WHAT I HAVE BEEN READING

I've had a great week but sadly it has not included much blogging. I completely missed Word of the Day which was just bad of me since lately I have had so many great contributers of sentences. I will do my best to be back on that this coming Wednesday.

What I did do is a rewrite on the 1944 chapter of my memoir, Reading For My Life. For those of you who have read the early chapters here on the blog, you might wonder why you haven't seen a new chapter for over a year. The main reason is that I haven't written a new chapter for a while. I joined a writing group about a year ago and have been revising my earlier chapters month by month and reading them to the group for feedback, which I am happy to say has been quite positive. The group members tell me that it reads like a novel. Maybe I could still write a novel or two in the years left to me.

The second reason is that I got squeamish about putting the memoir on the blog for free. What if I could actually publish it someday? Other reasons like should I put such personal information about my life and family on the web and related thoughts to that are still swirling through my mind and finding nowhere to rest. Stay tuned is all I can promise.

The other accomplishment this week, besides reading, was a book review of The Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostova for BookBrowse, which will go up on the web on February 17 for members and about 2 to 4 weeks later for visitors. But don't wait for that. Just read it. It is quite good.

I have been on hiatus from working at Once Upon A Time since we finished doing inventory at the first of the year. Since I had some savings and business is slower this time of year, I was lucky enough to take some time off. This blog is still linked to the store and I encourage any of my readers who are fond of independent bookstores to shop there or at your local one. We might not have them for much longer but at least we can support them and all their hardworking owners and staff. It is possible that our children and grandchildren will move on to other ways of shopping for books but then again, you don't what you've lost until it's gone. I find it heartening that children's literature is having a boom these days and really, how can you pick out a picture book without paging through it?

Reading: I started the year with a (probably unrealistic) resolution to read a book a day. Factually it takes a good eight hours or more a day to do so and some days just don't go that way. I got started on my resolution in the second week of January, due to the above mentioned inventory, but still managed to read 18 books last month. That is pretty good.

So here is the rundown. Some of these are already reviewed here on Keep The Wisdom. The rest are in the queue. One of my goals is to read three books a week for My Big Fat Reading Project, as that is the research for the memoir. In 7 years of working away at my lists I have only completed 17 years worth, so I must step it up. Also, the lists get longer as the years go by and I discover more authors I want to explore.

OK. Enough. Here is what I read in January:

The Short Reign of Pippin IV, John Steinbeck. A little known novel of his from 1957 which is his only book of overt political satire and takes place in France. Great!

Loser Takes All, Graham Greene. Very short, mediocre, 1957 novel. One of his "entertainments."

Little, Big, John Crowley. Adult fairy tale. My favorite book of 2010 so far.

The Madonnas of Leningrad, Debra Dean. Outwardly a story about the siege of Leningrad but really a story about art, memory and immigration.

Food Rules, Michael Pollan. A brief, hilarious list of ways to avoid food that will ultimately make you sick and poison you.

The Scapegoat, Daphne Du Maurier. Well, she just never wrote a book that wasn't wonderful. This one, from the 1957 list, is about a doppelganger situation that takes place in France.

The Swan Thieves, Elizabeth Kostova. The much anticipated follow up to The Historian. Art, love, women, and mental states with history added. Very nice.

The Borrowers, Mary Norton. A favorite of mine from childhood. Missed it when I read the books from 1952. About small human-like creatures who live in our homes and "borrow" all our stuff that's gone missing.

Bayou Susette, Lois Lenski. The first of her regional series for children. Also missed from my 1943 list. Life on the New Orleans bayou in the early 1900s.

The Deep Range, Arthur C Clarke. Futuristic extreme adventure set in the oceans of Earth, where mankind grows much of his food: algae and whales, from the 1957 list. Engrossing.

The Edge of Darkness, Mary Ellen Chase. Not the movie. From the 1957 list. She is a loved author of mine but this one wasn't her best. People from a Maine backwater and their foibles.

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, David Wroblewski. Just amazing. Can't believe I waited this long to read it. And I don't even especially like dogs.

Miracles on Maple Hill, Virginia Sorensen. Newbery Award winner from 1957. One of the best Newberys I have read so far. A father damaged by the Korean War is healed by life in the maple sugar country of northern Pennsylvania.

Dandelion Wine, Ray Bradbury. His 1957 coming-of-age tale set in a midwestern small town summer.

The Grift, Debra Ginsberg. Fun, trashy novel about a psychic by the author of Blind Submission.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Muriel Barbery. Three of my five reading groups have selected this bestselling book of ideas. Set in Paris, not much of a plot, but lovely just the same.

Giants of Jazz, Studs Terkel. The first of his books about American life. Non-fiction, loving portraits of many of the jazz greats from the first half of the 20th century.

White Man, Listen, Richard Wright. From the 1957 list. He continues to tell the truth about Africa, colonialism and the future of the black race. Amazing really.

What have you been reading? Or writing?

MARJORIE MORNINGSTAR

Marjorie Morningstar, Herman Wouk, Doubleday & Company Inc, 1955, 584 pp


I remember one summer day when I was a young teen, a movie by this name came on afternoon TV. My mother, passing through the family room, hurriedly turned it off and forbade me to watch it. In her eyes, it was too advanced in concept (translation: sex) for a girl my age. She didn't know, of course, that I was reading Lady Chatterley's Lover or Tropic of Cancer at babysitting jobs. In the long view, none of these books did much to prepare me for womanhood, but at 13, I was just trying to learn about sex.

Marjorie Morningstar was the #1 bestseller in 1955. When I finally read it in 1992, after having read Wouk's Youngblood Hawke, I found out what I had missed over thirty years earlier. It starts out great. Marjorie is a Jewish girl with stars in her eyes. She is all set to flaunt everything her mother tried to teach her and become an actress. She falls for Noel Airman, director of plays, a rebel against Judaism and society and a comet burning out. He is in fact another version of Youngblood Hawke, a novelist who meets a tragic end.

After much emotional waffling, reminiscent of Bella in Twilight; after realizing that being a "bad girl" means you have to go to bed with the guy, Marjorie turns tail and settles for marriage, security and all the rest, just as Noel had predicted. (I never finished the Twilight Series and don't know what Bella decided.) I'm not sure what Wouk was up to here. Youngblood Hawke burned out from a relentless pursuit of art and fame, as is predicted for Noel. It's a depressing end, but in the 1950s and today, that is appropriate for a man. Are women not allowed to burn out? Can they not be comets?

Well, the double standard was the official line in the 1950s. Marjorie Morningstar was an enlightening read. Free love, feminism, and all the rest was just a decade away in 1955. And at least Wouk posed the questions.


(Marjorie Morningstar and Youngblood Hawke are both available in paperback by special order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

THE MAN IN THE GRAY FLANNEL SUIT

The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, Sloan Wilson, Simon & Schuster, 1955, 276 pp


My dad used to use the phrase "man in the gray flannel suit" to describe certain people. In fact both of my parents read the book back in the day when it was #5 on the bestseller list of 1955.

Thomas and Betsy Rath are living in a small house in a small Connecticut town with their three small children. They were very happy and in love when they married in 1943, but Thomas had to go to war, jump from planes and kill people. He came back a changed man; now life is dreary and routine, they drink martinis every night and the magic is gone.

Thomas works for a non-profit foundation making not quite enough money. When his grandmother dies and leaves her house to him, he and Betsy decide to move up in the world. But Tom's war induced cynicism and the secrets he carries make it hard for him to take it all seriously. Since he is basically a good person and Betsy is positive with lots of energy, they rather improbably work it all out by the end of the story.

The writing is not great but Sloan struck a chord with the middle class reading public and the book was an instant bestseller, was made into a successful movie and the title went down in history as the concept of conformity. After hearing about this gray flannel suited man for almost my whole life, it was great to read the book at last.


(This book is available in paperback by special order from Once Upon a Time Bookstore. It is also on the shelves of many public libraries.)

UPDATE ON MY BIG FAT READING PROJECT

(For background on this post, see My Big Fat Reading Project.)

In a couple days, I will have finished reading my book list for 1955. Due to several factors, but mostly due to the extremely low level of excitement I have felt for the books of the 50s, it has taken me ten months to work through this list.

Last spring I joined a writing group in hopes of having some company for the lonely act of writing and in expectation of having a monthly deadline for producing work. It has worked out fabulously in both respects. I am basically a lazy person who can drift for days and weeks without accomplishing a darn thing unless I have deadlines, which I define as the line beyond which you are dead. My writing group members are wonderful, kind and sharp people; just what I need because I also suffer from low self-esteem as a writer. There, that is enough sharing.

