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

What I've Learned From The Pandemic

DEAR GEORGE, Our lives have been significantly altered for over a year because of the coronavirus pandemic. With growing hope that we might return to normal in the foreseeable future, I find myself trying to figure out what it has all meant to me. Here are my thoughts so far. LOVE, DAVE.

(1) The pandemic is like prison. The pandemic means different things to different people. One of my acquaintances loves working at home and dreads returning to the office. Another is mourning the loss of both of his parents to the virus. For Katja and myself it’s been mostly a matter of home imprisonment — confined to the house, cut off from contact with friends, most of our normal world inaccessible. Life’s pleasures typically involve going places and doing things, and fourteen months of restrictiveness have resulted in a felt loss of control and bouts of boredom and hopelessness. (2) My wife is a pretty good cell-mate. Despite divorce filings rising 34% during the pandemic, I’d say that we fellow prisoners have actually been more mutually supportive than we normally are. Together in the same boat, we’ve managed to share a few laughs every day. (3) The pandemic is a major test. In the most dire circumstances the pandemic has meant coping with the death of loved ones, job losses, business failures, neighborhood decay. In my own case it’s been more a question of resourcefulness — how to restructure my life in meaningful ways, given the loss of so many options. (4) My grade is a C-. A year ago I made a list of things I could do more of. Start a new home exercise program, read more books, do an art project, study Spanish, write more poetry. As with my New Year’s resolutions, I failed at all of these. Personal change is difficult to bring about. My only significant adjustment has been to watch more TV. That’s o.k. — I enjoy watching TV and it’s entertaining. But it’s also lazy and nonproductive. (5) Others are alien beings (and so are we). Out on the street most of us wear masks, concealing our faces, smiles, and nonverbal expressions. When passing on the sidewalk people move as far apart as possible, sometimes stepping into the gutter or onto an adjacent lawn. We now live in a world where everyone else is a potential threat to one’s well-being (and we ourselves are threats to others). How alienated can the populace be? (6) The pandemic is politicized. One might think the pandemic to be a public health matter, but, thanks to an unnamed former president, it’s a political monstrosity as well. Half the country (the other half) is the enemy. I feel angry when I see people in indoor spaces who refuse to wear masks; resent the millions who choose not to be vaccinated; and, with the exception of Gov. Dewine, am generally disgusted with the actions of red-state governors. It’s amazing that we can’t find more common ground since everyone faces the same global disaster. (7) Social isolation isn’t all bad. Some people have prospered during the pandemic. The takeout restaurant down the street is doing a whopping business. For myself I find that my faulty hearing has been largely “cured” during the pandemic (thanks to TV closed captions and lack of conversations). I also suffer much less from social anxiety (given minimal social contact). Much of the time I feel more at peace than I did before the pandemic. (8) One solution is a sense of mission. After months of stagnation, I rediscovered a major task that I’d put off for years and years. We have an upstairs room that I regard as my “junk room”. It’s filled with stuff that I’ve accumulated over forty plus years — treasures from yard sales, antique stores, flea markets, etc. The piles of stuff grew out of control a decade or two ago, and I’ve long been thinking about cleaning it up. With so much new free time, it seemed like my chance had come. The job took about a month, but I was totally engrossed and managed to create order out of chaos. This was my most satisfying accomplishment during the past year. (9) Family is the bulwark. We would have had a much harder time, were it not for the support of our sweet family in New Orleans. J, K, and the kids flew up last month, and, with all of the adults vaccinated, we did a lot of activities that we’d foregone for a year: the zoo, out to eat at a fancy restaurant, multiple thrift shops, Findlay Market and Jungle Jim’s, three-ways at Skyline Chili. They gave us concrete hope that our lives were changing for the better. (10) Dogs help too. Dogs don’t worry at all about the pandemic. If anything, they appreciate getting petted and walked more. My son J. drove up from New Orleans in March 2020 on his way to California and left their miniature schnauzer, Iko, with us. Having this furry bundle of energy in the house has made our lives much more lively and enjoyable. (11) Returning to “normal” is a challenge. With the exception of our recent family visit, Katja and I continue to pretty much shelter in place. Keeping isolated seems to have become our fixed pattern, and sometimes I worry it will go on forever. We need to take some more baby steps to break free.