Sometimes you just need to vent for the relief you get from releasing all that extra fart-gas that builds up in the brain from too much politics and environmental stress.
Have you noticed that there seem to be certain pests that you just can’t seem to get rid of? Mosquitoes? Rats in the attic? Fairies in the garden? In-laws who need money?
The St. Louis Cardinals seemed to be poised, based on late-season improvements, to make a bid for a World-Series surge in the playoffs. But they were taken out by the Los Angeles Dodgers in a one-game wild-card playoff. Wait till next year again.
We find out more and more bad stuff and crimes from Trump’s Presidential Administration (Prexydental Apeynation?) every single week. And the criminal is still not in prison yet? If this were a true banana republic, he would’ve been executed after the coup failed.
I keep taking careful steps to improve my health and become physically fit enough to stay alive. And yet, I can’t seem to get healthy enough to visit the Bluebonnet Nudist Park for a second time. I called them and found out that they are very willing to take Covid precautions and help me out. But blood sugar balance and a number of small wounds that won’t heal keep me from going au naturel.
I am too old and irritated to go for very long without ranting about the general unfairness of the universe. I am mindful that people like me can easily become annoying and are no fun to be around. So, I try hard to limit the Mr. Grumpy vibes I give off in this blog to only a day or two per week. But I often fail. So, dang it! I just have to spout out a little more today. That fart-gas in the old brain cavity really builds up fast.
In 1964 I was 7 years old until November. I became a baseball fan that year. I had listened to baseball games on the radio with Great Grandpa Raymond before that year, but that had always been Twins’ games in the American League. But that was the year I discovered the St. Louis Cardinals. I followed them in the newspaper, the Mason City Globe Gazette. They had lost the greatest hitter in their history to that point, Stan Musial having retired when the 1963 season ended. But he was replaced in left field by Lou Brock, the hit-making base-stealing boy wonder of 1964. They went from near the bottom of the National League to edging out the Philadelphia Phillies and the Cincinnati Reds by one game each (they were tied for second) at the very end of the season.
The World Series pitted the Cardinals against the mighty New York Yankees. Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford were the stars of that team and had won five World Series in a row a decade before. It was a fantastic battle that the Cardinals finally won 7 to 5 in the seventh and final game in St. Louis. Bob Gibson was a deciding factor and won Series MVP. I would become a life-long Cardinals fan.
And I lost my Grandpa Beyer. He went to work one day, driving a road grader and his heart simply stopped working. It was the first time I lost a major somebody in my life.
In 1962 I had spotted the bright pinprick in the sky that was John Glenn orbiting the earth in the Friendship 7 Mercury spacecraft. My mother and father helped me spot it from our back yard in Rowan, Iowa.
In 1964, therefore, I began to take a serious interest in outer space as the Mercury program transformed into the Gemini program that was testing procedures in space for eventual Apollo moon missions.
I was in the Second Grade in 1964. Miss Madison was my teacher. She was as old as my Grandpa and Grandma Aldrich. She got mad at me at least three times that I can remember. I mean, I know that there were more than that, but there were three times I made her so mad with a joke that she memorably made me feel the wrath that teachers reserve for classroom clowns.
Steve Kaufman “The Beatles Debut on Ed Sullivan 1964”
The Beatles were on Ed Sullivan in February. My Grandpa and Grandma Aldrich told me that the Beatles must’ve been confused about whether they were boys or girls to have haircuts like that. And those were the bowl-cuts they had before the wild-hair days of the later Sixties. All the boys in my class had either a butch cut or a flat-top. Hair styles for boys back then meant not really having any hair.
Lyndon Baines Johnson was president. He had been since the Kennedy assassination in 1963.
In July LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law, abolishing segregation.
In August, the Gulf of Tonkin Incident (since revealed to be a proven false-flag operation) leads to the Vietnam War.
The “Daisy” campaign ad for LBJ, showing a little girl picking flowers and then being blown up by an atom bomb, convinces my dad that Barry Goldwater is a dangerous radical, and he votes for LBJ even though he is not a conservative or a Republican.