So I have been re-writing the earlier chapters I wrote for the memoir of reading I hope to finish before I die; then reading them to the group. It is all working out fine, except that I have not written a new chapter since last November. You can read the first drafts of my chapters on this blog here.

I had a pattern of posting the list of books for each year with their reviews just before I would post a new chapter. That pattern is now in shambles and behind the times. I finished the books for 1955 late last year but have not ever posted the list of the reviews for them, because I have been not writing the chapter for 1954. So what, you say.

So I am going to try a new pattern. First I will post the reviews, individually of those books I read for 1955, interspersed with the stuff I am currently reading. Reading all those books from 60 years ago has paid off richly for me in terms of background to current fiction, seeing the trends and changes over the years and learning lots of history. I would like to share what I have found. Later, when I am ready to post a new chapter, I will precede it with a summary of the list.

Once again, thanks to my readers here at Keep The Wisdom. I have a feeling there are many more readers than I know about and I welcome you once again to leave comments, especially if you have read a book I have reviewed. I truly love to know what other readers think about the books I have read.

READING FOR MY LIFE: 1953

LOOKING EAST


In 1953, my family moved to Princeton, NJ, the town where I would live until I went away to college. It was a good move for the whole family. My parents were able to put a fair amount of distance between them and my father’s parents and found intellectual stimulation in both the town and at their church. My sisters and I got to grow up in a college town, go to excellent public schools and live in a fairly hip town. Of course, none of us, except possibly my dad, knew about all this when we made the move.

This year was the beginning of the Eisenhower era, as our 34th President was inaugurated, after a landslide victory over Adlai Stevenson. The campaign at the end of 1952 was the first to utilize television as well as public relations and advertising firms, techniques with which we are now nauseatingly familiar. Though fighting in Korea had reached a lull, it took six months of negotiations to finally arrive at a truce with North Korea on July 27. The death of Stalin, the threats of Eisenhower to use atomic weapons against China and the weariness of war in both the US and China finally brought the war to an end. Aside from demonstrating a commitment by the US to fight the expansion of communism in the Asia, after years of fighting nothing much changed politically in Korea.

Meanwhile the Marshall Plan to revitalize and rearm Europe was making headway. England got a new queen crowned, Elizabeth II, but carried on with Churchill as Prime Minister. Both western and eastern European countries were still trying to recover from WWII and undergoing various political shifts, but it seems that in America people felt that war was behind them, prosperity ahead of them and life could now be orderly and secure. It may well be that the Eisenhower campaign did much to advance this viewpoint because in reality the Cold War was escalating with the USSR and the USA being the main opponents. As far as I can tell by studying a bit of the history of the time, it was extremely tense. In 1953 the USSR exploded their first hydrogen bomb, following ours of the year before and despite the rhetoric in the United Nations and elsewhere, any efforts to regulate the proliferation and use of atomic weapons came to nothing.

What I am trying to get at here is a certain mood of false happiness and security with an underlying theme of danger and fear that characterized the lives of children growing up in the 50s. Of course, at the age of five going on six, I couldn't say that I had any knowledge of all this. I do remember seeing pictures on the front page of the New York Times of soldiers coming home wounded from the Korean War and asking my father about it. Those pictures gave me a feeling of doom.

Pop culture as usual for the 50s kept it light. “The Greatest Show on Earth” won the Academy Award for Best Picture, featuring romance in the circus. Best Director went to John Ford for “The Quiet Man”, in which John Wayne plays a retired boxer gone back to his native Ireland to woo Maureen O’Hara. Gary Cooper won Best Actor for “High Noon”, a classic western. For a taste of the dark side, Shirley Booth took Best Actress in “Come Back Little Sheba”, a drama about a woman married to a recovering alcoholic.

“Doggie in the Window” was a big pop song and I knew all the words. The very romantic “Ebb Tide” was a hit for Vic Damone. In 1953 you could still have a hit song from a musical, so “Stranger in Paradise” from “Kismet” was recorded by Tony Bennet.

Literature in 1953 was a mixture of just about everything. Out of the top ten bestsellers, the top two were about Christianity, though The Robe, by Lloyd C Douglas was revived from 1942 by the release of a movie based on the book. The majority of bestsellers were historical fiction ranging from the 18th century to post Civil War. The High and the Mighty by Ernest K Gann was one of three with a contemporary setting: a commercial airplane flight from Hawaii to San Francisco which almost went down in the Pacific Ocean because there was no radar on commercial flights in those days. This was surely a first in fiction!

Among the other books were two about the Korean War: The Bridges at Toko-Ri, by James Michener and very patriotic contrasted by The Long March by William Styron, though in both a main issue was soldiers from World War II brought back into the military just as they were getting well settled in civilian life. Most of these books dealt with postwar life in America and had themes about the generation gap, small town versus city life, anti-communism and racism. I read several books on women, feminism and female roles in modern life, though two were by South African writers (Doris Lessing and Nadine Gordimer) and one (The Second Sex) by that feisty French woman, Simone de Beauvoir.

The overall theme of these books is gaps; between war and postwar, communism and democracy, men and women, patriotism and dissent, black and white, young and old, city and countryside. Once again, the issues that would become huge in the 60s were showing up as hairline cracks in the smooth façade of the Eisenhower years.

My family was creating our own gaps. By the beginning of 1953, my dad was working at the New York headquarters of US Steel, but the rest of us were still living in the suburban Pittsburgh house. Daddy would commute to New York for the week and come home on weekends. He was also finding us a place to live. It turned out that he had an old friend from high school who lived in Princeton, NJ. Visiting the home of Princeton University with its lovely residential neighborhoods, colonial history and big leafy trees, he felt it was the town for us. Many men commuted daily on the train to the city for work, a trip that took about an hour including the subway from Pennsylvania Station down to the financial district. He found the Lutheran Church and called the pastor who hooked him up with a realtor.

The house in Pittsburgh had not sold, but my mother was eight months pregnant and had to get settled. So in March, the house in Princeton was rented, the movers (paid for by US Steel) took our stuff away and we got on an airplane headed for Philadelphia. I have no memory of my first airplane ride, but my mom remembers that Philadelphia was fogged in, so we had to circle and she got worried. When we finally got to our new house, rain had leaked in the windows and it was way below my mom’s standards of cleanliness. Luckily she was at the nesting instinct portion of her pregnancy and had us unpacked and organized in time for the new baby’s arrival. Grandma Engle, my mom’s mother, said the baby would be born with big hands because of all the cleaning Mom did.

Patricia Lo Succop was born, with normal size hands, on April 28, 1953. Grandma Engle came for a week followed by Grandma Succop for another week. I loved this new little sister from the first moment I saw her and I always have from that day on. I loved our split level house which seemed cool and cozy to me. Linda and I slept on the third floor, probably a converted attic with a slanted ceiling and small windows right above our beds. The house was close to the quiet street with the neighboring houses right there on either side. A side door off the kitchen led to a small yard and around to a fine backyard.

What I remember is playing all summer with kids from the other houses on our street, riding my tricycle, racing in to the kitchen for snacks, sleeping and sweating in our hot attic room and feeling even more free from my family than ever before. The boy next door, whom my mother could not stand, lived with his grandmother and was often in trouble. He could catch flies and pull their wings off, he ran fast, talked tough and I was at once scared of him and entranced. Since we moved in March, I never went back to kindergarten and after my ears popped in the airplane, I had no more earaches. The doctor in Princeton said I could keep my tonsils, which I still have.

In August, I turned six so when fall came and it was time for me to go back to school, I was a much tougher girl than I had been the year before. I started first grade at Valley Road School and I had to take a school bus. The first day, I remember standing in a long hallway-like room with what seemed like a thousand other kids. I felt alone and afraid but I was determined to be brave. Somehow we all got sorted out and into the right classrooms. Mine was in the basement with metal grilled windows looking our right onto a concrete surface. I had my own desk; the kind with an attached chair, an inkwell hole and a lid that lifted.

School was exciting to me but also had its hardships. Miss Large, our teacher, was small and nervous with her first class since graduating from college. I was a bit afraid of her but I think she was terrified of us. It seemed to me that she was very strict and serious and yelled too much. Recess was on a big blacktop playground with swings, merry-go-round, jungle gym, rubber balls and mean pushy girls. Either they knew each other from kindergarten or were friends from the same neighborhood, but there was a group of girls led by Margery who somehow sensed that I was new and would chase me around, grab me and not let go and laugh in my face. If I tried to get on a swing they would push me off. Even then I didn’t like to tattle plus I heard the teachers tell other kids to work out their conflicts on their own. The teachers seemed to like to huddle by the doorway and talk to each other.

