective is in order–I lived through the Arab Oil Embargo of the 1970s, for Pete’s sake. And as this February 20, 1975 political rant from the 7th grade personal journal that I kept for Ms. Fine’s class at Burnt Chimney Elementary School in Wirtz, Virginia amply shows, I was madder than #$%@&*, and I just wasn’t going to take it any more:

You said I could think of something to put in here, so heres the one thing I thought of [we didn't cover dangling prepositions until 10th grade]. This country is never going to get going again unless Mr. Ford and Congress stop their bickering and DO SOMETHING! [hmmm, sound familiar?]. I think they are partly to blame for this recession. [Partly? PARTLY?]. I think its dumb that the leaders of this country are fighting like little babies while everybody else in the country is suffering and waiting for them to do something [and waiting, and waiting...]. Mr. Ford never has to worry about coming up short a few dollars. If he would get off his skis for a second and live somewhere besides that fancy Whitehouse [yeah, walk a mile in my high-top Chuck Taylor basketball sneakers, Mr. Ford!] he might see how bad things really are. He never has to worry about getting laid off and out of work either [unlike Richard Nixon]. And I wish Congress would STOP FIDDLING WITH THE CLOCK!! I wouldn’t get home till 5:15 and I’d miss the Mickey Mouse Club[what the...?]. And man, thats taking it TOO FAR!!

A word of explanation is in order. Congress had implemented a year-round Daylight Savings Time in 1974 as a means of saving energy. It had the desired effect, but the “strategery” received a lot of criticism because it meant that school children in rural areas such as Southwest Virginia had to wait in the cold and dark during the winter months to catch the bus.

Our school system at the time was considering delaying the start of school by an hour. The problem was we would get home an hour later as well, and that would interfere with my afternoon TV-watching, which by that time included 20-year-old reruns of The Mickey Mouse Club (for you Millennials, this was back in The Age of Aquarius, before DVRs).

My adolescent hormones were just starting to crank up a little at that time, and one of their first targets was Annette Funicello. I thought she was HOT!!, and that was even before I saw Beach Blanket Bingo. This was exactly the type of preadolescent angst the granny-bespectacled, mini-skirted Ms. Fine was hoping to tap into, and for this particular entry she gave me an “O” for “Outstanding.”

I should also point out that the traditional grading system had been suspended at the time as well because the bleeding heart liberals who ran the schools thought that “As” and “Fs” would create an unacceptable meritocracy-based hierarchy and that somebody’s feelings might get hurt and their self-esteem crushed which would then result in a spike in juvenile delinquency.

Fortunately, on February 23, 1975, just 3 days after I penned this eloquent screed, Congress, in a rare fit of common sense and decency, rescinded the year-round DST. Crisis averted. Even then, the power of my proto-blogging was being felt across this great land. The country lumbered on, and I ditched Annette and eventually moved on to less-wholesome targets such as Farrah Fawcett and Bo Derek.

So the next time you find yourself whining about your life savings disappearing down the toilet and being re-routed to bailout some Wall Street fat cat, just remember, it could be worse–and has been.

I should know. I was there.

With the recent day of mourning in honor of President Gerald Ford, it seemed fitting to revive my dormant series, Blogging the Wonder Years.

What’s the connection? Well, as you may recall, in my personal journal that I kept for Ms. Fine’s 7th grade class at Burnt Chimney Elementary School in Wirtz, Virginia, I not only dealt with my “touchy-feely” emotional side, adolescent angst and roiling hormones, but I also responded to the issues and events of the day. Previous excerpts included reflections and rants on my personal emotional and psychological growth during my first 6 years of elementary school, guys with long hair, so-called friends who called me “shorty,” cussing and the 70′s music scene (highly recommended since that was my highest comment post ever).

On September 12th, 1974, I weighed in on the new president of the United States, draft dodgers and Watergate:

I’d like to say something about our new president. I believe he is a good man and is capable of running this country.

But there are some of his ideas I don’t agree with. For example, I’ve heard stories that Mr. Ford might allow amnesty to the draft dodgers. I think this is downright plain unfair. His proposal is unfair to the families who lost loved ones during the war. I think the medals won by our dead war heroes would be meaningless if this amnesty was passed. It brings a shame upon this country for grown men to refuse to serve their country. And the very idea of welcoming them back! Ahhh, it makes me SICK!!

I do agree with his pardoning former president Nixon. I think the poor man has gone through enough humiliation. I believe Watergate has really crippled this country. Wow, do some Americans have a rotten attitude! I heard that Americans were 6 to 1 against pardoning Mr. Nixon. Well, I’m proud to be part of that 1! I’m sick of Watergate and I think we should forget it and focus our thoughts on other problems.

The disease of ignorance have been passed on unknowingly to many kids I’ve talked to. It really makes me sad when I hear kids saying their parents’ opinion and not their own.

Out of the mouths of babes. What a dazzling display of precocious political punditry! It’s a wonder that little diatribe didn’t make the editorial page of the Franklin County News-Post. But it’s evident that my political views leaned a little right in those days and that I wasn’t afraid to blaze my own path through the liberal morass that was Burnt Chimney Elementary School. It’s no coincidence that the twentysomething Ms. Fine, with her granny glasses, miniskirt and bachelor’s degree from that swanky all-girls liberal arts college in the Northeast, left a “no comment” on that particular entry.

