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

Ringlessness

Dear George,

Katja and I got married at the Quaker chapel in Yellow Springs on August 28, 1960.  We drove to Dayton the month before to do some wedding purchases, including our rings.  Dayton’s three or four jewelry stores were on a single block on a downtown side street.  One of the shop owners had set up a table in front of his store, hawking items on sale.  We arranged to purchase two gold wedding bands from him, $19 apiece.  He had them inscribed “SKW - DCL, 8-28-60.”  

We left for graduate school a week after the wedding.  Three years later I was taking a social psychology seminar from Dr. Swanson in Mason Hall.  In the middle of a class session he said that the room was getting chilly and asked that someone close the window.  I stepped up on the windowsill, pulled the window down, and jumped back down to the floor.  Unfortunately my wedding ring got caught on the window latch, and, as I dropped to the floor, it tore the flesh half off of my ring finger before coming loose.  I was rushed to the emergency room, fantasizing that I would lose my finger and never be able to type again.  There goes my dissertation!  The male nurse tried to saw my ring off with a file but the ring was too strong.  After 30 or 40 minutes they sent me up to dental surgery, and the technician was able to cut my ring in two with a diamond drill.  He said that they have to cut a ring off a man’s finger at least once a week.  I decided that was it for me with wedding rings.  Happily my finger healed properly, and I was able to type again.  I still have the scar.  

Katja hasn’t been able to get her wedding band off for quite a long time, but that hasn’t bothered her.  Last week she went out to Sears to get some trashmasher bags.  Leaving the store, her open-toed shoe caught on the pavement, and she fell to the ground, landing on her left forearm.  She was able to drive to her scheduled massage, but the pain got too bad, and the massage therapist recommended going to the emergency room.  Katja came home, and we drove over to Good Sam.  The initial X-ray didn’t show a fracture, but, with all the bones in one’s hands, they couldn’t be 100% sure.  The doctor said that, because of the swelling, she would have to remove her rings.  The male technician successfully used lubricant to remove a recently acquired ring, but no luck with Katja’s wedding band.  He then used a ring cutter, though Katja’s ring was just as sturdy as mine had been.  Because of all the pain Katja was experiencing, this was a difficult procedure.  His first ring cutter broke, and he got a second one.  Finally success.  Leaving the two of us ringless of course.  

The episode was more distressing to me than you might think.  Aside from some photos and a few written documents, Katja’s wedding ring is the oldest physical object still in our possession.  Not only is it a symbol of our marriage, but it’s associated so directly with young love, our momentous step in getting married, our commerce with a sidewalk jewelry vendor, and all the other things going on with getting married at the time.   The destruction of Katja’s ring felt like the end of an era.  At least we had one wedding ring in the family, but now we are down to zero.  Probably a more encouraging approach is to think of it as a new beginning.  Katja even suggested that I might want to get a new wedding ring.  After 55 years without a wedding ring, I’m giving it some thought.   

Love,

Dave

When We Were Young and Wild(er)

Katja and Jacques at Faber’s Fabrics in Ann Arbor (circa 1962)

Dear George,

Katja’s and my life together is sort of sedate nowadays compared to years ago.  I think of the summer of 1962 when we set off on an improbable road trip from Michigan to the West Coast.  I’d just finished my second year of grad school.  Katja, then as now, had an intense desire to travel, and she’d scrimped and saved from her Faber’s Fabric job in downtown Ann Arbor and put together about $200 to finance a five-week trip to the Seattle World’s Fair.  Though a budget of six dollars a day seemed tight, we decided we could manage if we camped along the way.

We left from Menominee in late June.  We borrowed my grandfather Guy’s 1930’s white canvas tent which had been stored for many years in my folks’ garage.  It no longer had poles or stakes, so I cut these from alder trees on our back lot.  On the day we departed, my dad lent us his Standard Oil credit card to cover our gasoline expenses.  It was a generous and thoughtful act – we would never have made it across the country without it.  Katja hadn’t camped out since being a Girl Scout, and she was exceedingly anxious.  My mother reassured her that I was a very experienced camper and that she had nothing to worry about.  That helped at least a bit.

We headed west and drove through Iron Mountain where we stopped to look at the giant ski jump, deserted in the early summer heat.  We stopped for our first night at a state park in the Minnesota lake country.  I pitched the tent, and Katja prepared dinner.  She’d just finished the salad when she accidentally knocked the bowl off the picnic table.  She burst into tears.  I scooped it up as carefully as I could and explained that when you’re camping it’s not unusual to have a little dirt in your lettuce.  Katja was relieved, and that was the only emotional camping crisis of the trip. 

