I was born January 14, 1947. Today I am 68 years old. I was not expected to see this day. It is almost 5 years since I was diagnosed with Stage 4 Gastro-esophegeal cancer and told by a grim faced physician that I had between 3 and 6 months to live. People who were born on the 4th of July tend to think they have the same birth date as America but it was on January 14, 1784 that the Continental Congress ratified the Treaty of Paris and thus officially established the United States as an independent and sovereign nation. When I as born, Harry Truman was President of the United States and considered by many to be a poor replacement for FDR who had died two years earlier. In the election of 1948 the Democrat party would splinter into three factions and Truman would battle (and prevail over) not only the Republican, Thomas Dewey, but the Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond and the Progressive Henry Wallace. There were veterans of the Civil War still living. The last of them (Walter Williams) would die when I was 12. Wyatt Earp had died only 18 years earlier. Wyatts wife Josie had died only 3 years earlier. Bat Masterson, who had served with Earp as a Deputy in Dodge City, had died 26 years earlier. For the last 20 year of his life he had been sports editor of and columnist for the New York Morning Telegraph. The Chiricahua Apache leader Geronimo had died 38 years earlier. Lou Gehrig had died some six years earlier. My father was at Yankee stadium the day Gehrig delivered his famous luckiest man farewell speech. Al Scarface Capone would die 11 days after I was born. Babe Ruth was still alive. Mick Jagger was three years old. Albert Einstein was alive and still working. He would die when I was 8 years old. J.R. Tolkien was teaching at Oxford. He would die when I was 24. Issac Asimov was a graduate student at Columbia University. The Nuremberg Trials which had started less than two years previously would continue for another two years. Hermann Göering, convicted of war crimes, had committed suicide only three months earlier. Robert A. Heinlein would publish The Green Hills of Earth in the Saturday Evening Post in February and become the first sci-fi author to break into mainstream general magazines. Arthur C. Clarke was a student at Kings College, London. He had already published a paper in 1945 which would form the basis for the modern communications satellite. Legendary blues-man Huddie Ledbetter, known as Leadbelly was still alive and would die when I was two. Woody Guthrie was showing the first signs of Huntingtons Chorea. He would die at Creedmoor Hospital not far from my home in Queens when I was 20. Martin Luther King was a senior at Morehouse College. Alexandr Kerensky, the Social Democrat overthrown by the Lenin and the Bolsheviks was living in California. Wed meet fifteen years later after he had moved to New York. Joseph Stalin was dictator of the USSR. He would die when I was six years old. Adolph Eichmann who had handled the practical work of Hitlers Final solution was living in Argentina. He would not be brought to justice until I was in High School. A young, former Navy Lieutenant, John Kennedy had taken his oath as the newly elected congressman from Boston 11 days earlier. There were only 48 states and Canada did not include Newfoundland. The Salk Polio vaccine would not exist for another decade. I would be one of the children it was tested on and therefore become a polio pioneer. No one had ever traveled faster than the speed of sound. Chuck Yeager would break the sound barrier in October of that year. The principle means of transportation between New York and California was still the train. Traveling to Europe generally meant traveling by ocean liner. Pan American would not have jet air service to Europe until I was 11. No man made object had ever entered outer space. Traveling to the Moon was a concept that existed solely in science fiction. The first real computer, the ENIAC, had been completed 10 months before. It had thirty separate units, plus power supply and forced-air cooling, and weighed over thirty tons. Its 19,000 vacuum tubes, 1,500 relays, and hundreds of thousands of resistors, capacitors, and inductors consumed almost 200 kilowatts of electrical power. It had less computing power than a low end PC today. The transistor would be invented by Bardeen, Brattain & Shockley in Bell Labs in late December. The average house cost $13,000 and the average annual salary was $3,500 a year. Bread cost 12 cents a loaf, a postage stamp was three cents. The Dow was at 181. It cost a nickel to ride on the subway in NYC. My family would not own a TV set until I was three. It would have a screen that was round and about 8 inches in diameter. When we bought our set we owned one of only four million sets in existence in the entire country. The set was a Dumont and the company that made them had its own network so that customers could have something to watch. Wrestling