#468 Musings Beyond the Bunker (Wednesday September 28)
Good morning,
THE FALL EQUINOX CAME AND WENT
I try to note the changing of the seasons when they come along but I slipped this Fall (pun intended). Last Thursday, September 22, marked the change of seasons. Day and night on that day were of equal length and will become shorter and shorter with each day until the Winter Solstice.
Although people say there aren’t really four seasons in Southern California, they are mistaken. Yes, I know the joke about the four seasons in California being fire, mudslide, earthquake and heatwave… But one doesn’t need sleet and massive weather-induced traffic jams to witness the more nuanced change of seasons. The coming of the Fall means that the beach becomes a wonderful place to go (when less people are present), there is a chill in the evening air, leaves crunch underfoot, football season is upon us, and peaches, nectarines and plums have have run their course until next Spring. Time for pears and apples!
THE RHYTHM OF THE SEASONS—FROM A KID’S PERSPECTIVE
While the “official” new year is January 1st, Labor Day and back-to-school have always struck me as a second “new year,” particularly for schoolchildren and their parents. The chaotic Summer months—generally devoid of fixed schedules—give way to the structure and order of the Fall.
As a kid, Labor Day marked the real beginning of the year. Summer vacations were in the rear-view mirror and the inevitable September heat waves arrived. School began. With that came the anticipation/fear of teachers to whom we would be assigned—people who meant nothing to us months before but would be central to our lives for the next nine months. More importantly, it was the start of the “new season” of television, with shows appearing on three broadcast networks (well, local news could be found around the dial and PBS provided educational TV). Hard as it may be for Millennials to believe, there were NO RERUNS or recordings! If you missed the airing of your favorite show, you have to wait until Summer reruns (if any) or syndication…likely years in the future.
TELEVISION AND BASEBALL
Much of the talk around school during the Fall was about what show aired the night before. There was a sense back then that we were living in a shared world with shared entertainment, news, and social trends. There were great variety shows (like Ed Sullivan, Disney, and Jackie Gleason). And ridiculous situation comedies (like I Dream of Jeanie, Bewitched, and the still inexplicable My Mother the Car). Westerns were very popular (shows like The Virginian, Gunsmoke, Bonanza, Daniel Boone and the strangely surreal Wild, Wild West). But what I remember most vividly back then was the Tuesday morning commiseration after the prior evening’s Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In. It was subversive and edgy to a bunch of goofy suburban kids too young for “flower power.” At breaks, we would recount the prior night’s best sketches and sayings (like “sock it to me.”). It was juvenile humor, which was perfect, since we were juveniles!
Eventually, our taste in humor graduated later to the more sophisticated and subversive Smothers Brothers. These were early incarnations of what would give rise to Saturday Night Live and SCTV.
September also was the last month of the baseball season. Back then, baseball was worthy of the designation as “America’s pastime.” Hard to imagine that in the 60s and 70s, baseball reigned supreme, outshining football and the NBA. Baseball cards were a big deal and many of us listened to games on transistor radios under our pillows while feigning sleep, should our parents peek in.
When school began, the World Series was just around the corner. Most teams were out of the race by August. There were no playoffs back then. Finishing a game out of first place in a tight race didn’t mean a lesser seed in the playoffs. It meant it was time to pack it up until the following Spring. The idea of baseball extending into November would have been laughable.
While I followed the Dodgers dynasty of the early 1960s, the first series that really captured my attention was the 1967 Cardinals-Red Sox match-up. This was the series in which Bob Gibson led the Cards to the world championship, pitching three complete games (while Jim Lonborg won two complete games for the Sox). To understand how the game has evolved since then, only one pitcher in the major leagues this year has more than three complete games during the entire season.
ALL ABOUT THE HOLIDAYS
No sooner had the school year begun than we began thinking about when we would again get to escape. By a happy quirk of history, the Fall semester was punctuated by fairly evenly distributed holidays at the end of each month—October, November, and December—providing a regular diet of countdowns before the next holiday! I include Halloween, even though we did not receive a day off, but the build-up to disgusting quantities of sweets was a welcome distraction from the daily grind of classes. It was a holiday of near-epic magnitude, particularly in Anaheim. For some reason still unclear to me, the orange-and-black holiday warranted a city-wide celebration and a parade through downtown. Babe Ruth apparently was the Grand Master in one of the earlier years. Despite Anaheim’s odd fascination with this pagan holiday, for kids then and now, the holiday is a diabetic and diabolic bacchanalia.
While the second semester had its holidays, Spring semester definitely was more “serious,” with fewer holidays spaced further apart. The holidays no longer were monthly—but separated by closer to six weeks. After returning from the Christmas break (yes, we called it that back then—and it seemed okay and hardly an abridgment of the separation of Church and State), there was a long spell until the dual February celebrations of Washington and Lincoln. I still find these presidential birthdays far preferable to the more anodyne “Presidents Day” that we now celebrate. Another six weeks or so passed before Easter and Passover, always indeterminate as to precise date, as they followed two different lunar calendars. As a Jewish kid, I was confounded by the clearly deeply religious nature of the Easter story that somehow included bunnies and hiding eggs dyed various colors (was the Paas company a monopoly?). Around that time, the baseball season began anew, giving us a taste of the Summer to come. But still, there was a long slog until the beach, no school, staying up late, and the return of more watermelon, peaches and nectarines! That two month period we had to make it to the end of the school year seemed interminable.
While I’m sure the seasons aren’t quite measured the same way, each generation has its markers of the passage of time over the year. For all of you with kids back in school, welcome to the sense of order and structure that the school year brings. And get ready to pick out costumes, as Halloween is just around the corner!
Happy Fall!
Glenn
PS: And thank you to all who identified the cockatiel the other day. I’m told it likely was a pet that escaped and, surprisingly, likely has decent odds of making it in the wild!