After passing through the Badlands and checking out Mount Rushmore, we drove west through Canada.  There was a doctor’s strike going on in Saskatchewan, so there were no medical services available of any sort.  Though we were healthy enough, we fantasized about getting into a car crash with no hospitals or doctors’ offices open.  It put us on edge, and it seemed to take forever to get out of the province.  Then into the beautiful Rockies, where we stopped at Banff and Lake Louise and enjoyed a dip in the hot springs. 

Seattle World’s Fair 1962

In Seattle we stayed with our college friend, Dave S., who had introduced the two of us in Milwaukee five years earlier.  The World’s Fair, with the Space Needle, monorail, and all its ultra-modern structures and exhibits, was thrilling, and we spent a couple of days taking it all in.  Then we drove down the Oregon coast, which was stunning, and we camped on the beach.  At dawn the tide came in, the Pacific Ocean began flowing into our tent, and we had to pull up the stakes and vacate in the early morning light.

Agriculture Dept. rangers were checking cars at the California border to insure that no foreign vegetation was being brought into their pristine state.  They spotted our Michigan alder tree tent poles, and, despite my protests, we had to surrender them.  We drove a few miles, pulled over at the road’s edge, found a fallen evergreen tree, and cut some pure California branches to make new and legally approved tent poles.  In San Francisco we stayed with Mary and John P., Mary having been one of  my childhood friends in Menominee.  They were very gracious, and I enjoyed showing Katja around the beatnik landmarks in North Beach where I’d hung out as an aspiring novelist in 1959. 

We left California and drove through the Nevada desert at night, scared from seeing no cars for hours and worried that grizzled prospectors would be discovering our sun-parched bones in the sand.  We spent an hour in Las Vegas at 3 or 4 a.m., but had no extra change to gamble away.  The Southwest was exciting, with all the Hispanic and Native American presence -- the closest thing to a foreign culture that we’d ever experienced in the U.S.  We took in the Grand Canyon, Taos, the Hoover Dam, Santa Fe, and numerous other sites.  It was boiling hot, and Katja, against all her inclinations, eventually broke down and bought a skimpy little bra-like mini-top to wear in the midday heat.  She looked very cute, though definitely embarrassed.  We visited our grad school friend Dodd B’s ranch outside of Albequerque, and he was pleased and proud to show off the magnificent desert and mountain surroundings.

Leaving Albequerque, we drove into a state park in New Mexico after 10 p.m.  Too late to register for a campsite, we simply set our sleeping bags on the ground and slept under the stars.  In the morning a guy from Texas came by and asked if we’d seen the “bahrs”. We didn’t know what he was talking about, but, after a few more tries, we discovered that he meant “bears”.  He said that they came every night to try to get into the sealed garbage pit containers on the ground.  It turned out that we had been sleeping on top of the garbage pits, exactly where the pack of bears had been prowling around.  We were relieved to have not been eaten alive.

We headed northeast and stopped in Denver to fill up the car with gas.  I gave the guy our Standard Oil credit card, but, to my dismay, he said that it wasn’t valid in Colorado.  He showed me on the card where it said that.  We had to pay cash, but it was the last four dollars that we’d set aside for the remainder of our trip back to Michigan.  No more campgrounds, no more food.  In Nebraska we simply pulled our car over in a big field and slept in the car overnight.  In the middle of the night I went out to relieve myself.  As I was doing so, I heard the pounding of hoofs, and I saw in the moonlight that a large stallion was charging toward me.  I raced back to the car and jumped in just in time.  We drove and drove nonstop and finally we were back in Ann Arbor, glad to be home again but full of good memories.

I still think camping road trips are the best vacation of all.  I asked Katja last week if she’d like to go camping at Lake Cumberland in southern Kentucky, or perhaps to the Indiana dunes on Lake Michigan.  She just shook her head.  But after a pause she said that she’d like to go on a camping road trip to the West Coast.  I was amazed.  At first that seemed beyond possibility to me.  But then I thought, maybe we could do that again.  We’ll have to see. 

Love,

Dave

G-mail Comments

-Jennifer M (7-30):  I love this story.  I hope your trip to the farm is great!

Which Best Place Is The Best?

Electric Square, Menominee, MI (JML photo)

Dear George,

When we were young, my father always claimed that Menominee and the U.P. were the best places to live. Our house was out in the country, and my parents loved nature. The scenery was beautiful, the air was clear, sunsets beautiful, the forest and the river were right outside our door, and we spent much of our leisure time swimming, boating, and camping. My mom gardened, my dad painted wildflowers, our dogs ran free. The town itself was right on Green Bay, the epitome of Michigan’s Water Wonderland. People in our small town were friendly, honest, helpful, and non- pretentious. When my dad would run across a news report that the population of the U.P. was declining, he’d respond that people were foolish and the more people that left, the better it would be for the rest of us. We may not have been as totally convinced as my dad, but we all agreed that Menominee was a special place.

