Women and African Americans

I’ve always had this fascination with World War Two and the subsequent birth of the American Dream. After the war, there were powers-to-be among the military, political, industrial complex that wanted factory production work to continue. This focus on innovation, mass production and the growth of a consumer society all lent itself to exponential growth in the fifties and sixties. Good for some but as this book points out, it wasn’t fortuitous for women or minorities of any flavor.

The GI Bill and other government programs hyper-charged the growth of the middle class among millions of returning veterans.  It foresaw the advent of mass housing production and expansion out from the cities to the suburbs. Innovation in technology and communications soared. But for all the wonderful opportunities that were a part of this radical change in American society, two main groups of Americans were often left by the wayside; women and African Americans.

While I was aware of the role of women and minorities in the massive industrial growth during that period, I didn’t know about the hardships and prejudice both parties suffered during the war.

The book explains: ‘From the fall of France in the summer of 1940 to V-J Day in August of 1945, more than seventeen million Americans, or fourteen percent of the population, served in the armed forces of World War II. For millions more at home, a booming wartime economy produced a remarkable prosperity that ended the Great Depression, sparked a postwar economic miracle, and made the American Dream of suburban homes, shopping centers, and modern kitchens a reality.’

But during the war years, the challenges of housing, continuing segregation, universal child care and other domestic issues also dominated the American way of life. Reporters found that with more than twenty-five million men, women and children crowding into new centers of the war industry, the fabric of American life had unraveled.

The war emergency strained a tenuous racial balance to the point of violence. The social turmoil produced by the war also placed unprecedented pressures on family and home life. In the absence of social and governmental support, working mothers and their children bore a disproportionate burden. Not quite the picture painted by the newsreels seen at the movies or the image of John Wayne that I grew up with.

Advertisements in newspapers and magazines talked about life after the war assuming it would be for everyone. Yet after the war, African Americans found that those opportunities promised often disappeared and women in general were relegated back to the kitchen so men could get their old jobs back again. Masking much of that disparity for woman and African Americans was the economic growth brought on by pent-up demand over the years. I grew up during that economic growth and it seemed all wonderful to me, especially the vibes from out West.

Southern California seemed to be epicenter for the new America that came about after the war. Millions flocked to its golden beaches, lush mountains and deep valleys. Industrial and creative jobs attracted young families, each seeking their own version of the ‘American Dream.’ It was roughly twenty years of exponential growth benefiting many but also still excluding others.

The euphoria of ‘happily ever after’ lasted for, perhaps, twenty years before cracks began to appear in the American dream. Behind that façade of the iconic ‘golden state’ were the growing civil rights upheavals and women’s rights movements. The decade of the Sixties blew the lid off that happy smiling white couple and exposed the underbelly of inequality and injustice. Throughout the Sixties great strides were made to recognize the equality of women and African Americans and gays.

While the older generation of women and African Americans had to endure a return to inequality after the war, it was later generations that reaped the reward of their endurance, hard work, and persistence. It’s not perfect now nor will it ever be. But things have changed for the better for new generations of women and disadvantaged groups of people.

My two adult children work in areas of business where women compete equally with men for job opportunities. People of color have made tremendous strides in areas long denied them. While there is still a long way to go, it’s a far cry from the blatant segregation and inequality thrust upon their forefathers before and during World War Two.

While they’re still too young to fully appreciate the sacrifices made by past generations, I do believe my grandchildren will someday come to recognize what their grandparents and great grandparents did to make it a better world for them to live in. It’s a mindset I hope they will pay it forward for future generations.

Better Than Bitcoin

Old(er) age is uncharted territory for me. I’ve crossed that River Styx and entered foreign territory. Like ‘walking point’ in the Nam, it’s one cautious step after another and may the best man live…for another day.

Life investments have been made, squandered, lost, accumulated, divested and set aside. Some things worked out while others didn’t. Mostly what’s left is the residue of one’s collective wisdom and the luck or mistakes to live with for the rest of our lives. One of the few common denominators remaining is the enduring value of friendships.

It’s the best currency around and yet we’re seldom smart enough to recognize or appreciate what it brings into our lives. Who were those kids captured in that newspaper photo so many years ago? What did ‘finding the one’ mean for future friendships and life-long acquaintances?

