*The Ghost Classmate- A Personal Story And, Maybe, A Cautionary Tale

Every once in a while, although as much recently, some old high school classmates that I have stayed in touch with remind me that it has been 45 years since we went though those hallowed hall of the old school. That, knowledge, has on occasion sparked more than a few entries in this space. The following tale, although not filled with the humor that I tried to instill in of my earlier efforts, continues in that vein.

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Not everyone who went through our old high school survived to tell the tale, or at least the way the tale was suppose to be told, or how they wanted it told. Moreover, we, as a class, after 45 years, are long enough in the tooth to have accumulated a growing list of causalities, of the wounded and broken, of the beaten down and disheveled. This entry is going to be about one of our classmates who got lost in the shuffle somehow and it only here, and only by me, that he gets his struggles voiced. I will not mention his name for you may have sat across from him in class, or given him what passed for "the nod" in the hallway back in the day, or had something of a ¿crush¿ on him because from pictures of him taken back then he certainly had that 'something' physically all the girls were swooning over. Let's just call him, as the title for this entry suggests- the ghost classmate (and in the interest of saving precious space in order to tell his story, shorten it to GC).

Now I will surprise you, I think. I did not know GC in our school days; at least I have no recollection of him from that time. I met him, or rather he met me, when we were in our early thirties in front one of the skid row run-down "hotels" that dotted the low rent (then) streets of the waterfront of San Francisco. My reason for being there is a tale for another day, after all this is GC's story, but rest assured I was not in that locale on vacation, nor was he. Ironically, at our first meeting we were both in the process of pan-handling the same area when the light of recognition hit him. After the usual exchange of personal information, and assorted other lies we spent some weeks together doing, as they say, the best we could. Then, one night, he split taking all his, and my, worldly possessions.

Fast forward. A few years later, when I was in significantly better circumstances, if not exactly in the clover, I was walking down Beacon Street in Boston when someone across the street on the Common started to yell my name. Well, the long and short of it, was that it was old GC, looking even more disheveled than when I had last seen him. After an exchange of personal data and other details I bought him some dinner. The important thing to know, however, is that from that day until very recently I have always been in touch with the man as he has descended further and further into the depths of the skid row ethos. But enough of the rough out-line, let me get to the heart of the matter.

I have left GC's circumstances deliberated vague until now. The reader might assume, given the circumstances of our first meeting, GC to be a man driven to the edge by alcohol, or drugs or any of the other common maladies that break a man¿s body, or his spirit. Those we can relate to, if not fully understand. No, GC was broken by his own almost psychotically-driven need to succeed, and in the process constantly failing. He had been, a number of times, diagnosed as clinically depressed. I am not sure I can convey, this side of a psychiatrist's couch, that condition in language the reader could comprehend. All that I can say is this man was so inside himself with the need to do the right thing, the honorable thing, the 'not bad' thing, that he never could do any of those. What a terrible rock to have to keep rolling up the mountain.

Here, however, to my mind is the real tragic part of this story, and the one point that I hope you will take away from this narration. GC and I talked many times about our youthful dreams, about how we were going to conquer this or that "mountain" and go on to the next one, how we would right this or that grievous wrong in the world, and about the, to borrow the English revolutionary and poet John Milton's words from his famous "Paradise Lost", need to discover the "the paradise within thee, happier far". Over the years though GC's dreams got measurably smaller and smaller, and then smaller still until there were no more dreams, only existence. That, my friends, is the stuff of tragedy, not conjured up Shakespearean tragedy. but real tragedy.

*The Last Man Standing, Indeed- A Jerry Lee Lewis Encore

Click on title to link to "YouTube's film clip of the trailer for "Last Man Standing".

CD REVIEW

Last Man Standing, Jerry Lee Lewis and other artists, Shangri-la Records, 2006

The last time we heard the name Jerry Lee Lewis in this space (see above) was in connection with a rave review of his star-studded concert in New York City in 2006 also entitled “The Last Man Standing”. I was not aware at the time I wrote that review that there was a CD connected with the DVD. This CD also gets a rave review from these quarters. The last paragraph details some of the highlights of this CD. However, I can tell you right now to save your old eyes- get this thing. It is not the fire-balling of Jerry Lee's youth but virtually from start to finish it is some very nice work. If you need to go back to the Fifties and hear his original work there are plenty of his greatest compilations elsewhere. Here are a couple of words on this one.