Downtown Yellow Springs, OH

At eighteen I left home for Antioch College in Yellow Springs, a little college town of 3500 in southwestern Ohio. At first Yellow Springs seemed pretty rinky-dink. It had a two-block business district, one gas station, one drugstore, one grocery store, one hardware store, and one traffic light. It didn’t take long, however, to discover how idyllic the Yellow Springs village was. Antioch had a strong “beatnik” culture which gave the whole community an avante garde atmosphere. The town was home to numerous artists and writers. The Little Art Theater had a reputation as the best foreign film cinema in the Midwest, and Com’s Tavern and the Highway 68 Drive-in soon became late-night havens for my friends and myself. By the time I was approaching graduation, Yellow Springs had become home and the prospect of leaving was traumatic. Menominee had been good, but I’d concluded that Yellow Springs was the best.

Liberty St., Ann Arbor, MI

Katja and I married and moved to Ann Arbor for graduate school. I was heartbroken and wary. I was skeptical about going to a Big Ten school, and I was sure that, as dedicated Antiochians, we would never feel at home in a collegiate place like Ann Arbor. All of those worries vanished within weeks. The University of Michigan was an awesome institution, and the city of Ann Arbor was remarkable. The streets surrounding campus were full of bookstores, cafes, movie theaters, and elegant shops like Artisans and John Leidy’s. Katja and I became U of M football fans, and we decided that life in Ann Arbor was wonderful. Menominee and Yellow Springs had been good, but Ann Arbor was the ultimate.

Cincinnati skyline

In 1966 I took a faculty position in Cincinnati, and we were distraught about leaving Ann Arbor, our first married home. Cincinnati’s campus area business district couldn’t hold a candle to Ann Arbor’s, and the local rightwing media turned us off. All of our angst turned out to be temporary, however. Compared to Ann Arbor, which now seemed like a small college town, Cincinnati was truly a big city -- far more complex, diverse, and interesting. We discovered Cincinnati’s panoply of fine restaurants, including world-class establishments like the Maisonette and Pigall’s. Cincinnati is one of the premiere cultural centers of the Midwest because of its symphony, opera, ballet, chamber music, and theater. It has fine art museums; one of the nation’s best zoos; professional and college sports; seven hills, interesting architecture, and desirable neighborhoods. After a while we came to realize that living in a big metropolis was much more exciting than anywhere we’d lived before. Menominee, Yellow Springs, and Ann Arbor had been excellent in their own ways, but Cincinnati topped them all.

When I thought about all this recently, I got confused. It dawned on me that, wherever we happened to be currently living, I’d thought that that place was the greatest. How can one ever find the truth? Luckily I ran across a website called “City-Data.com” that offers an amazing amount of information about all the towns and cities in the U.S. I used it to look up facts about Menominee, Yellow Springs, Ann Arbor, and Cincinnati. I compared the four places by geography, climate, population characteristics, economy, and various amenities. Which place, I wondered, would objectively turn out the best? A scientific approach would surely give the answer.

The detailed results from City-Data.com are in the appendix below. I wasn’t surprised to find that each of these desirable places ranked number one on various dimensions. In fact, there was a three-way tie between Yellow Springs, Ann Arbor, and Cincinnati. Each was ranked number one on three different dimensions. Here’s where these three places get their top rankings,

respectively:

Yellow Springs: #1 on per capita income, % of residents married, and estimated % of lesbian and gay households.

Ann Arbor: #1 on educational level of residents, lowest unemployment, international diversity (% foreign-born).

Cincinnati: #1 on county population growth, restaurants per capita, and low adult obesity.

Well, what about Menominee, you ask? As my dad would have predicted many years ago, it pretty much sweeps the awards. It winds up #1 on 16 of the 25 dimensions I looked at: Low population density, low commuting time, low poverty rate, low cost of living. Greatest water area, highest air quality, coolest summer temperatures, lowest rainfall, fewest natural disasters. More Swedes, more Lutherans, more religious affiliation, more bars per capita, more pastie shops, more deer, fewest violent crimes.

Green Bay shoreline and Menominee Marina

Admittedly, not all of these Menominee attributes translate directly into quality of life. Like Garrison Keillor on Prairie Home Companion, we have a certain affinity for Scandinavians, Lutherans, and pasties, so we tossed those into the mix. Deer population might seem low in relevance, but when you’re from the U.P. it’s a major priority. Menominee’s number one ranking on both religion and bars may be puzzling at first, but when you’re familiar with Menominee culture it makes perfect sense. It appears that my dad was right after all. Statistics don’t lie -- Menominee is practically the best place there can be. It just goes to show – those early impressions often turn out to be the most accurate.

