Fifty Years Ago and Now

1962. Fifty years ago. I was 16. Like any fortunate 16-year-old I was madly in love with a girl my age who let me kiss and fondle her for hours every day after school—being kissable and fondlable are sufficient grounds for any 16-year-old male to fall madly in love. Before the year was out, our relationship was over and I was working through that other primary adolescent experience: heartbreak.

Unbeknownst to me a British rock group had just released its first single. Love Me Do didn't do particularly well, but it was enough to set the Beatles on their way. It was probably about another six months before I heard a Beatles tune—and a few years away from my awakening to their awakening with works like Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds and Strawberry Fields. In the meantime I had Bob Dylan and Masters of War as an anthem coming down the pipes. But, in 1962 there was nothing except meaningless studio-manufactured tripe on the radio. Like a rubber ball, I come bouncing back to you—a who, who, who, a who! (Bouncy-bouncy; bouncy-bouncy—oh, oh, oh!)

Also in the fall of 1962 we experienced the Cuban Missile Crisis. Young folks today think they know all about despair and what an awful mess the older generation has made of the world. They don’t know anything. Those who of who were conscious and aware in 1962 have already been through the Apocalypse—and survived. We were literally hours away from a world-wide catastrophe from which there would be no recovery. How we reacted spoke volumes. Our elder generation told us to hide in basements with our arms over our heads. To this day I can’t believe that they really believed that protecting our heads with our forearms would do anything to prevent us from being vaporized, but, then, they had survived a major world war by following just such advice. My response was to wear a “Ban the Bomb” pin to school which threw my girlfriend into a rage because it marked me as a coward. When I refused to leave my seat when the time came to be herded into the school basement (I figured I might as well be dead at my desk than in a hole in the ground), the school principal turned red in the face and threatened to suspend me. Fellow students (who, in later years tried to convince me that they were closet hippies at the time) called me a communist-lover and traitor. I recall one who was so angry at my apparent insubordination that he slammed me into a locker and screamed invectives. I just simply stopped going to school after a while.

Yes, I know it is hard to believe today, but, seriously, in the early 1960’s anyone who objected to being fried by nuclear weapons was called a coward, spat upon, and sometimes beaten by police officers. (I got pushed hard a few times, but never actually beaten—though friends were.)

In the fall in 1962, Dr. No was in the theatres, though it would be another year before Dr. Who made his first television appearance. Both James Bond and the Good Doctor are still around, James in his 6^th incarnation and the Doctor in his 11th. Though I was still infatuated with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee vampire movies at the time, it would not be long before I became a fan of European movies from Russia, Sweden, and Italy (Eisenstein, Bergman, and Fellini). Interestingly, it was about that time that I discovered the great twentieth century Russian composers (Stravinsky, Prokofiev, and Shostakovich) to which I've remained attached all my life.

In 1962 I discovered the club sandwich and western omelette. I was still about five years away from my first pizza and lasagne. Spaghetti was something that came out of a can. Cherry coke was a novelty. Everyone, but everyone, smoked tobacco constantly and wore their shoes all day—in house and out. In 1962 I stopped putting grease in my hair and spending inordinate amounts of time trying to place each hair just so. First I adopted the “Caesar cut”—short hair simply brushed forward. It wasn’t long before I gave up on hair styles altogether and let it grow where it wanted to. Standard clothing switched from “dress pants” for school to blue jeans. It just happened as part of a seeming natural evolution. In 1962 I drank my first espresso coffee and read Thomas Pynchon’s V. (I still have that original copy of the book. I’ll have to re-read it some time.)

In 1962 I befriended the first open homosexuals I had knowingly encountered. They were worried about being entrapped by police officers and sent to prison. I knew people who risked seven year prison terms by smoking marijuana, but, I was still a few years away from toking up with the rest of my generation. On the subject of… in 1962 Dr. Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (later called Ram Dass) were experimenting with LSD at Harvard University. Dr. Ewen Cameron was playing with the lives and mental health of patients at Montreal’s Allan Memorial Institute on behest of the CIA, testing out Chinese brainwashing techniques coupled with doses of LSD and sleep deprivation. Two men, Arthur Lucas and Ronald Turpin, were hanged in Toronto’s Don Jail in 1962, the last to be executed by the state in Canada.

Not much was going on in Vietnam in 1962 that was of note to the outside world.  The number of American advisors supporting the corrupt and unpopular Diem regime had risen to about 15,000 by the end of 1962, but it was still a couple of years before American teenagers and young men were fighting a war both in South East Asia and on American university campuses. In the late 60’s I met so many American deserters in Montreal that they appeared to form a major immigration group on their own. I later figured that the later amazing progress of Canadian research in the sciences and medicine had a lot to do with our acceptance of so many bright, educated, and thinking young people during the late 60’s and early 70’s.  (BTW, Canada is still a leader in world research in many areas, though we’re starting to slip.)

Right now I am sitting at a desk in my home office, using a computer that is magnitudes more powerful than the largest of the mainframes available fifty years ago—and it is my personal machine. No, I am not able to afford the millions of dollars for some crude circuit boards, vacuum tubes, and miles of thick wires and toggle switches that were required to do some basic mathematical calculations; just an average retiree able to purchase engineering so advanced that a computer scientist in 1962 would have it thought impossible—not just for private individuals, but for any government or huge company to afford. The thinking processes and approaches have underground major revolutions in the past fifty years. What was once unthinkable is now common-place. And…perhaps more significantly, what was once common-place is now unthinkable.