Apparently in putting together this album every musical artist who has ever been anything, every wanted to be anything or who will be in the various musical Halls of Fame signed on to play with “The Killer”. Let’s make this clear though- Jerry Lee is in charge here- the other artists are basking off his reflected glory. Ya, he is an old man and he has lost a step, and maybe he has not learned all of life’s lessons but he still rocks &rolls, does rockabilly and country rock’s with the best of them.

Highlights here concerning some of life’s lessons that old Jerry Lee has learned, as reflected in some of the lyrics, are his duo with Willie Nelson on “Couple More Years”, his duo with Keith Richards on “That Kind of Fool” (a take-off on his old classic- “Who Will The Next Fool Be”) and his duo with Eric Clapton on “Trouble In Mind”. To show that he can still rock- listen to the duo with Kid Rock (yes, that Kid Rock of rapper fame) on “Honky Tonk Woman”. If you need to hear rockabilly and boogie-woogie then the classic “Hadacol Boogie” with Buddy Guy will keep you moving. Enough said, except the production values on this CD are very good, as well.

*Once Again, Hard Times in Babylon

Click on title to link to a website that has information about the 1950's. This site is presented here for informational purposes only I will not vouch for its accuracy or political perspective.


Commentary

I have received a recent comment (not on this site) concerning my take on the labor movement these days. (See my entry, The AFL-CIO bureaucracy and the 2008 elections, dated September 25, 2007). The gist of the comment concerned my argument on the necessity of organizing (or rather, in effect, reorganizing) the coal miners. As part of that comment I noted that one of the problems in such organization is the geographical and physical isolation of the mines. I also note that the miners tend to be a parochial lot and mistrustful of outsiders, as a result. That seems to have set the reader off. In short, that person questioned my ‘credentials’ to speak on the question. He or she, apparently, missed the sentences about my father’s experiences as a young coal miner in Eastern Kentucky. That does not qualify me to be president of the union (which, I believe, at last look required five years in the mines before one could run for that office) but I know the ‘coal’ in an indirect way. Here’s a little bio sketch on that point.

GROWING UP DIRT POOR IN THE 1950’S

Recently I wrote a personal commentary about a childhood friend from back in the old neighborhood where I grew up in the 1950’s (see "An Uncounted Casualty of War", May 8, 2007 archives). I have also been re-reading the recently deceased investigative journalist David Halberstam’s book "The Fifties" that covers that same period. Halberstam’s take on the trends of the period in contrast to the reality of my own childhood experiences as a child of the working poor that missed most of the benefits of that ‘golden age’ rekindled some memories. It is no exaggeration to say that these were hard times in Babylon. Those events have also made me reflect on why the hard anti-communist politics of the period left people like my parents high and dry. The defeat and destruction of the left-wing movement, principally pro-communist organizations, of that period has continued to leave a mark on today’s political landscape and on this writer.

There are many myths about the 1950’s to be sure. However, one cannot deny that the key public myth was that those who had fought World War II and were afterwards enlisted in the anti-Soviet Cold War fight against communism were entitled to some breaks. The overwhelming desire for personal security and comfort on the part of those who had survived the Great Depression and fought the war was not therefore totally irrational. That it came at the expense of other things like a more just and equitable society is a separate matter. Moreover, despite the public myth not everyone benefited from the ‘rising tide’. The experience of my parents is proof of that. Thus this commentary is really about what happened to those, like my parents, who did not make it and were left to their personal fates without a rudder to get them through the rough spots. Yes, my parents were of the much ballyhooed and misnamed ‘greatest generation’ but they were not part of it.

I will not go through all the details of my parents’ childhoods, courtship and marriage for such biographic details of the Depression and World War II are plentiful and theirs fits the pattern. One detail is, however, important and that is that my father grew up in the hills of eastern Kentucky, Hazard, Harlan County to be exact, coal mining country made famous in song and by Michael Harrington in his 1960s book "The Other America". This was, and is, hardscrabble country by any definition. Among whites these ‘hillbillies’ were the poorest of the poor. There can be little wonder that when World War II began my father left to join the Marines, did his fair share of fighting, settled in the Boston area and never looked back.

