Vietnam in 25 Words or Less

Under President Eisenhower, The United States entered into a twenty-year chess game with the Soviet Union in southeast Asia, squandering American lives for wartime prosperity.

A Real Meal Deal

When I was in college I used to frequent a restaurant that was right across the street from campus. I loved their breakfast specials and the one I usually ordered was two eggs over easy, two strips of bacon, toast and jelly, orange juice and coffee. All that for a whopping 69 cents.

That’s right. A complete sit-down breakfast for 69 cents. Of course, that was around 1970.

The restaurant I’m talking about is no longer there but a comparable breakfast anywhere else these days would cost ten times that much. Not twice that or five times that, which would not be way out of line after 37 years of inflation. No, a ten-fold price increase that reflects our willingness to swallow just about anything nowadays.

Hell, no wonder I rarely eat breakfast out anymore.

Local Mail

Back in the good ol’ days of the 20th Century, the LOCAL letter slot at the Post Office was for letters that you were mailing to people who lived in the same town as you. The postal clerk would personally postmark that letter with a rubber stamp that had the name of your town on it and slip the letter into that local person’s mail slot. Usually, that person would get that letter the same day.

This local letter-handling method was prized highly by just about everyone but, alas, no good thing goes undone. In the high-tech paradise of today that local letter goes in with all the other mail, even the mail to other countries, and gets sent to a city where it gets scanned and bar-coded by a big-ass machine that cost a bazillion dollars. Now that local recipient will get that local letter sometime that week. Maybe.

Back in the 20th Century, when the USPS was simply called “The Post Office” and the local mail carrier was called the “mailman” (OH, that awful SEXIST word!), the Post Office didn’t raise its rates every year to pay for technology. Human beings were still allowed to handle the mail and make a decent living at it. And, way back then, the customer wasn’t always wrong.

The Media in 25 Words or Less

Everyone knew that television, movies and publishing were ethnically controlled since day one but no one had the courage to challenge this gross inequity. Cowards.

The Gypsies Are In Town!

You would think that the mid-20th Century was a time for overcoming some of the foolishness and unfounded fears that had crept over into that century from the previous one. By 1950, fewer people were throwing salt over their shoulders and refusing to let blonde children bring in the new year, for fear of bad luck. By 1960, not too many motorists would crash their car into a retaining wall in order to avoid crossing paths with a black cat in the middle of the road. And, by 1970, hardly anyone felt the blood rush from their face when someone at the dinner table accidentally “crossed steel” by absent-mindedly laying a stainless steel knife on top of a fork or spoon. But they still feared the Gypsies.

Every summer in the Pennsylvania Appalachians a “Gypsy Alert” would ring out from town to town. Better lock your doors because the Gypsies were coming to steal your children! The alert went from neighbor to neighbor and from one neighborhood to another. And it always occurred during carnival season, which meant most of the summer months, but especially during the Fourth of July weekend.

As children, we were instructed to walk in pairs or groups and not to speak to strange dark-haired women in old print dresses and paisley scarves who wore funny shoes. And to stay away from unshaven men with big-brimmed hats and suspenders altogether. No one stopped to consider that this tall order would eliminate contact with about half of our relatives at the time. It didn’t matter. The Gypsies were in town!

No one really knew who these Gypsies were or where they came from. They certainly didn’t come all the way from Hungary in their wagons to steal American children. As a child, I assumed that these people could not have children of their own and would take any healthy kid they could get their hands on. I felt sorry for them.

The word was out that these crusty and coarse people wanted somebody else’s children to clean out their wagons and shovel the horse manure and run errands for them because they were too lazy to do it themselves. No one in Appalachia suspected that these so-called Gypsies were just Americans called “Carnies” by the rest of the country, people who liked carnival work and carnival life and not paying taxes.

For us kiddies, the “dreaded curse of the Gypsies” was fearing them as much as fearing the devil, himself, without ever getting to see either.

The RAF in 25 Words or Less

During World War Two Great Britain’s Royal Air Force helped tame the hostile skies over Europe despite the bull’s-eyes they painted on all their planes.

At the Drive-In

When you think of a drive-in today you think of food-on-the-run. But back in the 1950s and Sixties a drive-in meant an outdoor movie theater. It was the biggest limestone parking lot in the world and the strangest and most exciting movie experience you’d probably ever have. The Drive-In Theater was a cinematic carnival that lasted all summer long.

