A while back, I posted about a near-miss automotive mishap that occurred several years ago, while our family was on its way to Florida. We've actually traveled to Florida for spring break twice. The first time was in 1989, after I’d re-established contact with my ‘first mother’. At the time, we only had three kids – 3M was a year old at the time, 2F was almost four, and 1F was almost seven. My aunt (my dad’s sister) was living in Sarasota at the time, and gave us a standing invitation to come down and stay with her at her place, and so we did.
It was the first time I had ever been south of the Ohio River (Molly had been to Florida once in college), and we generally soaked up the whole ‘heading south’ experience. Leaving Michigan with snow on the ground, and watching leaves appear on the trees and the grass get greener, the further south we went (and just seeing things like the red dirt in Georgia, for the first time). By the time we crossed the state line into Florida, it was 85º and the sun was shining, and we just felt like we were somehow cheating the system in a major way. We stopped at the ‘Welcome Station’ just across the Florida line, and 2F ran over and spontaneously hugged a palm tree. . .
We arrived at my aunt’s house, and she did a wonderful job of playing the gracious hostess and local tour guide. We drove over to Disney World (for which I’m sure I paid way too much for five of us to spend most of the day standing in line, but my kids wouldn’t have let me leave the state without going there), took in a Tigers spring training game, and consumed all the fresh-squeezed orange juice we could get our hands on (since then, frozen/canned OJ has just never been the same).
Two events stand out in my memory. First, was the initial face-to-face meeting with my ‘first mother’, for the first time in over 20 years. We were both pretty nervous, but we had a good visit. Molly’s winsome personality (she covers for my shyness in a most happy way), and the kids, went a long way toward relaxing the mood.
And there was the beach on Siesta Key. Oh. . . My. . . Goodness. It was the most incredible, beautiful beach I have ever seen. The sand was white, and fine – about the consistency of flour. We scrambled around to find a small container to take some of it back with us, just to show our friends. The water was a luminescent blue-green color, and we watched with delight as pelicans hovered high above the surface of the water, before diving to snatch a fish. And most incredibly, the beach was virtually deserted – we could look more than a mile in both directions, and see fewer than a dozen people besides ourselves. It was just incredible. We stayed on the beach until it got dark (the only not-beating-the-system aspect of the whole experience was that it was 85º and sunny on the beach in March, but the sun set at 6PM; (*sigh*) you can’t have everything).
Our week in Florida ended all too soon, and we piled back into our minivan and reversed the process we’d so enjoyed on the way south – with every passing mile, the grass got browner, the leaves on the trees got sparser and then non-existent, the air got colder, and by the time we crossed the state line back into Michigan, it was 35º and raining. . .
But we’d had a wonderful trip, and made a bunch of family memories.
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Three years later, we went to Florida again, with four kids this time – 4M was a year-and-a-half old – and Molly was six months pregnant with 5M (this was when we had our vehicular near-miss). Our main goal this time was to meet my birth-father in person, for the first (and so far only) time; he also lived in Florida, not too terribly far from my aunt. We mainly stayed with my ‘first mother’ and her husband, for that trip, but we stayed at my aunt’s place for the meeting with my birth-father.
On the tourist front, we visited the Kennedy Space Center, which given my own youthful fascination with all things Space, was a major highlight. The tour of the space center was really cool, but we got an added bonus, because while we were there, a shuttle was due to land there in Florida. So, we found out the details, awoke at 4AM, inquired about the best place from which to view the landing, and staked out our spot. We were about three miles from the runway; looking across open water, we were looking right down the runway – the shuttle would virtually fly right over our heads.
As the sun rose, the crowd of shuttle-watchers grew, so that, by the time the shuttle was due to arrive, cars were parked pretty much all along the shore of the little inlet we’d parked on. The guy next to us had his radio tuned to the Space Center communication, and we could listen as the commentator tracked the shuttle’s progress – “Atlantis has just crossed the California coast, at such-and-such altitude, flying at such-and-such speed.” “Atlantis is over Texas now. . .” And so on.
A few minutes before the scheduled landing, suddenly a fleet of helicopters popped up all around us, while the radio told us that Atlantis had crossed the Gulf Coast of Florida. We heard a sharp double-crack, almost like a pair of rapid-fire gunshots, and then we heard over the radio, “Atlantis is on the runway!”