Finally, I was rescued by Toni Marshall (one of the few black kids in the class) who gave those mean girls a mouthful and became my protector. I also got my first boyfriend that fall. I do not remember his name but he gave me a ring that turned my finger green. My mom refused to let me wear it when she saw that, but I would take it to school in a pocket and put it on there. One day when I was in the lavatory, it slipped off my finger and went down the toilet. I was heart broken and too embarrassed to tell the boy what happened, except that I had lost it.

Meanwhile, my parents had found a house for sale just up the street and bought it when the old Pittsburgh house finally sold. I am told that we moved in November though I remember that not at all. My first airplane journey, two new houses, and a new school must have been just a bit too much change. Overall it was a time of happiness for me. My parents seemed more relaxed, our family was complete and we had the house we would live in until all of us sisters grew up. Daddy went off to work everyday, Mommy was basically in charge, on weekends they took care of the yard and on Sundays we went to church. Except that we had no pets, it was just like that Golden Book that I loved the best: The Happy Family.

READING FOR MY LIFE: 1952

My World Gets Wider

In 1952, I turned five. The leap from four to five was a big one as I ventured out, both willingly and unwillingly into the neighborhood and to school. It was exciting, terrifying and fraught with opportunities for new ways of being.

In the world at large the Cold War was actually hot in the Far East and in various skirmishes in Africa. Attempts to achieve an end to the Korean War dragged on in 1952 due to the Western powers’ use of that battleground to try foiling the USSR’s timetable of world conquest. A communist inspired revolution against British supported King Farouk in Egypt would eventually put Nasser in charge and Egypt in alliance with the USSR. In Kenya, the Mau Mau uprising resulted in response to British interests that had ruined native farming there. Meanwhile 16,000 people escaped from East Berlin into West Berlin and the Western powers continued their efforts to rearm Europe and raise the standard of living in western European countries.

King George VI of England died putting Elizabeth in line for the throne, though it was really Churchill as Prime Minister who ran the country and what was left of the Empire. Eisenhower was elected President of the United States while our military boys achieved the first test of the hydrogen bomb, a weapon so destructive that war by nuclear force actually became an unthinkable future for planet Earth.

Odd developments at the time were the rise of Christian Dior in Paris and the production of the first birth control pill in the United States. If I look at history at this time from a viewpoint such as that in Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, I can see the rising up of all kinds of oppressed minorities: blacks, women, natives in Africa and Asia, etc. It is as if the world is growing up and seeking a more balanced civilization with ideas of freedom and liberty which began in the 18th century finding their way around the world, but the powers that be, the money and armaments guys, are certainly not ready to give an inch. While I would not want a world run on communism, I can see that it played a part in raising the consciousness of peoples everywhere and was perhaps a necessary stage in history which was what Karl Marx might have been trying to say.

The Academy Award winning films this year range from a silly musical to romantic and marital disorder causing plenty of censorship ills. “An American in Paris” is the musical and took Best Picture. George Stevens won Best Director for “ A Place in the Sun”, an adaptation of Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy. “The African Queen” won for Best Actor (Humphrey Bogart) in a romance with Katherine Hepburn set in WW I. Vivien Lee took Best Actress in “A Streetcar Named Desire.” Mostly fairly racy stuff and a harbinger of a change in standards in the motion picture industry.

The popular songs of the year included “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” which would have mystified me if I’d heard it. It was condemned by the Catholic Church for mixing sex with Christmas and has since been recorded by The Jackson Five and Jessica Simpson among others. “It Takes Two to Tango” is what my very staid maternal grandmother said years later when my cousin Rich, whom I idolized, had to get married and give up his dreams of being a doctor. “Wheel of Fortune” performed by Kay Starr actually later became the theme song of the TV show.

Among the books I read for this year, four of the bestsellers were historical novels and only one was about WWII. But the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award both went to war books: The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk and From Here to Eternity by James Jones, respectively. The bestseller list included four literary novels and a good slice of Americana. Kurt Vonnegut’s first novel, Player Piano came out in 1952, a futuristic look at the soul-killing aspects of big business. I was most impressed by East of Eden by John Steinbeck, which I think is his greatest novel; My Cousin Rachel by Daphne du Maurier for its compelling main character; The Natural by Bernard Malamud for a deep look at the American psyche; and Martha Quest by Doris Lessing because she began her probing of women’s issues. This was also the year Charlotte’s Web was released and I read that many times as a child. Once again, though I had thought books from the 1950s would be bland and boring, I was engaged and enlightened as a reader, even by the bestsellers.

As for my life in 1952, in one year I went from the close family circle into a social existence. At home, my consumption of sweets was closely controlled and I never felt I could get enough but my sweet tooth got me into trouble this year. I remember a party at our house when among other things my mom served homemade brownies. I don’t know how many I ate when no one was watching but I threw up all night and could not eat brownies again until I was an adult. Another time, I was at a birthday party in the neighborhood and was offered some of those orange spongy candies that look like peanuts in the shell. Though I wanted one desperately I told the mother of the birthday girl that I wasn’t allowed to have candy. (My mother was there.) Sadly regretting being such a good girl, I later snuck around until I found the plate of candies and gobbled several while my mother was not watching. I also discovered where my mom hid her gum at home and would sneak a piece now and then, going off by myself for a good chew. But I was busted by Daddy one time when he asked me what I was chewing. I shamelessly lied and said it was celery strings, which he believed. This may have been my first lie to my adored father.

Then there were boys. Two little brothers from a couple doors down used to come into my yard and we would go off exploring the big field next to our lot. Exploring included crawling under a clump of bushes and taking off our clothes so we could see how our bodies were different. Somehow I sensed that this was secret and not to be discussed with my parents. Across the field was our closest neighbor, the Steigerwalts. To get to their house, you had to cross a hanging bridge over a gully that lay between the road and the house. I was terrified by this bridge because you could see through the slats and I was afraid of falling through, but Mrs Steigerwalt always served cookies and she had two sons older than I was. I would take my sister Linda by the hand and with Mom watching from the back porch we would navigate the field, creep across the bridge, trudge up the front walk giving a wide berth to the garter snake that would be sunning himself there and finally make it to the back door. I always thought Mrs Steigerwalt was a bit scary herself the way she would stand at her ironing board looking stern and slamming that iron about. The boys would start roughhousing with me until I screamed for mercy but she would just laugh. So I learned that pleasures in life often came with pain and danger.

Across the road lived Mr Muchow who seemed to me a very old man with his white hair sticking out beneath the cap he always wore. He had an invalided wife whom I don’t remember ever seeing, but he would come over and get me for walks through the woods behind his house. To me he was a combination of Santa Claus and Jesus as we walked along hand in hand and he listened to all I had to say as if I were the most important person in the world. I dreamed about this man whenever I was going through something stressful and lonely all the way into my 20s. After my grandma and my dad, he was the third great person in my life up to that time.

But then came my first major challenge: school. In the fall, I began kindergarten. For someone who grew up to love travel, change, new people and adventures, I started out as a complete wimp. I wailed when my mother left me there until, after a week or so of that, she got angry and told me to stop being a baby. Then I held it inside, but I was afraid of the stairs up to the door, of the kids dashing around me, of being knocked down. Inside the classroom was a slide that became an object of obsession for me. It seemed very high, I remember it as having no sides and I was completely conflicted between wanting to go up there and slide down but being convinced I would fall off and die. My only happy memory of kindergarten was the day I finally got to paint at the easel. You had to get on a list and it seemed I was on that list for weeks but at last it was my turn. I painted a huge red apple that took up almost the whole page. Apparently I took too long because the teacher came over and said I did not have to cover every bit of the paper with paint. Of course I did! After that I rarely met a teacher who did not specialize in saying ridiculous things. My kindergarten teacher was first in a long line of authority figures whom I perceived as enemies.

By this time I was five years old, the year was drawing to a close, I suffered from consecutive earaches (probably brought on by the stress of school) and big changes were afoot. Mom got pregnant about August and near the end of the year, United States Steel decided to transfer my dad to the New York City office. I don’t have memories of these things, although I do recall the earaches and visits to the doctor. According to my mom, it took two people to hold me down while a third put in the eardrops. Well, who wants people dropping cold liquid in your ear when it hurts? In any case, it would be our last winter in Pittsburgh and by the following Christmas, I would have moved twice.