The main features in the 1960s, when I was finally old enough to see the movie over the back of the front seat, were quite often Disney movies, and about half of them were animated. Dad got the speaker off a hook and pulled it toward us. He clipped it on his window and turned up the volume. Just for the heck of it he’d turn the volume clear off in the middle of a movie and we could still hear it. The sounds of swords clashing or six-shooters booming were carried on a wave of a hundred speakers into the atmosphere and, there we were, right in the middle of it. But the movie was just the tip of the iceberg.

There were cartoons and commercials for the concession stand. And there was the concession stand, a long flat concrete-block oasis in the middle of a limestone desert, full of smells that made your mouth water. Popcorn, pizza, hotdogs, french fries, soda in paper cups. Who needed the movie?

And then the Seventies came along and drive-in theaters all across America became vacant lots and weekend flea markets and porn theaters and no one seemed to notice or care.

I think few people would believe me if I told them that the first time I saw “Dr. Zhivago” I was sitting on the hood of a car and totally surrounded by trees.

Little League Life

In 1939 Little League was founded in Williamsport, Pennsylvania with only three teams. By the time I was playing Little League baseball in the late 1950s it was all over the country and now Little League is being sponsored all over the world. It’s a great way to foster a healthy, competitive spirit between children ages five through eighteen and in several arenas, based on age.

But back in 1959 through 1962 my Little League experience was a wonderful, exciting and rewarding competitive camaraderie between a bunch of boys. And a time for them to learn how to play baseball together and learn pitching, fielding and hitting skills from grown men who enjoyed showing boys how to play baseball and how to compete with a sense of sportsmanship.

The very notion of boys enjoying team sports under the direction of men who lent their time and effort to help boys become better youths became a topic of heated debate and contention by the time I was all grown up. It seemed that the new America, which had sprung from the bosom of the American Feminist Movement, somehow believed that boys having fun playing an organized sport were somehow depriving girls of the same age of the opportunity to play baseball.

No one ever thought to form a separate Little League for girls. Instead, the new America decided to instill in the boys entrusted to its care an undeserved guilt about playing sports with just boys, making them and the men who managed their Little League teams feel that what they were doing was somehow wrong, shameful and sexist. How in the hell a ten-year-old boy back in 1960 could be guilty of sexism just by swinging a baseball bat at a ball pitched by another boy is still totally beyond my comprehension.

What was really shameful and sexist was the false sense of righteousness in an America that allowed such an ill-conceived national movement to become Little League policy. Any arbitrary decision by adults which forces boys to play with girls (and vice-versa) and to forsake children's natural tendency to enjoy the company of other children of their own gender only masquerades as an equal opportunity of any kind for anybody.

“I Love Lucy” in 25 Words or Less

Movie star and pin-up, Lucille Ball, played a 1950's TV housewife from hell trying to get into her husband’s nightclub act, over and over again.

The Corner Drugstore

Not all small-town drugstores in the 20th Century were on the corner and not all of them had soda fountains but my favorite one did. It was replaced before the new millennium made its debut by a chain restaurant that mostly sells ice cream. I’ll bet there were a lot of corner drug stores around the country between 1951 and 2000, when I did my running in the last century.

These were places where you could buy tobacco and newspapers and magazines and men’s and women’s toiletries and get your prescriptions filled. But they were also places to leisurely enjoy a cherry Coke from a soda fountain or an ice cream soda or even a hamburger. The “druggist” usually wore a white smock and the soda fountain waitresses often wore pink or blue uniforms. I liked it when these women popped their chewing gum and winked at me.

I’ll probably never get to see a drugstore as cool as the one in the movie “It’s A Wonderful Life” but I’d give an eye tooth to set my butt down on one of those high stools and order a double chocolate malted or an egg cream or a lemon phosphate.

Anyone have a time machine I can use for a few hours?

Air Raid!

In the 1950s school children like me, who would later become labeled “Baby Boomers” ( as if we had been shot out of cannons at birth), hid under our desks at school during regular air raid drills that began with a brief warning from the teacher, followed by the blast from a chrome whistle.