LBJ is elected President of the United States in 1964.
Later that November, I turned eight years old.
1964 was a notable year for me. Even if it wasn’t for Barry Goldwater.
In the picture that starts this post, I am 8. Nancy is 6, holding on to little brother David at 2. Mary is 4. We are all in our Sunday best on Easter Sunday morning.
Why am I writing about 1964 today?
My mother is in hospice at 87 years old. She is dying of heart failure. And today, I and my two younger children got to talk to her by phone. The light and hope we have today is colored by the hope and light we had in the past. Such is the nature of having a family over time.
If you’ve read very much of my goofy little blog, you’ve probably run across the fact that I am something of a conspiracy theorist and strange-twist believer… sometimes referred to as a tinfoil-hat-wearer, or that old uncle you don’t want your kids sitting next to at the Thanksgiving dinner table. And I’ve got another one for you. I discovered while obsessing about nostalgia and old ads in the Saturday Evening Post, that the Coca-Cola company is probably responsible for warping my mind as a child.
My plan in revealing this hideous conspiracy is to take a look at ads and illustrations that I saw as a kid addicted to reading Saturday Evening Post every week at Grandpa and Grandma Aldrich’s farm. I will scour them for hidden meanings and try to reveal to you the insidious plot underlying these mind-altering illustrations. Keep in mind that you should probably take everything I say in this article with a grain of salt. No, really, salt can protect you from subtle mind-control messages.
And, yes, I realize that not all the messages are that subtle. Sometimes they shout at you, “Drink Coke and you will have more sex!” And you have to remember we are trying to avoid that kind of mind control. We have to fight every instance of ad companies trying to take control over us by exploiting our baser animal urges.
So, let me take a momentary interlude, a break if you will. I have this big glass of Diet Coke I just bought at QT, and…
Well, that was good!
Coca-Cola has been at this for a while. This ad from the 1940’s is apparently attempting to win World War II through choice of soft drinks. Look at this feisty brew the soldier is about to quaff. It is actually struggling in the cup to get out and go bite some German soldier’s face off. Any American soldier who can choke this stuff down is tough enough to take on the Axis powers, Napoleon after Hitler dug him up and used Frankenstein’s scientific breakthroughs to re-animate him, and even several countries we weren’t actually at war with. Even Rush Limbaugh and his weird lesbian-farmer-subsidies theory can’t compete with Coke on this level of propaganda wars.
I also think Coca-Cola ads may have something to do with why I became a Cardinals fan when I lived in a place full of Cubs and Twins fans. I admit, I added the dialogue and the commentary, but I used to do the same thing in my head when I was eight and the Cardinals went to the World Series… and the Cubs could not win it all even with Ernie Banks on their team. The Cardinals beat the Yankees in 7 games!
I blame Coca-Cola. Especially their ad department. Cause the generic manager is telling the generic Oubs player to “Relax… take it easy.” But the Cardinals won because Bob Gibson had that laser-intensity stare that bored holes through Mickey Mantle’s bat! (It is Oubs, not Cubs, by the way. Look at the big “O” on his jersey.)
And you can’t tell me that the Coca-Cola ad seen here, the one with the white-haired goblin child casting a spell on you with his crazy eyes and pointing at your dark, delicious master isn’t seriously trying to mess with children’s minds. There used to be a big five-foot-tall metal sign with this very picture on it in the one and only alley in Meservey, Iowa. The one time I went to the barber there to get my hair cut I had to sit in that barber chair and stare at this evil thing staring back at me from the alley across the street. It warped me. For one thing, I never went back to that barber shop again… at least until I was in college and the sign was gone.
So, I seriously believe Coca-Cola was messing with my mind as a child. They did it through subversive ad illustrations in Saturday Evening Post Magazine. And if I’m completely crazy now, I blame them. You don’t see that kind of thing going on today, do you? Well, I mean, we should be very worried. Because it probably means they have gotten better at it.