AND WE NEVER SAW IT!!!
The damn shuttle flew right over our heads, and we never saw it! We heard what we were told was a double sonic boom (although I don’t think the shuttle would have been supersonic at that point; that’s what we were told, though), and we were certainly present for a shuttle landing, but somehow, despite all that, we managed to completely miss making visual contact with the bird itself.
(*sigh*)
Returning to my aunt’s house, we were eager to get back to the beach on Siesta Key, remembering what a slice of paradise it had been three years previously. But you know, a lot can change in three years. . .
Driving out to the key, it was instantly apparent that this time, the beach wasn’t going to be quite so deserted as it had been on our first visit. We parked the car and walked, farther than we remembered having to walk before (and Molly six months great with child). And as we stepped onto the celestial white sand, it became instantly obvious that, in the three years since our previous visit, the college students had discovered Siesta Key.
The beach was crammed, virtually wall to wall (if beaches can be said to have walls) with college kids, in various states of drunkenness, and various states of, um, undress. As we walked across the sand, trying to scope out a place where we could put our blanket down, at one point we were walking behind a young woman in a very, um, skimpy thong bikini (the kind that Molly refers to as ‘butt floss’; and actually, ‘skimpy’ vastly overstates the amount of actual cover the suit was providing for her). 2F, who was not quite seven at the time, turned to me and asked, in that innocent six-year-old manner, “Dad, how come that girl’s butt is hanging out?”
“I don’t know, dear,” I replied. “I wonder if her mother knows.”
The girl briefly sort-of half-turned her head and cast a quick sneer in my direction, and those pleasantries having been taken care of, we all continued on our way.
And with every passing minute, Molly was getting more and more steamed, her rotund self, great with child, juxtaposed most unfavorably (at least in her own mind) with the nubile young ladies on display all around her (and ‘on display’ does not begin to do justice to the situation). To be fair, a spring-break beach full of scantily-clad college girls is not a happy situation for a six-months pregnant mother, with four kids in tow. I practiced as much ‘ocular self-discipline’ as I could muster, and reassured her repeatedly that, as far as I was concerned, she was more woman than any of these girls would ever be, but her embarrassment could not be assuaged. And I knew that this was not going to redound to my benefit. I took a few minutes to let the kids get wet, and we hightailed it out of there. And the whole way back to my aunt’s house, Molly fumed at me, for taking her out in public looking like a whale, to be embarrassed by all the Sweet Young Things on display, etc, etc, etc. I have mostly lived it down by now, but I know better than to bring it up. . .
We had a good visit with my birth-father, and his two daughters, my half-sisters, and once again headed back home.
I don’t think I’d want to live in Florida (I’m told August there is pretty brutal), but the two times we’ve visited have been interesting, and a lot of fun. . .
Showing posts with label space program. Show all posts
Showing posts with label space program. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Growing Up In the 60s
I was born in 1956, the last year of President Eisenhower’s first term, and my adoption was final a few weeks after his second inaugural. I have vague memories of Elvis from when I was a small child. I was seven when President Kennedy was assassinated, the same weekend that our family moved Up North. The Viet Nam war, and the anti-war protests, dominated the headlines for most of my junior-high and high school years; my first campus visit to the mega-university which today is my alma mater had to be re-routed due to a massive sit-in which closed the main avenue through town.
But, for me personally, in my own young life, three things captured my imagination during the Sixties – the Beatles and their music, the space program, and the Detroit Tigers. . .
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I was a month or so shy of my eighth birthday when the Beatles made their first appearance on the Ed Sullivan show. I really couldn’t tell you what it was that so struck my young fancy, but I was instantly smitten. The next day, I, along with most of the boys in my 2nd-grade class, collected such length of hair as we had available, and combed it forward, imitating, as best we could manage, their ‘long’ hair (and it is a source of considerable amusement to me, in retrospect, how really tame those 1964-vintage haircuts were, especially considering our parents’ reactions to them; to say nothing of what came to be considered ‘long hair’ in subsequent years).