Love,

Dave

P.S. If you want to see why Seattle, Santa Cruz, New Orleans, Philadelphia, East Lansing, Princeton, Rochester, New York City, Charlotte, or your home town are great places, just go to www.city-data.com. You’ll be pleasantly

surprised.

APPENDIX (Rank order of four cities and their scores on 25 dimensions):

Low population density (per sq. mi.): Menom (1582), YSprgs (1725), AnnArb (4178), Cincy (4271)

County pop. change (2000-10): Cincy (+0.5%), AnnAr (-1.0%), Menom (-10.3%), YSprgs (-12.9%)

% Water area (vs. land): Menom (5%), AnnArb (.03%), Cincy (.003%), YSprgs (0.0%)

Travel time to work: Menom (9 mins), AnnArb (19 mins), Cincy (20 mins), YSprgs (21 min)

Per capita income: YSprgs ($32K), AnnArb ($27K), Cincy ($24K), Menom ($21K)

Low poverty rate: Menom (15%): YSprgs (18%); AnnArb (21%): Cincy (26%)

Unemployment rate: AnnArb (7.5%), Cincy (8.6%), YSprgs (8.9%)(, Menom (9.0%)

Cost of living (US Ave = 100): Menom (77), Cincy (90), Yellow Springs (92), AnnArb (92)

% Married: YSprgs (53%), Menom (51%), Cincy (34%), AnnArb (34%)

% BA degrees or higher: AnnArb (69%), YSprgs (59%), Cincy (27%), Menom (13%)

Diversity (% foreign-born): AnnArb (17%), YSprgs (3.8%), Cincy (3.8%), Menom (0.8%)

Swedish ancestry: Menom (10%), AnnArb (>2%), Yellow Springs (>2%), Cincy (>2%)

Lutherans: Menom (22%), YSprgs (5.3%), AnnArb (5.2%), Cincy (>2%)

Lesbian & gay couples (est.): YSprgs (2.4%), AnnArb (0.9%), Cincy (0.6%), Menom (0.2%)

Affiliated w/religious congregation: Menom (69%), Cincy (49%), YSprgs (34%), AnnArb (33%)

Violent crimes (per 10K residents): Menom (11.7), YSprgs (13.9), AnnArb (18.6), Cincy (44.9)

Adult obesity rate: Cincy (26.6%), AnnArb (27%), YSprgs (28.6%), Menom (28.8%)

Temperature (highest monthly ave.): Menom (81), AnnArb (83), YSprgs (84), Cincy (87)

Rainfall (highest monthly ave.): Menom (3.6”), AnnArb (3.7”), YSprgs (4.4”) Cincy (5.1”)

Air Quality Index (low = better): Menom (9), AnnArb (32),YSprgs (39), Cincy (42)

Natural disasters (e.g., floods): Menom (4), AnnArb (8), YSprgs (9), Cincy (12)

Restaurants (per 10K residents): Cincy (7.5), AnnArb (7.2), Menom (7.0), YSprgs (5.6)

Bars (per 1000 residents): Menom (1.1), YSprgs (0.6), AnnArb (0.3), Cincy (0.2)

Pastie Shops: Menominee (3), Ann Arbor (0), Yellow Springs (0), Cincinnati (0)

County deer population: Menominee (46K), Ann Arbor (26K), Cincinnati (8K), YSprgs (6K)

Main Sources: www.city-data.com; www.yellow-pages.us; Google Images

G-mail Comments

-Mary B (3-25): You got me going on this one, because I'd said my entire adult life I'd never live in Florida; then family circumstances brought me to Gainesville in 2000. My sister-in-law reassured me with that year's #1 ranking of Gainesville. Over the years that hasn't always been true, but in 2007 we were again ranked #1 by Sander and Sperling on economy, cost of living, climate, education, health, crime, transportation, leisure, and arts and culture; more specifically, "the presence of 'college town amenities' such as athletics and museums." Looking for more recent data, I discovered we were ranked on March 17, 2011 among the Ten Happiest Cities! I'm glad my personal experience is matched by statistics. I've grown to love all those things about Gainesville. Yet... I still miss Cincinnati. Thanks for the memories.

-Jennifer M (3-25): the website you refer to is crazy! what a lot of information!