There is considerable evidence that I am not a totally normal human being, or as Danny Murphy used to say “A normal human bean”. Danny is, by the way, a character in several of my novels, including Snow Babies and When the Captain Came Calling. He did the complete Circle Streak (running around the entire high school campus buck naked in a huge and chilly circle) more than once. And he was based entirely on one of my high school classmates and friends. That bird-walk about streaking is an example of the kind of quirks I am guilty of when I am being totally not-normal. I am now entirely off topic and must pull it back to defend myself by saying, “Nobody else is a totally normal human bean either!”
Among my many quirks and oddities is my love of baseball and slavish dedication to the St. Louis Cardinals baseball club. My favorite World Series memories are from 1934, 22 years before I was born. Dizzy Dean was a 30-game winner pitching for the Cardinals. Joe “Ducky” Medwick was their star hitter, and in the 6th inning he hit a triple and slid hard into the third baseman with his cleats up (a trick learned from former Detroit Tiger Ty Cobb) and the Tiger fans lost their cool in a big way (they were behind 9-0 at the time in the deciding 7th game). They began throwing things at Joe as he tried to play left field. He nearly missed an easy fly ball because somebody threw an orange and almost hit his glove. It is the only time in baseball history that a baseball commissioner had to eject a player from a World Series game for his own protection. (Needless to say, I love to hate the Tigers.)
I also love all the other ten times the Cardinals have won the Series, and I am proud of the eight times they nearly won besides.
Another of my odd quirks is a love of nudity in spite of my skin condition that prevents me from comfortably being a nudist. I first encountered nudism in a clothing-optional apartment complex where my girlfriend’s sister lived in Austin. I went from being shocked almost to apoplexy, to my girlfriend’s overwhelming amusement, to rejecting a chance to try nudism in the late 80’s, to actually spending a day at a Texas nudist park in 2017, and really enjoying the experience. My children are mortified.
And this quirk affects my fiction. I have some characters in a few of my stories based specifically on nudists I have known. I also wrote an entire novel, A Field Guide to Fauns, about a boy learning to live with his father and step-mother in a residential nudist park. Additionally, I have irrationally tried to use the word “penis” in every novel I have written. I only failed to do so when some editors insisted on its removal. So, I believe I may be 12 for 16 on that score.
But this particular quirk, no matter how totally embarrassing my children find it, is not a sexual perversion. I don’t write porn. And, as a survival matter after being sexually assaulted as a child, my nudity fixation has helped me to accept that I am not evil and unworthy when I am naked. My attacker had me convinced otherwise for more than twenty years.
I am also an aficionado of science fiction, classical music, and a faith that tells me rabbits make better people than people do.
My books are divided, for the most part, into Cantos instead of Chapters. This is because of my love for Classical Music and my dedication to the weird notion that novels should be more like epic poetry. Not necessarily written in verse, though if I ever get to write Music in the Forest, that one is written as poetry.
But paragraphs need to be written as purely poetically as perfect white pearls are poetically pearly.
But as poetry, my tendency towards comedy rather than drama or tragedy, leads me to write purple paisley prose (like all this p-word nonsense) which makes my paragraphs more Scherzo than Nocturne, Sonata, or Symphony.
While researching alien invasions for the novel Catch a Falling Star, the story of when aliens from deep space tried to invade Iowa, I came across internet information that ignited another quirky passion of mine, studying conspiracy theories. And it isn’t all just a plot to embarrass my children in front of people we know in real life. Although that is a definite side benefit. But conspiracies are an excellent source material for making humor. Comedy gold. Knowing who people like Alex Jones, David Icke, and Jesse Ventura are, gives me not only easily ridiculed personalities to make fun of, but also windows into thinking habits that may or may not turn up some real anomalies in the world of science and so-called historical fact. For instance, I can credibly argue that there is more to the Roswell Crash story than the government is willing to tell us about, and Lee Harvey Oswald did not kill JFK by himself, if at all.
And besides, my boyhood friend Robert was part of my small-town gang when we fought off the alien invasion in the 60’s, and he told me on Facebook that he remembered when that happened. Good old Bobby. He really likes beer and alcohol.
And I could go on like this for an entire book’s worth of silly jabber. But this post has to end for today. This blog, after all, isn’t the only quirky and crazy thing I have to attend to.