I talked my mom into taking me to see ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ (and ‘Help!’ a year later), and I turned such disposable cash as I could scrape together into 45rpm records (the ones with the huge center-hole, containing one song on each side; for my birthday, or other occasions where I might have a bit more available cash, I could afford a whole album!), which I played until they were too scratchy to hear anymore. One of my cousins actually went to one of their concerts, at the Olympia in Detroit, which made me quite envious, and miffed at my own parents that they wouldn’t take me (the five-hour drive notwithstanding).
The Beatles’ musical development seemed to track perfectly my own growth process - I was 10 when ‘Revolver’ came out, 11 for ‘Sgt. Pepper’, 12 for the White Album, and 13 for ‘Abbey Road’ – and their songs, like ‘Hey Jude’, ‘Get Back’, ‘Something’, ‘Let It Be’, etc, etc, became the soundtrack for my adolescence. I memorized entire albums, and I can still sing dozens of their songs, by memory, from beginning to end.
I’d be hard-pressed to tell you why the Beatles captured my imagination the way they did. I suppose their music was just interesting (at a time I was learning to play) and a lot of fun.
I was 14 when Paul McCartney put out his first solo album, effectively announcing the breakup of the Beatles. But their music remained popular all through my college years, and beyond. I followed their solo careers, and some of the music was still very good (I still regret not at least trying to get tickets when Wings came to Detroit in ’76, but I was a poor college student at the time), but it wasn’t quite the same. And when John Lennon was murdered a few months after my wedding, it just put the final ending to all the hopes of a Reunion Tour (which, c’mon, wouldn’t have been the same, either; but it would’ve been a hell of a lot of fun), and the Beatles passed definitively, once-and-for-all, into history. . .
-------------------------
I was within a week or two of my sixth birthday (maybe it’s a February thing) when John Glenn became the first American to orbit the earth, and that was the beginning of what has become a lifelong fascination with space and space exploration, and other worlds. . .
Especially when I was in 5th grade, during the heyday of Project Gemini, my teacher would bring a TV set into our classroom, to watch the launches and splashdowns, and all the talking heads playing with the models of rockets and space capsules, and it was all very cool, thinking about being in outer space, where the sky was black, and there was no air, and no gravity. Such a strange, exotic place!
But the real kicker came over Christmas of ’68, when I was in 8th grade, and Apollo 8 orbited the moon. That was just the most incredible thing – three men in what was really a tiny little can were a quarter-million miles from earth, orbiting another heavenly body! I was glued to the TV set watching the pictures that Christmas Eve, of the lunar surface passing below the Apollo spacecraft. And the Earthrise photograph that came back from Apollo 8 was one of the great paradigm-shifting images of all time – suddenly, the earth didn’t seem quite so huge – just the notion that those three men in their tin can could look out their window, and see the earth whole and entire, rising above the surface of the moon, and really kinda small against the backdrop of space, was a revolutionary shift of perspective.
And I was advancing in my own education to the point where I could begin to have some understanding of just what the physics of space flight were, and how the machines worked. (It was maybe 15 years or so ago, that young engineers started coming into the work force, who were born after the moon landings; I remember asking one of them, “Without the space program, whatever inspired you to become an engineer?” Because so many of the engineers of my generation grew up watching the moon shots on TV).
The following summer, when I was 13, Apollo 11 landed on the moon. I, and my whole family, along with most of the United States, and a large proportion of the entire world, watched in awe as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin actually walked on the surface of the moon – another world, entirely separate from the earth! I was utterly, completely fascinated, and I spent hours reading all I could get my hands on about it, and imagining what it was like to be there, on another world, and fly in a spaceship, and all that stuff.
The moon landings continued, roughly two a year, for four more years, ending in December 1972, my senior year of high school. And I was glued to the TV set for every one of them. At the time, Apollo 13 was a huge disappointment to me, but I have since come to understand the magnitude of the accomplishment of simply bringing three men home safely, whose spacecraft had exploded 200,000 miles from home. But once the moon landings resumed, the TV images of lunar mountains, and astronauts driving moon-buggies across the moon, just never got old for me.
Once I was in college, though, the moon landings were securely in the past. The Skylab missions were interesting, in their way, for a year or so more, but earth orbit seemed like a tame retreat, after the exotic glory of seeing men walk on another world. But some of the engineers who helped put those men on the moon became my professors, and even if I never got close to the space program myself, it left an indelible mark on my psyche and my intellect. . .
