When the Soviet Union put an end to Czechoslovakia's "experiment" with democracy ("The Prague Spring") late in the summer of 1968, it hit close to home because my maternal grandmother was from Slovakia, the eastern region of Czechoslovakia. She came to the U.S. in August of 1920 shortly after the independent nation of Czechoslovakia was created out of the dismantled Austro-Hungarian empire. By coincidence the day the Soviet army rolled into Prague occurred the day before her 69th birthday on Aug 22.
I heard this dispiriting news during the afternoon as I was lazily lying on the living room floor reading the comics in the Pittsburgh Press and waiting for my dad to come home from work (around 4:30). A TV news bulletin came on reporting what was happening in Czechoslovakia. Although I was just 11 at the time I knew that restricting one's freedom wasn't a good thing (e.g., like not being allowed to watch TV or go outside to play) so I understood the seriousness of the situation there. Mom called grandma to tell her the news. It was yet another week of turmoil that was par for the course in turbulent 1968. And the Democratic convention in Chicago, which would be held next week, would be the icing on the cake.
The acclaimed novel, Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, uses the Prague Spring as the backdrop for the intertwined and tempestuous relationships of two couples. It was published in 1984 and was later made into a movie in 1988 starring Daniel Day Lewis and Juliette Binoche.
(By the way, my grandmother lived to see Czechoslovakia divided into two independent nations in 1993 when she was 93.)
The morning of Apollo 11's lift-off on Wednesday, July 16, 1969 was bright and sunny in Pittsburgh. My dad was on vacation that week and we went for haircuts in the morning and were back in time to see the rocket blast-off from Cape Kennedy at around 9:30. By contrast, the weather on the day of the Moon landing four days later, a Sunday, was overcast and a bit showery.
It seemed that life was put on hold as most everyone was following the TV coverage of the lunar module's approach to the surface of the Moon. (And since this was in the days before cable TV there was no counter-programming to switch to.) The afternoon's baseball games kept fans apprised of the mission's progress. I alternated my time between playing kickball out on the street and sitting in the living room sorting through my baseball card collection while listening for updates. The anticipation was unlike any I had ever experienced - perhaps with the exception of waiting for the arrival of Santa Claus.
The lunar module settled on the Moon’s surface late in the afternoon at 4:17 ("Houston, the Eagle has landed"). Finally, at around 11PM, we watched the fuzzy black/white TV transmission as Neil Armstrong descended the Eagle's ladder and took his, and mankind's, first step on the moon. A short time later he was joined by fellow astronaut Buzz Aldrin (the quintessential astronaut name) and together they planted the American flag into the lunar soil (further immortalized by an MTV promo 12 years later). It looked like they were having fun as they sort of skipped and bounced around due to the Moon's lack of gravity. This was a truly an awe-inspiring occasion that was a bit difficult for my 12-year-old brain to fully grasp.
Many years later (in 2003) while vacationing in Iceland our tour bus drove through the barren central part of the island and my friend Tom and I remarked how it could pass for a moonscape. Then our tour guide told us that, in fact, NASA had trained there for some of its Moon missions because of the similarity in landscape.
Because of its inland location Pittsburgh isn't susceptible to the furies of a full-blown hurricane (and its hilly topography largely protects it from tornadoes.) However, the city's famed three rivers (Allegheny, Monongahela and Ohio) make it susceptible to flooding. Fortunately, the neighborhood I grew up in sat protected on a bluff overlooking the Ohio River about 10 miles down river from Pittsburgh's renowned Golden Triangle.
Hurricane Agnes was a rare June hurricane, but when it crossed the Florida panhandle on June 19, 1972 it was a weak storm that caused little damage. However, once it was downgraded to a tropical storm it turned into a prodigious rainmaker as it moved up the Eastern Seaboard. The storm became known for the loop it made over New York state and Pennsylvania where it stalled and caused catastrophic flooding that extended into Maryland and Virginia as well.
Although our neighborhood was out of harm's way from flooding my family was nevertheless impacted by the storm. My dad was a foreman at a steel fabricating plant on Neville Island, situated in the middle of the Ohio River, and it closed that Friday (June 23) when water began covering the main highway.
Meanwhile my sister Linda's job at Joseph Horne department store, where she was an assistant buyer, was interrupted for a few days when the waters of the Allegheny River overran its banks. To protect the store special floodgates were wrapped around the building. Linda's plans to see Alice Cooper in concert at Three Rivers Stadium on Friday were scuttled when the waters of the three rivers made their way into the stadium. And my brother Darrell, who was home from college after his freshman year had a summer job as an usher at the Roxian Theater in our hometown of McKees Rocks and helped bail water from the theater.
