Reading Anne Tyler #1

 

I’ve started reading Anne Tyler’s first novel, If Morning Ever Comes, published in 1964 when she was only 22 years old (I was still a student, midway through Hiram College).  It takes place in Sandhill, NC, where a young man from there, Ben Joe, is at law school at Columbia and, on impulse, decides to return to visit his family.

And oh what a complicated bunch they are! From a great-grandmother to a baby.

I’ll write more about the book when I finish it.

But it got me thinking of how different the world was when I was a college student. No cell phone; no computers (except the UNIVAC type that filled an entire room—we each carry more power in our pockets these days).

JFK was assassinated in November 1963. The MLK, Jr. speech “I Have a Dream” was earlier in 1963. The world was ready to boil as the Vietnam War was commencing. There was no Medicare or Medicaid. No Voting Rights Act. Etc. There was still de facto segregation throughout much of the South. The cities were ticking racial time bombs.

Born in Enid, Oklahoma, a small city fully segregated, in 1944, I would not speak to a black person till I was in college—where I found out what I had been missing. I felt like an idiot. And I was.

In 1964 I wasn’t sure what I was going to do—or be. My parents wanted me to teach; therefore, I did not want to. I found, because of a couple of wonderful professors, that I loved literature, so I applied to the University of Kansas for their American Studies Ph.D. program. I got in ... but with no financial aid. So ... I couldn’t go.

To appease my parents, I had done my student teaching, had earned my teaching certificate from the State of Ohio in secondary school English.

I’ve told this before, but my critic teacher at West Geauga HS (where I did my student teaching) warned me, “Don’t get stuck in a junior high school!”

But I did. I applied for only two jobs (there was a teacher shortage), and the first one to call me back was in nearby Aurora, Ohio. I interviewed. Got the job (7th grade) and started my career in the fall of 1966.

I was thinking I would stay a year and get the hell out.

Ha!

I stayed a dozen years (earning my Ph.D. at KSU, mostly part-time), married a wonderful woman, and left Aurora at the end of the 1978 school year, having accepted a job as the Chair of the Department of Education at Lake Forest College (north of Chicago).

But I missed middle school kids, and so ...

I’m drifting away from 1964, the year we elected LBJ, captured the Boston Strangler, the Beatles released their first album (on LP, of course), the USSR was our biggest fear, Cassius Clay defeated Sonny Liston for the heavyweight title ... and so much more.

I turned 20 in 1964–impossible to believe that our world was so ... different. Yet in some scary ways fundamentally the same. Divided. So many people certain they were right—about everything. And anger, boiling, that would soon flow out into our streets ...