-------------------------
It’s funny, but even growing up in Michigan, I really didn’t follow the Tigers until 1965, when I was nine years old. Until then, I’d been pretty much of a bookish little nerd. I had vague memories of Rocky Colavito (all the little kids tried to imitate his ‘stretching exercises’ with the bat in the on-deck circle) and Jim Bunning, and the ’61 Tigers who chased the Yankees into September. But, my dad had to force me to go out for my first baseball team; physical activity just wasn’t my first choice of activities, at that age.
But, in ’65, my ‘first mother’ left, and Dad started dating the woman who would eventually become my ‘new mother’. She had a son who was my age, and he was a complete sports nut. So, at least partly out of self-defense, and partly just so I could have something to talk with him about, I started to follow the Tigers, who were an average-to-above-average team that year, with a promising crop of young players like Bill Freehan, Willie Horton, Mickey Lolich and Denny McLain, to go along with established veterans like Al Kaline and Norm Cash.
Kaline, especially, grabbed my imagination – something about the quiet, elegant way he played the game, at such a level of excellence, just compelled my attention. Because of him, I think, to this day, my favorite play in baseball is the right-fielder throwing to third base, to keep the runner on first from advancing two bases on a single (or even better, to throw the runner out on the attempt).
And in 1968, it all came together for my Tigers. They got on this incredible roll, and just never looked back. Denny McLain (one of the great assholes in sports history, by the way) won 31 games (the only 30-game winner between 1934 and the present day); Jim Northrup hit four grand slams (three of them in a week, and two in one game); and something like 40 times, the Tigers won a game in which they were behind after the 7th inning. My dad took us to a game in August, against the Chicago White Sox; Mickey Stanley tied the game on a home run in the 8th inning, and Jim Price (go to the head of the class if you remember Jim Price) won it with a homer in the 10th.
The ’68 Tigers won the American League pennant going away, and played the St. Louis Cardinals in the World Series. After falling behind three games to one (and with Denny McLain being thoroughly outclassed by Bob Gibson), the Tigers came back (in typical fashion) to win the Series, largely on the left arm of Mickey Lolich. I still look back on Game 5, when Mayo Smith left Lolich in to hit in the seventh inning, trailing by a run, and Al Kaline drove in the go-ahead run in the pivotal game of the Series. The Tigers won Game 6 behind Denny McLain (finally not matched up against Bob Gibson) and a 10-run inning (featuring another Jim Northrup grand slam), and then Lolich beat Gibson in a tense Game 7, when Northrup’s triple flew over Curt Flood’s head. For a 12-year-old Tiger fan, there could not have been anything closer to heaven – the Tigers were World Champions!
The Tigers stayed decent for a few more years, winning their division in ’72, before losing the ALCS to the Oakland A’s. But by the time I was in college, all the players I’d grown up watching were getting old, and the team was rebuilding, toward another eventual championship in ’84, which was very cool in its own right, but by then, I was married and a father, and the Tigers didn’t absorb my attention like they did when I was 12. . .
-------------------------
The Sixties, as such, at least in terms of the popular imagination, really ran from 1964 or so (they could be considered as starting with the Kennedy assassination, or the Beatles on Ed Sullivan) and ending roughly 10 years later (roughly with Watergate and the Nixon resignation, or the final pullout from Viet Nam). The headlines were filled with Viet Nam, and the anti-war movement; the popular culture suddenly became ‘druggier’ than it had been before; hair got longer – a LOT longer – and the sexual revolution took hold. All of those things were the cultural backdrop of my growing-up years.
But the things that most caught my youthful imagination were the Beatles, the moon landings, and the Detroit Tigers. . .
But, for me personally, in my own young life, three things captured my imagination during the Sixties – the Beatles and their music, the space program, and the Detroit Tigers. . .