Gender Politics

Geraldine Ferraro (1935-2011)

Dear George,

We were saddened last week when we learned that Geraldine Ferraro had died at age 75. For many of my students she was probably a footnote in history, but for our generation she was a living, breathing vital figure in late twentieth century American politics. She ran, of course, as the vice-presidential nominee with Walter Mondale in the 1984 election against incumbents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. Ferraro’s V.P. nomination, the first for a woman in U.S. history, represented the culmination of two decades of work by the Women’s Liberation Movement, and Katja and I saw her as an outstanding politician: bright, articulate, assertive, knowledgeable.

We were in our forties in 1984 and had seen monumental changes in American society during our lifetimes. Menominee in the 1940’s and 50’s, when I was growing up, was a small town in a conservative, isolated region. While my parents and their friends were undoubtedly enlightened compared to the community at large, traditional gender stereotypes and discrimination were the rule of the day. My paternal grandmother had been state chairperson of the Wisconsin Republican Party, and my dad and mom were staunch conservatives. In our North Woods world, men were “manly men”, women their helpmates, and there were no questions about who was head of the household. Few women in my parents’ friendship group worked outside the home; families were larger than nowadays; and the sexes had a traditional division of labor. I do believe that the adult women and men that I knew as a kid respected and delighted in one another, but males and masculine values clearly enjoyed higher esteem by all concerned.

While I don’t really know for sure, I’d bet that I was the only high school student from the U.P. to ever attend Antioch College. I discovered from the first day of freshman orientation that I was naïve and backwards politically and culturally compared to my more cosmopolitan classmates, many of whom came from left-wing families in East coast metro areas. I recall listening to some of my new classmates discussing the pros and cons of socialism. I had heard vaguely of socialism, but I had it confused with “social diseases”, and I couldn’t imagine what some of my peers found so appealing about syphilis and gonorrhea.

Racial issues were beginning to come to the forefront of societal debate in the late 1950’s, and some of the first civil rights picketing in the nation was done at Yellow Springs’ segregated barber shop. My hallmates and I patronized the black barber shop at the edge of the town’s business district as our mild form of protest. Katja was a member of the local NAACP and more sophisticated about political matters than I. When we talked about gender roles, she argued vehemently for women having lifelong careers, while I tended to dwell on the supposed rewards of motherhood. Katja’s opinions, of course, eventually held sway.

We married in 1960 and went off to graduate school at Michigan. Pharmaceutical companies had just completed their trial tests in Puerto Rico of birth control pills, a revolutionary new breakthrough, and Ann Arbor had been selected as the first site in the U.S. for testing on the mainland. Katja was in the initial group of enlistees, and I used to accompany her to her monthly exams at a second floor office suite on a darkened block of Liberty St. between campus and downtown. She joined Planned Parenthood and then became a charter member of N.O.W. when it was launched in 1966.

Katja L. (1972)

By the time we were living in Cincinnati in the early 1970’s, the Women’s Liberation Movement had gained substantial momentum. Katja was a T.A. in the French department at the University, and she formed a women’s consciousness-raising group composed of friends and colleagues. Soon afterwards she began to notice that whenever she called her friend Ellin both of them would hear a strange clicking sound on the telephone when they first connected. Katja called Bell Telephone to complain about wiretapping, but Bell claimed they would never do that without informing their customers. It was the midst of the Nixon years, and we both felt that wiretapping of a feminist group leader was a distinct possibility. Our phone conversations became less spontaneous.

Katja’s women’s group rotated among the members’ homes, and, over time, I got to know each of the participants, at least superficially. After a few months I got the distinct sense that people were giving me unpleasant looks when I passed in the hallway. I asked Katja what their consciousness-raising discussions were about, and she said they were about individuals’ personal lives. I wondered whether this might include their husbands, but I didn’t pursue the question. The only thing I know for sure is that every group member got divorced in the next two to three years except Katja. She claimed it was because we had the most solid marriage, but I think it was mostly luck.

I wish Geraldine Ferraro or her surrogates were still around today. Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann seem to be sharing the limelight as women politicians, and, despite Palin giving public credit to Ferraro for paving the way, they are fraudulent imitations. Gender politics, of course, have come a long way since 1950. But they seem to still have a long way to go.

Love,

Dave

G-Mail Comments

Jennifer M (3-30): This is great. I didn't know about Katja's and your roles in the "rights" movements. Thinking back on the goals of the women's movement, Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachman are put in new light.

Newlyweds

Young Marrieds at River House [July, 1961]

Dear George,

Katja and I were married fifty years ago this past Saturday. It’s hard to imagine. We were 23 at the time and viewed ourselves as grownups. Now I think we were closer to being babies. I can’t imagine how we undertook this major life step, much less how we survived it.