It doesn’t seem that long ago when the world was a rainbow landscape full of wonderous adventures and opportunities. Each of us set out to become whatever we thought we should be…at the time. The world was our oyster and we meant to have it all.

It’s funny how reality evolves and our past lives and aspirations finally catch up with us. That winding road called ‘life’ is either running smooth as asphalt or rough like gravel. And yet none of us want to get off the road even if the ride isn’t what we expected it to be after all these years.

It’s been sixty plus years since I turned twenty-one and shed my cloak of anonymity to adorn myself with the costume of adulthood. Now I, like so many others, am at a point in my life where reflection is more than a glass of chardonnay framed within a sunset or a cold brew among high school buddies.

My current life style is an accumulation of habits born at birth. For some of us it was modeled after our parent’s pioneering excursion into life. For others, it was a process of discovery, loss, acceptance and rejection. Our life style became us on a daily basis and we weren’t even aware of it. It’s only now that the accumulation of excess and/or scarcity raises its hidden head.

Ernest Hemingway is quoted as saying that life is like a bank account. How you use it is solely your determination. You can withdraw it in a hurry and live a very short life. Or you can be diligent with your withdrawals and live, hopefully, much longer.

We can always try to rectify some of our mistakes or enhance our positive steps but age and reticence to change are usually huge obstacles to overcome. We’ve let life’s ebb and flow (our gypsy muse) guide us in this rhythm of life. For most of us, the process was organic and without a lot of thought. Living abroad, that first apartment and that first step in something called a career.

We find ourselves both benefiting and/or suffering from past investments of our youth. The things we did to ourselves, the deposits we made on our bodies, our finances, our love life and our children. We’re now at the stage of making withdrawals from our youthful decisions and indiscretions.

Those random discoveries got me thinking about friendships; past and present, strong and vapid, present and omnipresent. I thought about the friends I’ve had over the years. Some of them shared isolated points in my life; high school, college, the service and work. Some were but fleeting incisions in the tenderness of my youth. Others were shared experiences like the military; isolated, vacuous, and destined to crash with each discharge celebration where inane behavior in the barracks seemed to make perfect sense back then.

Most of those memories are lost now in that vacuum called life experiences. A few were found again but most are just fragrant memories of a life well spent. Like separating wheat from the shaft, I’d love to rekindle a few of those friendships and nourish them back to the point of commonality we once shared.

The cliché that you can never have too many friends dissolves over the pages of Facebook where collecting friends can be a cybergame for some folks, devoid of meaningful contact and concern. Having friends on Facebook isn’t the same as having real friends who care and share and actually want to be somebody in your life. Big difference there! For some folks it’s like grade school best friends.

I guess that’s why I want to continue seeking out old friends and acquaintances who might share my own values and interests. The past can’t be replicated nor ignored. It can be accepted for what it was even if we couldn’t see it at the time. It’s all cloaked in that most evolving, trans-lucent, vapid metaphor called relationships. Together they fill our thoughts and dreams and aspirations with dream-like illusions we’d like to believe in. It’s a game we play on a daily basis as we go about the business of living.

Maybe I’m just trying to replicate some of what I captured early in life when playground antics caught a reporter’s camera and made the front page and added to the serenity of those long-forgotten friendships. If it’s true that a life well-lived includes many friends, then I want continue adding to my roster.

They say true wealth is all about good health and friendships. If so, I’d like to be a very wealthy person.

Treasure Hunting

It could be old age or the memories piled up inside my head that draw me back to my first office/cave in the basement. It’s like a treasure chest of flashbacks that seems to happen whenever I return to my past life down there. While it’s not derelict real estate yet, the home of Sharden Productions, Inc. and various real estate ventures has long since lost its strategic placement in my daily life.

This nest of all things me was created many years ago when the children were finally settled into their beds each night, Sharon was working on office material upstairs and family life for both of us was busy, busy, busy. We had recently moved back from Maryland and comfortably ensconced in our new home in Apple Valley, Minnesota.

This man cave of sorts is where I escaped every night to focus my attention on my other life outside of public television. It was, at once, bill-paying central, dealing with landlord and apartment management issues, tenant concerns, reading to escape, writing to explore, and trying to stay on top of life in general.