Last night I watched the movie version of Jersey Boys the musical. It touched me deeply. And the band was asked to each answer the question, “What was your best year as a member of the Four Seasons, your peak year?” Frankie Valli’s answer got me thinking about the answer to that question as it applies to who I am and what was the peak year of my career.
Now, I can’t deny that, having been a successful public school teacher who loved teaching for more than 30 years, there were a number of very successful years I could point to. But scoring well on State writing tests and reading tests despite teaching in a poor rural school district in South Texas, nor competing in the Odyssey of the Mind creativity contest with my gifted students were really what I would call my peak year. That honor has to go to the year I was twelve (for most of the year), 1969,
That was the year that men walked on the moon. I had followed the whole thing for several years, since Mom and Dad had gotten me excited about space by trying to spot John Glenn in his Mercury capsule crossing the blue sky in our back yard. I had watched religiously as Walter Cronkite and Wally Schirra told us on CBS about Mercury and Gemini and finally Apollo.
It made me believe in myself and the power of people for the first time since the tornado and the sexual assault from 1966 had toppled my world.
I had numerous self-confidence issues after 1966. I really, deep down, blamed myself for what happened to me. I was convinced that I was worthless and evil. But watching Neil Armstrong step onto the surface of the moon on that late July evening made me yearn to reshape the world the way he did, even if I could only do it in a much smaller way.
’69 was the “Summer of Love” in more than one way for me. I wasn’t really able to think about myself as a virgin in ’69 for… reasons. But it was the summer that I got to see a girl who wasn’t my sister naked because she wanted me to see her. We were not able to actually do what both of us wanted to do, and my double-clutching at the last moment destroyed any chance of her ever even talking to me again for the rest of my life, but it proved that I was at least desirable to girls. And music from that moment on began to underscore everything in my life. She had “Sugar Sugar” by the Archies playing in her bedroom. And the same song was playing again at the roller rink in Lake Cornelia the night she refused to do the couple’s skate with me, and I asked Leslie instead. Leslie accepted. I was not a monster made from the horror of ’66. i proved that to myself to the beat of “Sugar Sugar”.
And, of course, even though I was a Cardinals fan, the New York Mets proved to me that year that the impossible can happen. Of course, I rooted for the Orioles. You know, a team with a bird for a mascot.
But 1969 was also a year of big decision for me. I already knew at that point that I was destined to be a storyteller. But that was the year of the My Lai massacre. I remember looking at the photos in Life and Look magazines of the dead bodies of women and children, killed by American bullets. I could not, at that point, stomach the idea of going to war after turning 18, a possibility that became very real to me that year.
It was the year I made up my mind I would never kill anyone in my lifetime, never pick up a gun to harm others, or be a part of any such atrocity. I still have great respect for soldiers and what they do, but if I had been there, I would’ve been moved to lay down my weapon and stand with the victims in front of the machine guns. They would’ve had to kill me too. And I was determined to go to jail sooner than fight in the war. Luckily, that was never put to the test. The war ended in 1975, before I graduated high school.
The peak year was not for me a year of great personal success or wealth or accomplishment. 1969 was the year I chose who I was going to be in life. The year of decision. The year that brought me all the way through from there to now. It was 50 years ago. It was the year I was 12.
Yes, it is the bottom of the ninth. I am up to bat, but down by a half dozen runs. How do I pull it out of the fire? My fat, I mean. I am busy mixing and mangling metaphors again.
I tried a bit of nude pool repair today. I got one crack secured and plugged. I spent about fifty per cent of the time wearing only sunscreen. It was hot. I got done as much as I could. And then it rained. So only one run in the eighth. I sealed at least part of one crack. But there are twenty-three still to go. And I have to make the pool hold water by the 9th of July. And it is supposed to rain again tomorrow. I suppose doing this as a fool naturist is stupid and self-defeating, but it was cooler in the hot Texas sun. I don’t think I will be doing that foolishness in public after all. But fixing the pool is not completely impossible. Just mostly.