We got married in Yellow Springs on Aug. 28, 1960, had a one night honeymoon in Dayton, and moved a week later to Ann Arbor where we were beginning grad school. We arrived in Ann Arbor with an ill-founded snobbism from our undergraduate experience. Antioch was like a cloistered island in southern Ohio, surrounded by conservative communities (e.g., Cincinnati) whose media constantly attacked the campus as a leftwing stronghold. Antiochians consequently developed a strong in-group identification and maintained a sense of superiority to the external world. I initially viewed Michigan as a big and probably mediocre public university, though I soon discovered that it was an astonishing place and that my view of the academic world was seriously distorted.

We rented a second-floor apartment on Brookwood St. near campus in a house owned by 80-year-old Mrs. Quackenbush. Mrs. Q had been renting to Michigan students for decades, and she was a fair and business-like landlady, if a bit old school. Our apartment was tiny, but it was our first home and we loved it. I had retrieved a tree stump with all its roots from the Menominee River earlier in the summer, and we bought a round piece of glass and made it into a coffee table. We made another table out of a wooden whiskey crate that we’d bought for a dollar at the local state liquor store. Katja bought a big rocking chair with lion’s head arms from the Salvation Army for $8, and we still have it in our living room, though sheepdog puppies did some chewing on its legs.

Grad school was serious business, and I applied myself day and night. Katja delayed her plans to begin M.A. studies in French, and, to help support us, she took a job as a clerk at Faber’s Fabrics which had stores in downtown Ann Arbor and at Arborland. Katja became immersed in her new job, took weekly sewing lessons, and began turning out homemade shirts for me and napkins and tablecloths for our household. Between my graduate stipend of $1,450 for the year, a small monthly allowance from my parents, and Katja’s weekly salary, we were able to eat and pay the rent. We went out for lunch once a month at the Pretzel Bell, a famous Ann Arbor college hangout, and enjoyed prime roast beef sandwiches and gravy.

One day I came home, and there was a fuzzy little ball of black fluff that turned out to be a German Shepherd puppy named Heather. Katja thought we needed a third party to be a real family. We loved the little dog, and our non-work lives soon centered around her. Then a tragedy occurred. We’d left her in the care of a friend, who tied her up in the back yard, and Heather scaled a wire fence, tumbled over, and strangled to death. We were in a state of grief for a long time. It was our first occasion for dealing with a traumatic event as a married couple. We’re still sad when we think about it.

Antioch had prohibited intercollegiate athletics , and we thought it weird to be at a Big Ten school. Students, however, received free tickets to the football games, so we went to the first game of the season at Michigan Stadium, along with 100,000 others. Katja, despite not knowing much about football, loved the pageantry of it all. The game was exciting, and the halftime Michigan Marching Band was even better. After that first outing we only missed one or two home games during our six years in Ann Arbor. We even went now and then to watch the marching band practices which were held in a field a couple of blocks from our apartment. One enduring byproduct was that we came to hate Ohio State with a passion.

Managing money was scary to me, so I was happy when Katja volunteered to take care of our finances. We opened our first checking account at the Ann Arbor bank. Looking at it in hindsight, Katja was remarkably systematic and frugal. We, of course, didn’t have much money to spare. Consequently she only wrote checks for the amount of each single purchase. $4.89 here, $12.50 there, and so on. We’d been in Ann Arbor for about six months when we stopped at the bank to cash a check, and the clerk at the window said that the branch manager wanted to talk to us. Puzzled, we went into his office. He explained that the bank’s board of directors had spent their entire February meeting discussing policy issues regarding our account. It turned out that we were averaging over thirty cashed checks a month, mostly for amounts under ten dollars, and the bank’s costs in processing our account were excessive. I can’t believe they were that excessive, but it apparently was a very serious matter for the bank. The manager explained how we could cash a check for more than an item’s purchase price, and then he gave us an ultimatum: either stop writing all these small checks or find another bank. Katja changed her check-writing practices. An impartial observer might say that that marked the end of frugality in our married life.

My parents came down to visit in the spring at the time of the Ann Arbor Art Fair. We all went together. Katja saw a painting that she fell in love with. I remember it as being very large and very colorful. The price tag was $700. Katja wanted it with all her being. In fact, she asked my parents if they would lend us the money. She said she couldn’t go on living without it, and I think she meant it. My mother, a fledgling mother-in-law at that time, was horrified. She told me privately that Katja’s unchecked desire for luxury didn’t bode well. I was a little nervous myself, but I told her how remarkably frugal Katja was. My mother wasn’t convinced. Little did I know.

The academic year came to an end. Katja was committed to traveling, and she chose the Seattle World’s Fair in Seattle as our first destination. She had saved a few dollars each week from her Faber’s Fabric paycheck, and so we had $200 (plus my father’s Standard Oil gasoline credit card) to cover a six-week trip to the West Coast. We set out from Menominee in July. I’ll have to tell you more about that another time, but I’ll just say for now that this was a momentous time in our lives.

