by Jennifer Johnston
It was the best of times , it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us....
It was the best of times , it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us....
So wrote Charles Dickens in his epic, classic novel, A Tale of Two Cities, about the French Revolution (1789-1799), published in 1859, 100 years before we entered Childress High School as Freshmen in 1959. As true and applicable as Dickens' words were when written, as well as to the time and times before they were written, I find myself recalling them often when thinking of the present day, and of all the decades of the lives of the Class of 1963.... And while to some extent those words may have over the years become something of a cliche, I still find them moving, and memorable ... a reflection of times past, and a cautionary prediction of times to come....
We grew up in an idyllic, idealized time following World War II, through the 1950s and into the 1960s, when there began to be a great movement for change in this country. The halcyon visions of the 1950s were the TV shows Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver, along with "throwback" shows about a fictional Old West which we never knew, and didn't really exist as it was portrayed. Rod Serling's prescient advisory Twilight Zone in 1959 and Gene Roddenberry's ground-breaking and iconic Star Trek in 1966 fired our imaginations to contemplate both the past and the future and how they were and are related. There was a revolution in music which exploded in 1956 with the advent of Elvis Presley and rock and roll, followed by Motown, the British Invasion and others, and which continues to this day in various new forms and styles.
We grew up in an idyllic, idealized time following World War II, through the 1950s and into the 1960s, when there began to be a great movement for change in this country. The halcyon visions of the 1950s were the TV shows Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver, along with "throwback" shows about a fictional Old West which we never knew, and didn't really exist as it was portrayed. Rod Serling's prescient advisory Twilight Zone in 1959 and Gene Roddenberry's ground-breaking and iconic Star Trek in 1966 fired our imaginations to contemplate both the past and the future and how they were and are related. There was a revolution in music which exploded in 1956 with the advent of Elvis Presley and rock and roll, followed by Motown, the British Invasion and others, and which continues to this day in various new forms and styles.
The problems with the aforementioned Father and Beaver and other television shows of that era were that the majority of them did not present an accurate reflection of real life, when women had few to no rights; blacks and other minorities did not enjoy even basic civil rights; birth control and abortion were illegal; and there was no real safety net for the poor, the aged, the disabled, the disadvantaged. Unfortunately, despite many gains and much work by people who noted and were appalled by such inequities, those things have yet to be fully rectified, more than half a century later, regardless of the efforts of many of us over the years to effect such needed change. Others were and still are of the opinion that those were the best years ever, and so there remains in a rift in this country between people and classes that I likewise fear may not be bridged during what remains of this lifetime.
We were the first generation to grow up with the threat of global annihilation following the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan on August 6 and August 9, 1945 (more than a year before I was born). Following those horrific events, the arms race among global powers led I believe to a particular fear and paranoia that we (perhaps all life on planet Earth) might be snuffed out at the push of a button. We learned to "Duck and Cover" ... although had an actual nuclear bomb been dropped in close proximity, that "strategy" would likely have been ineffectual, not to say fatal. I remember very distinctly the entirety of the student body at Childress High School being assembled at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, when the possibility of a nuclear war between the US and the Soviet Union seemed very real. Fortunately that incipient disaster and others were averted, though the possibility still remains.
Our generation was the first to benefit from many advances in medical science, particularly with the dreaded disease polio, when Jonas Salk produced the first polio vaccine in 1955. We witnessed the first transplant of a human heart into another human by Christiaan Barnard on December 3, 1967. The advance of medical techniques and procedures and curatives over the past several decades has been nothing short of mind-boggling, and the day may be fast approaching when we are actually able to have ourselves cloned.
We marveled, but still felt a frisson of fear at the implications as the Soviet Union sent Sputnik into orbit on October 4, 1957, followed by the first man in space, Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin on April 12, 1961. Alan B. Shepard became the first American to experience sub-orbital flight, on May 5, 1961. The space race was on!