Now that both Sharon and I have entered our ‘it’s time to purge a lifetime of collecting’ phase, I find myself returning, once again, to that basement treasure chest of memories; good, bad, remembered and long-since forgotten. Most of the treasures can be found in the books and magazines collected over the last forty plus years. A slow meandering perusal keeps tripping old memories long locked in that vast vacuum called ‘the past.’

This return journey to wonderful storytelling began with 1950’s male tabloids, Jack Kerouac travel tales, bicycling and running books, biographies, and a lot of reference material for past novels written. The dust and desert heat of the old West was never far away. Each book pulled me back to another time and place in my life. They were all good, often complicated treasures, soon forgotten in the encapsulating rush of daily life.

Rereading some of that collection has been a real joy all over again. It started with ‘Wanderer’ by Sterling Hayden then moved on to ‘I See by My Outfit’ by Peter Beagle. ‘The Fume of Poppies’ was one of the first novels that explored young love with all of its complexities and sad outcomes.

The list goes on and on. Adventure novels like ‘South by Java Head’ and ‘HMS Ulysses’. Self-maintenance ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’ and ‘A Yaqui Way of Knowledge’ by Carlos Castaneda. Religious reflections by Malcolm Boyd with his ‘Are You Running with Me, Jesus?’ and poetry by Leonard Cohen among others.

Since I was in the television/video production business, my shelves held years of past productions. Work tapes, scratch tapes and all forms of analog reference material played prominently during that period. Movies on DVD and VHS played a prominent role in entertainment back then.

My enthusiasm for N-Scale model railroading never proceeded beyond collecting lots of magazines and building a ton of scratch-built homes, buildings, trestles, and other assorted railroad structures. In one corner of my desk over 700 of my blogs are now captured in hardbound books for future readers?

Next to my office in the laundry room, I’ve carved out a corner with an old Dell PC used primarily for scanning photos, etc. to digital images and scratching out writing ideas. The purging continues with old files, analog material, and collected mementoes; most of them heading for the waste paper basket.

So, whenever I can carve out some evenings, the treasure hunting continues, the memories keep spilling out and time marches on. It was the best of times and it’s always fun to stumble across some mementos of those periods in my past life.

Life is good.

Nana's Pool

Hard work and good fortune enabled Sharon and I to have a second home in the desert. It wasn’t by some fortuitous accident but rather our focused attempt to carve out a place of comfort for our respective families to gather. Alternating each year between Thanksgiving and the Christmas holidays, our children’s families came to stay with us for a week or more.

Right from the start, our back patio became the focal point for all kinds of family gatherings, games, meals, discussions, staged readings, parties and, of course, aquatic gymnastics.

It was a wonderful opportunity for the cousins to get better acquainted, respective families to share time (and wine) together and for everyone to grow memories for a lifetime. One of the highlights of each visit were the aquatic antics, ventures, and creative games our grandkids thought up eight feet under and over the water.

Even as toddlers, swathed in floaties or arm bands, the grandchildren quickly became aquatic babies spending hours in and under the water. They rode boogie boards in manmade waves, skipped across the pool in a bridge made up of floatie devices and practiced all sorts of weird dives off the deep end.

As teens and pre-teens, the aquatic antics continued with even more elaborate games and contests. For several seasons, a slide was added to the mixed and only added to the high-jinx.

Reconstruction of the pool from plain to pebbletec didn’t slow down their activities or antics. As the years passed, one fact became more and more apparent. None of the floatie devices could withstand the onslaught of their vigorous games. One by one the floaties were destroyed, some in less than a day or two.

Fact is, the capsizing kiddos have destroyed just about every inflatable we’ve thrown at them. Two alligators, a unicorn floaty, inflatable canoe, balls of all sizes and shapes, floaty devices and a slide have all succumbed to their overly enthusiastic poolside antics. The one survivor, thus far, seems to be the gerbil ball.

Over the years, the pool has become a talisman for both families. It is, at once, a gathering spot, a giant board game, a challenging contest, a deep-sea submersible venture, a place to play ‘horse,’ catch, and a dozen other unnamed games of the imagination.

At some point, Sharon and I know it’s all going to all end. Maya, the eldest is already in college. The others aren’t that far behind. Personal commitments, social factors, and life in general will soon demand more and more of their time and attention. Nana’s pool as the great equalizer will have to change along with the times.

