A few weeks before the holiday break of my sophomore year, on December 8, 1980, John Lennon was shot outside his apartment building in New York City. The Beatles didn’t mean much to my friends and me, the final album Let It Be having arrived in 1971, when we were fully occupied playing duck, duck, goose and musical chairs. But it turned out that the Fab Four were significant to many of our parents and teachers, and for several days afterward these adults appeared hollow-eyed, stumbling around, and wondering aloud what had gone wrong. They couldn’t understand how it was that we’d finally finished fighting all these wars and made it through two decades of social unrest only to live in a country where people assassinated rock stars.
Following Christmas vacation, Ronald Reagan took office as the fortieth president of the United States, having beaten Jimmy Carter in a landslide by asking Americans if they were better off than they were four years before. Minutes after the inauguration on January 20, 1981, the Americans held hostage in Iran for 444 days were flown to freedom, following a deal in which the United States agreed to return 8 billion dollars in frozen assets to Iran. Jimmy Carter had demonstrated that the presidency was essentially an impossible job, and yet Ronald Reagan
would continue to prove that basically anyone could do it.
The murder of John Lennon and the hostage crisis began true political awareness for me and most of my classmates. My memory of President Reagan being shot in the chest on March 30, 1981, by a would-be assassin in Washington is quite clear. As he entered surgery, the former actor joked, asking if his doctors were all Republicans. And when his wife, Nancy, arrived at the hospital, he is reported to have said, “Honey, I forgot to duck.”
Five months later, Pope John Paul II was shot while blessing an audience at Saint Peter’s in Rome. He survived after five hours of surgery to treat massive blood loss and abdominal wounds. Rather than cracking wise about the matter, the pope credited Our Lady of Fatima with helping to keep him alive through the ordeal.
I recall how elated women were when, in September of that year, President Reagan appointed the first woman, Sandra Day O’Connor, to the United States Supreme Court. Finally, it seemed as if all vocations really were opening up to women. People started to speculate for the first time whether they’d see a woman president in their lifetimes. And it was a good thing, as far as I was concerned, to have all that excitement and adventure finally available to the sisterhood. Because there’s no doubt in my mind that, had I been born a hundred years earlier, there’d be only two words for the situation: Calamity Jane. I’d have thrown on a hat and trousers, hopped on a horse, and lived my life as a man. And with my figure, it’s pretty safe to say I’d have pulled it off.
The Reagan Revolution meant slashing government spending (purportedly), increasing the military budget (definitely), and cutting taxes (at least early on). This was supposed to create a trickle-down effect that would in turn boost the economy (one of his critics deemed it “voodoo economics”). In actuality, the result of these measures was a terrible
recession in 1981. Yet, they eventually gave way to boom years of high technology and productivity that would last through the rest of the eighties, despite the spectacular but brief stock market crash in 1987.
However, these good times were accompanied by the largest federal budget deficit in history, along with numerous huddled figures on the streets, the likes of which hadn’t been seen since the Depression. And former factory towns like Buffalo saw no hope for replacing all the lost jobs.
Whatever our mothers felt about his fiscal policies, Reagan certainly caught their attention in 1981 when the Department of Agriculture
proposed that ketchup be considered a vegetable when calculating the nutritional value of school lunches. The suggestion caused such uproar that the rule was never instituted. Meantime, we kids were working the opposite end of the food chain, attempting to employ the Twinkie Defense when called out for bad behavior. The era of personal responsibility was crumbling, and, going forward, it would be possible to blame most blunders on external factors or medical conditions.
Prior to 1980, aside from the bad economy, the real world hadn’t directly impacted our lives. We took our time transitioning to adulthood. In elementary school, we girls despised the opposite sex. They were the hair pullers, stone throwers, mud lovers, and worm cutters. In junior high, we progressed to playing touch football with boys and embarking upon such risqué games as spin the bottle and pass the frozen orange. It was the job of the girls to organize the parties and kissing games. It fell to the boys to play the role of victim, often making us drag them away from shooting baskets in the driveway. But once it was on the record that they’d been forced into such compromising circumstances, no attempts were made to shirk their duties.
By high school, we no longer needed games to start a make-out party—just a place. After an hour or so, the lights were dimmed and kids paired off in corners to the sound of Meat Loaf’s hard-charging, hormone-stoking Bat Out of Hell blasting from a stereo with heavy bass, followed by the Cars album Panorama, which contained the fabulous hit single “Touch and Go.” If kids wore braces, they tried not to get stuck together, which usually involved calling someone’s father and the appearance of a flashlight and needle-nose pliers. Total embarrassment.
A seriously committed couple was more likely to spray paint the news of their devotion on a highway overpass than have sex. Among my girlfriends, few drank or even smoked. And First Lady Nancy Reagan
was warning us teenagers not to do drugs (while she needed to be warned not to listen to astrologers).
