More 85

My memories of earlier times prompted by my 85th birthday seem to have gathered some interest, so I will add a few more.


In the 1950s we were greatly concerned about polio. Everybody knew someone who had been struck. We were familiar with the horror of “iron lungs.”


Nobody understood at first what caused it. Some thought it was carried by flies. I spent long periods on my grandmother’s porch exterminating flies. There sometimes is, rarely, progress in our downhill world. The vaccine came along and polio has almost disappeared, although I knew people who continued to suffer from the effects.


Also, during the 1950s we were obsessed by the Cold War. In school we were taught, stupidly, to get under our desks if there was a bomb attack. We expected that an attack was coming any time. At the same time we were relentlessly propagandized about what a great thing the United Nations is.


Some of my earliest memories revolve around World War II. With my grandmother I listened to the news every day. At about four years old, I picked up a small iron pipe as a rifle and went out to kill Japs or Germans.


All the uncles on both sides were overseas or at sea, as was my father. I remember clearly that I was alone with my grandmother when the telegram came that my Uncle Paul, the third of her five children, had been killed in Europe. I was too young to really understand but you don’t forget things like that.


Later wars did not attract so much attention, and now with a volunteer force, nobody cares at all.


I was in high school when I first learned there was such a thing as an automatic transmission. Every boy worth his salt learned on a stick shift. That’s what the clutch was for.


One summer I worked, incompetently, as a boy in a cotton mill, which was the biggest industry in our town. We turned out vast quantities of denim—worn by farmers and working men. We never dreamed that blue jeans would become a worldwide fashion item.


I mentioned previously that as an undergraduate, friends and I raucously watched “Lone Ranger” on our little TV before supper. We also fervently watched Jesse Helms editorials on the Tobacco Network from Raleigh. That probably explains a lot.


Of course, in those days, he was a Democrat like all good people. The Democrats had not yet driven us out or the Republicans, our blood enemies, cynically taken over the South, for which they never have and never will do anything. My State of Sam Ervin now sometimes votes Blue.


In my early days there were only a handful of Catholics and Jews in town. There was a big competition between Baptists and Methodists for market share. Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and Lutherans kept to themselves. Now there are mosques and Buddhist places.


The only immigrant I knew was a lad who was a refugee from Latvian Communism. Everybody else, black and white, had American ancestors, including the numerous carpetbaggers.


In my day, North Carolina history was a required subject for the 8th grade. That must have long since disappeared or else changed to a source of shame rather than pride.


Now, my grandfather’s house is inhabited by people from Sierra Leone and my father’s house by Vietnamese. There are foreigners anywhere you go. Hospitals are staffed by Asians and even Jamaicans. Black “leaders” control the government and schools. There is no community and the basic values and continuity of civilisation are missing. Young white people are stateless refugees in their own country.
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