I Never Went to Woodstock

One of my husband’s (much younger) cousins once asked me what it was like growing up in the Sixties.  A teenager with visions of Woodstock dancing in her head, she sighed, “It must have been so cool.  I envy you so much.”  I hardly had the heart to remind her that, first of all, I would have been eight at the time of the legendary Summer of Love and second, I lived in Ogallala, Nebraska, where Woodstock referred to your shotgun.  Oh sure, my brothers and I watched the Monkees on TV--fortunately they were on one of the two channels we got--and I was desperately in love with Davy Jones, because he was cute and because he was just about my size.  As far as I was concerned, that meant it was a match made in heaven.  

I never got to meet Davy Jones.  But I did get to see Bobby Kennedy during the 1968 campaign.  

The news of his arrival caused huge excitement in our town and at St. Luke’s grade school, and no where more so than in the heart of our Boston-born first-grade teacher Sister Margaret William.  What Sister was doing in the wilds of western Nebraska, I have no idea, although I suspect it had something to do with a vow of obedience.   A rabid Red Sox fan, when her team went to the World Series in 1967, she wangled a TV from a parishioner (of course the convent didn’t have one yet--vow of poverty and all that), and managed to jerry-rig an antenna that gave her a snowy picture of the action. In those days a lot of games were actually played in the afternoon and so, other than a worksheet on addition facts, math class was pretty much suspended.. I tried to make sense of the pictures on the screen, but at this point in my life I’d seen far more calf-ropings than baseball games. A fast time in roping might mean an appreciative whistle or two, but there was no roar of the crowd, no jumping up and down, veil flying, like Sister was doing when her man Carl Yastrzemski made a base hit.  We were greatly entertained by the whole show. The baseball was okay, too.

Of course Sister’s beloved Sox lost that year, despite a few discreet prayers to St. Joseph “to help the players--and the umpires--to play the very best game that they can.” We figured St. Joseph would know this was really code for “help the Red Sox” but apparently St. Louis fans were also storming heaven’s gates. At any rate, Sister soon had another Cause to consider--Bobby Kennedy had announced that he was running for President.  

Not only was Bobby a favorite son in her native territory, he carried the very Catholic legacy of the nearly sainted JFK for the whole country.  Nobody in those days knew about  “Happy birthday, Mr. President”; Catholics were just ecstatic to have a representative so handsome, so mainstream, so well-spoken, so...rich.  He was the epitome of the immigrant dream and if that dream had been dashed in Dallas,  Bobby seemed its resurrection. True, Ethel was no Jackie, but aww....look at that family! Nine freckled-faced, Kennedy-toothed kids.  A baby-boomer postcard.

Stumping for the primaries, Robert Kennedy had the rather romantic notion of a train trip across the nation, with “whistle-stops” along the way.   Ogallala, the proud hometown of 5,000 mostly Republican souls, would be privileged to be one of those stops. Rumor had it that the stop was something of a pay back for a contribution from our very own local Rich Catholic Democrat, but so what? In a town mostly known as a good place to use the restroom on the way to Colorado, we could say a Kennedy Stopped Here.

Overnight, Sister became Turbo Nun.  We had Social Studies 24/7.  We talked about elections, democracy, freedom.  The first and second-graders staged a mock election in which the whole school voted.  We didn’t stick to primary party rules--anyone could vote for anyone.  So there were a few votes for Hubert Humphrey and Eugene McCarthy, but the overwhelming landslide majority in our farm/ranch Republican-bastion parish school went to, yup, the ultimate Eastern seaboard product of prep schools and Ivy League, RFK himself. There were exactly two votes for Richard Nixon, and even though the ballots were supposed to be secret, first and second-graders are not exactly models of discretion.  After all, this is a demographic that will cheerfully tell you that everyone could see your Flower Power underwear when you were on the swing set and oh yeah, Jason Svoboda, second-grade dreamboat, thinks you’re ugly. Whom you voted for was nothing.

We were a Nixon household, and I had to digest my mother’s lecture on how one voted for a particular ideology, not on the basis of the looks or charm of any particular candidate. Family history of said candidates, however, was apparently a perfectly fair predictor of how they might run the country. “Old Joe Kennedy got his money selling guns and bootleg liquor,” Mom said during a dinner table discussion. “He bought the election for John Kennedy, who, by the way, was the one who committed ground troops to Vietnam.” 

I was confused. “How do you buy an election?”

My older siblings looked at me as though I had the IQ of a mashed potato. “Dead people voted in Cook County,” Mom said succinctly.

Despite the fact that Nana, my dad’s mother, thought JFK had been the next best thing to the Second Coming, I knew that nobody had been resurrected in Cook County. I didn’t know how they had managed to vote anyway, but in the present atmosphere, I wasn’t going to ask.  I dutifully voted for Nixon of the frugal Quaker background, whose wife believed in cloth, not fur, for her coat.

          Ribaldry was pretty much the reaction to my vote. “Hey, did you vote for DICK?” Gales of high-pitched eight-year-old male laughter. “Nielsen voted for  DICK.”  The only other person to vote for Nixon was Charles Wilhelm,  who was actually a forty-year-old systems analyst in the body of an eight-year-old.  He wore Hush Puppy loafers instead of cowboy boots or tennis shoes and a zip-up sweater like Mr. Rogers.  His black book bag was square with a short handle and looked like a brief case.  He was also four inches taller and twenty pounds heavier than any other boy in class.  No one ever called him Charlie or, God forbid, Chuck. No one questioned him about his vote. Charles had gravitas.