Subsequently the Vietnam War, Watergate, Iran/Contra, the disputed Florida vote count in the 2000 election, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the election of Barack Obama as our first black President in 2008 tore our generation and others apart, revealing ugly contrasts between those still stuck in the Jim Crow, racist, misogynistic 1950s and those who strive to continue our progress toward full civil rights for all. We covered most if not all of these things in The Times of Our Lives series in several posts to the blogs ... the good, the bad, the ugly and the indifferent.... (See particularly my post on 1968, indexed in the Reflections blog.) Given the results of the 2016 US Presidential and Congressional elections, I fear there are many more years of strife ahead.
On September 11, 2001 we as a nation came together again in shock and sorrow over the terrible loss of life in New York City, Washington DC and Pennsylvania, as well as the shattering of our collective sense of security. Alas, the schisms between right wing (conservative, Republican) and left wing (progressive, Democratic) in the wake of 9/11 deepened the divide between ideologies. Yet I remain hopeful that this chasm will eventually be bridged, to benefit us, and all mankind.
Our generation saw the amazing evolution of the telephone from the time we had to ask a local operator to dial a call for us in our own towns, to the first rotary dial, to touch tone phones, to cell phones which can be carried with us and can at the touch of a keypad almost instantaneously connect us with people all over the globe.
We who learned to type on old Royal manual typewriters also have witnessed the rise of computers, from those which took a huge room to contain them to personal computers for our home, or to be carried with us, or accessed on those cell phones nearly all of us carry now. As with many things, some may consider the computer and/or its progeny the internet to be mixed blessings. For all of the amazing things they can do, these electronic wonders (along with television) can also be used for the dissemination of "fake news" (such as the canard that President Obama was born in Kenya, and other scurrilous things). In these troubled days, it is more important than ever before that we make sure of our facts and the truth, as well as check and cross-check with reliable, credible sources of news before spreading unfounded, untrue rumors.
Television itself also came into general use as we grew up, when we watched our parents put tall, heavy antennas in our back yards to catch a weak signal from one or two stations. Now we live in a world of cable and fiber optics, where we can access literally hundreds of channels, from all over the world, in different languages. And air travel to the far horizons of our world, once only the province of the rich, or the military, has become pretty much available for anyone who is so inclined, within a matter of hours, not the days or months which travel once entailed.
Despite our small-town upbringing and rather homogeneous earlier lives, we did become different people as we grew and learned and matured. Some of us left the confines of our parental homes and of Childress for the wider world as soon as we could, as I did, ultimately traveling to six of the seven continents (and I haven't yet given up on the possibility of Antarctica), and multiple cities and countries, in fulfillment of one of my childhood dreams to explore other worlds, other cultures, other people.
Some of us were content to remain in the familiar surroundings where they were nurtured, while others left Childress for diverse reasons. Whether they stayed "at home" or moved elsewhere, some retained the mindset they grew up with there of the 1950s and 1960s, while others blossomed into new thoughts and beliefs. In other words, we lived our lives ... for good or ill, for better or worse, in happiness and in sadness, or a mixture of all those things, as people have throughout time.
Some of us were content to remain in the familiar surroundings where they were nurtured, while others left Childress for diverse reasons. Whether they stayed "at home" or moved elsewhere, some retained the mindset they grew up with there of the 1950s and 1960s, while others blossomed into new thoughts and beliefs. In other words, we lived our lives ... for good or ill, for better or worse, in happiness and in sadness, or a mixture of all those things, as people have throughout time.
And now, with a heavy heart and many mixed feelings, I must write that this will be the final post to this blog, and by extension to our previous blogs, Reflections on the Way We Were: The Childress High School Class of 1963; The Class of 1963: Show and Tell; and Short Notes for the Class of 1963, all of which are linked here on the right hand side of this page and/or on the Reflections blog, for anyone who may read this and want to access them in the future, or for those of us who may want to return and reread them for the sake of remembrance and reverie. There is enough of the historian and the scholar and the writer in me to think that some day, perhaps even hundreds of years into the future, someone may stumble upon these writings and memories and thoughts and be absolutely fascinated to discover what a group of people who grew up in a small town in Texas in the latter half of the 20th Century felt and thought and observed through that time, and into the 21st Century ... and how we evolved and changed during those years ... much like historians and scholars have pored over hieroglyphs, and cuneiform tablets, and Dead Sea Scrolls, and cave drawings to try to determine what actually occurred in eons past.
