Fathers and Sons
Lawrence Wright's In the New World: Growing Up With America from the Sixties to the Eighties is about father-son relationships, so I thought I’d introduce today’s book review by saying something about mine. Carl Gresham Mitchell was born in 1910 in a small town in eastern Oklahoma, hard by the Arkansas border. The first 35 years of his life were pretty hard. His father died of tuberculosis about the time my father started school. World War I and the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918-1919 rounded out his teen years, and he had to leave high school early to help my grandmother operate the general store she’d opened in Pratt, Kansas. After a few relatively placid years, the Great Depression started, and Kansas turned into the Dust Bowl.
My father moved to the big city, Wichita, Kansas, in the second half of the 1930s, where he found work at one of the aircraft factories that sprang up there –Beech Aircraft, which is now part of the Raytheon empire. He was a shy man, but he made one good friend, a man named Dayton Cline. And Dayton had a sister. Golda Cline married my father in 1940, and things were looking up for a while. But then came the “day that will live in infamy,” and World War II.
My mother’s two youngest brothers, Dayton and Roy, enlisted in the Marines. My father, who was 32, wanted to start a family, but as the song says, his number came up and he was caught in the draft. Luckily for the as yet unborn me, my father’s skill at putting airplanes together landed him in the Army Air Force. In due course he was sent to the Pacific Theater, but he was always in a secure area, one island away from the fighting. He spent three years in the Pacific, out of harm’s way, keeping the planes flying. New Zealand, Australia, New Guinea (the only place he ever talked about wanting to see again), and finally Okinawa, where he was on V-J Day.
Meanwhile, my future uncles were also ticketed for the South Pacific, where, as Marines, they were actively involved in combat operations. My mother was a nurse, and she missed her husband and brothers. She decided to enlist in the Women’s Army Corps, assuming she’d be sent to the Pacific Theater herself, where she’d be sure to run into her family members.
Alas, my mother’s hazy knowledge of geography was matched only by her naiveté about military priorities for nurses. She was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant and shipped off to Europe, where she was separated not only from my father, but also from the rest of her family in Kansas. Fortunately, my mother was a cheerful person, and mustered out of the army with mostly fond memories of her time in England, Denmark, and France. Long story short, they both returned safely to Kansas and had me. But I digress. This essay was supposed to be about my father.
Carl G., as he called himself, went back to work at Beech Aircraft, and stayed for 30 more years until he retired at 65. He worked hard at his blue collar job. He went to church every Sunday and tithed 10% of his income, to the penny. The poverty of his pre-war life left its mark on him, and he was loath to spend money. He’d drive all the way across town to save a penny a gallon on gas, even in the days when gasoline often sold for less than twenty cents a gallon.
He was a good man by anyone’s calculation, sober, faithful, with no vices to speak of. He was a smoker, as were most men and a lot of women of his generation, but he gave it up, cold turkey, on February 18, 1959. He wrote that date down on an unfinished pack of cigarettes, which he kept in the freezer of our refrigerator for years. He was really shy, and his social life consisted of spending Saturdays with his mother and sister, and Sunday’s with my mother’s larger family at her parent’s house. He got along fine with my mom’s side of the family.
He had a kind of uncommon hobby - raising chickens in our basement and suburban back yard – but you could do that in Wichita in the 1950s. It was a little odd, but not weird. My father shunned eccentricity. He wanted to blend in, so as not to have to interact too much with strangers.
But avoiding eccentricity, too, was part and parcel of the times. Having made it through nearly two decades of crisis, the only thing my father’s generation wanted was a little peace and quiet. Go to work, come home, watch a few sitcoms and westerns on TV, and go to bed. Keep doing that until you reach retirement age, which at that time was a mandatory 65. If someone asked my father how he was doing, he’d say “Fine,” or “Can’t complain.” Not complaining was important. “Keep calm and carry on” was a British slogan, but it described my father’s attitude to a T.
Naturally, I turned out to be almost nothing like my father, at least superficially. In my teens and twenties, we butted heads often. Nothing awful happened, but we were baffled by each other. He expected me to be like him – to enjoy working with my hands, to get a job on one of the local aircraft assembly lines as soon as I got out of high school, to save my money, find a good woman and settle down.