But until then, for all those formative years up until now, it’s been a favorite gathering spot for the kiddos and a memory maker of the most wonderful kind. All that will eventually become history but the memories will endure, etched permanently on the collective minds of the young ones who grew up catching waves and making joy in ‘Nana’s pool.’

Double Clutch and Hidden Talents

She was a simple farm girl who always seemed to have a new car while her brothers were still riding tractors. She could play at least four musical instruments and once owned a thriving restaurant. Not too shabby considering her sixth-grade education, stringent social and religious norms always trying to hold her back, and distain for anyone trying to be different. It’s quite a legacy I knew little about until a cache of old black and whites peeled away one more mysterious layer of this person; I was never able to call Mom.

I’ve been working on a new play about my parent’s early years; long before I was even a glance across the dance room floor. Part of my research was studying a ten-page handwritten bio my mother wrote not long before she passed. In it, she chronicled sketchy minuet glimpses into her upbringing on a farm outside of St. Cloud, Minnesota.

Over the years, my mother would occasionally let slip some comment about her upbringing. She was much closer to her father than her step-mother. She was the youngest and spoiled by her father whom she adored. She loved to travel and couldn’t wait to escape her life on the farm for the big cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul.

The handwritten bio, really a jumble of streaming thoughts, was the only tangible, written history my mother left my sister and I before she died. Ten pages, single spaced, documenting a lifetime of hard work, unbroken faith in her God, loss, rejection, betrayal, and heartbreak.

But there were many gaps in that brief bio which I discovered when my sister shared some old photographs Mom had given her just before her passing. We both knew that our mother and father had, early in their marriage, started a restaurant called ‘Frenchy’s Eats’ near downtown Saint Paul. It folded after six months when financial challenges and health issues crippled their abilities to manage it. But there was more.

Only once or twice over her lifetime did our mother ever mention that she used to own a plethora of cars in her youth. She never made mention of her being in a band or her many countrywide travels, usually alone.

My mother grew up a beautiful and ambitious young woman. The Twin Cities of Saint Paul and Minneapolis proved irresistible to Hilde when she cautiously toe-stepped away from home for the first time. She was hungry enough to break free of the life-choking reins of farm work by testing herself in the cities. But with just a sixth-grade education, the only work she could get was housekeeping for wealthy clients, odd jobs as a seamstress and cooking. She became a maid on Summit Avenue. Not quite Downton Abby but close.

Despite the occasional homelessness, abject poverty, and lack of support from relatives, my mother soldered on, and with the help of one brother, actually built her own house in a tony neighborhood in town.

There were clues in those pictures…in the clothes, mannerisms, posture, location and a hundred other enounce that spoke volumes about the woman that gave me life. By reading into them with the inquisitiveness of a writer and a curiosity of past traits passed down to me, there are answers (unconfirmed, of course) in what those pictures were saying.

So, without being clinically antiseptic, I began to study the clues some unknown photographer presented to me. There were stories in those images that said so much and yet revealed so little. I did my surgical inspection without the benefit of that brief written journal pasted down from my mother. I was also cognizant of her reluctance to recognize that part of her past life.

So, who was this woman that was a part of my life and yet someone I never really knew? She was buying and swapping automobiles when they were the newest craze and playing in a band when most women were relegated to stay in the audience. So, I studied the cars, her clothes, her girlfriends, and hints of the life she was leading.

The cars varied but most were new and shiny. She and her girlfriends loved to dress up and go out to town in their new chariot. I have only the vague recollection of her commenting once that her brother took her new car out and ran into a tree when he came home drunk. She never forgave him for that.

We knew our mother loved to dance and frequented the dance halls in both Cities. In fact, that was where she met her future second husband. What we didn’t know is that she had been in a band herself. It was the Noll (her maiden name) Family Band and it had gigs around the area. Pictures revealed that she could play at least three, if not more, musical instruments. Who knew?

My grandfather, Martin Noll, died seven years before I was born. That’s really a shame. It’s obvious from Mom’s comments, both verbal and written, that he was a tremendous influence on her young life. I’m guessing he would have been one hell of an influence on me had he lived long enough.

While I’ve never been a ‘car guy,’ I have always loved music. I’d love to hone my skills as a song writer someday. Thanks, Mom, for that dream; hope I can make you proud someday.