I took a hit to my numbers on this blog by not posting for three days. But I published multiples in order to get caught up, and people are reading and liking them although they are full of the same nudist nonsense I have been pursuing for a week now.
But I am six runs behind. My fat behind may have gotten slightly sunburned. I need to score seven in the bottom of the ninth. Can it be done? Possibly. But I need to bare down and concentrate on the pitches coming over the plate.
Sep 2, 2016; Chicago, IL, USA; Chicago Cubs first baseman Anthony Rizzo (44) hits a double against the San Francisco Giants during the eighth inning at Wrigley Field. Mandatory Credit: David Banks-USA TODAY Sports
The Cubs, those lovable losers from Wrigley who haven’t won the world series in a century, came from behind in the 9th inning and closed out the hated Giants. They are going to the National League Championship. If they win the World Series, the world will end. And I have to say, in spite of being a Cardinals’ fan and wanting the world to survive, I am rooting for them to do it.
Feb 29, 2016; Mesa, AZ, USA; Chicago Cubs pitcher John Lackey poses for a portrait during photo day at Sloan Park. Mandatory Credit: Mark J. Rebilas-USA TODAY Sports
For the record, two critical Cubs are actually Cardinals in Cub suits. John Lackey and Jason Heyward were both part of the Cardinals’ 100-win season last season. In my heart, they will always be Cardinals. If they can’t win the series with St. Louis, at least they deserve to win it with the team that stole them. And, of course, the Cardinals themselves didn’t make the playoffs, and the Texas Rangers were blasted out of the playoffs by Toronto. I can’t root for any of the other teams that remain.
So I end up rooting for the world to end. The goat’s curse will be broken. Donald Trump will be president. And solar winds from the sun will strip the biosphere off the planet. Why would I want such a thing? Because it is baseball… and baseball is a life.
Yes, we are out of the playoffs. Even though we won the last game of the year against the evil Pirates, we fell one game short. The evil San Francisco Giants beat the hapless Dodgers. No, that’s not quite right. The EVIL San Francisco Bullies With a Glandular Problem beat the worthless Dodgers whom you can never depend on when you need them to win! And so, believe it or not, I must now root for the Cubs to win it all in the National League. Yes, the Cubs, even though they took the Cardinals out of the playoffs last year during the Cards’ 100-win dominant season, are the least detestable team still in the playoff hunt for the World Series. Donald Trump may be the next president of the U.S. The Fukushima nuclear plant has irradiated the entire Pacific Ocean. Global warming is out of control. And the Cubs might win the World Series. Humanity is doomed.
But it gets worse. I am also a loyal Arizona Cardinals fan (a condition I have suffered since they were the St. Louis Cardinals, before evil billionaire Birdy Bidwill moved them to Arizona in a petulant fit about stadiums and sky-boxes).
Last year the Cardinals were poised to be Super Bowl contenders. Even though they lost last year to the Panthers, they were favored to be one of the teams in the big game this year. But then they lost a squeaker to New England in the first game of the season. They lost last week to a suddenly potent Buffalo defense. And yesterday, the EVIL Rams not only snatched victory away in the 4th quarter, they wounded Carson Palmer again, this time with a possible concussion. At one win and three losses, this will have to be a come-back season… if it is not lost already. Maybe the world needs to end to put me out of my misery.
If you’ve read very much of my goofy little blog, you’ve probably run across the fact that I am something of a conspiracy theorist and strange-twist believer… sometimes referred to as a tinfoil-hat-wearer, or that old uncle you don’t want your kids sitting next to at the Thanksgiving dinner table. And I’ve got another one for you. I discovered while obsessing about nostalgia and old ads in the Saturday Evening Post, that the Coca-Cola company is probably responsible for warping my mind as a child.
My plan in revealing this hideous conspiracy is to take a look at ads and illustrations that I saw as a kid addicted to reading Saturday Evening Post every week at Grandpa and Grandma Aldrich’s farm. I will scour them for hidden meanings and try to reveal to you the insidious plot underlying these mind-altering illustrations. Keep in mind that you should probably take everything I say in this article with a grain of salt. No, really, salt can protect you from subtle mind-control messages.