READING FOR MY LIFE: 1951

Continuing my memoir-in-progress, in which I ponder the way my life developed in the context of the main fiction published in those years. To read earlier chapters click on the label at the end of this post. This is the 13th chapter.


The Happy Family

My memories of this year of my life are slim. I went from 3 1/2 to 4 1/2 years of age and it seems to me now to have been a year of settling in to family life without a lot of change. The world was in a state of flux with major political changes in Israel, Iran, Ireland and Czechoslovakia, while the United States and Great Britain moved ever more towards conservatism. Congress passed the 22nd amendment, limiting service as President to two terms. The Korean War waged on with North Korea (and thus Communism) winning for most of the year. Because of this and due to some of his wackier ideas, General MacArthur was relieved of his command, yet all attempts to negotiate an armistice failed.

By the end of 1951, thanks to the Marshall Plan and billions of American dollars, many Europeans countries had recovered economically and production-wise to levels higher than before WWII. Americanization of Europe was well on its way in terms of pop culture, though resentment towards America was also present. Rearmament in Europe and the United States had raised taxes.

The problems facing the last years of President Truman's term as President of the United States included inflation, labor troubles, discrimination against Blacks (especially in the South with poll taxes and lynching still going on) and poverty. But the main story of the 1950s was the Cold War: the fight between communism and democracy and the threat of nuclear weapons. The discovery and conviction of Russian spies in 1951 was fomenting an extreme fear of communism in our country which would lead to the abuses by Senator Joseph McCarthy and other witch hunters. While the Korean War was anything by cold, I see it as a dramatization of this conflict between democracy and communism while the Marshall Plan demonstrated that democracy won when money and expansion were present.

In the books I read from 1951, war and military subjects dominated the Bestseller list with five out of the top 10 books being about WW II. Three of the bestsellers were religious in content and only two were historical fiction. The #1 bestseller was also my favorite: From Here to Eternity by James Jones was a big war book with strong emotional impact. The other novel which stuck with me was Hangsaman by Shirley Jackson which ranks with any of the top literary titles of today. I read five books of science fiction in which the authors were busy predicting futures which are the present today. Except for the war books and the religious, the literature of 1951 was mainly concerned with the present and the future.

In film, the award winning films were two about contemporary times and one historical. "All About Eve" won Best Picture and Best Director (Joseph L Mankiewitz), starred Bette Davis and told the story of an upstart young actress usurping the reigning actress of the day. "Born Yesterday" took Best Actress (Judy Holliday), who played a dumb blond who gets wise and busts her criminal boss. This movie was remade with Melanie Griffith in 1993 and it would be hard to pick which version is the better one. "Cyrano de Bergerac" took Best Actor (Jose Ferer). It was based on a play which is pretty much a romantic comedy set in 1640s France.

In popular music, two of the hit songs of the day were from "The King and I", which was playing on Broadway that year. "Hello Young Lovers" was recorded by Perry Como and "Getting to Know You" was recorded by many. "Kisses Sweeter Than Wine", a re-write by Leadbelly and Pete Seeger of an Irish ballad was made famous by The Weavers. Also this year, Gian Carlo Menotti wrote the operetta "Amahl and the Night Visitors" on commission from NBC TV. Once we got a television, I would see this every Christmas of my childhood. The great synergy of theatre, film, radio and television had begun.

The world of science continued to develop peacetime uses for discoveries made in wartime: chemicals for fertilizer and atomic energy for electricity. Penicillin and streptomycin were in wide use in the United States getting kids through their childhood ailments, thus helping the population grow.

In out little house in suburban Pittsburgh, my parents were creating a safe haven. Daddy went to work everyday and my mom was playing the role of 1950s suburban housewife. My sister Linda and I had chicken pox at the same time, but most of my memories are happy. There were evenings when Mom would play songs on the piano while Linda and I marched and danced around. We visited neighbors with children and went to birthday parties. An older man from across the street would come and take me for walks in the woods behind his house. Mr Muchow was childless with an invalid wife but to me he was a personification of Santa Claus and Jesus combined, as he took me quite seriously, talking to me about my life and the trees and animals around us. I've had dreams about this amazing man all of my life.

Sometimes we had guests for dinner, which was called "having company." I was always willing to sing a song or tell a joke for the adults. My mom says this was my idea and I never had to be persuaded. I did love that feeling of being the center of attention. My dad had a great sense of humor and taught me the jokes I told. My signature song was "Jesus Loves Me."

Mom always had a pile of magazines in a corner of the living room. I would sit there for hours and "read" them, making up stories about the pictures. I also had blocks to build with, though Linda would most often come along and wreck my structures while laughing with glee. I kept my rage in check because pretty much all was right in my world and I didn't want it any differently.

Despite the occasional crisis with my grandparents which Daddy would have to handle, even though money was probably tight, I think my parents felt they had somewhat arrived in their own life. Through education, Mom escaped her small farm town life and Daddy had escaped his parents' home. They shared a strong Christian faith, a work ethic and a love of children. The happiness and safety I felt that year were in a large part created by my parents in the spirit of the "better world" America was supposed to be building. Though the next year would bring new changes for them and me, I was content and adjusted to our home and my little sister.

READING FOR MY LIFE: 1950

Finally after much procrastination and fiddling around, I present the latest installment of Reading For My Life. It is a memoir about me, my life and books. To read the earlier chapters, just click on the Reading For My Life label at the end of this post. (You might want to get some coffee or whatever beverage gets you through long stints of reading from a computer screen. There are 11 previous chapters.) I value any and all comments, such as: Wow that was great! or Huh? I didn't get it. Also, corrections of typos, historical or technical inaccuracies, etc.


Fear and Loathing in Pittsburgh

1950 is the year I ceased to be an only child and became a big sister. Politically the world was in a mess. The USSR and Communist China signed a 30 year pact and Europe was half controlled by communism. The first war of my lifetime, the Korean War, began a decades long effort by the United States to keep communism at bay. (It is not even funny that England and France had thought Hitler would get rid of communism as they dithered with him before World War II finally started.) Congress passed the McCarran Act, hoping it would keep communists out of America, while the Atomic Energy Commission worked on the hydrogen bomb. My take on all this is that the ennui of middle class America was one big state of denial about the extreme dangers bubbling just below the surface. About all that science brought us in 1950 was Miltown for anxiety and antihistamines for colds and allergies.

About half of the books I read from 1950 were historical novels and the other half concerned contemporary times. Only one, The Wall, by John Hersey, was about WWII. The Grass is Singing, by Doris Lessing took place in Africa (riots against apartheid in Johannesburg were in the news that year.) Bright Green, Dark Red, by Gore Vidal was about revolution in Central America. There were best sellers about the Catholic Church; a writer who was a fictional version of F Scott Fitzgerald at work in Hollywood; social upheaval in Boston and another female writer who became a bestselling author and lived an immoral life. There were three science fiction books on my list, all predicting political and social breakdown on Earth. World Enough and Time, by Robert Penn Warren, though it was historical, probed questions about truth and justice that are relevant today.

In film, "All The King's Men" took Best Picture and Best Actor (Broderick Crawford), though I do not think it captured the book well at all. "A Letter to Three Wives" won Best Director (Joseph L Mankiewicz) and was the story of three wives worrying about whether or not their husbands were faithful. Best Actress went to Olivia de Havilland in "The Heiress", a film based on Henry James' novel, Washington Square, which is set in New York society in the 1840s.

Of the songs that were popular in 1950, the only ones I recognize were "If I Knew You Were Coming I'd've Baked a Cake" (first song title with a double contraction?) and "Good Night Irene."

Way back then, so near to the beginning of my life, what was going on? As the year opened, I was almost two and a half years old. It was winter with snow on the boughs of the fir trees surrounding the house. Before spring was more than a suggestion, on March 15, my sister Linda was born. The Ides of March and what used to be Income Tax Day, brought this intruder into my family. Here was another person with whom to share my parents' attention. My first response, when they brought her home from the hospital, was to unwrap her from all her blankets and look her over. What do you know? She was NOT perfect! The second and third toes on each of her feet were stuck together. Well, I had been instructed that I would have to be Mommy's helper with the new baby, so off I ran in search of the screwdriver. I figured I could separate those toes with the tool my father had taught me how to use. Right away, I was in trouble. Laughter and then disapproval greeted my efforts to be the big sister.