with the likes of Haystacks Calhoun and Legs Longivent was a big hit. But back then people would turn on the set just to watch the test pattern. The Howdy Doody Show with Buffalo Bob Smith would air for the first time in December of that year and run until 1960 when both Howdy and I would be 13. I hadnt watched that show in years but made a point of seeing the last broadcast. Clarabelle, who had been mute during the entire series suddenly indicated to Buffalo Bob in the closing seconds of the last show that he wanted to speak. He looked tearfully into the camera and said simply Goodbye kids. The Howdy Doody generation did not realize it at the time, but President elect John Kennedy would, in just a few months, send the first combat troops to Viet Nam. The innocence of childhood and life itself would soon end for many of us. It would be five years to the day when on Jan 14. 1952 at 7 a.m, NBC-TV opened a broadcast with a shot of Dave Garroway looking outside through the ‘Window on the World’ in New York City and the Today show began. The Baseball Dodgers and the Giants were both New York teams. On April 15, 1947 Jackie Robinson would become the first African-American to play in US major league baseball. He would be named Rookie of the year by Sporting News. The American Football league would not be formed for another 12 years. There would be no Superbowl until I was a senior in college. India was still a British colony and would become independent as the two states of India and Pakistan eight months later at midnight August 14th. I would be an infant in my crib while one the greatest mass migrations in human history would happen as Muslims fled India and Hindus fled Pakistan. Mahatma Gandhi had only a little over a year to live. He would be assassinated January 30, 1948 by a Hindu fanatic. Only this last year was the candidate of the party that grew out of the assassins fanatic circle of friends become Prime Minister of India. A month earlier the French government had unilaterally abrogated the treaty they had signed in March 1946 recognizing the independence of their colonies in Indochina. They ousted the provisional president, Nguyen Tat Thành, who narrowly escaped assassination by a French death squad. He would become known to my generation by his nom de guerre (adopted in 1942) of Ho Chi Minh. Korea, only recently liberated from its brutal Japanese occupation was theoretically a single nation but both Russia and the United States, its new occupiers, were hastily promoting separate governments which would split the country along the 38th parallel in a year. War would break out on June 25, 1950 and cost the lives of 30,000 Americans. That war has still not technically ended but only halted for a cease fire. Germany was occupied by the victorious allies. In two years separate governments would be established in the East (10/49) and West (5/49) and become the focal point of the Cold War. The United Nations was two years old and did not as yet have a fixed headquarters. Construction would begin on the New York headquarters in 1949. My birth certificate (issued in New York City) would classify me as Colored. Public schools were still segregated in most of the country, by law in the South and by practice in the North. Jim Crow was alive and well. I would be seven before the Supreme Court handed down Brown v. Board of Education. It was illegal for people of different races to marry in 40 states (of 48). I would be twenty years old before the United States Supreme court in the case of Loving v. Virginia (June 12, 1967) made it legal for me to marry a white woman. Thus, for some five months, I was a criminal in the eyes of most state governments having done just that some five months previously. Today we are facing terrible problems. Our nation is fighting undeclared wars in faraway places. Terrorism is still unchecked and threatens us every day. Economic dislocation on a frightening scale still looms. Our environment is degrading at an alarming rate fueled by our crass materialism. Our people are riven by partisan strife as fierce as any since our calamitous Civil War. Rational discourse is in its death throes. Social and intellectual progress seems stymied by a growing and increasingly intransigent fanaticism from every corner of the political spectrum. What will become of this world? How shall we deal with our problems? What does tomorrow hold? The answer my children is that none of us know what is coming, how problems will actually be solved, assuming they are, or, indeed, even what will happen tomorrow. The only certainty is that nothing is certain. Our lives are a constant dance between joy and sorrow to a music written by the hand of time. No matter how the tune plays out I intend to keep dancing as long as I can. The only thing I am sure of my friends is that I love you all. I hope that is enough.
Posted on: Wed, 14 Jan 2015 06:29:26 +0000
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