-------------------------
I was a month or so shy of my eighth birthday when the Beatles made their first appearance on the Ed Sullivan show. I really couldn’t tell you what it was that so struck my young fancy, but I was instantly smitten. The next day, I, along with most of the boys in my 2nd-grade class, collected such length of hair as we had available, and combed it forward, imitating, as best we could manage, their ‘long’ hair (and it is a source of considerable amusement to me, in retrospect, how really tame those 1964-vintage haircuts were, especially considering our parents’ reactions to them; to say nothing of what came to be considered ‘long hair’ in subsequent years).
I talked my mom into taking me to see ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ (and ‘Help!’ a year later), and I turned such disposable cash as I could scrape together into 45rpm records (the ones with the huge center-hole, containing one song on each side; for my birthday, or other occasions where I might have a bit more available cash, I could afford a whole album!), which I played until they were too scratchy to hear anymore. One of my cousins actually went to one of their concerts, at the Olympia in Detroit, which made me quite envious, and miffed at my own parents that they wouldn’t take me (the five-hour drive notwithstanding).
The Beatles’ musical development seemed to track perfectly my own growth process - I was 10 when ‘Revolver’ came out, 11 for ‘Sgt. Pepper’, 12 for the White Album, and 13 for ‘Abbey Road’ – and their songs, like ‘Hey Jude’, ‘Get Back’, ‘Something’, ‘Let It Be’, etc, etc, became the soundtrack for my adolescence. I memorized entire albums, and I can still sing dozens of their songs, by memory, from beginning to end.
I’d be hard-pressed to tell you why the Beatles captured my imagination the way they did. I suppose their music was just interesting (at a time I was learning to play) and a lot of fun.
I was 14 when Paul McCartney put out his first solo album, effectively announcing the breakup of the Beatles. But their music remained popular all through my college years, and beyond. I followed their solo careers, and some of the music was still very good (I still regret not at least trying to get tickets when Wings came to Detroit in ’76, but I was a poor college student at the time), but it wasn’t quite the same. And when John Lennon was murdered a few months after my wedding, it just put the final ending to all the hopes of a Reunion Tour (which, c’mon, wouldn’t have been the same, either; but it would’ve been a hell of a lot of fun), and the Beatles passed definitively, once-and-for-all, into history. . .
-------------------------
I was within a week or two of my sixth birthday (maybe it’s a February thing) when John Glenn became the first American to orbit the earth, and that was the beginning of what has become a lifelong fascination with space and space exploration, and other worlds. . .
Especially when I was in 5th grade, during the heyday of Project Gemini, my teacher would bring a TV set into our classroom, to watch the launches and splashdowns, and all the talking heads playing with the models of rockets and space capsules, and it was all very cool, thinking about being in outer space, where the sky was black, and there was no air, and no gravity. Such a strange, exotic place!
But the real kicker came over Christmas of ’68, when I was in 8th grade, and Apollo 8 orbited the moon. That was just the most incredible thing – three men in what was really a tiny little can were a quarter-million miles from earth, orbiting another heavenly body! I was glued to the TV set watching the pictures that Christmas Eve, of the lunar surface passing below the Apollo spacecraft. And the Earthrise photograph that came back from Apollo 8 was one of the great paradigm-shifting images of all time – suddenly, the earth didn’t seem quite so huge – just the notion that those three men in their tin can could look out their window, and see the earth whole and entire, rising above the surface of the moon, and really kinda small against the backdrop of space, was a revolutionary shift of perspective.
And I was advancing in my own education to the point where I could begin to have some understanding of just what the physics of space flight were, and how the machines worked. (It was maybe 15 years or so ago, that young engineers started coming into the work force, who were born after the moon landings; I remember asking one of them, “Without the space program, whatever inspired you to become an engineer?” Because so many of the engineers of my generation grew up watching the moon shots on TV).
The following summer, when I was 13, Apollo 11 landed on the moon. I, and my whole family, along with most of the United States, and a large proportion of the entire world, watched in awe as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin actually walked on the surface of the moon – another world, entirely separate from the earth! I was utterly, completely fascinated, and I spent hours reading all I could get my hands on about it, and imagining what it was like to be there, on another world, and fly in a spaceship, and all that stuff.
The moon landings continued, roughly two a year, for four more years, ending in December 1972, my senior year of high school. And I was glued to the TV set for every one of them. At the time, Apollo 13 was a huge disappointment to me, but I have since come to understand the magnitude of the accomplishment of simply bringing three men home safely, whose spacecraft had exploded 200,000 miles from home. But once the moon landings resumed, the TV images of lunar mountains, and astronauts driving moon-buggies across the moon, just never got old for me.