And so it went. This baby had colic, she cried for hours, had to be held and carried. She spit up her formula and smelled bad to me. Secretly I thought maybe she could be sent back, but after the screwdriver incident, I kept this idea to myself. I was saved by the regular visits of my grandmother, who seemed to understand my position without having to be told. I had my own little table in the dining room and there she would sit with me, teaching me how to cut with scissors, how to color inside the lines, how to put clothes on paper dolls. With Grandma, I felt smart and special and interesting.

This year also brought new terrors. I seemed to be afraid of everything. I still had nightmares, but there were dangers in the daytime as well. Though I had happily gone to the basement at my grandmother's house, I was in an agony of fear every moment I spent in the basement of our new house. First of all, there were no backs to the stairs. You could see through to the floor far below. It took me forever to get down those steps as I fantasized that my feet would get stuck in the spaces. It was a big basement and had dark corners and spiders and webs, but if I wanted to stay close to my mother (and I followed her everywhere), I had to go down there when she did the laundry.

Outside were further challenges. Behind the house was a narrow strip of flat ground and then began a slope down to the creek. Once I was down there, I loved to watch the flow of the water, the frogs and the minnows. But I needed someone to hold my hand because I was convinced that if I fell, I would roll down the hill and drown in the creek. Where do these terrors of childhood come from? Do we hear the adults worrying over us to each other? Are we told too often to be careful? Do we feel that their dismay over our falls and minor injuries hurt them too? All I know is that a black, shaggy dog as big as I was would visit our yard and jump up on me and I would become hysterical if I was anywhere near that slope to the creek.

But Daddy was good. He would take me outside and patiently show me how to walk down a hill, how to keep my arms at my side when the dog came around and how to say, "Go home!" We would walk around and examine the wonders of the natural world together. My dad knew birds by their songs and he would have me listen and look for the birds. As the good weather came, I had a favorite spot on the top step of the stoop outside our kitchen door. It faced the road in front of the house, so I would watch the cars and trucks go past, look at the shapes in the clouds, sing songs and make up stories in my head.

I turned three years old in August. I knew songs and nursery rhymes by heart because my mother took time to read to me and sing with me. I loved books and the piano and crayons and colored paper. I loved jumping in the piles of leaves my dad would rake up and when winter came again, I loved my snowsuit and my boots and walking in the snow. Linda could sit up now and crawl and she had a great laugh. She survived the bottle and could eat real food. We could play and have our baths together. Perhaps it would turn out all right.

READING FOR MY LIFE: 1949

This is the latest chapter in a series of posts that relate fiction and my life. Not exactly a memoir of reading but a memoir compared to the fiction of the years I have lived. As soon as I switch over to the "new, improved" blogger, and as soon as I learn how to use the "new, improved" features, I will endeavor to make it easier for readers to find the earlier chapters in the archives. For now, you can search in past months. I usually post a new chapter about once a month.


PARADISE LOST

In 1949, I turned two and experienced the first major change of my life. After four years of living with my father's parents, my mom and dad finally got their own home and we moved to it in November. Until then I had been the only child in a house with five adults. Actually my Aunt Lois, who had been around since I was born, married in 1948 and moved to Chicago with her new husband, now my Uncle Frank. But two parents and two grandparents were a good number of big people for me to interact with and be loved by and from whom to get lots of attention. By the end of 1949, I spent each day alone with my mom in our new house until my dad came home from work.

Independence and change were also keynotes in the world at large. Ireland achieved independence from Great Britain and China became a communist country under Mao Tse-tung. India, having gained independence in the previous year, adopted their first constitution and were ruled by their own Prime Minister, Nehru. East and West Germany were established as separate republics with one of those insane arrangements that come out of world wars: Berlin, the country's capital city falls in East Germany and so was also split into two, leaving some West Germans stranded within the communist side of the country. Vietnam officially became a country, but in Korea, civil war and communism were stirring up trouble which would lead to the next war for the United States. Apartheid was established in South Africa, officially splitting that country between the ruling whites and the oppressed blacks. All kinds of splitting into halves and breaking up of old patterns. How odd that the same sort of thing was going on in our family.

In the realms of science and technology, cortisone was discovered and neomycin developed. I would be part of the first generation to have infections treated with antibiotics. Militarily, the United States Airforce flew a jet across the country in three house and forty-six minutes while the USSR tested its first atomic bomb. The US also launched a guided missile 250 miles into the air, the highest altitude ever reached by man at that time.

In film, "Hamlet" won the Oscar for Best Picture and Best Actor (Lawrence Olivier.) I tried watching this movie on DVD and found that Shakespeare works better for me as live theatre. "Treasure of the Sierra Madre," a tale of gold fever and distrust in Mexico, won Best Director (John Huston) and "Johnny Belinda," about a deaf and dumb girl who is molested by ignorant country people, got Jane Wyman an Oscar for Best Actress.

It was a big year for pop music with songs that have become standards: Bali Ha'I, Some Enchanted Evening, I Love Those Dear Hearts and Gentle People, Diamonds Are A Girl's Best Friend, and (my favorite) Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. The musical, "South Pacific" was a big hit in New York theatre.

When I finished reading the books for 1949, I had completed reading through an entire decade and had read over 200 novels and short-story collections. That felt like quite a milestone until I realized I still had six decades to go. In any case, historical fiction dominated the year in both the bestseller list and other more literary fiction. World War II was adddressed in only three of the novels, but one of those, Guard of Honor, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Two of the historical bestsellers were stories about the life of Jesus Christ and the beginnings of the Christian church.

My favorite novels of the year included Nineteen Eighty Four, by George Orwell, which introduced the "Big Brother" who is still watching us; The Egyptian, by Mika Waltari, for being exciting and telling the story of Egypt's first attempt to worship only one God; Cutlass Empire, by F Van Wyck Mason, an early Pirates of the Carribean; and The Fires of Spring, which made me a Michener fan for good. The novels portraying contemporary life were generally somewhat weak but showed a society becoming obsessed with money and getting ahead in business. Those being traditional American pursuits, indicate a country getting back to regular life after the war.

Certainly getting ahead with a regular life was the aim of my parents. When the year opened they were still living with my dad's parents in Pittsburgh, PA, still saving money and still watching the papers for a home to buy. But in July, my mother realized she was pregnant when she asked for an onion sandwich as a bedtime snack. As she tells it, she then "put her foot down" and declared to my dad that she would not have another baby in that house. They found a two bedroom Cape Cod in an outlying area called Perrysville, which is a suburb now but was out in the country then. The house was near a bus line so my dad could get to work on public transportation and they bought a car for my mom to get around. The house was also close to a shopping area with a good butcher store, always important to women of German descent.

I have vivid memories of that last year at my grandparents'. A front porch stretched across the entire house, surrounded by a low wall with pillars to hold up the roof above it. I spent hours out there swinging by myself on the cushioned metal glider and watching the cars go by. On either side of the cement steps leading down to the street were spirea bushes which had lacy white flowers in the spring and small black berries in the fall. I made up lots of games and stories for myself with those flowers and berries and learned that birds could eat the berries but I couldn't.

My best time out on that porch was the late afternoon, while dinner was being prepared, when I would watch for my dad to come walking up the sidewalk from the streetcar stop at the corner. But one day, standing on one of those concrete steps, I lost my balance and fell to the first concrete landing. Oh my, this was a bigger tragedy than the time I fell off the bed. It hurt a lot. I got a big bump on the head which developed into what was called a goose egg in my family and plenty of bloody scrapes on my knees. After that I became extremely cautious about stairs, although it is possible that my grandmother, who was scared of everything, had made me overly careful about stairs and steps already and this contributed to my fall. I was a timid kid when it came to physical activity and there are few times in my life when I have felt comfortable or competent in any sport, I don't like climbing hills or mountains and I hate going out in boats.

I also remember sitting on my grandpa's lap and having him tell me over and over that I was his honey. At some family celebration, perhaps my birthday, I was allowed a sip of wine. The taste was so odd and the smell so pungent that I mistakenly took a bite out of the fragile glass, causing everyone at the table to laugh and to tell the story many times over. What I learned from this was that drinking and parties and drawing attention to myself were fun. I have always loved parties and at times in my life I have liked drinking way too much.

The basement at my grandparents' was another special location for me. Grandma would take me down there with her when she did the laundry. She had a washing machine but in those days there was no spin cycle. She used a device called a mangle, through which she would feed the wet, dripping clothes from the washer. It would squeeze out the water and drop the clothes into a basket. Then it was up the stairs that led out to the backyard where the clothes were hung on the line. I was entranced by the mangle and never tired of watching her do that backbreaking job. Outside, it was my job to hand her the clothespins.