Like this “safety precaution” would have actually helped us in the event of a nuclear attack. Like desks and puny arms clasped over our innocent heads would keep a 50–megaton atomic bomb from turning us into vapor in a split second. Like all grownups from Russia were devils from hell and our parents and grandparents were all darling angels straight out of Heaven. Later, in high school, we put two and two together and thought this was a pretty stressful and hyped-up time to be alive.

And they wondered why a lot of us wanted to be stoned out of our skulls when we grew up.

Las Vegas in 25 Words or Less

In the last half of the 20th Century mob money transformed this tiny desert bus stop into a sprawling, hideous shrine to greed and perversion.

Prohibition Through The Keyhole

A lot of people born long after the Prohibition Era in the United States probably found it hard to believe that the USA has once ventured so far toward becoming a totalitarian state that it passed a law declaring that no one in "America" could thereafter "take a drink". The very idea was just so preposterous to most Americans. And yet it actually happened.

Why it happened was really no mystery. After World War I ended, Americans just couldn’t seem to stop celebrating. In fact, by the end of 1918, so many Americans were drunk and fornicating and committing alcohol-fueled crimes that it stood to reason that somebody just had to do something about it. And, boy, did they ever.

Bolstered by the American Temperance Movement which began in the 1860s and which was on quite a roll ever since then (especially throughout the Bible Belt and in Washington, DC), Congress passed the 18th Amendment to the Constitution on January 16, 1919, virtually outlawing the consumption of alcohol in the United States and penciling Prohibition into the national archives. The 18th Amendment paved the way for the passage of The Volstead Act in October 28, 1919 which was the federal government’s official act of declaring a national Prohibition of alcohol.

Despite a standing federal law against the consumption of alcohol between January 16, 1920 and December 5, 1933, drinkable alcohol was still legally available during that period by certain means and methods. It could be obtained with a medical prescription and many doctors during this era wrote many such prescriptions with reckless abandon. In fact, they wrote so many phony prescriptions that a lot of drug stores that filled these prescriptions for “medicinal alcohol” were shut down by the feds. After all, it was considered one thing to put a crooked druggist out of business and quite another to jail a delinquent sawbones.

During the years of Prohibition, which lasted from 1920 to 1933, it was also permissible to make hard cider and wine at home, in limited quantities, of course. All commercial wineries were forced to sell their wine through government warehouses and then only for use in religious ceremonies. Unh hunh. Right.

During Prohibition more Americans were incarcerated than before the moral right and left took away their beer and whiskey. Gangsters had a lot more to peddle now than games of chance and human flesh. Without Prohibition, bootlegging on a large scale would have never existed in America. In fact, without Prohibition, Al Capone would probably have been only a minor crime figure of that period.

Prohibition in the U.S. was repealed by the 21st Amendment, which turned over the control of alcohol to the states. It is interesting to note that Pennsylvania and Ohio only dared to ratify the 21st Amendment after Utah had done so. Hmmm.

The fact that Prohibition was a monstrous failure in the United States should have come as no surprise to anyone. After all, it was strongly supported by the Ku Klux Klan. What more can be said?

Manning The Moon

Between 1969 and 1972 there were six lunar landings made by NASA and eleven men walked on the moon’s surface during that time. The first man to walk on the moon was Neil Armstrong on July 20, 1969 and the last man to set foot on the lunar surface was Eugene Cernan on December 11, 1972.

Nobody can really say for sure why the milestone Apollo Missions were replaced by the millstone Shuttle Launches, which are about as exciting as watching a neighborhood kid fly a kite on a still day. NASA thinks that playing Buck Rogers in the 21st Century and blasting off the Earth in rockets big enough to power a city for a year and loud enough to wake up aliens anywhere in the solar system is still a laudable idea when almond-eyed, bubble-headed extraterrestrials have been flitting in and out of our atmosphere on the whisper of gravity for centuries.

Hmmm....you don’t suppose these are the same almond-eyed, bubble-headed bastards who told us to get the hell off the moon in 1972? After all, they just may have outposts on the dark side of the moon (the part that never faces Earth) and want to remain hidden. But then NASA Apollo astronauts would surely have seen their lights while orbiting the moon in search of a landing spot so how could this possibly be?

Let’s face it, going to the moon was a very big deal and making rings around the Earth in a “spaceship” that looks like it was made from Lego blocks is nothing but window dressing for an American space program that was zapped in the bud by extraterrestrials who put their foot down about our traipsing all over the solar system without a plan.