Although rainfall in Pittsburgh itself wasn't excessive (2.50" fell on Thursday and Friday) the watershed areas for its rivers and creeks received over six inches and caused the city's most serious flooding since 1936 (e.g., the Monongahela River crested 11-feet above flood stage). However, flooding in Wilkes-Barre (below), the state capitol of Harrisburg and Elmira, NY was much more destructive. These areas had in excess of 10 inches of rain. And despite the fact that summer had just begun temperatures in Pittsburgh got no higher than the mid-50s for three consecutive days (25 degrees cooler than normal).
Fortunately the hurricane season of 1972 was one of the least active on record which allowed the Mid-Atlantic to dry out. The U.S. mainland wouldn't be ravaged by such a destructive hurricane until 1983 when Alicia hit Houston. (For those fascinated by hurricanes a book to consider is Hurricanes & the Mid-Atlantic States.)
The June 19, 1953 execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, who were members of the Communist party convicted of passing plans about the A-bomb to the Russians, coincided with a milestone for my parents - the purchase of their first home. At the time my sister Linda was 2-1/2 years old and my mother was a month away from giving birth to my brother Darrell. Mom and Dad were understandably anxious to move because they wanted to be settled in by the time my brother arrived.
The new house on Roosevelt Ave. was in McKees Rocks, seven miles northwest of downtown Pittsburgh and overlooking the Ohio River. It was part of a new development, Hanover Heights, that was very near to the small farm where my father grew up. Ours was one of the first homes completed and after a string of delays our fledgling family moved in on June 30. My brother was born a few weeks later and I came along four years after him. And it's where my mother still lives (as of June 2020).
The early 1950s was rife with paranoia about Russia's plans to overtake the U.S. Thus, the Rosenberg's actions were portrayed as having seriously comprised the nation's security. Still, as a young mother, Mom felt some uneasiness over their execution since they had two young sons, Michael and Robert (pictured below), who were orphaned. The execution of their parents in the electric chair took place at Sing-Sing prison in New York State.
South Africa's selection as host of soccer's 2010 World Cup was a great honor since it was once a pariah state for repressing its black population. Back in mid-June 1976 the world's attention turned to the all-black township of Soweto after police violently repressed a student protest there. The protest was in reaction to a law requiring schools to provide instruction in the Afrikaans language, the tongue of the minority white population (which enforced the legalized separation of the races known as apartheid). Violent altercations with police resulted in hundreds of deaths and the incarceration of thousands.
I read about the uprising in the morning paper, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, as I drove with my parents and sister to my cousin Karen's wedding in York, PA. We left on Friday, June 19. Driving east from Pittsburgh, the trip of 175 miles took about four hours. My brother Darrell drove in from northern New Jersey and provided music during the ceremony, playing a number of trumpet solos. Rather than the traditional Wedding March he played Trumpet Voluntary by Henry Purcell and Processional & Recessional by Eugene Hemmer.
It's painful for me to admit, but I wore a get-up that was more appropriate for Soul Train than a family wedding, i.e., a wide collared, bold brown and white patterned qiana shirt and platform shoes that made me tower over everyone. (And the platform part of the shoes was made out of rattan.) Looking back I don't know what was I thinking but I also wonder why my parents or sister didn't say anything? In my defense it was the 70's and I was 19.
The Soweto uprising was a turning point for South Africa's black population as the world's press remained focused on the struggle there. This attention ultimately led to boycotts and ostracism by the world community. Still, it wouldn't be until the early 1990's before the apartheid regime was finally dismantled. In June 1990 long imprisoned freedom fighter Nelson Mandela and his wife Winnie were honored with a ticker-tape parade in lower Manhattan celebrating his release from prison earlier in the year. (Hollywood embraced this hard fought and inspirational struggle with a number of acclaimed films including Cry Freedom, Sarafina! and A Dry White Season.)
BONUS. Here is a vintage music video of the 1984 protest song Sun City by Artists United Against Apartheid (featuring artists such as Bruce Springsteen, Hall & Oates and Pat Benatar) that called for performers to boycott South Africa's Sun City entertainment complex because of its whites-only admissions policy. Parts of the video were filmed in New York's Washington Square Park.
The residents of McKees Rocks, the factory town I grew up in just outside of Pittsburgh, were a mix of Poles, Slovaks, Italians and Germans, and predominately Roman Catholic. Jews were few and far between. However, the Six-Day War in the Middle East in June 1967 struck a chord with my family because my teenage sister, Linda, had an Israeli pen pal. Her name was Meirah; she lived in a village somewhere between Haifa and Tel Aviv and was a soldier in the Israeli army. When war broke out it put a human face on the conflict for us.