I learned that drugs can kill brain cells from my mother’s nursing books and Mr. Wyatt’s health class. Anyway, that was all I needed to know; no need to repeat it, thank you. It wasn’t necessary to sit me down in front of the public service announcement that showed an egg frying on a hot stove with the ominous voice-over: “This is your brain on drugs!” Obviously I was going to need every brain cell in my possession. I didn’t have the test scores of a person in possession of a mind that could afford to play fast and loose with its gray matter. Thus, I decided it was best not to take any drugs, including alcohol, allergy medicine, and aspirin, just to be safe. The closest I ever came to a drug trip was in the form of an excursion to Quebec with my high school French class, during which I was swigging codeine cough medicine to beat back a bad case of bronchitis. I arrived home with a new boyfriend and photos that looked as if they’d been snapped from the top of the Château de Frontenac.
Reinforcing this antidrug stance was the fact that at the start of high school, the academic fog, which had until then cast a long shadow over my life, could be declared permanently lifted. I clearly recall the amazing feeling of finally understanding what was being taught in social studies, math, science, and English. It was also at this moment that I realized I had little or no interest in most of it. Sure, I enjoyed a good book, but certainly not Beowulf or “The Fall of the House of Usher.” However, I continued to attend school because that’s where my friends were, and so that’s where the fun was.
Throughout my four years of high school, I played on the soccer team every spring. I was an enthusiastic player more than a talented one. Coach Radka kindly described me as “a bull moose in a china shop.” He had all those great coach sayings like “hustle your bustle,” “you gotta want it,” “drop the piano when you’re running,” “they caught you napping,” “the ball won’t kill you,” and “now you got a piece of it, it’s time to get the whole pie.” His cheeks turned slightly red when he suggested that the girls who were experiencing chafing from their thighs rubbing together should try a bit of Vaseline.
Coach Radka was a born-again Christian and believed in the inherent worth and athletic ability of every player. He played us all. We almost always lost. I was no help here. As sweeper, I’m not even sure what color the net was on the other end of the field or how someone got there. But the good thing about being on a bad team was that I had the chance to play a lot more
than I would have if we were winners. After all was lost, usually shortly following halftime, Coach Radka turned the field into an aerobics class and put in the second, third, and fourth strings.
Soccer was strictly an after-school sport, thus participation didn’t exempt one from the state-mandated three days a week of physical education. Usually it was fun to take twenty minutes to play softball, bounce on a trampoline, or perform group calisthenics designed for gulag prisoners, but classes were large enough that it was easy to slip away on the days we weren’t in a sit-up state of mind. Candy and soda machines couldn’t be found for a mile in any direction, so not many of us actually needed more exercise than we were already getting. (Translation: Still no good video games.)
My most vivid memory of gym class is an eleventh-grade badminton course where, for about six weeks, I was teamed with another girl for doubles. Through some random matching system, my partner was severely anorexic, weighing about eighty pounds. She was positively skeletal, as if she’d just hopped down off the rack in the science room. When class began, she’d only recently arrived back from a monthlong stint at a clinic in Rochester.
At the time, I was five foot nine and almost 150 pounds. My main objective was to not accidentally collide with my frail partner, thereby instantly killing her. I could only hope that when it came to badminton, size didn’t matter, and we’d be able to pass the time without injury or embarrassment. There wouldn’t be any real competition, of course, since nobody took public-school gym class seriously.
While waiting to play our season opener, we got to talking and my partner, who happened to be extremely bright, told me about her experiences at the clinic. It transpired that the doctors had given her a weight target she had to meet in order to be released. They put her on the scale every day for several months. So one morning, she drank an unbelievable amount of water before the weigh-in and just barely managed to get sprung.
Okay, now I was wondering if I had some sort of duty to tell a gym teacher or guidance counselor that she shouldn’t have been released. Worse, I was afraid that a blow to the eyebrow from a birdie would take her out, or that moving three steps to the left on a badminton court might melt off the six ounces between her and certain death. I decided not to rat her out, assuming that if a person spends a few months flirting with anorexia, there must be some follow-up from doctors. However, I did manage to make sure that we did not play badminton by feigning some sort of a thrombosis every time a court opened up.
Twenty-Four
Earl and Me…The Sewing Circle Turns Square
Although western New York is the birthplace of some of North America’s wackiest religions, God never spoke to me. However, another person did: Earl Nightingale.
The name is probably not ringing a bell among those who admire great thinkers like Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Emerson, especially if you’re under fifty. But Nightingale became the portable tent I would carry through life.
My dad’s best childhood friend still lived on Long Island, so we’d visit him when traveling there in the summertime. Rich held various jobs for the Carnation Company, most having to do with managing a sales staff. He gave my father a box of motivational tapes by Earl Nightingale. I don’t know how much impact they could have in the field of court reporting, but Dad found the messages worthwhile with regard to life in general, and so he passed the tapes on to me.
A series of motivational tapes is probably an odd item to have given an eight-year-old girl back in the seventies, especially when self-help meant transcendental meditation or heading to an ashram. Dad didn’t label a person according to age or gender and was liable to turn up with absolutely anything he found interesting, whether it was an abacus, boomerang, zither, Lawn Jarts, or box kite (all real examples). Dad was the king of strange stuff. Let’s not forget the blowtorch.