By this time, anticipation for the actual visit  on Saturday morning had reached a feverish, 104 degrees pitch.  The big girls, the seventh and eighth-graders, had created large rally posters mounted on sticks, which we thought looked very professional, just like protest marchers.  Mom wasn’t thrilled about  driving me to the Event of the Year,  but finally agreed after I assured her that my playground life would be completely over, I would be a social leper, an outcast, unclean and uncool ( and yes, we knew about lepers because Sister had told us the story of Father Damien catching leprosy for God). Looking back,  I suspect that Mom was afraid people would think she was celebrity-chasing, since she obviously wasn’t going to vote for Kennedy.  Adult votes weren’t terribly secret in Ogallala, either.

The Big Day was drizziy and gray,  and when we finally arrived at the railroad tracks on the edge of town, there was already a big crowd there. People were saying that if it were raining really hard, he probably wouldn’t speak, but just wave.  Sister was marshaling her troops, the girls with the signs, and playing the crowd just a little with her megaphone.  She may have spent her days teaching ABCs for the greater glory of God, but somewhere Boston had missed out on a very competent alderwoman.   I tried to worm through the crowd to get closer to the front and to the other St. Luke classmates, but people were packed tight and not moving much.

The train finally arrived. It stopped. After a nine-months pregnant pause, Robert Kennedy stepped out of the car. Cheers erupted.  Signs waved. All I could see were two white-cuffed hands held high as Kennedy greeted the crowd.  Eventually the cheers died down.  I could hear a faint, un-miked voice in Sister’s accent.  The crowd chuckled appreciatively.  I jumped up and down, trying desperately to see The Man.  On one jump, I thought maybe I saw a shock of brown hair.  Then large hands grabbed me under the armpits, swung me up high and held me. “Can you see now?” asked a masculine voice.  I was so focused on my goal I didn’t even look to see who it was, and to this day I have no idea.  There in front of me, I could finally see Bobby Kennedy, in the flesh.  He looked remarkably like his photos.  I basked for a couple of moments, then the hands put me down.  I was a pretty sturdy seven-year-old.  It didn’t matter.  I had come, I had seen.  If I hadn’t conquered, I could at least be cool about my brush with greatness tomorrow on the playground.  “Wow, wasn’t it so neat,” someone would say, and I would nod casually, a witness to history.

Sister’s civics blitz did have some effect.  I started to follow the rest of the campaign with keen interest.  It started to dawn on me that one of these men who were crossing the country, making speeches, appearing on TV, would get to make decisions that would affect the issues that my family discussed at the dinner table.  Whose policies would affect cattle and wheat markets? Who would stop inflation? Who could turn around--if anyone could--the mess in Vietnam? My family lived in the middle of what newscasters would later label derisively as “flyover country” but my parents held the strong conviction that their opinions mattered and their voices would indeed be heard at the voting booth. Lacking their faith in the process, I nevertheless to this day feel compelled to vote.. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, democracy is an awful system--it’s just that anything else is much worse. 

Despite our remote and irrelevant location, we heard about Kennedy’s death almost as soon as the rest of the free world, thanks to the NBC affiliate fifty miles away in North Platte. It was June, school was out and the presidential campaign was just a background hum. Nobody watched TV in the summer much then--it was all reruns, and even those were mostly at night. Daytime TV consisted of talk shows, game shows and soaps. I didn’t come inside unless I was hungry.  But when I ran in to forage for food that day, the kitchen was empty.  Mom, who never watched anything but the news and Masterpiece Theater, was standing in front of the TV in the living room.  Huntley and Brinkley, the Mount Rushmore of the evening news, were talking out of season.  Mom looked thoughtful and sad. 

“What----” I started, thinking it was probably astronauts, who were always doing dangerous things in rockets and causing TV cameras to spend huge amounts of time focused on motionless spacecraft pointed at the sky.

“Shh---,” Mom said, frowning.  “It’s Robert Kennedy.  He was shot last night.”

             You can’t live on a ranch without seeing a good deal of death--generally animal, at least--or go to Catholic school without hearing a good deal about death--both human and divine.  So I knew, even at seven, that death is frequently arbitrary and unfair, but I was not blasé about death yet. I still cried over dead calves and kittens, and I mourned the brown-haired man I had seen for five seconds on a train. Robert Kennedy should have won or lost a national election on his own merits, and in either case, gone home to his kids at the end of the day.  The decision should not have been wrested from him, and from the rest of the country, in a restaurant kitchen in Los Angeles. That, in fact, is the anything else that is so much worse than democracy. 

The world went on turning, as it so frequently does.  The Beatles broke up. So did the Monkees.  Sister got transferred to Cedar Rapids. The Red Sox met the Cardinals again in the 2004 World Series, and this time, swept them in four. Bell-bottom pants came back in style; LSD, thankfully, did not.   Jimmi and Janis and Jerry Garcia are gone, although Jerry has an up market ice cream named after him.  We are more cynical about both our politicians and our musicians. We look for the spin and we don’t expect much. Maybe because of that, the sixties have acquired a nostalgic and mostly undeserved patina of idealism and anti-materialism.  But when I’m all alone in the car, I can turn the radio to an oldies station and sometimes hear the exhortation to teach my children well: “And feed them on your dreams/ the one they picked, the one you’ll know by.”  I never went to Woodstock, but I sing along.