I was 10 at the time and the idea of female soldiers was a novel concept (as it probably was for most of pre-feminist America). Linda developed a crush on Israeli general, and war hero, Moshe Dayan (and also took a liking to a Jewish classmate of hers, Sanford, who was valedictorian of her 1968 senior class). Because of the ties my sister had with Meirah I developed a strong affinity for Israel. (20 years later I'd have an Israeli boyfriend who drove a tank in the 1973 Yom Kippur War.)
In the eyes of this 10-year old the conflict seemed fairly black and white: Egypt, Syria and Jordan planned to attack Israel which struck first, prevailed and gained new territory - which its enemies then demanded back. Even a child on the playground would find this demand laughable.
Israeli soldiers in Jerusalem
Also on the minds of my family at this time was the well-being of my Aunt Lillian who had been hospitalized. Shortly after the war ended she died suddenly on June 13 - the first time I experienced the death of a relative. On that sweltering day my parents picked me up from school at lunchtime and once home told me the news of her death. It was a shock since she was set to be released from the hospital the next day. She was only in her mid-50s at the time of her death.
Linda and Meirah exchanged 25 letters over a three-year period (thru the end of 1969) and she has all of them as well as souvenirs and small gifts she received. I've wondered how much she could get on Ebay for the special commemorative edition of the magazine Bamahane, a Hebrew-language weekly of the Israeli Defense Force that Meirah sent her after the war concluded.
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis died the night of May 19, 1994 at her Manhattan apartment. Cause of death was non-Hodgkins lymphoma, which had been made public a few months earlier. Her death came one month after the death of former president Richard Nixon (who JFK defeated for president in 1960). She was a great lady who was especially revered in New York because of her love of architectural preservation. Jackie's death is particularly memorable for me because it coincided with the death of my father.
Dad suffered from a rare degenerative disease of the brain known as progressivesupranuclear palsy (PSP) for about 10 years - the same condition actor Dudley Moore suffered from. On Mother's Day on 1994 he was hospitalized for a mild heart attack and two weeks later I visited him and my mother for the weekend. (Up until this hospital stay my mother had taken care of my father at home.)
I heard the news about Jackie's death (at the age of 64) during the 11:00 news while packing for my trip and I read more about it the next morning in the New York Times while waiting to board my flight to Pittsburgh at Newark Airport. On the last day of my visit Mom, Dad and I watched some of her funeral from Dad's hospital room. (It was a sunny and hot day in New York.) The next day, May 24, Dad died unexpectedly, two months shy of his 70th birthday. I returned to Pittsburgh the following day to help my brother, sister and mother with funeral preparations.
Ours was one of the first families in the neighborhood to own a color TV. It was a Magnavox, delivered at the beginning of April 1968. On Thursday, April 4, I had just come in from playing in the backyard, where I'd been having fun rolling around inside the TV's shipping box. (I was 10 years old at the time.) When evening came, I went inside and lay on the living room floor eager to watch The Flying Nun in living color for the first time. However, shortly after it came on a news bulletin interrupted to report that civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. had been shot and killed while standing on the balcony of his motel room in Memphis. He was just 39 years old.
The next day, looking from our side porch, we could see smoke rising in the distance (about 10 miles away). It was from fires set during rioting in a predominantly black neighborhood in Pittsburgh known as the Hill District. The biggest fire came from a supermarket there that had been torched. (Riots had broken out across the country as a result of MLK's assassination.) Since we lived in a predominantly white community I didn't realize Pittsburgh had many black residents, at least not enough to have their own neighborhood.
Tuesday, April 9, was King's funeral in Atlanta and schools were closed because of concerns that there might be trouble. I didn't watch the funeral but occasionally would catch a glimpse of the funeral procession on TV when I'd walk through the living room. For the most part I spent the day outside playing because the weather was nice and warm. This was my first exposure to the tumult of 1968 that was just getting underway.
(There are countless books and videos about the accomplishments of and controversies surrounding King, including an autobiography, the 1978 NBC mini-series King and the acclaimed PBS documentary from 2004 Citizen King.)
I graduated from Penn State University on March 3, 1979 but the occasion wasn't tied to any momentous historical event. Rather, my commencement took place at the height of the disco-dancing frenzy sweeping the nation. At the time it seemed that Top-40 radio was playing nothing but wall-to-wall disco, e.g., hits such as YMCA; I Will Survive; Shake Your Groove Thing; Le Freak; and Do Ya Think I'm Sexy, to name just a few. The Village People (whose first LP I bought in the spring of 1978) even appeared on the the cover of Rolling Stonemagazine.