[The thought occurs: Since I believe we live multiple lives, wouldn't it be amazing if I were the "someone" (same soul, different life) who stumbles across these blogs??? Oh, the possibilities, karmic and otherwise.... Snarf!!!]
Unfortunately, since the blogs' creator and my blog partner Nicki Wilcoxson closed this blog on April 6, 2010 (having previously closed the other blogs), and then reopened it on January 18, 2012 for me to begin posting a series of obituaries of our classmates, in addition to my earlier writings on many subjects, the blog has now devolved into a veritable death watch, and as I said in one of those obits, I am beginning to feel like the Angel of Death.... Indeed, I had the particularly difficult task of having to write obituaries not only for Nicki, but for her husband Jim, who I believe fittingly died within ten days of each other, since it was impossible for me or others to think of one without the other. And, given that I have now reached the advanced (and once seemingly impossible, to me anyway) age of 70 (October 18, 2016), it becomes ever more apparent that I am the last voice left to speak for us, at least on these blogs, since I am the only one who can still access them. There are so many wonderful posts and posits and comments in all the blogs, so much life!!! And I cannot bear the thought of that future scholar or historian finding them, seeing nothing but a lot of death, and perhaps not taking the time to explore the wonderful memories, and experiences, and stories and thoughts that we recorded here.
In short, I think the blogs have been an incredible endeavor, and constitute an incredible record of our life and lives, and I hope somehow they (and we) will be preserved, at least in our words and photographs, if not in our current corporeal bodies.
Before I close, I have a few people I must acknowledge and thank for enriching my life and/or for their contributions to these blogs. First and foremost, to Nicki for her vision and hard work in starting the blogs. Thanks are also due to Linda Kay Bridges Cook, Joe Don Hopkins, Sheila Davis Martinez, Clara Robinson Meek, Raenell Wynn Smith, Charlene Bierschmitt Clouse, Bettye Shahan Bagley, Driscilla Dehtan Storrs, Jim Wilcoxson and others who wrote posts and/or comments to posts to further leave a record of our progress through the days and times of our lives. (A whimsical "thank you" to Guinevere the Druid Goddess, my alter ego who first "came to me" in Journalism class in high school, under whose name and slightly "unhinged" persona I wrote several posts, and to Blog the Troll and Sister Brigid, who still choose to remain anonymous ... snarf!) A very personal thanks to my mentor and friend, Alton Darryl Morris, our Junior English teacher, who also taught Speech and Journalism, and who was the first person to convince me that I might actually have something to say that people might be interested in reading. Darryl also contributed numerous posts and comments to the blogs, and his participation was greatly appreciated.
So, on this last day of December of the year 2016 CE (Common Era) ... Hail and farewell to the Class of 1963 of Childress High School.... Gods and ghosts, spirits and seers, dreamers and believers ... remember always and sing the songs of the people who walked the halls of CHS and graced these blogs, and our incredible saga as a particular generation of people in a country on the third planet from the sun once upon a time, during diverse times.... May we always live in mist and memory....
Jennifer )O(
(Please continue reading the Comments appended hereto, more Reflections and Voices from the Class of 1963, and friends of the blogs. The name of the person making the comment appears below mine, which is the only way I can get them added to this post. If anyone else wishes to comment, or someone wants to comment further, please send your comments to me at jennifer9johnston@att.net.)
(Please continue reading the Comments appended hereto, more Reflections and Voices from the Class of 1963, and friends of the blogs. The name of the person making the comment appears below mine, which is the only way I can get them added to this post. If anyone else wishes to comment, or someone wants to comment further, please send your comments to me at jennifer9johnston@att.net.)