Also in the basement was the huge coal furnace and a room where the coal was stored. I remember the big truck that would deliver the coal, dumping it into a shute on the side of the house that mysteriously led to the coal room in the basement. I was not afraid of those basement stairs or any of the rooms down there, but I was never afraid of anything when I was with my grandma. It must be that she held all the fear and made me feel safe.

For me, life at my grandparents' was paradise and leaving there was wrenching. But it was not paradise for my parents and they were ecstatic to finally have a place of their own. I remember nothing about the move. All I know is that one day we were living in a strange new house. I had my own room, after sleeping in my parents' room all my life up to then, and I would wake in the night feeling alone and afraid. My parents thought I was having nightmares but I sensed a large and threatening presence in my room that scared me to death. I would cry and Daddy would come to carry me to the kitchen where there was a light on the stove. There he would walk with me in his arms until I fell asleep again.

We moved in November and the first disaster was the furnace blowing up, which I also do not remember. This was a huge emergency because there was no extra money left and Daddy had to borrow from his sister to get a new furnace. During the day in our new home, it was just me and Mom. She was usually busy cleaning and I am sure having fun setting up her own home, but I was lonely and I missed my grandmother terribly. I would settle into a corner of the living room with a pile of my mom's magazines and "read" them aloud to myself. In my memories of the first months there, it was always dark and gloomy which is probably because it was the middle of winter and there were trees surrounding the house. I longed to be back in what seemed like the warmth and love of our former home. Little did I know that things were about to get even worse when my sister Linda would be born the following spring.

READING FOR MY LIFE: 1948

I started 1948 as a four-and-a-half-month-old baby and ended the year as a sixteen-month-old toddler. While I was learning to walk and to eat solid food, the rest of the world was still in recovery, trying to find prosperity while once again realizing that war had solved very few of the world's problems.

In the motion picture world, "Gentleman's Agreement" won Best Picture and Best Director (Elia Kazan.) Based on the 1947 bestselling novel by the same title, it dealt with anti-Semitism in American society. "A Double Life" won Best Actor (Ronald Coleman) and was a psychological drama about an actor who lost his identity in the characters he played. "The Farmer's Daughter", a romantic comedy about a farm girl who ends up in politics, won Best Actress (Loretta Young.)

Popular songs included "All I Want For Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth" (understandably a hit in our house), "Nature Boy" and "Buttons and Bows."

New antibiotics were developed, the long-playing record was invented, rocket missiles could go farther and faster and Idelwild Airport (now JFK) was opened on Long Island. Leo Fender produced the first electric guitar, the Bic pen came into existence and the first Polaroid Land camera went on the market.

The books I read from 1948 spanned the gamut from historical fiction to books about World War II, stories of contemporary life and a representation of writers from around the world (Japan and Africa.) The war books written by Americans were from the enlisted man's viewpoint rather than the officer's and were distinctly anti-war in tone (The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer and The Young Lions by Irwin Shaw.) All manner of social situations and problems were represented including poverty, racism, immigrant life and homosexuality. Three of the top ten bestsellers were heavily Christian, which showed a return to religion as some kind of refuge in uncertain times.

I found the war books exciting and eye-opening. Those authors presented a picture of what it was really like to be a soldier, as well as casting doubt on whether the purpose of World War II was actually worthwhile. My favorite book of the year was Raintree County by Ross Lockridge Jr. Besides being an incredible read, Lockridge took on the issue of the ideals of this country and showed that the seeds were sown at the end of the 19th century for the tarnishing and undermining of those ideals. Other favorites were The Twenty-One Balloons by William Pene duBois, for presenting a unique utopia; Seraph on the Suwanee by Zora Neale Hurston, because she is a wonderful writer; and The Plague by Albert Camus. All of these books are full of hope, belief in the human spirit and the idea that man can rise above the destructive and evil aspects of his nature.

Overall, I think it was a dull year for America, still trying to get back to "normal" life after the war. That effort made for a conservative time of shutting our eyes to the devastation and spread of communism in Europe. Our government was aware of all this but not the American people, who had had enough of worrying about the problems of other countries. Truman was elected for four more years in the White House and the Marshall Plan for rebuilding Europe with American money was passed, but labor was still striking, wages and salaries were still low and the cost of living was still rising.

Perhaps dullness was a good thing, compared to the rest of the world. India was unstable after achieving independence and Gandhi was assassinated. Chaing Kai-shek was re-elected as President of China but would fall to the communists within a year. The Jewish state was hammered into existence in Palestine by the United Nations but the area was already bathed in bloodshed as Jews fought Arabs.

As far as my life goes, I was reigning queen of my own little kingdom at my grandparent's house. Mom would put me in my playpen where I played happily, learned to sit up at about five months and then to pull myself up to a standing position. I got my first tooth at seven months, could stand by myself at nine months and was crawling by ten months. I turned one year old in August and by September I was walking. Also in September I attended Aunt Lois and Uncle Frank's wedding. In a picture from that day, I am eating some wedding cake brought to me by my dad. I look pretty blissed out eating that sweet morsel and have always had a sweet tooth, as did my dad. My first word was "mama."

I have some memories of that year. I remember my parents' bedroom, which was where I slept in my crib. I remember falling off my parents' bed and being amazed at what an effect I created as everyone came running. (My mom says she can't believe I would remember that, but she remembers that she and my dad were kissing in the bathroom at the time.) I remember sitting in my highchair at the dining room table and entertaining them with my antics. At least I remember having everyone's attention and feeling that they all thought I was pretty cool. My favorite times were being in the bathtub with my grandma and playing with her huge soapy breasts. I loved my grandma best of all and I'm sure she loved me back just as intensely. My parents sang in the church choir and from my infancy they would lay me on the pew in the choir stall while they sang. So I got those hymns in my consciousness from very early on and this comes out in my songwriting from time to time. Sitting in any church, listening to the music of a pipe organ never fails to fill me with feelings of peace and longing.

I've been told that whenever my grandpa was home, he would tote me around with my face outward so I could see what was going on, but I don't remember that. What I feel certain about is that all that love and attention was a wonderful thing and that all I had to do was cry or fuss and I could get pretty much anything I needed or wanted. But my mom says I was a "pistol" and that if I couldn't get what I wanted I would bang my head on the floor until I got the imprint of the carpet in my forehead. Spoiled drama queen? Well, those days were numbered.

My parents were doggedly saving money for a home of their own. On Sundays, they would look in the paper at homes for sale and my grandma would get upset, wail about why they would be so ungrateful as to move away from her house and then she would get a headache. At the end of 1948, moving out was still a year away.

READING FOR MY LIFE: 1947

I started reading for this project in June, 2002, beginning with books published in 1940, even though I was born in 1947. I had the idea that I could get a sense of the times I was born into by reading fiction from the entire decade. It took me two and a half years to read from 1940 through 1947 and I began to wonder if I had set myself an unrealistic goal.

My intention is to put all these posts together into a memoir that considers the way in which the literature published during my lifetime has influenced the life I have led. Here on the blog, each year gets its own chapter. As I wrote this chapter, I was reading the last few books from 1951 which did strange loopy things to my memory, due to working in two different time periods at the same time. In 1951 I was three years old going on four. All week as I was writing and rewriting I felt distinctly odd: trouble sleeping, headaches, sinus trouble and a strange uneasy feeling about everything. This is the first chapter where I am present in the narrative, so I presume that is why it felt so bizarre. Starting a life! What an undertaking for any person, no matter what kind of life one ends up having.

But I am now glad that I read about all those previous years, because I can see where it was that I landed in 1947. My parents were still living in Pittsburgh with my dad's parents. Daddy worked at United States Steel. Mom stayed home, pregnant and doing housework with her mother-in-law, but they did not get along. There was a miniature cold war going on right in the house where I was born.

According to history books, in 1947 the biggest problem for the United States was Europe, which was in ruins from the war and threatened by communism from the Soviet Union. Stalin was in power and though the United Nations was formed and operating, Russian delegates opposed everything the other Western powers wanted. The Soviets were unruly in all conferences and wanted extensive lands in Europe under communist rule, not democracy. Truman was still President of the United States and George Marshall had been made Secretary of State. Most Americans wanted "normalcy" and prosperity, a million vets were going to college on the GI bill and no one wanted any more responsiblity for Europe or the Far East. However, the government was faced with the fact that a new enemy had arisen, one who had been an ally just two years previously. The Cold War had begun and atomic weapons were a big issue.

