A Kid's-Eye View of Politics and Pop Music

While I was seven years old, I was abruptly jolted into awareness in two areas: politics and popular music. For it was at this time that our beloved president John F. Kennedy was assassinated and the Beatles made their debut in the United States with an appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. When the first event happened, I was in the second grade at my school in West Hollywood, Florida. We had been back in our classroom a little while after lunch when someone came into our room and said something to my teacher. She left the room. Some of my classmates touched base with kids in the classroom across the hall (anytime our teacher left the classroom we pretty much did whatever we wanted) and the terrible news got out about the shooting. There was a lot of uncertainty, though, as to how badly the President had been hurt. By the time I got home that day, his death had been announced. My mother was there with the TV on, probably CBS, which stayed on with that story nonstop for a very long time that day (Friday) and what seemed like days afterward. Before that day, I had already been aware that we had a president whose name was John Kennedy, but it didn't seem significant enough to give much thought to. It was later when I found out that the answer to a mystery from early in the first grade had a lot to do with him. One day at school, without warning, our teacher had lined up our class, marched us out into the inner hallway that separated the classrooms and had all of us crouch down in a line on the floor against one of the walls with our heads dug down toward our knees and our hands clasped over our heads. We held this position for a few minutes and then went back into our classroom. We knew even back then that this couldn't be a fire drill, but what was it? It turns out that this happened in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October, 1962 and we were performing a civil defense drill. There was an imminent danger then of a nuclear exchange between the USSR and the US if the American blockade of Soviet ships coming to Cuba with reinforcements had escalated into open combat. And Kennedy had at that time established his legacy as a great statesman for standing up to the threat while resisting the prodding of many in this country to attack Cuba and overthrow Castro. This turns out to have been fortuitous because, from what we know now, Cuba already had access to tactical nuclear weapons that they were prepared to use against any invading US forces. Castro apparently wanted a US-USSR conflict and felt betrayed by Khruschchev when he backed down from the blockade. It was after this that the two superpowers began to take tangible steps to limit nuclear testing and increase bilateral communication to avoid catastrophic misunderstandings that could lead to a holocaust.

After Kennedy came Lyndon Baines Johnson. Like many people, I believe he would have gone down in history as a great president if he had resisted the advice of other people to engage in full-blown military combat in Vietnam. But then I was still a little kid and began to think less of this President when he kept choosing Sunday evenings for his special nationwide television addresses. And that usually meant interrupting and preempting parts of the Ed Sullivan show. At the time I was totally into groups like the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Supremes, Dave Clark Five, and Herman's Hermits, all of whom appeared often on that program. But my favorite group was the Animals, a British keyboard-based rock group fronted by a great vocalist, Eric Burdon. They had several hits, but broke up because of bad internal squabbling (later, Burdon formed another group with different musicians that he called "Eric Burdon and the Animals"). One Sunday, the Animals were going to be the special guest act on Ed Sullivan. When the show started, I couldn't wait. Only I knew I would have to, because Ed had this sly, nasty habit of waiting until the last five minutes of the show before he would bring on the hot rock acts while teasing the audience that they would be coming up soon. But on this night, that would never happen because, a few minutes into the show, CBS News broke in to give us President Johnson with his slow-drawling "My fellow Americans, blah-blah-blah etc" way of putting people to sleep. Only I wasn't ready to sleep. I wanted my Animals! But Lyndon wouldn't heed my brain waves transmitting this urgent need through the ether. He kept rambling on until the entire show was preempted. It was at this time that I decided that I hated Lyndon Johnson. In two or three years, many, many more people would join me in that feeling, but for a different reason. Still, looking back on it, because of his pushing through Congress and signing of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, Lyndon Johnson deserves praise along with the criticism (for Vietnam and knocking off the Animals).

Which brings me to the second eye-opening cultural phenomenon that happened when I was seven: the coming of the Beatles and the British Invasion. In February, 1964, my sister, who was eleven years old at the time, suddenly began to speak of a rock and roll group from England called the Beatles that were coming to the U.S. and were going to be on Ed Sullivan the next Sunday. This was good for us, because we had one and only one TV set and my parents determined which of the four channels it was going to be on. "Good", because they happened to like the Ed Sullivan Show! As it turned out, the Beatles had such an impressive performance that evening and on a subsequent appearance that within a few weeks, my mother and father went to W.T. Grant (our local 1960s equivalent of Wal-Mart) and bought Meet the Beatles and The Beatles' Second Album, not to mention the Twist and Shout and Please Please Me singles. We played them over and over again in our house. My father also began to record Beatle songs off the radio with his gigantic tape deck, and one time recorded us kids singing Beatles songs. When the movie A Hard Days Night came out that summer, we saw it and got the soundtrack album. During the next two years my parents, because they themselves loved the Beatles, bought Beatles '65, Beatles VI, Help!, Rubber Soul, and Revolver.
When the Beatles decided in late 1966 to stop performing in public and just make studio albums, my parents cooled off on them, but my sister and I didn't. Between us, we eventually bought the rest of their studio albums. But back in 1964 my family was pretty much on the same page concerning pop music. Radio was fun to listen to, the big rock stations in South Florida then (560-WQAM "Tiger Radio" and 790-WFUN) interspersing current hits with golden oldies. My sister and I each received transistor radios that Christmas, and we wore out a lot of batteries! I even found some groups that I liked more than the Beatles, tops among them of course the Animals!