Earlier this week, I got together for coffee with a friend of mine. He was there ahead of me, so I smiled through my mask and went to get mine. When I came back out, he looked up at me and asked me if I thought young people know what hubcaps are? I paused and wasn’t ready with a quick response, because I wasn’t sure. We had an excellent conversation about so many contemporary issues, but the hubcap reference stayed attached to the wheels of my mind.
Later in the afternoon, I was watching incredible pictures of the Space X rocket launch on a computer screen. There have been quite a few of these incredible scenes over the past few years. Get this, the first stage of the rocket disconnects and falls away from the thrusting juggernaut in front of it. Somehow, it fires up in order to head back to earth. At some point, it turns around and this son of a bitch lands smack in the middle of a barge, waiting for it in the ocean. Meanwhile, the main package heads into orbit and launches something like fifty satellites.
It got me thinking about how much we take for granted today. Rockets matter of factly launch into space. Nearly everything that takes place anywhere in the world is no more than minutes from being shared with billions. We are angry when wifi suddenly goes, right in the middle of Fortnite . There are billionaires with no particular talent, other than manipulating their exposure on social media and that is all they do! Covid has suddenly kidnapped our peace of mind. I abruptly cut myself off mid-thought, because I didn’t want to think anymore about any of this right then.
All of a sudden, I was overcome with the idea of sharing some stories from a time when many of you weren’t even here yet. With so much going on at this moment, we are stuck in the now and trying to guess about tomorrow, coming up empty. It was the hubcap, time traveling me back to the Fifties. The stories I am going to share are inaccurate recollections, recklessly juggling time and feeling good about it. Memories are stories we tell ourselves and they change with each retelling. At first, I admit to being concerned about being right and then I very comfortably realized it was not only impossible, but it wasn’t going to matter to you anyway.
My older brother, Marty, bought a used ’54 Oldsmobile. It was repainted Titian red and I swear I don’t know how I remembered that. It had a suicide knob on the steering wheel, which allowed you to grab it with one hand and make your car bend into a turn. It had skirts, which covered about 2/3’s of the rear wheels. It had Hollywood Mufflers, packed with fiber glass, rapping like a baritone machine gun. It even had an electric eye, mounted on the driver’s side, which lowered the brights to oncoming traffic. I can’t remember the custom hubcaps, which took me on this ride in the first place.
In the first grade, we had impromptu drills, forcing us to take cover under our desks until the all clear signal. This was done so we would survive a nuclear attack, because the Soviet Union had become our evil enemy. We all wore dog tags, so our charred remains could be identified, which is obviously not what we were told.
Polio was an unbelievably frightening illness, pretty much singling out kids. It devoured your muscles and made breathing impossible. Children were put into a terrifying contraption, called an iron lung, a metal cylinder, leaving only your head exposed. No one seemed to be terribly sure how it was contracted, but public swimming pools were deemed to be ground zero for its transmission. An angel by the name of Jonas Salk created a vaccine in the mid-Fifties and before the decade ended, this devil and its scourge disappeared, leaving casualties behind.
While we are on the subject of fear, the Army McCarthy Hearings were on full throttle in the middle of this decade. I guess I was around ten at the time and I can’t say that it was top of mind for me, but our parents followed it religiously, pun intended. Remember, we were doing under the desk drills, because Communists were going to drop the bomb. There were these hearings in Congress, primarily focused on people in the entertainment world and their possible UnAmerican activities. Lives and careers were destroyed by this evil, witch hunting, ritualistic behavior. There were a lot of Jewish people, who got caught up in this web, a convenient and politicized form of anti-Semitism. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were sensationally put to death as spies during this lunacy. Fear was their executioner. The climate today is no less dangerous.
In 1954, Emmett Till left Chicago to spend the summer with relatives in Mississippi. I think he was a pretty nice kid. Growing up in the projects in Chicago did not prepare him for his reception. Supposedly, this fourteen year old whistled at a white lady in a grocery store. Memory being the slippery grip it is, the whistling likely never even occurred, which doesn’t really matter, based on the consequences. I am not going to tell you what happened to him, other than to say his mother insisted he have an open coffin at his funeral in Chicago. Take a look at this boy’s face! In communities, like Queens, where I grew up, it wasn’t news.
A new sub-culture was slowly being born in this decade and it was incredibly rich. Being young started to become important and potent. Rock Around the Clock, by Bill Haley and the Comets busted into our consciousness, preceded by years of a sweet foundation laid down by people like Chuck Berry, Fats Domino and the Platters. i swear, when I was sitting on my stoop, listening on my transistor radio, i was just thinking music and not color. There was a DJ out of Cleveland, named Allan Freed. Supposedly, he coined Rock ’n Roll. When I was around 12 years old, I took the subway from Queens all the way into Brooklyn, to see his all-star show at the Brooklyn Paramount. It was a much more trusting time and we lived our young lives freely moving about.
I realize I have to get back to now, because there is a limit to your patience and I know I am pushing it. We can’t go backwards from today, because this is where we are. However, we have all come from some place in our past and I wanted to share a piece of mine with you.
I left out movies like Rebel Without A Cause and Blackboard Jungle, but we’re out of time. How could I forget the Edsel?
OK, OK, I have to stop. There are so many memories.