How I Became a Liberal, Commie Pinko

I saw an old intro to a kid's educational program we used to watch back in 1975 called Inside/Out. It had fairly left leaning stories that depicted kids in moral dilemmas. They always chose the liberal choice to solve them. It wasn't bad as I liked watching it and it was damned realistic about life in general. “Janey's Grandmom DIED” would be one show I remember. Heady stuff for 10 year olds for the time though. Seeing this intro opened up a flood gate of memories for me. It amazing how a song, a ditty of a song really, can do that.

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“We're the kid brothers and sisters of hippies you know.” says M one night to me in a Mansfield sports bar. I never looked at it that way. I figured we were the last of the Boomers who were influenced by the generation that preceded us, but not by some direct relation. My older brother was in no way a hippy, ostensibly. Our right wing Dad would have none of that if he could prevent it...for a while.

My brother dabbled with hippy-ness on the sly though and I came along for the ride eventually. When I found my brother's stash of pot in the battery compartment of his Radio Shack cassette player, he finally admitted a lot to me and “brought me in.” I can see me there still at 10 yrs old, with a shocked look on my face, holding up a fat bag of pot, and figuring out my brother in a nanosecond. After that, I was introduced to Frank Zappa, National Lampoon, Hustler and Oui magazines and a host of other shit a 10 yr old was never to be introduced too. Thank God! It opened up a much more fun world than the one I knew up to that point.

Add to that this; my Dad gave up his a lot of his Goldwater/Republican views and I can nearly pinpoint the date, May 1974. That was when we stopped going to church regularly. I once was up early on a May Sunday, saw my parents as two lumps under the covers and was stupefied as to why they never got up to get ready for church that Sunday. Cool! I get to watch shitty Sunday morning TV and go out and play instead, figuring my good luck was based on their need to sleep in. The next Sunday proved it to be for good when we didn't go then either. Double Cool!

Why did Dad give up this right wing stance? I guess seeing Nixon admit he was this short of a convicted felon, resign and seeing Ford pardon him was the clincher. My Dad secretly, sheepishly and quiet oddly voted for Carter in that election. He said that day at work he was hoping to vote for Ford three times in a row. That was a public face to put on in front of other republican financial managers there. He turned coat though in his own little quiet way.

After all that, I grew my hair out w/o any remarks from him. I stopped wearing my “good” school clothes as I thought they made me look like Myron Poindexter. I bugged my Mom to get me a pair of gold rimmed Elton John/RayBan aviator style glasses instead of those black 50's glasses I had. I got them. I also could wear (horrors!) plain ol' jeans to school w/o a goddamned collared shirt. I fit in and was looking cooler by the day.

Fifth grade I had Miss McHale. Being ten I didn't know how hot she was but she had suitors show up to the class to visit and “drop by.” This was when anyone could walk into a school. I did see the other 10 year old girls in the class notice though, as they'd asked a ton of questions about “him,” who keeps showing up to drop off meaningless items. We young boys were far too stupid to figure that out...and actually, we didn't care what men came to her class, we were boys and girls have cooties.

McHale, loved to sing and when you're not teaching kids math and such, you get them to sing to folk music. Not just any folk music, but 30's Labor Strike-kick the scab in the knee and death to the rich kind of songs. Dylan, Pete Seeger, Joan Biaz and some of Lennon's stuff. We as kids didn't know the heavier meanings in those songs but like everything else, you soak it up in time with repetition. I knew the song, “Power to the People” from singing it before I heard it on the radio.

Next door to our class was Ms...and I mean Ms. Barbadoes. Do you remember that moniker...Ms? Your strident feminists began to demand you address them that way instead of “miss.” Ms. Barbadoes was a female Che Guevera. She had long ropey black hair she kept up in a red bandanna and eyes that could affix a trouble making boy to a wall. She at times wore those olive drab Army pants that had 49 pockets in them. Her efforts to turn us into little Maoists included watching movies about the evils of pollution, Vietnam and get this, making us watch the Church Committee hearings as they skewered the CIA. I thought it cool there was an actual electrically powered poison dart gun. I saw some Senator hold it up as evidence of the CIA's cache of assassination weapons. As for the actual testimony of others, I suppose most of it went over our 10 year old heads. The whole point Ms Guevera was turning us into commies.

Church Committee...holding up that pistol. All the boys in the class went, "oooh!"

By 1978, we had teachers openly talking about smoking pot. Our science teacher in Goff tried to explain to us, Zen Meditation and we kept trying to make him explain it in the only terms we knew, the television series, Kung Fu. Mr. O'Donnell, told us we could remain seated, talk quietly as they played the Star Spangled banner over the intercomm. For years before, we had to stand up and face the flag for it. O'Donnell didn't give a shit. We had another teacher who was a bookie for the local caporegime of Patriarca in Pawtucket. Kids would bring money in from Dad and placed bets through him.

Now that I think on it, a few of our male teachers had hair as long as Barry Gibb from the Bee Gees.

It wasn't till high school that we learned about teachers having relationships with students. Guess what? No one cared.

What a completely different time it was compared to today, where a school kid  can't point a banana at some one and say BANG BANG!