Santa Barbara, Fall 1960
Democracy in Action

In 1960, John Kennedy ran against Richard Nixon for the office of the President of the United States.  "Ike" Eisenhower had been the President as long as I could remember but he had already served two terms and was not allowed to run again.

One Saturday afternoon, Pop took Roy and me to visit the Kennedy headquarters on State street. Like most local campaigns, they operated in a donated space.  The building had been vacant before it was loaned to the to the Democratic Party. The wooden floors of the headquarters were devoid of any covering and the walls (except where they were covered with campaign posters) clearly showed the positions of all the fixtures of the prior tenant.  I had never been in a vacant store before and I found the space startling, not unlike finding one of the neighborhood Moms walking around in their underwear: the appearance unexpected and interesting, but rather indecently exposed.  The headquarters was full of volunteers, all seated on folding chairs and tables.  Each person had a black, rotary dial telephone and they were all calling voters to ask for support. There were phone cables on the floor or snaking down from where the ceiling should have been and it was all very noisy, dusty and exciting!

It was a real measure of how much we wanted Kennedy to win that Roy and I donated some of our carefully-saved coins to the campaign.  I remember giving three dollars and I think Roy did so as well.  It was probably the most money I had ever spent on a single item in my life and represented a serious financial commitment: at the time gasoline cost 29 cents per gallon and we got a very generous allowance of 25 cents per week.  In exchange for our donations, we each got a Kennedy campaign button and a Kennedy bumper sticker.  We wore the former and happily horded the latter, since it would have been unthinkable to affix anything to the car.  Mine have been lost over time, but Roy developed a more serious interest in collecting political memorabilia and may well still have his.

Kennedy was young, handsome and smart.  He had even written a book that we could read and get book-report credit for: Profiles in Courage.  He was much admired by the fourth grade at Washington School and not just because his book was good to read.  We saw him in a live debate against Nixon on television; the first time ever such a thing had ever been done.  On TV, Nixon seemed even worse that he did in the press -- slow on the uptake and repeating himself.  Worse yet, he turned out to suffer the hideous disadvantage of looking at lot like Poodgie, the Rawson's ugly old basset hound.  After the debate, the fourth grade happily (and surreptitiously) sang a vulgar little song that we learned from the older boys up the street:

Whistle while you work,
Nixon is a jerk,
This old genie
Pulled his weenie
Now it doesn't work!

In wonderful speeches after the debates, JFK challenged us all to make the world better: to serve our country, to lead the effort to end the cold war and to help other nations.  Nixon complained that the news media was unfair to him.  When the school held a mock election for president, Kennedy won easily.  The fourth grade was the first to turn in results and we felt  we'd be the leaders in an exciting new age!

Instructional materials for our classrooms came in several forms.  There were pre-printed sources like the textbooks (write in them and die), spelling workbooks (fail to write in them and die) or the Reekly Weeder (no one cares if you write in it or make paper airplanes out of it, so long as you do so the week after the class is done with it -- there are few things as despised as an outdated newspaper!)

The teachers had the ability to create worksheets for the class to do.  My niece, Laura, calls these articles "Shut-up Sheets"; my teachers at Washington Elementary called them "Dittos."  Creating Dittos was a complicated process.  The content to be presented was typed on a rubbery blue stencil.  If there was a typing error, a radioactive-blue patch material had to be painted over the problem area, allowed to dry and the erroneous bit re-typed.  If the typo was too large, the stencil was thrown away and typed over.  The finished stencil was removed from the typewriter, detached from its backing and stretched over the drum of a special machine. When the handle on the device was turned, paper moved through the machine while a strange, odiferous purple ink was forced through the stencil to create the desired number of copies. It was rumored that kids who distributed Dittos for the teacher could be knocked unconscious by the fumes left by this process, but I never saw this actually happen. 

Our classroom was equipped with several green boards where our teacher, Mrs. Hill, could write in chalk, erase what was written and then write some more.  We mostly copied from the chalk board to our papers but occasionally, students got to write on the boards as well. On Thursdays, we had math relays where teams were formed and one kid from each team would go to the front of the room.  Mrs. Hill would dictate an arithmetic problem and everyone at the board write it down in chalk, competing to solve the problem fastest.  The first team with a correct answer got a point and the process repeated until every kid on the team had a turn.  The competition was savage because stakes were high: all members of the winning team got to go to recess five minutes early for the rest of the day. 

By the end of every day, particularly on Thursdays, the linoleum floor by the boards was littered with dust and little pieces of chalk which the janitors swept up during their nightly rounds.  Periodically, the felt erasers used to clean the boards got completely full of chalk dust and had to be taken outside the classroom and cleaned by banging them together.  This process resulted in a monstrous white cloud that coated everything in the vicinity: it was always evident which corner of each room's courtyard was used for eraser cleaning.  The teachers had cleverly contrived to make this act an honor and the lucky "eraser monitor" could be distinguished from ordinary mortals for the rest of the day by the thin film of chalk on their clothing.

