17.
I graduated from high school in June of 1963. That summer I worked for Bostwick’s, a men’s store in Janesville. This was the first of a series of summer jobs that helped pay my way through college.
I secretly believed that good clothes would somehow give me a new family. They would help me escape the haunting of my family. I’d have a sane father with a better car than an old Ford with iron surveying stakes in the trunk and rubber bands on the shift column, and a mother who didn’t spend the day in her faded housecoat drinking coffee and discussing how the family fortune had been lost.
“What a man needs,” Bill Bostwick, one of the store owners, always said, “is a new Botany 500 suit and a set of matched Samsonite luggage. Those items, along with a half Windsor knot beneath the collar of a new Arrow shirt, will take you to the highest promontories of life.”
In August of 1963, when I left for little Cornell College in Iowa, I followed Bill’s advice pretty closely. I had that brandnew Botany 500 suit (just like one that Dick Van Dyke wore on his TV show), some Arrow shirts, and a matched pair of Samsonite Ultralite suitcases in Colorado Brown my aunt and uncle gave me. I borrowed a device that made hard plastic label tapes with raised lettering, so my Norelco electric razor was clearly identified as belonging to “Ryan.”
“Let me get this straight,” my friend Tom Bamberger says. “You graduated from high school in 1963, and you were putting your name on your electric razor because you were worried that someone would steal it?”
“And my alarm clock—oh, and my clothes brush, too. I even put labels on these wooden hangers I had. They had these clamps to hold your pants.”
“You had wooden hangers in the fall of 1963? You had a clothes brush?”
“For my Botany 500 suit.”
“What’s wrong with you? The sixties were just getting started in 1963, and you were worried about creases in your suit. Bob Dylan is writing ‘Blowing in the Wind,’ and you’re suiting up with The Four Freshmen.”
Look, Tom: I thought I was keeping up with the times. I thought we were pretty hip there in Mount Vernon, Iowa.
When John Kennedy was assassinated in the fall of my freshman year, I was sitting in my dorm room reading aloud from “The Fable of the Final Hour” by Dan Propper. I thought this was a pretty hip moment.
Of course “The Fable of the Final Hour” hasn’t completely stood the test of time. I mean, how many times have you pulled this poem off the shelf in the last few years? How many times has anyone you know read this poem? Have you, in fact, ever heard of this poem? With its slightly offbeat spacing and incantatory rhythms, it seemed a piece of early 1960s hip. Now, though, the poem seems almost as earnest as the era it wanted to enlighten.
In the 37th minute of the final hour a Bop version of the Star-Spangled Banner was proclaimed official arrangement of the United States Marines
As I read to my bored roommates from “The Fable of the Final Hour” that chilly November afternoon, I began to feel pretty hip myself, with the syncopated flow of those anapests running along:
In the 51st minute of the final hour Texas was declared Incapable and assigned a guardian
This was the exact sentence I was reading the afternoon of November 22nd, 1963, when Freddie Sarnack came running into the room.
“The president,” he said, out of breath, trying to get enough wind for a full sentence. “The president . . . the president has been shot.”
This is probably the one and only moment in my life when I was somehow completely in tune with the subterranean, homesick blues of my time.
“I think you’re kidding yourself, Rick,” Tom Bamberger tells me. “That isn’t a real sixties story. Real sixties stories involve pot or sex or war protests—not reading bad poetry. Did you ever have to wash the smell of tear gas out of your clothes?”
“I was close. There were war protests in Madison. I grew up only forty miles away in Janesville. I visited a lot.”
“You visited the sixties,” Bamberger tells me. “That’s funny.”
Oh—and there was the time I was almost a civil rights protester.