The Marshall Plan was proposed to Congress, calling for billions of dollars of aide to Europe, including Greece and Turkey. The theory was that people with no hope will embrace communism, but at least some hope of prosperity will keep them wanting democracy. The UN was also working out a plan for Israel, since Britain had now withdrawn from Palestine and neither the Arabs nor the Jews were happy with Britian's plan to partition the country. India gained her independence from the Commonwealth in this year as well and was another victim of partitioning, which created Pakistan. Here are many roots of the very situations that are making headlines and trouble now.

In my imagination, I think of children born in Israel, Palestine, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, India and China in the same year I was born. In fact, some of those individuals are finally getting a voice in literature and film to tell the stories of their lives and societies. The themes are change, political unrest, displaced peoples and a conflict between traditional, spiritual values and the growing influence of Western money and views. An example of such juxtapostion is the excavation of the Laws of Hammurabi and the Dead Sea Scrolls, both of which came to light in 1947, while billions of dollars of United States aide was pouring across the globe.

Congress also passed the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947, restricting labor unions. Big business was fighting back against the Democratic majority which had been in power since the Depression and through the war; a time during which labor had made a good bit of progress toward better wages and working conditions. I would guess that industry will cash in on the Marshall Plan while trying to avoid paying their workers any more than they have to. Also in 1947 the United States flew the first supersonic planes, Bell Labs invented the transistor and flying saucers were sighted. Henry Ford died and fashion was promoting the New Woman.

In film, "The Best Years of Our Lives" won Best Picture, Best Director (William Wyler) and Best Actor (Fredric March). It is a postwar film about three World War II soldiers returning to life in small town America. "To Each His Own" won Best Actress (Olivia de Havilland) and is another war story about a small town girl who has an illegitimate child with a soldier and has to give up the child. How the war affected small town America was a popular subject.

Popular songs were more light-hearted and as usual dealt with love and dancing: "Almost Like Being in Love," "Papa Won't You Dance With Me?" and "I'll Dance at Your Wedding" were the hits.

In the books and literature, about half of the bestsellers were historical fiction and the other half about contemporary life, but war books were not selling in this year of "normalcy". Even in the other books I read for the year, only one was about WWII. The rest were also about postwar city life and work life except for two historical fiction novels. The stories about contemporary life included poverty, anti-semitism, racism, the entertainment business and efforts to get ahead in a postwar economy. A new development is the publication of science fiction and speculative fiction in book form. Those kinds of stories were being published in the pulp magazines all through the 30s and 40s, but due to the emergence of the paperback, could now be put into book form and reach a wider audience. They also give a feeling of looking towards the future.

I was hugely relieved not to have to read about World War II for a few months, but it was a short reprieve. The war books came back the very next year and as of 1951, are still going strong. Overall from the 1947 fiction I got a spirit of recovery from war, looking ahead, building families and futures for them.

I was born at 9:33 AM on August 18, 1947 at Allegheny General Hsopital in Pittsburgh, PA. I was delivered by Dr B O Hawk and weighed 8 lbs 8 oz, measuring 21 inches long. This is a completely average size for a baby and I have been average in size my whole life. As far as I know I was healthy and though the labor was long and they yanked me out with forceps, there were no complications. My Aunt Lois, who was a nurse at the time, was present at my birth. She was not Dr Hawk's nurse, but entered the delivery room along with my mom and was permitted to stay since she was family. That is all she remembers about it.

My mom remembers the long labor, the fact that it was about 90 degrees in the delivery room and that she missed breakfast and lunch. She decided then and there that she would have no more babies in the summer. In those days, they kept new mothers in the hospital for at least five days. The babies were kept in the nursery and only brought to the mothers at feeding time. My mom had her abdomen kneaded several times a day and went home with a flat stomach. Aunt Lois was her post-partum nurse and since she still lived at home in those days, I already knew her by the time they took me home.

I was baptized on September 21, 1947, at St Matthew's Lutheran Church by Reverend Martens. Since I was about three weeks past the due date when born, I held up the baptism of two other babies. Their mothers were friends of my mother and all were due to have babies around the same time. The other babies were born on time but the mothers decided to wait until I could be baptized too. Pastor Martens was the father of one of those babies. Until that day, the mothers in that church always held their babies during the rite, but Pastor Martens wanted to hold his own baby, so he held the other two as well, which my mom says was a big deal for him. I was good and did not cry when the water was poured over my head, but this did not please my dad. He felt that babies should cry in protest at giving up their sins, so I guess he started worrying about me right then and there.

Life at home was a tumult of issues. There were five adults in that house who were all thrilled to have a baby in the family, so I was surrounded by love and was the center of attention, a position I still enjoy. But my mother was of the mind that babies should be on a sleeping and eating schedule as soon as possible and should not be given in to at every cry, lest the baby become the ruler of the household. My grandparents believed that babies should not ever have to cry and insisted on picking me up every time I did. My grandfather in particular would walk into my parents' bedroom, where I slept, and pick me up, even if it was the middle of the night. This drove my mother to distraction. She felt he was undermining her attempts to get me on schedule and also that she and my dad had no privacy. I am pretty sure that I was the ruler of that household.

According to the baby book my mom kept, none of this did me any harm growth-wise. By the end of the year I had doubled my birth weight and grown to 27 inches. At first I was breast fed with supplementary bottles, but after a few weeks Mom and her doctor decided she did not have enough milk, so that was the end of breastfeeding for me. I never even had a cold until I was five months old and have always been healthy. I could hold my head up at two weeks and I laughed at around five months. By then I was also sitting up alone.

My first trip to town was at seven weeks, for a check-up at the doctor. On November 8, I went to my first dinner party at the home of my Great Aunts Lou and Moll. I still love dinner parties. I ended the year with my first Christmas, at which it was reported that I liked the ribbons on the packages but cried when shown a toy dog given to me by Aunt Shirly and Uncle Jim from Michigan. (I've been afraid of dogs for most of my life.)

I don't have any memories of those first four and a half months except for the impression that I was loved completely by everyone around me. I wonder if I could perceive that not everyone around me loved each other. Perhaps that awareness came later, but I seem to have always wanted all the people I loved to get along with each other. In fact, it has always bothered me when people around me are in conflict and somewhere along the line I got the idea that it was my role to resolve those conflicts. So there you have it: the training ground for a pacifist and an anti-war protestor. I would also bet that my dad was caught in the middle and did his best to smooth things over with communication, becoming my first role model for the skill of diplomacy.

READING FOR MY LIFE: 1946

I started this project as an attempt to make sense of my life in terms of the major fiction published in my lifetime. Then I decided to start reading the major fiction beginning in 1940, though I was not born until 1947, to get a feeling for the decade into which I was born. By the time I started reading for 1946, I had already read over 100 books and I was beginning to get impatient about reaching my birth year. Surprisingly, 1946 turned out to be one of the best and most exciting years for fiction that I had encountered so far. Since I was conceived in 1946, I take that as a good omen.

Ten of the books I read were about war in some way; in eight of them World War II was either the main subject or influenced the story. One of the bestsellers, The Snake Pit, dealt with psychiatry and a mental institution, a new evil in the 20th century. Another, The Street, was about racism in New York City. East River told the story of Jewish immigrants in that same city. Three of the books were set in New Orleans, a city which turns up often in fiction, and though I have never been there, these novels gave me the feeling of knowing New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina hit. Why was I so impressed and emotionally engaged by this collection of novels? Partly it was the high quality of the writing, but also these books represented the world I was about to enter and felt somehow more familiar to me, whereas the early years of the decade felt like another era.

In film, "The Lost Weekend," about an alcoholic writer, won Best Picture, Best Director (Billy Wild) and Best Actor (Ray Milland.) "Mildred Pierce," about an obsessive mother, won Best Actress (Joan Crawford.) In these films are the modern anxiety and postwar ills that will be bubbling below the surface during the deceptively benign 1950s.

The popular songs, "Zip-a-dee-doo-dah," "Come Rain or Come Shine," and "Doin What Comes Nacherly" sing to me a somewhat giddy release from the tensions of war.

Because, the war is over and American is trying to get back to "normal" but life will never be the same. Women and blacks, who had the jobs during the war, are back at home or out of work, since the soldiers are coming back. Jews have been persecuted and butchered in Germany but are still hated in America. The economy is shaky and class lines are forever broken down. The world is a rougher place; hope and idealism have take hard blows. The River Road and Delta Wedding were novels of 1946 that told this story of change, of the struggle of the older generation to hold on and the efforts of the current generation to carry on. Of course, that is an age-old story, but in terms of my life, it is THE STORY.