Mrs. Hill decided she'd improve our understanding of the political process by making the position of eraser monitor an elected office.  We were organized into a red party and a blue party, each of which was supposed to produce a candidate for a final run-off election and the race was on! Just about every kid in the class wanted the position and we quickly learned about the entire democratic process: campaigning, nomination and vote-buying.

I was in the blue party and badly wanted the office.  Unfortunately, Blythe Gaye McDaniel did too. 

Blythe.  Gaye.  McDaniel. 

Never was a child more cruelly misnamed!  The dictionary defines "blithe" as meaning "carefree, lighthearted" and defines "gay" (in those innocent and un-liberated days) as meaning "cheery, bright and pleasant." 

Those parents should have been had up for violations of Truth in Advertising! 

From a tubby, mean first-grader, Blythe had matured into a porky bully, the red-haired bane of the entire fourth grade.  At school, the boys usually wore black high-topped Keds and the girls wore regular Keds or rubber-soled "velvet" shoes.  Blythe wore neither: she wore saddle shoes that featured steel shanks ("for support") and internal metal toe caps ("for protection.")  Students in the ghettos of Los Angeles might fear switchblades, shanks or shivs; the kids at Washington School feared Blythe's feet.  And with good cause, too!  She could kick like a pro football player and was an equal-opportunity terrorista who democratically picked on girls and boys alike.  When our Social Studies book described "jack-booted" Nazis marching into subjugated cities, I knew without being told that those storm troopers were wearing something exactly like Blythe's saddle shoes -- perhaps with the addition of black fabric high-tops to make them more manly.

Metal taps were affixed to the heels and soles of Blythe's shoes so that an ominous metallic clicking sound announced her wherever she went. 

Click, click, click ...

Blythe was sneaky. 

She had a trick of surreptitiously kicking her way to the front of the line when the class waited to come in from recess or queued up on the special occasions where we got to go to the multipurpose room to enjoy 16mm epics like "Our Friend, the Atom".

Click, click, click ...

Blythe was ruthless. 

During marble season, she never played but amassed a collection of the best peeries and boulders by simply announcing to her victim "I'll have those, ya gotta problem with that?" while tapping her feet.

Click, click, click ... 

"Resistance is futile," her shoes beat out. 

And we all knew it was true.

It seemed her parents would have been better advised to grace her with some cute diminutive of "Göring" or "Attilla" than the names they'd chosen.

Blythe's father owned the small variety store in the shopping center at the bottom of the hill.   At the store, we peasants stood on one side of the counter exchanging our horded milk money for forbidden sweets while "Blythe, Honey" imperiously took everything she wanted from the other side.   Bad-tempered, spoiled and fat from eating too much candy, she was thoroughly disliked by most and, when not terrorizing the rest of the class, spent her recesses with a little cadre of greedy sycophants that she rewarded with handfuls of Jujubees.  Exchanging my penny for two illicit cherry Twizzlers at her father's store, I silently invited the evil fairy of tooth decay, a close acquaintance of mine, to pay her a long visit. 

Despite Blythe's unarguable personal flaws, she proved to be a formidable political opponent.  Her electoral advantage: a campaign chest stocked with a virtually unlimited supply of jelly beans, jawbreakers, Jujyfruits and other delectables that she distributed with a lavish hand in exchange for promises of votes.  I tried very hard to persuade the members of the blue party that a vote for me meant an opportunity to share the honor if I were elected, but, alas, it was all for naught!   Licorice trumped logic.  Blythe won nomination handily and, having bought or terrorized members of the opposing party as well, was duly elected permanent class eraser monitor.

After the election, things returned to normal in Mrs. Hill's class.  Blythe whacked the erasers weekly and flaunted her pale coat of dust before the envious eyes of all.  The flow of candy dried up and, fueled partially by the jealousy of all the other would-be eraser monitors, her popularity sank even below its former level.

When the real election was held in November, Kennedy won, although certainly not with the margin he'd obtained from the fourth grade at Washington School.  We feasted our eyes on pictures of the elegant inaugural ball in Life Magazine and passionately admired Jackie Kennedy as the epitome of sophisticated style.  The news media wrote of "Camelot" and the start of a new political era of leadership and cooperation.

During the summer that followed, Blythe suddenly got her growth.  When she returned to school in the fall, she was still red-haired, but she'd become tall and willowy.  Being pretty had a remarkable effect on her disposition: she gave up kicking people and when she brought candy to school, there always seemed to be enough for everyone.

It seemed that a new day had dawned: nothing was impossible, right would triumph and the entire world would be safe for all!