This year, as I perused my special preview edition of Indycar magazine in preparation for the 92nd running of the Indianapolis 500, the one sporting event aside from the baseball season that attracts my attention at all, I noted one glaring fact:
They listed the birth date of each driver. And I could tell you where I was and what I was doing when each and every one of them was born.
But I won't do that.
Still, I am here this morning to discuss one of those subjects that you have to have a few years on you to be able to discuss, to wit: something many of you out there in blogland are just too damn young to remember.
This week the Sally Forth comic strip has had the two main characters, Sally and Ted Forth, reminiscing for the benefit of their daughter Hillary about the Great Bicentennial Bash, America's 200th birthday celebration: July 4, 1976.
Presumably the Forths and their cartoonist creator, whose name I won't give here because I suspect it's a nom-de-plume, were little children in that bicentennial year. They talk of where their parents took them that day.
My parents didn't take me anywhere. I don't even know where they were. My journal entry for July 4, 1976 indicates that at suppertime I was alone in the house.
That is correct. I've been keeping a journal for more than 35 years, since I was in my early teens. It enables me to bore people to death with exercises like this one. I have at my left elbow a tattered, falling-apart Stuart Hall wirebound 100-page theme book on whose blue cardboard cover is scrawled "Journals, 1976."
In the summer of 1976 I was preparing to start my senior year of college. I would turn 21 in another three months or so. Hence, my being alone in the house was no big deal. I was a legal adult, if just barely.
And for the Forths, and all who were children then, or for those who were not even children yet and are hearing about what a great bash that party was, I can toss a little salad dressing on your heads.
For me, anyway, it wasn't such a great day. My day began at 8:30 that morning when I rose late; I seem to have spent most of it alone, and it concluded before midnight with a buddy and me, bored out of our skulls, sitting on the beach drinking beer in the dark.
And my journal records that I was already getting pretty sick of all the hoopla.
For those of you who remember...Beginning on July 4, 1974, precisely two years before the Big Day, the Shell Oil Company sponsored the first of its "Bicentennial Minutes." Each night, around 8 p.m., some celebrity would appear in a one-minute spot brought to you by Shell, in which that celebrity would detail, as fife music played in the background, some event that occurred on that date 200 years earlier which helped lead up to the American Revolution.
This went on 365 nights a year for two years. By the time the Big Day was drawing near, the Bicentennial Minutes had gotten to be kind of a national running joke. On one episode of All In The Family, after Archie Bunker had just concluded one of his high-volume bigoted rants and then bolted the room with his usual concluding words, "Get away from me, all of youse!" Mike Stivic, his left-wing son-in-law with the droopy mustache turned to those remaining in the room and said, "I think we just heard Archie Bunker's Bicentennial Minute."
Okay, I did bust a gut laughing at that, but it pointed up an essential truth: that enough was getting to be enough. Here, as written evidence, is how my journal entry for July 5, 1976 begins:
"Yesterday was the Bicentennial Bash. The biggie, July 4, 1976. I remember how, two years ago when I was taking History 19A (American history) in summer school, I planned to go to Boston this year and be with Uncle Louie [my dad's brother] yesterday. Well, since July 4, 1974, when they televised the first Bicentennial Minute, I have had a chance to get plenty sick of all of it, and probably wouldn't have gone to Boston this summer even if I'd had the chance."
Yes, at 20 I was having Bicentennial Burnout. And I'm sure I wasn't alone.
My diary goes on to record that after rising late, I made myself a huge pancake breakfast and then, at 11:15, went to Mass. Catholics are expected to attend church on July 4. Presumably I wasn't planning to take communion, since I ate breakfast.
I spent the shank of that exciting afternoon in front of the tube, watching a special July 4 presentation of the movie Patton starring George C. Scott. It was presented on Channel 100, which in the mid-1970s was San Diego County's forerunner to HBO.
Even at 20 I was concerned with getting exercise, and my journal records that when the movie was over I went out to the family garage where I had some weight-lifting equipment, lifted weights a little bit and then went out for a constitutional (no pun intended) spin on my bicycle, as I recall a burgundy-red Schwinn Continental (again, no pun intended) that I had bought out of my wages while pumping gas back in high school.
While riding my bicycle around Chula Vista, I bumped into my old pal Mike Baker, driving aimlessly around in his Plymouth Challenger, an exemplar of that wondrous era when you often saw such "muscle cars" on the street, gas at that time costing about 50 cents a gallon. Michael worked at the local Sav-On drugstore in those days, a job he had slid into directly after his own high-school graduation. He was also a volunteer police reservist; his ambition, never realized, was to become a policeman. This detail will become relevant shortly. Michael and I had been friends for a handful of years; about 18 months before this Fourth of July street encounter, he had had his heart seriously broken by my younger sister Lynn, and he hadn't fully recovered yet. Fortunately that didn't affect our friendship, Michael's and mine. Michael and Lynn are both dead now.
Michael and I agreed to get together later in the evening. Our half-baked plan was to drive out to Coronado and watch the fireworks display over the San Diego Bay. My diary then records that I went home, drank three-Scotch-and-waters (I don't know where I got the Scotch, since I was three months short of being old enough to buy it for myself) ate canned chili con carne for supper which later gave me heartburn, and went back to watching the bicentennial whoopee stuff on TV.
Michael showed up on the porch about 8:30 p.m. We got in his Challenger and headed for Coronado. But halfway out the Silver Strand we came across an automobile accident: two cars that had hit each other, two police patrol cars, Navy ambulance, flares all over the place and the usual crowd of rubberneckers. Now, we could have just driven on, but Michael took his obligations as a police reservist seriously, and he insisted on pulling over and volunteering to help direct traffic. I was left in the car to listen to the radio for about half an hour.
But he finally came back and we headed on up and into Coronado. We went to a liquor store where Michael bought a six-pack of Schlitz. (Schlitz was his brand in those days because he had seen Clint Eastwood drinking it in one of the Dirty Harry movies. I'm serious.) We took our six pack and trudged, in the dark, out to the middle of Coronado Beach, right in front of the Hotel del Coronado. There we plunked ourselves down in the sand and sat there on our asses, drinking beer, while Michael poured out his romantic woes to me (he had just started up again with an old girlfriend, but was still talking about my sister a lot) and all around us, lovers canoodled and occasional fireworks went off.
After drinking three cans of beer each, we went to Burger King to use the john. Michael was hungry and bought himself a burger and fries. I had heartburn.
I was in bed before midnight.
And you know something? I live in Washington, D.C. now, and I really don't expect that this Fourth of July is going to be all that much different. The Fourth also happens to be my wife Valerie's birthday, and I had invited some friends over for a cookout, but you know how it is...even with gas at $4.50 a gallon, most of them had already made plans to go out of town. Well, one thing's for certain, we won't run short of food. I bought enough spareribs for six or seven people, and it looks like it's just going to be the two of us and maybe one guest.
Oh, well. Maybe Patton will be on. Yeah, I've seen it a hundred times since 1976, but I know one thing about it: it's long enough to kill a dull afternoon.
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