Love,

Dave

G-Mail Comments

-Linda C (9-3): The bank story is just great. And your dog story is soooo sad I will call u soon. Great updates on the twins. What is too late to call?

-Vicki L (9-2): Dear David, Whenever I hear of your days in Ann Arbor, I wish we'd been there together for a longer period of time (it must only have been one year). I'll always think of Katja at Faber's. I knew nothing about going to football games - just think, you could've introduced me and my whole life might've turned out differently (eg. I may've become a cheerleader instead of a hippie). By the way, I refuse to believe the man in the picture is actually you - it's clearly Katja but as far as I'm concerned she's standing with a young Ralph Buscher. Love, Sis

-Donna D (9-1): david, this is great! can you make the picture bigger? it is awfully hard to see. but it could just be my eyes,,,,:) donna

-David to Donna (9-2): Hi Donna: I agree the pic would be better larger, but I was unable to do so. David

Dr. Swanson's Exciting Seminar (or: How I Lost My Wedding Ring)

           LSA (Lit, Science & Arts) Building, University of Michigan

Dear George,

My favorite professor in grad school was Guy Swanson.  He was the head of the Soc Department at Michigan and taught a core seminar in our social psychology program.  Swanson was extremely well-read, articulate to the point of being flowery, and readily able to span the gamut from macro-societal phenomena to the intricacies of everyday social interaction.  I wrote down everything he said in class and emulated his style of thinking as much as I could. 

 

Curiously my most memorable experiences in Dr. Swanson’s seminar didn’t have to do with academic content, but with other classroom happenings.  One of these occurred in late November 1963.  Swanson had just started discussing distinctions between Georg Simmel and Charles Horton Cooley when one of my classmates, Rich J., came into the room and announced that President Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas.  The class was stunned.  Dr. Swanson commented on what a terrible tragedy this was, paused for a few seconds, then analyzed the remarkable capacity of social institutions to maintain equilibrium in the face of catastrophe, and finally returned to his comparison of Simmel and Cooley.  The students just sat there in silence.  Finally Dave B., one of the more mature members of my cohort, politely expressed to Dr. Swanson that he didn’t think that class members were able to go on.  Reluctantly, Swanson conceded.  I ran to a pay phone and called Katja who was working at her part-time sales job at Faber’s Fabrics.  Katja had already gotten the news and she was crying uncontrollably over the phone.  We didn’t recover for a long time.

 

A few weeks later Dr. Swanson had moved on to Talcott Parsons and the critique of structural functionalism.  The room was stuffy, and because I was seated at the end of the table, he asked me to open the window.  I did so, but after a while it got too chilly, and he asked me to close it.  The window didn’t come down easily, so I stood up on the windowsill and applied more force.  As the window started coming down I jumped off the sill.  My wedding ring, however, got caught on the window latch, and, as my body dropped to the floor, my hand stayed caught on the latch.  The ring stripped away a big chunk of flesh from my finger, and only then did my hand come free.  Blood started pouring out all over my clothes and the floor.  Swanson sent a class member to the department office to notify his secretary to call for medical help.  The secretary did so and came back to the classroom with a vial of smelling salts which they kept in the department office for just such occasions.  I was in a state of shock.  The main thing running through my mind was that, since I would no longer be able to type with my left hand, my scholarly career was all but over.  Soon the ambulance arrived, and the paramedics carted me off to the emergency room at the U. of M. Medical Center.

 

The medics stopped my finger from bleeding.  Then the task was to get my wedding ring off so they could patch up the injury.  Because there was a lot of stripped off flesh in front of the ring, they couldn’t pull the ring off my finger.  One of the residents started using a small metal file to cut through the ring.  Thirty minutes later he hadn’t even made a dent.  After some brainstorming, the staff transported me to dental surgery.  There a doctor cut through my ring in no time at all with a diamond drill, bent the ring open, and pulled it off.  I was taken in a wheelchair back to the emergency room, where they sewed me up.  Thankfully the tear, though it nearly circled my finger, was a flesh wound, and none of the muscles had been severed.  The doctor told me that they dealt with this sort of injury nearly every day, nearly always with men who’d been wearing their wedding rings while doing manual labor.  I was their first case from a classroom seminar.

 

I took my severed wedding ring home, and Katja said she would buy me a new one.  I just shook my head.  I explained to Katja what the doctor said and that I wasn’t going to be wearing a wedding ring or any other sort of ring ever again.  She was disappointed about that, but I think she eventually came to terms with it.  I still have the scar which encircles my ring finger.  Just looking at it is unpleasant.  Swanson, though, remains my favorite professor.

