VOTE

I have written my little blog about Key West real estate for nearly eleven years.  Occasional I have departed from writing about homes to share stories about growing up in the suburbs of Denver after World War II. I often mention photos in my old shoebox. I have several boxes of photos, really. And I have boxes and boxes of little trinkets of things I held dear at one time of my life including my Communion Cross and Cub Scout Promise Token. Neither is probably worth much. But they mean so much to - especially on this Election Day November 8, 2016 because these two pieces of metal represent the values I learned in my church, my school, and in my home in the 1950s - a time when values were much different than they are today.

Last summer I traveled back to Colorado to attend my 50th high school reunion. Earlier that day I went to my grade school which was sold off by the school district and is now owned by a non-profit which primarily teaches the children of Mexican immigrants.The young woman who runs the school allowed me to wander through the old building. That blog is located here.

I remember November 2, 1952 quite well. It was the Sunday before election day.  I was sitting on our living room floor looking at the comics in the Rocky Mountain News and the Denver Post. My dad came over and threw down the Sunday supplements for each paper. There was a full page photo of Dwight Eisenhower on one and Adlai Stevenson on the other. My dad gave me one of those ubiquitous life lessons fathers give to their sons. He told me to NEVER VOTE FOR A REPUBLICAN BECAUSE ALL THEY CARE ABOUT IS MONEY.  He said the Democrats care for working people.  At that moment I learned I was a member of the working people group.

Two days later after my mother and dad got off work I walked over to the town hall where they voted for Adlai Stevenson. I remember going inside the building where I saw one or two machines similar to the one below. They each had to tell the people who they were and where they lived before they could go inside. They closed the drapes and voted in private. I understood what voting was. Later that night or maybe the next day we learned the Stevenson lost and Eisenhower won. We repeated the process four years later with the same results.

It was in 1960 that I developed the bug for politics.  I admired John F. Kennedy so much. He was so not like Ike. He was young. He spoke in prose that evoked visions of pride in our country and what we could become.

I got to see President Kennedy in Berlin in 1963. Thousands of people were there screaming and yelling praise at Kennedy. I was so proud that he was our President. Later we got to go to East Berlin and I saw what not having the freedoms we enjoy in the United States looked like. Shortly thereafter we ere on our train riding through East German where we had to stop. German guards boarded the train and went through each and every compartment looking at our passports and bags. A schoolmate of mine, Nina McKitrick, had take a couple of photos of the guards. One grabbed her camera and ripped out the film and handed back to her. She was in tears. I think the rest of us were pretty terrified. Things like that do not happen where we came from. At least not where I lived. A little more than three months later John F. Kennedy was assassinated. He had spoke to my generation to be our better angels. And then he became one. Sometime between his being elected and before his death, I decided I wanted to go to law school to become a lawyer. I planned eventually to run for public office. I did become a lawyer but I never ran for office. Now I sell houses in Key West.

In the summer of 1963 I got involved in local community politics. I organized the Jefferson County Teen Democrats. I was terrified about what a Barry Goldwater presidency would do to our country. There were a lot of other teens like me who got together on Saturdays to walk through various neighborhoods handing out election brochures. We went to several campaign events where we got to shake hands with President Lyndon Johnson and Vice President Humphrey. We did not have polling back then like we have now. I did not go to school on election day. Instead I got in my car and drove voters to their precinct polling places. Later I went to the Democratic post election meeting place to gather with other Democrats. The news coming on TV was quite exciting. It looked like we were going to win and win big. A fellow Teen Dem and I drove down to the Hilton Hotel in Denver. Early editions of the Rocky Mountain News and The Denver Post already announced that LBJ had won before midnight.

It wasn't until the next day that we learned the extent of LBJ's victory. The Democrats not only won the US Senate and House, but also took over many governorships, state houses, and local offices across the country. Johnson's coattails were long and wide. Several of the candidates who the Teen Dems worked for were elected. We felt we contributed to their victory.

The lessons I learned as a little boy about God and Country live with me today. I have been horrified at the prospect of Donald Trump becoming President. He is not from the mold of an Eisenhower - he ran away from war not toward it. He is not a skilled politician like Nixon nor a statesman like Regan. Just about everybody has a word to describe him. I don't know what will happen today. I already voted. VOTE.  Fifty years from now how will you look back on what you did today?

All The Way with LBJ - Reflections of a Former Teen Democrat

The photo above shows Marcia McGinley, Ben King, and me awaiting the arrival of President Lyndon B. Johnson at a political speech in Denver in 1964. I was the president of the Jefferson County Teen Democrats. Our group attended a speech the President made at the old auditorium arena sometime during the race for the White House. Later that day the President signed the poster I was holding.

I still have the poster with LBJ's autograph as well as autographs of Senators and Congressmen who accompanied him. It's been kept in dorm rooms, basements, and closets for years. There are little tears and water marks, but the color and character of that time are still in tact.  CLICK HERE to see the signatures of those who accompanied LBJ as well as Colorado's former Republican Governor John A. Love.

Lady Bird Johnson stopped briefly at Stapleton Airport in Denver en route Washington D.C after vacationing at Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Our teen dems presented her with a small pine tree which we suggested she plant on the White House grounds. She said she would see to it that it would get planted on the Texas ranch.  How naive our gesture seems now. It made the news back then. Lady Bird signed the home made campaign poster with our Teen Dem mascot on it. Years later as her autograph started to fade, I used a magic marker to retrace her signature. For that forgery, I now atone.