And a Mission to Mars? Forget that. Until we learn to eliminate our exhaust emissions, we’ve pretty much been “grounded” by the solar system police.

Axis Legacy of Death

For the second time in the twentieth century an economically and morally bankrupt Germany would declare itself a nation of super people and blame all its woes on the rest of the world and especially on Jews living in Europe and the Soviet Union. This time, Germany had the help of Japan and Italy, two countries whose leaders simply claimed to be God’s gift to the world and the hell with anyone else, including their own people.

This time Germany’s legacy to the rest of the world, with the assistance of Japan and Italy, would be an estimated 52 million people dead worldwide, 6 million of them Jews whose deaths were not easy ones. Germany was a nation that needed to be squashed like a bug. Instead, people still buy their cars, guns and machinery as if nothing had happened. Nothing at all.

But Germany is not alone in its ability to be forgiven for its heinous and massive crimes against humanity. No one seems to remember Pearl Harbor, either, when they go shopping for a new car or a TV. But then, no one is going to stop eating pizza or spaghetti, by the way, and doesn’t everyone want to wear at least one thing with an Armani label before they die?

The good news is that there will probably never be a Third World War as long as the children and grandchildren of mass murderers control companies in the Fortune 500.

Civil Rights War

The Civil Rights Movement of America's 1960s was inevitable in a country that didn't have very much respect for people with African-American origins or for women of any origin. Bolstered by President Lyndon Johnson, who wanted to take Americans’ minds off the horrors and the merchandising of the war in Vietnam, the movement was initially a demonstration of southern black opposition to the slavery mentality still prevalent in much of the Bible Belt.

Led by Martin Luther King, Jr. and encouraged by LBJ, the Civil Rights Movement was suddenly in every American's face and the movement would be in full swing by the time the "n" word was generally considered to be a dirty, racist, bigoted word. Black Americans wanted to be referred to as "African Americans" and the term sounded good to most Americans and even progressive. But white Americans were still called "white", whenever they weren't being called "honky" or "whitey" or "cracker". Apparently non-white Americans thought it was perfectly OK for black people to continue calling white people names like that, especially on the new TV sitcoms starring African Americans like Sherman Hemsley and Redd Foxx, whose hatred of white people as characters George Jefferson and Fred Sanford, knew no bounds.

Racial slurs against white people were, for some stupid, hideous reason, considered to be funny and not offensive, especially when famous black movie actors in the 1980s began referring to white men as "white bread" or "Jim Bob" or "Joe Bob" or "Jethro" or "hillbilly" or just plain "redneck". Well, it might have been fun for these "African-American" actors to enjoy their equal opportunity for hatred in the public arena but these dirty, racist names were just as bad as the word "nigger" and none of these names were one damn bit funny to me. Nasty is nasty and racist is racist, no matter how you slice it. Fighting racism is pointless if you use racism as your weapon and anybody from my part of Appalachia could have told you that.

"European-American" would have been a nice word for any American who had family origins in Europe but that would have also included people of African, Asian, Hispanic and Pacific Island origin as well. "Native-American" would have been a better handle for anyone born in the United States but that would have made us all just a little too equal and that apparently wasn't the purpose of this new movement. Besides, what would Americans call the descendants of the people originally native to the North American continent? The word "Indian" was definitely out. And Whoopi Goldberg seems to be the only non-Caucasian U.S. citizen who likes being called just plain "American" these days.

Alas, The Civil Rights War all boiled down to incidents of name-calling and finger-pointing and demands for reparation that would obviously never benefit those who had been wronged in the first place or punish any of the original wrongdoers. Apparently, the Equal Rights Amendment wasn't the crown of victory for minorities and women it was intended to be. But then any real social panacea is spelled out in actions, not words.

So, what began as a necessary component of cultural evolution, the Civil Rights Movement in America soon ended up as a new civil war of race hatred, fueled by television, Hollywood and the Internet, instead of a welcomed cultural movement spearheaded by a handful of dedicated visionaries with a plan.

Elvis in 25 Words or Less

In 1956 Elvis Presley brought hillbilly America out of the closet and into the mainstream and by 1970 he was the Liberace of Pop.