I had other ideas. I hated physical effort of any kind, be it shop class or gym class or mowing the lawn. I wanted to read. I liked school and wanted to stay there as long as possible. I was increasingly suspicious of religion and authority. The times they were a-changin’.
And that brings me to Lawrence Wright, and his 1987 book, In the New World: Growing Up with America from the Sixties to the Eighties. Wright is my age, though our early circumstances were pretty different. He was a banker’s son, came of age in the epicenter of 60s ultra-conservatism, Dallas. He went to college in decidedly non-conservative New Orleans, embarked upon a career in journalism, wrote best sellers, and won a Pulitzer Prize.
Like me, he had his share of disagreements with his father. In analyzing the friction between the two of them, Wright made a very astute observation. It was obvious in retrospect, but it never registered with me until Wright spelled it out.
Let’s say you have two men. “John Smith” grew up in a small town where horses outnumbered cars. His father died young, and before he turned twenty, the economy crashed, and stayed crashed for over a decade. He had to drop out of school to help his family make ends meet. As a twenty-something, he felt lucky to have found a stable blue collar job.
“Bill Johnson,” on the other hand, was born decades later. He grew up with both parents in the home. He lived in a medium sized city, at a time when the national economy was booming, and white collar jobs were increasingly available to anyone with a college education. He wanted to go to college, and when he got there, he liked it. He stayed in college long enough to acquire a couple of master’s degrees, and didn’t get a “real” job until he was nearly 30.
As Wright noted, given their divergent backgrounds, no reasonable person would expect John Smith and Bill Johnson to live similar lives. But change the names and make those two men father and son, and the whole dynamic shifts. There’s an expectation of continuity. Like father, like son. Chip off the old block. And if the sons have different ideas, feelings can get hurt.
Ironically, as we both came to realize as the years passed, my father and I had a lot in common. I “inherited” his shyness, though not to the same degree. And I also picked up one of this other quirks. He was a stickler for punctuality. If he wasn’t at least fifteen minutes early to wherever we were going, he felt like we were late. We spent a lot of time sitting in the car waiting for a store to open, because we’d arrived way early. I’m not quite that compulsive, but I appreciate punctuality and tend to define “on time” as “early.”
Try as he might, though, my father was never able to instill frugality in me. John Lennon’s Aunt Mimi famously said, “A guitar’s all right, John, but you’ll never earn your living by it.” She was wrong, but her advice wasn’t foolish, and her heart was in the right place. Lennon was a classic example of a high risk-high reward lifestyle choice. No responsible adult would encourage a child to forgo his education and bet his future on becoming the next Elvis.
I didn’t become the next Elvis or John Lennon, but for a daydreamer who just wanted to read books, I did pretty well. I wound up becoming a librarian, and I earned a good living in the bargain. I’m glad my father lived long enough to see that happen, and to appreciate the path I chose.
I haven’t said a whole lot about Wright’s book, so let me remedy that briefly. If you’re old enough to remember the Kennedy assassination (the first one), you’ll be fascinated by Wright’s account of growing up in Dallas in the early 60s. Contemporary news accounts reported that when word of the assassination reached the Dallas high schools, the students cheered. Wright acknowledges having been one of those kids, and explains the blinkered thinking that led him to celebrate, however briefly, the death of a president. He also writes engagingly about walking away from his conservative upbringing once he was exposed to college life in the Big Easy.
Wright ends his book with an account of the attempted assassination of President Reagan in 1981 by Dallas resident John Hinckley Jr. Hinckley turned out to be eerily similar to the right wing crazies operating in Dallas in 1963 – precisely the sort of person that everyone initially assumed had shot Kennedy, until it turned out to have been a left wing crazy instead. A left wing crazy shot a Democrat president, and a right wing crazy shot a Republican president. What a country we live in!
I'm not likely to get around to writing an autobiography, apart from a few stories I may tell on this blog, but Lawrence Wright's In the New World will give you a pretty good macro level view of my story.