So how do I feel about those same issues today? As the father of three sons who will all register for the draft within the next 5 years, I suspect my feelings on military service and conscription might be a little more nuanced these days than they were in 1974. But I think it’s also fair to say that I would still respect a conscientious objector or a person who is willing to go to jail for their beliefs more than someone who simply cuts and runs.

As for Ford’s pardon of Nixon, I still feel he did the right thing. Whether you love or hate “Tricky Dick,” I think it would be a hard sell to make the case that carrying out that nasty little business any further would have served the best interest of the country. The pardon probably contributed greatly to Ford’s loss to Jimmy Carter in the 1976 election, and the fact that he was willing to act on his convictions regardless of the political consequences speaks to his stout character and integrity.

As for the “the disease of ignorance,” my daily forays into the blogosphere are enough to convince me that this country still suffers from a pretty bad case of the sniffles (don’t worry, I’m not talking about your blog).

In April 1981, President Ford visited Harding University under tighter-than-normal security in the wake of the Reagan assassination attempt the month before. I recall seeing a lot of guys wearing earphones and suits on rooftops during that time and getting a pretty good ocular once-over when I entered the Benson Auditorium. Once inside, I saw (and heard) first-hand that Gerald R. Ford was indeed a good man with a pretty decent sense of humor. And so was his son Steve, who was an actor and wannabe soap star at the time, who took some Q&A after his dad spoke and then hung out in the student center after the event was over.

But as we’ll see in the next installment, the honeymoon with President Ford didn’t last long. What a difference four months can make.

Speaking of Henry John Deutschendorf, Jr. (aka John Denver), in 1974 he was one of my favorite musical artists, along with Elton John, Steely Dan, The Eagles and Bachman Turner Overdrive (BTO). I was pretty eclectic, even though I had no idea at the time what that word meant. All I knew was that I liked it loud–“Annie’s Song” was simply not the same unless it was belted out at the top of one’s lungs with the radio volume button turned all the way to the right.

Hence the problem. This was long before the advent of “personal listening devices” such as iPods, back in the stone-age when LP stereos were located in common areas and a set of headphones was a rare luxury. I shared my common living area with a 16-year-old classical music-crazed, piano virtuoso wannabe older sister and a 2-year-old sister who was more into Romper Room, Mrs. Beasley dolls and taking naps in the middle of the day. [...]

In 1972, comedian George Carlin released the monologue, Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television on his album Class Clown. In 1973, some of those words even made it onto the radio airwaves when WBAI-FM broadcast, uncensored, another Carlin monologue containing the same profanity.

My parents wouldn’t even let me watch M*A*S*H or All in the Family much less listen to Carlin, but that never stopped a preteen who was determined to hear what all the fuss was about. The problem was I had the kind of mother who always had the uncanny knack of knowing when my Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition was going to arrive and intercepting it before I could get home from school, so coming by critical information in those days wasn’t easy.

Enter my friend Rusty from church (where else?). Rusty was a “man of the world” who had seen and heard a thing or two in his time and he was the go-to guy in such situations. One day after his parents had left us alone while running an errand, Rusty invited me up to his room to listen to a copy of Carlin’s monologue which he kept cleverly hidden in a John Denver album cover. Needless to say, my ears fairly tingled as they were opened to a new level of vocabulary that I’d never been exposed to in my elementary school classroom. [...]

They got little hands
Little eyes
They walk around
Tellin’ great big lies
They got little noses
And tiny little teeth
They wear platform shoes
On their nasty little feet
Short People got no reason
Short People got no reason
Short People got no reason
To live
–from Randy Newman’s “Short People”

If you’ve spent any time at all reading Ocular Fusion, you’re no doubt aware of my enduring love for basketball. If you were to go further and scan the pages of my elementary school scrapbook, you would find that I listed basketball as my “favorite activity” from second grade through seventh (there was that little “tag” business in first grade, but that hardly counts). I lived for ACC basketball and the Boston Celtics, and whenever I played in a schoolyard pickup game, I took on the persona, if not the skill, of my favorite player, John “Hondo” Havlicek.

However, there was one problem. I was short. In today’s politically correct climate, I would be more thoughtfully and humanely labeled “vertically challenged.” Even though I found myself on the losing end of a game of genetic roulette, I compensated to a large degree by developing a reliable outside jump shot. Still, I knew that Laurie Partridge was probably never going to give me the time of day and that I would rarely have the opportunity to venture into the paint where the big boys, who could pack one of my layups as easily as they could pick their own teeth, loomed like vultures scanning the menu for the roadkill du jour.

By September 1974, I had heard just about every “shorty” joke in the book and was well-versed in how to run the typical elementary school insult gauntlet—cover your head and run as fast as your stubby legs will carry you. However, as is evident in the following passage from my long-lost but recently rediscovered 7th grade journal, I appear to have had some “unresolved issues:” [...]

Let it fly in the breeze
And get caught in the trees
Give a home to the fleas in my hair
A home for fleas
A hive for bees
A nest for birds
There ain’t no words
For the beauty,the splendor, the wonder of my…
Hair, HAIR, hair, HAIR, hair, HAIR, hair
Flow it, show it
Long as God can grow it
My hair.
–from the song “Hair”

Category:Blogging, Humor, Nostalgia, The Wonder Years | Comments (14) | Autor: Mike the Eyeguy