 

Love,

Dave

Banana Reveries

Dear George,

I see in the paper that the number of people in their late 50’s who smoke marijuana has gone up 350% since 2002.  That’s because those aging baby boomers are returning to habits they developed in their youth.  Katja and I, a decade older, basically missed out on the whole counterculture drug revolution.  When we graduated from Antioch College in 1960, I don’t think a single student on campus had ever tried marijuana.  There simply was no system of distribution on college campuses at that pristine time.  A few years later, Antioch had become the drug capital of southwestern Ohio, but we had already moved on to the serious grind of graduate school in Ann Arbor.  We kept reading in the local newspaper about marijuana arrests of  Michigan undergrads, but we didn’t know anybody in town who had tried pot, and, while curious about these new mind-altering substances, we lacked the connections to do anything about it.  Then one day I saw a story in the Ann Arbor News which reported that one could get high by smoking banana peels.  That was interesting.  Maybe this was our chance to experiment with drugs.   The reporter even  gave instructions.  I showed it to Katja, but the notion had no appeal to her at all.  I pointed out that smoking bananas was perfectly legal, as well as relatively cheap, and I proposed that we try it.  Katja raised her eyebrows and made a funny face, but she did drive over with me to the supermarket on Packard St.  As I paid for my purchase of 17 bananas, I asked the cashier if they’d been selling a lot.  She said they actually had, though she didn’t know why.  I smiled knowingly.  Then we stopped at the Blue Front magazine store at the corner of Packard and State where I purchased some Zig Zag cigarette papers.  I felt self-conscious doing this since there was only one obvious reason for such a  purchase.  I looked around carefully for NARCs before I asked the clerk for the item.

 

Back home, I checked the recipe again.  It said you only use the peel of the banana and throw away the fruit itself.  As virtually penniless grad students, three bunches of bananas did cost something, so I ate the seventeen bananas for my lunch.  Seventeen is quite a few – you should try it some time.  Then I scraped the stringy fleshy part off the inside of the banana peel, threw it away, put the cleaned out peels on a pizza tray in the oven, and cooked them on low heat for two hours.  Finally I crumbled up the dried out peels into tiny pieces and rolled a bunch of cigarettes.  Despite her reluctance, I got Katja to share the first one with me.  She’d been smoking Black Russian cigarettes with her friend Murielle, but she’d never really learned how to inhale, and the banana peel cigarette made her choke.  She exclaimed that it tasted awful.  I smoked the rest of the cigarettes, drawing the smoke deep into my lungs.  They did taste pretty bad.  I was already feeling sick from eating seventeen bananas, and smoking the peels only made me sicker.  I didn’t know exactly how to tell if I were high, but I was pretty sure that this was not it.  After an hour of unsuccessful effort, I went to bed and stayed there for the rest of the day

 

Later, disgusted with the experiment and our waste of money, I re-read the newspaper blurb.  I was shocked to find out that I’d made a big mistake in preparing the banana peels.  The article said to scrape the innards off the peels, throw the peels away, and bake the innards.  Instead I’d thrown the innards away and baked the peels.  I’d done the whole thing backwards!  That’s why I didn’t get high, I thought to myself.  I considered starting over again, but Katja was discouraging, and I didn’t want to spend the money for more bananas.  I finally concluded we’d had our shot, and destiny had decided that we weren’t ready for a radical life style change.  That was the end of our venture into hallucinogenic drugs.

 

Now it’s 45 years later.  Out of curiosity, I did a Google search on “smoking banana peels,” not knowing whether there would be any historical trace of this brief fad or not.  Much to my surprise, I got 106,000 hits.  I didn’t read all of them because the first ten explained that smoking banana peels was a hoax perpetrated on naïve and gullible youth in the 1960’s and 70’s.  If kids had had any experience of getting high, the Internet accounts said, it was probably due to indigestion from eating a lot of bananas.  That made me feel better.  I was relieved to learn that it didn’t matter whether I had smoked the dried out banana peels or their innards.  I guess I’d had an authentic banana high experience after all.

 

Love,

Dave 

G-Mail Comments:

-Amy R (3-15): This is so great.

-Linda C (3-15): dave, I love this story, however ruth and susan and I did not miss that age and would/could have a lot of explaining to do, which unfortunately I told all under a light anesthetic to my colonoscopy doctor. (and later the colonoscopy doc had a lawsuit against him which I dismissed immediately).

-JML (3-13): great story dad. I seem to remember some elements of this story from my youth but not the whole deal.  a follow up story that i'd like to see might include some of your tennis playing adventures with george.  again, I remember some elements of that but not the whole deal. great blog today. thanks, j**