My daughter refers to my young years as ‘your Dick and Jane childhood’. And so it was. I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s in a smallish Midwestern town with a single, powerful, successful, paternal company.
Our parents wanted us to have the best of everything, the schools were lavishly funded, music and art even in grade school. The public schools were so good that the executives of the Company didn’t send their kids away to prep school, they went to school with the rest of us. To me the 1% was just Gretchen’s dad. In high school we had 3 choirs, two bands and orchestra. Honors classes in English, the sciences and math. French German and Spanish, up to 5 years, because you started in 8th grade.
The town was laid out with an extra large plot every 10 or so blocks with a park in the center, complete with playground equipment and a ball field. The family that owned the Company provided an outdoor swimming pool and a community center with an indoor pool and a skating rink. They provided a picnic for every department at the Company every summer. We never thought about what the Company manufactured.
Everybody I knew was a Republican — my family, my friends’ families, teachers, businessmen, everyone. My mother was Catholic and we were raised in the Church. The Church and the local priest were Republican. So I was a Republican.
In 1960 I became enamored of John Kennedy. When he won the nomination I turned a cartwheel in the living room (and got sent straight to bed.) That fall I started 7th grade, Junior High, the first step to adulthood. The Wednesday after the election most of the kids were saying, “Nixon won, just wait and see.” I argued for Kennedy. When he won I was elated. I remember my mother coming home from voting and saying to my father, “I voted for John Kennedy. I like him and I just couldn’t bring myself to vote for Nixon.” The first crack in the Republican dam.
We subscribed to the Detroit Free Press as well as the local rag and watched the news every night, Huntley and Brinkley. As I got older I paid more attention and watched what was happening in Mississippi and Alabama. I noticed that ‘liberals’ supported rights for black people. There were liberal Republicans in those days. Then came the murders of Medgar Evers, Cheney, Goodman and Schwerner, Viola Liuzzo, and four girls in a church basement. Then came Dallas, and the glee of so many kids at my school, echoing their parents. Then came Goldwater. That was when I stopped being a Republican. From that point forward I was aggressively liberal in a very conservative town. I got increasingly political, and hung out with kids who were the same.
Around the end of my junior year I realized that a lot of the boys I’d known all my life would probably end up going to Vietnam. When I went to college I was active in the Peace Movement, helping to manage the Moratorium on campus, and marching on DC. I campaigned in two states for McCarthy and was invited to Chicago. I didn’t go because I needed to work to earn my rent money for the next year, but we watched it on TV. I had been arguing with my father for years about the war. (Did I mention the Company manufactured a nasty chemical used in Vietnam?) Chicago was the final straw for my father. I can’t say he became a Democrat then, but he stopped being a Republican. My mother had quietly left them behind years earlier. I’m proud that I converted my whole family to beingliberals.
There is an old saying, “If You Are Not a Liberal at 25, You Have No Heart. If You Are Not a Conservative at 35 You Have No Brain.” If it’s true then I have no brain because rather than becoming conservative over the last 50 years I have become more radical. I still work for what I believe in (right now it’s gun control) and push for equal rights. I am an old fashioned, bleeding heart liberal and proud of it!
