In 1962 my father would, every three weeks, pick me up at our school yard, and drive me to our monthly father and son haircut. We went to Jerry and Son's Barber Shop in the Point Breeze neighborhood of Pittsburgh, a Barber Shop where my Dad, as a Policeman was treated like a king, and his son me, was given special attention. Including the actual haircut and then the time needed for the BS, we would spend about two and half hours at Jerry and Son's. This barber Shop was a mecca for die hard out of shape athletes, middle aged unhappily married men who could ogle at girlie magazines, blue collar families who thought $3.50 for an all American haircut was a respectable amount to pay, and a place to lament, languish and loudly pursue politics.
Jerry and Son's had a small television mounted on a rusted metal rack over the entrance to the restroom/workroom/lunchroom.Not just anybody could use that space but being 'Benny Buncher's son' I had special privileges and could enter whenever I wished. It was so gross I never used my special entry pass. However the one consequence of using that restroom was that all eyes were on the television above its entrance and lead by Jerry and then his son, whoever was in the Barber Shop would in unison scream "did it come out all right?" as the person using the facilities re-entered into the Shop.
My dad was a union man and believed that any community was only as strong as its weakest link. He also believed that no one deserved to be treated with respect, they in fact had to earn it through trust and honor. So, among the crowd at Jerry's who many times wanted to find a scapegoat or someone to blame their inability to achieve their dreams or just grunt and groan about everyone else but themselves, my father was not one to delve too deeply into the politics of the time. He would defend his being Jewish when a new guy walked in the Shop and had some kind of Sunday sermon derogatory comment to make about the Jews, but mainly he would listen. When fingers were pointed at an easy prey, the Negro (in those days the reference to Blacks), the Jew, again if they didn't know the policeman sitting in the shop in his uniform was Jewish they would somehow blame the greed of the Jews, or refugees,(in Pittsburgh in the 60's people started to arrive from other countries than Italy, Ireland or Poland and did not fit into the perceived ethnic make up of the city, my dad would speak up and ask anyone in the Shop "does your shit smell any better?"
But I remember it was the week after the announcement of Soviet missiles in Cuba that my Dad and I went to Jerry and Son's Shop. It was a cold rainy wet miserable bleak day in Pittsburgh and almost looked as dark outside as if we were approaching the midnight hour.The streets seemed deserted, anyone on the streets looked sour and sullen and it was hard to find any color outside except for grey.
We got to the Barber Shop and the place was filled, some old recognizable faces but plenty of people I had never seen at Jerry and Son's ever. It was standing room only and all eyes were on the television set located above the entrance to the restroom. Walter Cronkite was on the air and was speaking to a general and some Congressperson. The man was a Republican and he was smugly shouting that the Catholic President, Kennedy was busy taking orders from the Pope and was not acting in the American way. We took too much time in discovering the missile sights and now there would be hell to pay. The general said the US was on top of the crisis, and we had an arsenal of weapons that could blow Cuba off the map if we had to. Walter Cronkite asked if that general knew how close Florida was located to Cuba and in the blowing off the map of Cuba might not at least the Keys and maybe Miami be blown away also?
The discussion focused on the Atom Bomb and just whose bomb was bigger. (Had I been a bit more sophisticated at the time I certainly could have related that conversation to the many references of penis size and the power of the penis by most if not many of the customers at Jerry's.) When the conversation on television focused on the Atom Bomb and its destruction and the fall out and the devastation caused by the fall out the place grew eerily quiet. The only noise we heard was the rain falling on the sidewalk and as if it was a scene from a movie a clap of thunder clicked and made quite a few people jump, including my father. We were all scared. What scared me most however was witnessing the look of fear on all these able-ed body men and in particular my hero and saver of all things bad, my Dad.
I wanted to run home, go under the bed, build a bomb shelter, drive to my grandparents homes, my aunts and uncles bring them all to my house and just hide and wish away this horrible event. I wanted my Dad to say it will be all right, don't worry. I hated television and what I decided that day was its unrelenting communication of bad news.
Many wonderful experiences came my way growing up in the 50's, and 60's but that news cast with the word BULLETIN flashing under the chin of Walter Cronkite's chin still find its way into my psyche. The talk of doom and destruction haunted me many nights and every time we were at Linden School and there was a Retention Drill, I wondered if the Atomic Bomb was headed to Pittsburgh.
I trusted Walter Cronkite and somehow knew he would do anything in his power to make things right, to make my Father and those men at Jerry' shop stop worrying. I believed everything he had to say because, well because he was a news caster, a journalist.
I am a news junkie. I, like my Father still worry about the downtrodden, those easily scapegoated, the innocent who have little voice and listen closely to how the world around us is communicated. I worry about how the news is told and wonder often if like everything else of recent times what is supposedly reality is just scripted and marketed. I don't worry so much about the Atomic Bomb, but more so about the lies which many people seem to think is the truth, and the trust placed in people who are not journalists, just jerks.
The message from the television set above the restroom at Jerry and Son's had a powerful impact, one that still nags at me. The television in peoples' living room, computers, smart phones spews information almost twice the speed of light and the messages it delivers has an impact greater than that of radiation from an Atomic Bomb. It has scared many of us into believing things once unimaginable about our friends, neighbors, and family and fellow Americans.
America was on the verge of destruction in 1962, we heard it from Walter Cronkite's lips, America is on the verge of even more devastation in 2011 and we hear it from the lips of FOX, MSNBC, CNN, AM radio. We survived the Cuban Missile Crisis but somehow I still am reminded of that awful rainy day in Pittsburgh at about 5:00 pm when I thought it was the end of the world.
I decided to write a blog in hopes of speaking about things the common person finds relevant and important. I write a blog to help me cope with the bad guys in this nation who prey on people's need for a higher power, for their fair share, for recognition as equals and who use those needs as weapons.
I am not sure what I could have written about in 1962 after Walter Cronkite informed us of impending doom. But America did not give up then, and I sure as hell hope we don't give up now.
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