By all rights my father should have been able to take advantage of the G.I. Bill and enjoyed home and hearth like the denizens of Levittown described in Halberstam’s book and shown on the classic television shows "Ozzie and Harriet" and "Leave It To Beaver". But life did not go that way. Why? He had virtually no formal education. And moreover had three young sons born close together in the immediate post-war period. Furthermore he had no marketable skills usable in the Boston labor market. There is no call for coal miners here. My father was a good man. He was a hard-working man; when he was able find work. He was an upright man. But he never drew a break. Unskilled labor, to which he was reduced, is notoriously unstable, and so his work life was one of barely making ends meet. Thus, well before the age when the two parent working family became the necessary standard to get ahead my mother went to work to supplement the family income. She too was an unskilled laborer. Thus, even with two people working we were always dirt poor.

Our little family started life in the housing projects, at that time not the notorious hell holes of crime and deprivation that they later became but still a mark of being low, very low, on the social ladder at a time when others were heading to the Valhalla of the newly emerging suburbs. By clawing and scratching my parents saved enough money to buy an extremely modest single-family house. The house was in a neighborhood that was, and is, one of those old working class neighborhoods where the houses are small, cramped and seedy, the leavings of those who have moved on to bigger and better things. The neighborhood nevertheless reflected the desire of the working poor in the 1950’s, my parents and others, to own their own homes and not be shunted off to decrepit apartments or dilapidated housing projects, the fate of those just below them on the social ladder. This is social progress?

But enough of all that. Where in this story is there a place for militant political class-consciousness? Not the sense of social inferiority of the poor before the rich (or the merely middle class). Damn, there was plenty of that consciousness in our house. But where was there an avenue in the 1950’s, when it could have made a difference, for a man like my father to have his hurts explained and have something done about them? Nowhere. So instead it went internally into the life of the family and it never got resolved. One of his sons, this writer, has had luxury of being able to fight essentially exemplary propaganda battles in small left-wing socialist circles and felt he has done good work in his life. My father’s hurts needed much more. The ‘red scare’ aimed mainly against the American Communist Party but affecting wider layers of society decimated any possibility that he could get the kind of redress he needed. That, dear reader, in a nutshell is why I proudly bear the name socialist today. And the task for me today. To insure that future young workers, unlike my parents in the 1950’s, will have their day of justice.

*In The Time Of The Great Fear- David Halberstam's "The Fifties"

Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for the American writer, David Halberatam, most famous for his revealing look at the underside of American foreign policy in Vietnam, "The Best and the Brightest.

BOOK REVIEW

THE FIFTIES, DAVID HALBERSTAM

Although I am a member of the Generation of ’68, a political characterization, I am also by accident of birth a child of the Fifties. In some recollections of that period, including the present book, those times appear almost as a ‘golden age’. For those who were either too young to remember fully some of the early events of the Fifties or those who were not born at that time this book is a nice overview of the various political, social, economic, technological and cultural events of the period.

In a sense Mr. Halberstam has tried to accomplish too much under one cover, despite the book's several hundred page length. He has taken a panoramic view of the whole event- filled decade and with few exceptions given only a surface skimming of events, personalities and the impact that they had on the times. Notwithstanding that limitation, which can be addressed by reading other material on particular topics suggested by each chapter this is a solid journalistic piece of work. For an analysis of the meaning of the times or their place in the overall scheme of American history one can look elsewhere.

One thing is clear from Mr. Halberstam’s sweep of the decade and that is that many of the trends just coming to the surface then are still recognizable today. He tackles the vast changes in mass consumption brought on by the end of World War II that include the rise of the automobile, the suburbanization of America and the revolution in communications headlined by the use of television. This in turn triggered new mass service industries like airlines, hotels and fast food joints. These were also times of changes in cultural appreciations from an earlier more Victorian (at least on the surface) time and so on. Remarkably what has not changed despite massive changes in the forms of political packaging is the shallowness of political discourse. The banalities of the Eisenhower-Nixon years can easily compete with the banalities of today’s Bush era. The maturation of the age of the information super-highway since then has not brought a concurrent rise in political maturity.

Those of us who were alive during the period have our own take on the Fifties. I would make two points here that underscore what the Fifties mean to me. First, a lot of hoopla has been made over that generation that survived the Great Depression and fought World War II, my parents’ generation. In some cases they have been called the ‘greatest generation’. That is pure bunk. They sold their birthright to a more just society for a mess of pottage. However the Fifties was their time, the time that they came to maturity, and one cannot understand why they did or did not do better without and understanding of the period. Secondly, for my family, the saga that Mr. Halberstam presents was not our 1950’s. The promised abundance never reached down to my family, a family of the marginally working poor. In some ways the picture he presents is of a different society from the one I grew up in. There is no reason now to cry over it but those are the facts and that helps explain why my political trajectory took the course that it ultimately did.