And, yes, I realize that not all the messages are that subtle. Sometimes they shout at you, “Drink Coke and you will have more sex!” And you have to remember we are trying to avoid that kind of mind control. We have to fight every instance of ad companies trying to take control over us by exploiting our baser animal urges.
So, let me take a momentary interlude, a break if you will. I have this big glass of Diet Coke I just bought at QT, and…
Well, that was good!
Coca-Cola has been at this for a while. This ad from the 1940’s is apparently attempting to win World War II through choice of soft drinks. Look at this feisty brew the soldier is about to quaff. It is actually struggling in the cup to get out and go bite some German soldier’s face off. Any American soldier who can choke this stuff down is tough enough to take on the Axis powers, Napoleon after Hitler dug him up and used Frankenstein’s scientific breakthroughs to re-animate him, and even several countries we weren’t actually at war with. Even Rush Limbaugh and his weird lesbian-farmer-subsidies theory can’t compete with Coke on this level of propaganda wars.
I also think Coca-Cola ads may have something to do with why I became a Cardinals fan when I lived in a place full of Cubs and Twins fans. I admit, I added the dialogue and the commentary, but I used to do the same thing in my head when I was eight and the Cardinals went to the World Series… and the Cubs could not win it all even with Ernie Banks on their team. The Cardinals beat the Yankees in 7 games!
I blame Coca-Cola. Especially their ad department. Cause the generic manager is telling the generic Oubs player to “Relax… take it easy.” But the Cardinals won because Bob Gibson had that laser-intensity stare that bored holes through Mickey Mantle’s bat! (It is Oubs, not Cubs, by the way. Look at the big “O” on his jersey.)
And you can’t tell me that the Coca-Cola ad seen here, the one with the white-haired goblin child casting a spell on you with his crazy eyes and pointing at your dark, delicious master isn’t seriously trying to mess with children’s minds. There used to be a big five-foot-tall metal sign with this very picture on it in the one and only alley in Meservey, Iowa. The one time I went to the barber there to get my hair cut I had to sit in that barber chair and stare at this evil thing staring back at me from the alley across the street. It warped me. For one thing, I never went back to that barber shop again… at least until I was in college and the sign was gone.
So, I seriously believe Coca-Cola was messing with my mind as a child. They did it through subversive ad illustrations in Saturday Evening Post Magazine. And if I’m completely crazy now, I blame them. You don’t see that kind of thing going on today, do you? Well, I mean, we should be very worried. Because it probably means they have gotten better at it.
Okay, I am taking over this danged silly old blog today to talk about something important! Baseball!!! Yeah, and even more important, I wanna talk about how girls can be good at baseball.
My name is Maisey Moira Morgan. I am a left-handed pitcher for the Carrollton Cardinals. That’s a boys’ Little League team, in case ya didn’t know. I ain’t the only girl in boys’ Little League, but I am the only girl on the Cardinals’ team. The only girl pitcher. The only WINNING girl pitcher. I woulda been an undefeated winning girl pitcher if Tyree Suggs hadn’t dropped that fly ball in the bottom of the ninth inning out in right field two weeks ago. I ended my season at 3 wins and 1 loss.
You see, the thing is, I know the secret to striking out boys at the plate. First of all, I am a left-handed pitcher. Those danged boys are all used to seeing the ball flung at ’em from the right side. Ninety-nine and two-tenths per cent of all pitchers in our league are right-handed. So are most of the batters. So that futzes them up right there. And on top of that, Uncle Milt taught me to throw a knuckle-ball two years ago. That is one amazingly hard pitch to hit square if you do it right. You curl your fingers on the ball and give a little sorta push-out with your fingertips as you let it go. And you try really hard to make the ball not spin as you push it towards the batter. It can do amazing things after it leaves my hand. Uncle Milt swears that he saw one of my pitches double-dip and then corkscrew as it went across the plate low in the strike zone. A mere boy can’t really get a good swing at a pitch if it flutters around like a crazy bug with butterfly wings.