Earlier this week I watched the HBO movie ALL THE WAY which depicted LBJ's first year as President and the events which led up to his election as President in his own right in 1964. Since I already knew how that election ended, it was fascinating to watch how Johnson responded to events and political turmoil that raged throughout much of  my youth. The driving force of his election bid was the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. It ended racial segregation of public schools, the workplace, and in facilities that serve the public known as "public accommodations". I urge readers to watch this flick. Bryan Cranston did a superb job as LBJ and made history relevant to our current body politic.

I grew up in a lily white suburb of Denver. We had no black students at any of my schools and probably none in Jefferson County located west of Denver and extending into the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. We lived a very comfortable post World War II life in an economy that was booming. I had no reference to poverty or racism because I didn't see it. But I knew it existed because I watched the nightly news and saw stories on TV about how blacks were treated in other parts of America - especially the south. Those of us in our sixties and older probably remember those grainy black and white nightly news clips which showed sit-ins, marches, bombings, lynchings, murders, riots, and speeches by civil rights leaders reacting to the turmoil of that era. The Civil War ended slavery, but it had not given black people equal rights to whites. Blacks could not vote in many parts of the south. They could not use restrooms in bus stations or eat a meal at a lunch counter. They could not go to college in many places. Segregation was a method by which the white majority kept the black minority in its place. It was a way of life. In Denver blacks lived in one part of town. A federal judge created forced busing to desegregate Denver's public schools.  A lot of white folks fled to the suburbs in response.

In June 1965 I got a summer job at a guest lodge located in Upper Bear Creek Canyon just outside of Evergreen, Colorado. Historically the lodge had been the summer home of one of Colorado's richest families. In 1965 the owners were a middle aged couple who ran the place with the aid of their adult daughter and her husband plus the summer crew of four or five college students.  I was one of them. I had never had a job in the hospitality business before that job. One day I had to replenish the glasses in the bar. I carefully stacked each cocktail glass in a neat row on glass shelves with a mirror behind. I put one glass too many on the glass shelf. The entire wall of glasses came crashing down. I was mortified. I found an online photo of that room as it exists today. Instead of stocking glasses, I laid kindling and logs for future fires throughout this mountain castle and other odd jobs that did not include anything in the bar area.

The other college kids were like me: squeaky clean white kids. The cook was a young black guy named Willie. We had worked together as a group for a couple of weeks. We all got along great. One afternoon after our work was done and when all the guest rooms were vacant, we all jumped in the pool and had a good time. We spent the entire day preparing for the next day arrival of a group of executives from Duracell or some other battery manufacturing company. The lady owner, whose first name was Sadie, was not pleased that Willie got in the pool. She told him he could not swim in the pool in future under any circumstance. Whereupon he quit before she had a chance to fire him. This all seemed odd and wrong to me. You see Sadie routinely boasted that she and Lady Bird Johnson were cousins. I would have thought she would have treated a black person with respect since she was an important member of the President's family so to speak. She could have said that none of the staff could use the pool and that would have been understood by all. But that is not what happened. In the HBO movie ALL THE WAY LBJ told a story about the time before he was President, when his cook drove the Johnson's car from Washington down to the LBJ ranch in Texas. This was a time before the Civil Rights Act was passed - when blacks were not allowed to use white restrooms in many parts of the south.  Johnson bemoaned the fact his cook had to squat in roadside fields.

Willie got his revenge on Sadie without doing or saying anything. When the guests arrived the next day there was no cook. The owners' daughter and I drove into Evergreen to find already prepared food to feed the guests. There wasn't such a thing in 1965 Evergreen. So we ended up at the Safeway store where we bought Swanson TV chicken dinners. We took them back to the lodge. I remember thinking how loony it was that we were taking TV dinners up a private gated half mile road to this luxurious mountain top retreat to serve to people who were expecting a wonderful meal. We heated the TV dinners and plated them along with a sprig of parsley. We made salads and served some form of desert as well.

The next morning the college kids cooked breakfast. I remember one guest asked me for some jelly or preserves. I knew Sadie had two different kinds of preserves. One was a cheap jar which was to be served to guests and an expensive jar which was reserved for family use. I reasoned that since the guests had to eat a TV dinner instead of a real meal prepared by a real chef they should be treated to the more expensive preserves. Sadie noticed I had done and walked through the elegant dining room with windows looking out to the wooded grounds and removed the bowl from the table. She told me to replace the bowl the cheap preserves. I did as I was instructed.

The owners hired a new cook who started work later that day. We served bottle after bottle of champagne to the battery people that night. We kept the bubbly flowing and flowing. After all the guests paid for it. Sadie's husband who was referred to by all as The Colonel grilled the steaks. The new cook prepared the remainder of the meal. The guests had a really good night in this  remarkable setting.

The next day was Sunday morning. I walked into the office and told Sadie I quit. I told the other kids. They all quit as well. I couldn't work for a crazy woman (or man). Until I started to write today's blog I forgot how wacko Sadie behaved over a jar of preserves and cruel she was to Willie. What a petty person she was. And what a miserable human being she was to treat a really nice man so meanly.

The President got landmark civil rights legislation enacted which has changed the course of American life for the past 52 years. But there are still people who are petty and carry on grudges over the way things used to be. They continue to use the States Rights argument to deny all people fair and equal treatment in these United States of America.Watch ALL THE WAY as it recalls the way we used to be and that the way some of still are. The echoes of that era are a part of our current political debate.