Earl Nightingale was a Depression-era child, like my father, and had a wonderful broadcaster’s voice, also like my father. Nightingale had
been in the marines, hosted some radio shows, and then went on to speak and write full time on the subject of achievement. His first full-length recording, The Strangest Secret, sold over a million copies back in the sixties. Nightingale partnered with businessman Lloyd Conant, and together they tackled the infant self-help market. The best-selling Lead the Field and The Essence of Success soon followed. I would later find the material was similar to that of Dale Carnegie, Napoleon Hill, and the Reverend Dr. Norman Vincent Peale.
However, it was Nightingale I stumbled upon first. Indeed, he borrowed from, and sometimes reworked, the best material of the time, but he always credited those individuals attached to the original information. Today, his equivalents would be Tony Robbins, Ken Blanchard, and Dr. Arthur Caliandro at the Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan (Norman Vincent Peale’s successor). But most of the motivational work being done nowadays has too much cheerleaderlike enthusiasm for my taste. And much as I liked Dr. Norman Vincent Peale and admire his successor Dr. Caliandro, at the end of the day these pastors of the Dutch Reformed Church toss it all up to God. Having someone else in charge doesn’t work for me, even a project manager with the
Almighty’s credentials.
Earl was calm, thoughtful, measured, and sensible. I’m willing to admit that because he was my first motivational romance; it’s like a first love, and therefore I’m not capable of being objective. After all these years, he’s still the one for me. (Earl died on March 28, 1989.)
First and foremost, Earl offered concrete thoughts about achievement, highlighting the fact that you don’t have to be too smart. I was immediately hooked.
He talked about starting from scratch with no particular advantages, working hard, working honest, and working smart. It made sense the way he told it and explained exactly how to proceed, often by using engaging anecdotes and real-life examples. Earl kept breaking down concepts to make sure the listener understood. He talked about where to get ideas and how to be observant. One story he recounted focused on looking for fortune all over the world when it was right in front of your nose at home—diamonds in your own backyard. Another featured a prisoner of war who used his jail time to teach himself to play a better game of golf by thinking about all the rounds he’d played in the past, visualizing and then improving upon each shot.
Earl spoke of leadership, problem solving, passion, a sense of urgency, the importance of focus, and determination. If a person listened long enough, Earl taught him how to think.
In the meantime, Earl kept reminding his listeners that they didn’t have to be the best and the brightest, just ambitious, and then to learn to make the most out of what they already had. He provided great hope and inspiration for the underdog.
Is it trite? Is it all just common sense? Was it merely commentary from a guy who didn’t make the A-list broadcast team? For me, Earl offered a way to view everything from my education, goals, and plan for the future to how I wanted to live my life and the kind of person I wanted to be. He urged me to learn, plan, organize, and focus. Earl told me to get out there and make mistakes.
Top 10 Earls of Wisdom
• Our attitude in life determines life’s attitude toward us.
• We can let circumstances rule us, or we can take charge
and rule our lives from within.
• What’s going on inside shows on the outside.
• Whenever we’re afraid, it’s because we don’t know enough.
If we understood enough, we would never be afraid.
• People with goals succeed because they know where they’re going.
• Your world is a living expression of how you are using your mind.
• Wherever there is danger, there lurks opportunity; wherever there is opportunity, there lurks danger. The two are inseparable.
• Creativity is a natural extension of our enthusiasm.
• You can help others by making the most of yourself more than
in any other way.
• You become what you think
about.
***
Two decades before Google and Wikipedia, learning came where you found it. Classroom grammar and civics lessons may have been a thing of the past, but we had ABC’s animated Schoolhouse Rock! every Saturday morning. Anyone born between 1965 and 1975 can liberally quote from these educational shorts, such as “I’m Just a Bill,” where a dejected scroll of paper is dragged through our labyrinthine legislative process to become a law. Similarly, “Conjunction Junction” explained how to hook up words and phrases and clauses using and, but, and or. However the list clearly did not include like and you know.
The early eighties were when the repetition of like and you know permanently entered the vernacular. Prior to that, they were employed in similes the way Robert Burns wrote, “My love is like a red, red rose,” or else as a question or statement during introductions, for instance, “You know the Smiths.”
My friends and I entered high school not saying like and you know several times in every sentence, and four years later we departed as the carriers of a sloppy new speech pattern. It spread like head lice. Teachers and parents attempted to fend off the invasion, but most eventually fell victim to the dialectical disease themselves. Soon it was a staple in movie and television dialogue.
When I was young, most homes had a TV antenna on the roof, operated by a dial inside the house. Viewers quickly determined that the best reception was achieved by having a person stand next to the TV, touching it with one hand and holding a wire hanger above his head with the other. Or if we had rabbit ears (a ten-inch-high antenna that resembled, well, yes, the head of a bunny) atop the set, then we wrapped tinfoil extensions around the tips and attached ourselves to those. This was usually a job for the youngest child, especially in a large family like the Pynes. At our home, when Dad ran his electric razor in the bathroom, the TV became a test pattern of fuzz and stripes. This happened when almost any electric appliance was activated, similar to the way flushing the toilet caused the person in the shower to get scalded.
Buffalo Gal Page 24