But that ain’t even the real secret to my baseball success. You see, them danged boys all think they can step up to the plate and put their bat on any ball thrown at ’em by a mere girl. They are not afraid of me, even the third time they get up to bat after striking out twice before. My uniform is not exactly sexy, but all I really have to do is wiggle my behind a little and smile at them, and they don’t even seem to be thinking about hitting the ball any more. I get an even bigger smile on my sweet little face when strike three flutters past ’em. I always take ’em by surprise.
I expect to be the first woman pitcher in the major leagues one day. Remember my name. Maisey Moira Morgan. Future Hall of Famer.
(Disclaimer; Maisey might actually have a hard time claiming her place in the Baseball Hall of Fame, not because the major leagues don’t have any women in them, but because she is an entirely fictional human being, only existing in Mickey’s stupid little head.)
Reflections from 1964
In 1964 I was 7 years old until November. I became a baseball fan that year. I had listened to baseball games on the radio with Great Grandpa Raymond before that year, but that had always been Twins’ games in the American League. But that was the year I discovered the St. Louis Cardinals. I followed them in the newspaper, the Mason City Globe Gazette. They had lost the greatest hitter in their history to that point, Stan Musial having retired when the 1963 season ended. But he was replaced in left field by Lou Brock, the hit-making base-stealing boy wonder of 1964. They went from near the bottom of the National League to edging out the Philadelphia Phillies and the Cincinnati Reds by one game each (they were tied for second) at the very end of the season.
The World Series pitted the Cardinals against the mighty New York Yankees. Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford were the stars of that team and had won five World Series in a row a decade before. It was a fantastic battle that the Cardinals finally won 7 to 5 in the seventh and final game in St. Louis. Bob Gibson was a deciding factor and won Series MVP. I would become a life-long Cardinals fan.
And I lost my Grandpa Beyer. He went to work one day, driving a road grader and his heart simply stopped working. It was the first time I lost a major somebody in my life.
In 1962 I had spotted the bright pinprick in the sky that was John Glenn orbiting the earth in the Friendship 7 Mercury spacecraft. My mother and father helped me spot it from our back yard in Rowan, Iowa.
In 1964, therefore, I began to take a serious interest in outer space as the Mercury program transformed into the Gemini program that was testing procedures in space for eventual Apollo moon missions.
I was in the Second Grade in 1964. Miss Madison was my teacher. She was as old as my Grandpa and Grandma Aldrich. She got mad at me at least three times that I can remember. I mean, I know that there were more than that, but there were three times I made her so mad with a joke that she memorably made me feel the wrath that teachers reserve for classroom clowns.
The Beatles were on Ed Sullivan in February. My Grandpa and Grandma Aldrich told me that the Beatles must’ve been confused about whether they were boys or girls to have haircuts like that. And those were the bowl-cuts they had before the wild-hair days of the later Sixties. All the boys in my class had either a butch cut or a flat-top. Hair styles for boys back then meant not really having any hair.
Lyndon Baines Johnson was president. He had been since the Kennedy assassination in 1963.
In July LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law, abolishing segregation.
In August, the Gulf of Tonkin Incident (since revealed to be a proven false-flag operation) leads to the Vietnam War.
The “Daisy” campaign ad for LBJ, showing a little girl picking flowers and then being blown up by an atom bomb, convinces my dad that Barry Goldwater is a dangerous radical, and he votes for LBJ even though he is not a conservative or a Republican.
LBJ is elected President of the United States in 1964.
Later that November, I turned eight years old.
1964 was a notable year for me. Even if it wasn’t for Barry Goldwater.
In the picture that starts this post, I am 8. Nancy is 6, holding on to little brother David at 2. Mary is 4. We are all in our Sunday best on Easter Sunday morning.
Why am I writing about 1964 today?
My mother is in hospice at 87 years old. She is dying of heart failure. And today, I and my two younger children got to talk to her by phone. The light and hope we have today is colored by the hope and light we had in the past. Such is the nature of having a family over time.
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Filed under autobiography, baseball, commentary, humor, nostalgia