After a celebratory lunch in State College with my parents, brother and sister, rather than return home to Pittsburgh I went east with my brother to his apartment in Bayonne, NJ. (It would serve as my home base while I went on job interviews in Manhattan for a position in advertising.) As we drove he played a cassette he had made from the wildly popular New York disco station WKTU. As I caught a glimpse of the Manhattan skyline at sunset Sister Sledge's song He's the Greatest Dancer came on the air.
Four months later a backlash to disco music began, largely a reaction by listeners with more rock-oriented musical tastes (and who helped make My Sharona a big hit later that summer). It was epitomized by "Disco Demolition Night" at Chicago's Comiskey Park on July 12 when a riot ensued after thousands of disco records were blown up as part of a radio station promotion (between games of a doubleheader). However, gay, black and Latin audiences, who first embraced disco music in underground clubs in the early 1970s, would continue to do so for years to come as it evolved into hybrids such as Eurodisco, hi-NRG and electronica.
Although viewing choices in the primitive 1960's were limited to just three broadcast networks they produced an abundance of programs to choose from when reminiscing about favorites. And what I remember best about some shows isn't necessarily individual episodes but, rather, peripheral aspects - which I've written about below.
I'd be getting ready for bed when the Andy Griffith Show aired on Monday evenings. Funny, but what I associate most with the show is a commercial for Maxwell House coffee that seemed to air every episode. It showed coffee starting to perk in the little window atop the coffee pot and a catchy jingle derived from the sound of the rhythmic perking would begin to play.
The Pruitts of Southamption was a way-wacky, and short-lived, sitcom that aired on ABC during the 1966-67 season starring Phyllis Diller. It's seared into my brain because of its surreal, so-bad-it's good opening. Interestingly, 20 years later my friend Marina moved to Southampton and opened a bed and breakfast there that I'd visit regularly.
Petticoat Junction was a CBS sitcom that aired on Tuesday evenings, coming on just as my mother was leaving for her bowling league. During the show's opening credits I was fascinated by the big water tank in which the three daughters were either swimming or bathing in. I always wondered how deep the water was - and whether the girls were skinny dipping.
The Addams Family and Patty Duke Show aired on Friday nights on ABC and when they were over I'd take a drive with my parents into downtown Pittsburgh to drop-off a stack of weekly football contests at the Pittsburgh Press/Post-Gazette building.
Although I was only 7 or 8 I had a pre-conceived notion that Brooklyn wasn't a great place to live so I was intrigued that Patty Lane's family lived in Brooklyn Heights - which seemed like a very nice place. Both shows had classic theme songs, and one of my all-time favorite lines is Patty Duke's - "A hot dog makes her lose control". I don't know what it says about my family but we preferred The Addams Family over The Munsters.
The Mod Squad was another show with a great opening. I was winded by the time Pete, Peggy and Link completed their run through that dark & dank tunnel. Even 40+ years later the theme song doesn't seem dated - and it can be great for inspiring a sprint when you're on the treadmill!
When thinking of the CBS sitcom Family Affair many think of Anissa Jones, the child actress who played Buffy and who died from a drug overdose as a teenager in the mid-70s, but I first think of the twinkling crystal chandelier from the opening credits. And even though I was just 10 years old I was curious about the relationship between Uncle Bill and Mr. French (his "gentleman's gentleman"), especially when he'd draw his bath.
I was never a fan of the Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres or Gilligan's Island - perhaps because they were a bit too zany or ironic for my prepubescent brain. However, I did love the opening of Green Acres. Intererstingly, when I'd occasionally catch a repeat of the show as an adult I appreciated Arnold the pig. Another show I wasn't too keen on was the Brady Bunch. However, I really got a kick out of the two movies from the 1990's that spoofed the show.
A long-forgotten show from the late 60's - Here Come the Brides - had a catchy easy-listening theme song which made it onto Billboard's top 40. This one-hour show wasn't quite a Western or a sitcom although it had elements of both. Set in the Pacific Northwest in the 1860's it told the story of a lumber mill owner who brought marriageable women from Massachusetts to serve as potential brides for the lumberjacks. It introduced Bobby Sherman and David Soul before they became pop idols. Also featured was 1930's actress Joan Blondell as Lottie, the owner of the local saloon who also watched over the girls (unbeknownst to benighted viewers she was probably a "madam".).
Finally, Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In was a jolt of electricity and watching it Monday night was a great way to start the week. I loved the Farkles and all of Lily Tomlin's characters (e.g. Ernestine, Edith Ann, the Terribly Sophisticated Lady) and I got a kick impersonating some of the characters in front of schoolmates. Besides the regular cast the show also featured a cavalcade of stars who'd make cameos throughout each show (e.g. John Wayne, Sammy Davis, Jr., Raquel Welch). Its over-caffeinated pace was a pre-cursor to the MTV era.