1960

DEAR GEORGE, 1960 was a momentous year. The Cold War was in full sway; France tested its first atomic bomb; Fidel Castro declared allegiance to communist Russia, nationalizing American oil and sugar companies; the Soviet Union downed a U-2 reconnaissance plane and imprisoned American pilot Francis Gary Powers. In my Upper Peninsula home town rumors circulated that Menominee could be mistaken for the Soo Locks from the air and become the target of a nuclear attack by Russian bombers. My father and my uncle Ralph converted a room in the basement of our family drugstore to an atom bomb shelter, stocking it with canned goods, barrels of water, a radio, magazines, and a portable toilet.

Katja and I were busy finishing our fifth and final year at Antioch College in Yellow Springs. She was the T.A. for Romance Languages, and I had the same job in the Psychology Department. My friend John N. and I both put off our year-long senior year projects till the last night and nearly flunked out. The entire campus was overjoyed when President Eisenhower signed the Civil Rights Act of 1960 to prevent voter disenfranchisement in the South. Antioch students had carried out one of the nation’s first sit-ins to protest discrimination at a local segregated barber shop. Because Katja’s parents were unhappy about our pending marriage, we held our wedding at the Quaker chapel on the Antioch campus in August. My future father-in-law told my father he was certain we would be divorced within a year, and my dad took us aside the night before the ceremony and told us in no uncertain terms that Lundgrens never get divorced. We’re sure it’s one of the reasons that we stuck together for the next sixty years.

On September 1st we moved to Ann Arbor for graduate school, Katja in French and me in Social Psychology. We found a second-floor apartment at Mrs. Quackenbush’s house on Brookwood St., a five-minute walk from campus. Having come from a small liberal arts college, we were very skeptical (and snooty) about going to a huge public university. However, we immediately discovered that the U. of M. was amazing and Ann Arbor was a wonderful college town. Much to our surprise, we started going to all of Michigan’s home football games (we lost to Ohio State in 1960, 7-0). Katja bought a German Shepherd puppy who we named Heather, and she got a job at Faber’s Fabrics to help keep us a step ahead of poverty. We opened our first checking account and were called in by the bank and told not to cash a separate check for every $2.00 purchase that we made. The FDA had approved the pill as an oral contraceptive in the summer of 1960, and the Ann Arbor Planned Parenthood was made one of the first distribution sites. Katja signed up on the first day, and we fantasized that she might have been the first woman in America to be on the pill.

The war in Viet Nam was growing, and, with 900 military advisers already in South Viet Nam, President Eisenhower announced that the U.S. would be sending an additional 3,500 troops. Michigan, along with Berkeley and Columbia, was soon to become the site of massive anti-war protests. Home on vacation, I visited my local draft board which assured me that my graduate school enrollment would prevent my being drafted in the near future. John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon were running for president, squaring off in the first televised presidential debates, and, along with millions in our generation, we became fervent Kennedy supporters. In October JFK came to Ann Arbor for a major speech (in which he introduced his idea for the Peace Corps), and Katja and I joined the huge crowd in front of the Michigan Student Union. Kennedy was several hours late, and around ten o’clock, when somebody accidentally stepped on our puppy Heather’s front foot, we decided not to stay for the historic address.

We voted in our first presidential election, and Kennedy won by a narrow margin of 112 thousand votes out of 68 million cast. Kennedy carried Menominee County, 5,857 to 5,064. On the home front, we went to the movies most Saturday nights at the Michigan or the State Theater: Ben-Hur, Psycho, The Apartment, Exodus, La Dolce Vita, Spartacus, etc. Charlton Heston and Simone Signoret won the best acting Oscars. Many other notable things happened in 1960. Elvis came back from his two years of military service in Germany, and Chubby Checker introduced The Twist on the Dick Clark Show. “Its Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini” reached #1 on the Billboard charts. The Anne Frank House opened in Amsterdam. The Flintstones premiered on ABC. Wilt Chamberlain set an NBA playoff record, scoring 53 points against the Syracuse Nationals. Lew Burdette of the Milwaukee Braves pitched a perfect game against the Phillies (just 27 pitches). Hugh Hefner opened the first Playboy Club in Chicago. Adolph Eichmann was captured by the Israelis in Argentina and later hanged for his role in the Holocaust. The Surgeon General reported the initial findings that smoking causes lung cancer (launching my twenty-year struggle to quit). The Philadelphia Eagles beat Vince Lombardi’s Packers, 17-13, in the NFL championship game. Ted Williams hit his 500th home run, Cassius Clay (a.k.a. Muhammad Ali) won his first professional fight against Tunney Hunsaker, and the U.S. hosted the Winter Olympics in Squaw Valley, California. Grandma Moses turned 100. The Beatles had their first public gig in Hamburg, Germany. All in all, a year to remember. LOVE, DAVE