Once I was in college, though, the moon landings were securely in the past. The Skylab missions were interesting, in their way, for a year or so more, but earth orbit seemed like a tame retreat, after the exotic glory of seeing men walk on another world. But some of the engineers who helped put those men on the moon became my professors, and even if I never got close to the space program myself, it left an indelible mark on my psyche and my intellect. . .
-------------------------
It’s funny, but even growing up in Michigan, I really didn’t follow the Tigers until 1965, when I was nine years old. Until then, I’d been pretty much of a bookish little nerd. I had vague memories of Rocky Colavito (all the little kids tried to imitate his ‘stretching exercises’ with the bat in the on-deck circle) and Jim Bunning, and the ’61 Tigers who chased the Yankees into September. But, my dad had to force me to go out for my first baseball team; physical activity just wasn’t my first choice of activities, at that age.
But, in ’65, my ‘first mother’ left, and Dad started dating the woman who would eventually become my ‘new mother’. She had a son who was my age, and he was a complete sports nut. So, at least partly out of self-defense, and partly just so I could have something to talk with him about, I started to follow the Tigers, who were an average-to-above-average team that year, with a promising crop of young players like Bill Freehan, Willie Horton, Mickey Lolich and Denny McLain, to go along with established veterans like Al Kaline and Norm Cash.
Kaline, especially, grabbed my imagination – something about the quiet, elegant way he played the game, at such a level of excellence, just compelled my attention. Because of him, I think, to this day, my favorite play in baseball is the right-fielder throwing to third base, to keep the runner on first from advancing two bases on a single (or even better, to throw the runner out on the attempt).
And in 1968, it all came together for my Tigers. They got on this incredible roll, and just never looked back. Denny McLain (one of the great assholes in sports history, by the way) won 31 games (the only 30-game winner between 1934 and the present day); Jim Northrup hit four grand slams (three of them in a week, and two in one game); and something like 40 times, the Tigers won a game in which they were behind after the 7th inning. My dad took us to a game in August, against the Chicago White Sox; Mickey Stanley tied the game on a home run in the 8th inning, and Jim Price (go to the head of the class if you remember Jim Price) won it with a homer in the 10th.
The ’68 Tigers won the American League pennant going away, and played the St. Louis Cardinals in the World Series. After falling behind three games to one (and with Denny McLain being thoroughly outclassed by Bob Gibson), the Tigers came back (in typical fashion) to win the Series, largely on the left arm of Mickey Lolich. I still look back on Game 5, when Mayo Smith left Lolich in to hit in the seventh inning, trailing by a run, and Al Kaline drove in the go-ahead run in the pivotal game of the Series. The Tigers won Game 6 behind Denny McLain (finally not matched up against Bob Gibson) and a 10-run inning (featuring another Jim Northrup grand slam), and then Lolich beat Gibson in a tense Game 7, when Northrup’s triple flew over Curt Flood’s head. For a 12-year-old Tiger fan, there could not have been anything closer to heaven – the Tigers were World Champions!
The Tigers stayed decent for a few more years, winning their division in ’72, before losing the ALCS to the Oakland A’s. But by the time I was in college, all the players I’d grown up watching were getting old, and the team was rebuilding, toward another eventual championship in ’84, which was very cool in its own right, but by then, I was married and a father, and the Tigers didn’t absorb my attention like they did when I was 12. . .
-------------------------
The Sixties, as such, at least in terms of the popular imagination, really ran from 1964 or so (they could be considered as starting with the Kennedy assassination, or the Beatles on Ed Sullivan) and ending roughly 10 years later (roughly with Watergate and the Nixon resignation, or the final pullout from Viet Nam). The headlines were filled with Viet Nam, and the anti-war movement; the popular culture suddenly became ‘druggier’ than it had been before; hair got longer – a LOT longer – and the sexual revolution took hold. All of those things were the cultural backdrop of my growing-up years.
But the things that most caught my youthful imagination were the Beatles, the moon landings, and the Detroit Tigers. . .
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