My mom, a Midwestern girl, now lived in Pittsburgh, PA with her inlaws. She got pregnant with me in about November of this year. My parents didn't have much money and the plan was to save up so they could get their own home. After my dad died two summers ago, I was talking to my mom about him. She told me that one of the things she was drawn to in him was his deep faith, which I imagine helped them through this time.

In the fall of 1946, my mom was called in to substitute teach at the Lutheran parochial school connected with their church. The teacher they had hired was a young man just out of college, who ran away from his position and refused to come back. The job was to teach a combined classroom of grades one through three, though Mom was trained in music education. She said she just had to use her common sense. The students were mainly rejects from public school with behavior problems and Mom had quite a time dealing with them. One mother reported her as a child beater because she tapped a pupil on the head with a pencil when he was misbehaving. She worked there for about three months, taking the streetcar to work, until they found another teacher. By that time she was pregnant.

They had been trying for some time to start a family and were so happy about this pregnancy. All three of us girls were planned for. On the day that a doctor's appointment confirmed that I was there in the womb, my mom stopped at a bookstore on the way home and bought a copy of The Joy of Cooking (newly reprinted in 1946 with war-time rationing recipes deleted) as a present for her sister-in-law, my Aunt Lois. It was a celebration and expression of her happiness, though an odd gift for Lois. After all, my aunt was rarely home, worked as a nurse and certainly never has been into cooking. But they were good friends and still are, so I think it was just one of those whimsical things us women do when we are feeling hormonal.

In Europe, conditions were extremely unsettled. Russian communism was everywhere, socialism was taking hold in France and England, Italy was making attempts at democracy, Eastern European nations were struggling for independence, and Germany was divided between countries who had been allies during the war. At the first meeting of the United Nations, Russian immediately began making trouble. China was embroiled in civil war due to communism, Japan was in ruins and there were all sorts of shenanigans going on in Southeast Asia, which did not even come to light until the Vietnam War. President Truman made some attempt to create guidelines for uses of nuclear power and bombs, but there was a dearth of consensus on this around the world. Truly a scramble of issues and power struggles with new buzzwords coming into parlance, such as the Iron Curtain and the Cold War. One can just imagine the books that are coming, the spy genre especially.

Science and technology were still raging on from the impetus of the war. The first electronic brain, pilotless missiles and xerography were some of the advances of that year. Studies were being done on the effects of x-rays and on enzymes. Richard E Byrd began his third expedition to Antarctica.

1946 was a pivotal year. I feel like I was born into a world that was being made anew in many ways. The old beliefs and answers are all challenged, new answers are being sought. I will be born a Lutheran, baptized, taught to love Jesus, be a good, chaste girl and to grow up to be a wife and mother. But while I am being taught these values, the world is changing fast all around me. My mom has told me that they felt they went through the hardest times a parent could go through in the 60s. They were hoping, as were many, that we kids could have a good, safe life, without economic stress, war or threats to democracy.

READING FOR MY LIFE: 1945

1945 is just two years away from the year of my birth: 1947. I have parents now, since they got married last year. I have two sets of grandparents, aunts and uncles and even some cousins. Three of my cousins are older than I am and we visited them every summer of my life, until I went away to college.

1945 is the war, the war, the war. This is not much different from the last two years, except that it is like March in a temperate climate. No matter how much it snows or how strong the bitter winds, you know that it is almost over and that spring is around the corner. At least, that is how I felt as I read book after book about THE WAR.

But I suspect for Americans, not to mention Europeans and Japanese, it was an exercise in hanging in there, being short of almost everything and dreading to find out that another one of your loved ones was dead. There was good news for the Allies as the year went by. Hitler had pretty much lost in Russia and was losing right there in Germany. FDR died on April 12 and Vice President Truman took over, but Generals Patton, Eisenhower and MacArthur were on a roll and didn't miss a beat. By April 30, the defeat of Germany was so complete that Hitler committed suicide and the remains of the German Army surrendered unconditionally on May 7. War ended in Europe on VE Day, May 8. The United Nations Charter was signed on June 26, excluding Spain. This had been FDR's main concern in the last months of his life: planning for peace and finding a way to prevent another world war.

In July, the first atom bomb was tested in the New Mexico desert, proving that we had the ultimate weapon. Less than a month later an atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, on August 6 and three days later on Nagasaki, wiping out both cities and killing over 100,000 people. World War II ended on August 14 as the Japanese capitulated, signing an unconditional surrender on September 2.

There were 45 million dead including 10 million from the Nazi camps. Even now, 61 years later, I feel a sensation of dread. Victory is victory, but I don't feel that it was sweet. Having created the hugest, most destructive war in the history of earth, having created a weapon capable of wiping out mankind, the peoples of earth destined themselves to live under a cloud of potential annihilation. I have lived my whole life under that cloud.

Most of the books I read from 1945 were about World War II in some way or about war and imperialism in other times. There were also books about women getting a new awareness of themselves as human beings and Blacks getting a new awareness of needing rights. These are both products of the war, because women went to work and Blacks went to war. Actually, women also went to war and Blacks also went to work making war materials.

In film, "Going My Way" won Best Picture, Best Director (Leo McCarey) and Best Actor (Bing Crosby.) "Gaslight" took Best Actress (Ingrid Berman.) Popular songs included "Sentimental Journey," "Rum and Coca Cola," "There! I've Said It Again," and "On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe." "Carousel" was the top musical comedy and bebop was the latest jazz craze.

Vitamin A was synthesized, but the big news in science and technology was the first atom bomb being successfully detonated outside Alamogodo, NM. At some point in my childhood, growing up in Princeton, NJ, I was taken by a German friend of my parents to meet Oppenheimer. I remember a very sad and troubled man, who had no idea how to atone for what he had helped create.

The United States federal government tried to make the transition from a war-time to a peace-time economy less drastic than after WW I, but according to my parents, it was still tough and economics were confused. My dad was discharged from the army in the spring of this year, right after the war in Europe was won. His last duties involved renegotiation of government contracts and traveling to companies around the US.

When my parents left Philadelphia, where my dad had been stationed, they moved their belongings to his parent's home in Pittsburgh, PA, and then took a trip in the family car to visit old friends at Valparaiso University, their alma mater, and in Grand Blanc, MI where my mom used to teach. Then Daddy went back to work for US Steel in Pittsburgh and they moved in with his parents. My dad missed out on all pay raises while he was in the service and returned at his former salary.

My mom began the battle with her mother-in-law, which went on for as long as they lived in Pittsburgh. They ran the house together while my dad and grandfather went to work and brought home the income. I have a feeling that those four years of living with her in-laws were some of the unhappiest years of my mom's life. It was a classic case of no woman being good enough for my grandma's first born son, plus the fact that my dad was very close to his mother. My grandma and grandpa were alcoholics after 5:00 pm every day, which was shocking to my mom. The two women had differences about cleaning, cooking and raising babies. But more about that later.

I get the feeling that there was plenty of confusion in American life in this year and the next, as soldiers came home and re-entered civilian life. In the literature of 1945 there is nothing about the bomb, but I predict that will come in the next few years along with all the Holocaust literature. Though Americans must have generally felt that they did the right thing in putting a stop to Hitler and fascism and Japanese aggression, though they must have been proud of helping to win the war, already in meetings of world leaders it was becoming apparent that though Russian was one of the Allies during the war, they had a different plan for the future than the United States did. The Cold War, which will be a major topic in the 1950s, began right away even if it was not yet called by that name.

The stage is set for rapid change. Never again will the United States practice isolationism. The map of Europe was changed once again, but the countries, no matter what they were called, were in ruins. Other strong issues were prejudice against Jews and Blacks, fear of Communism and economic reorganization. My dad and possibly my mom were aware of antisemitism and racism and not in favor of either. Especially my dad had picked up plenty of ideas about these areas of life in college from reading several liberal Christian publications. My sisters and I were raised to abhor intolerance of other religions and racial prejudice. I found these ideas in the books of 1945.

The big question was, where do we go from here? It has been the question of my lifetime and many have come up with possible solutions and scenarios. I have been involved in several of these. Having now read the fiction from 1940 to 1945, I am beginning to see the ways that history and my parents' views set me on such a path.

READING FOR MY LIFE: 1944

I have been "trying" to write this chapter for about a month. All the "writing" has gone on in my head. In that time, I have bought a car, had it stolen right out of my driveway, gone to work, read about 20 novels and just generally felt bad. 1944 is the year that my parents got married. In a certain way, the year is a prelude to the beginning of me, though I would not be born for another three years. Possibly I have been bogged down in the significance of it all.

My father was a writer; a secret writer in a way. He was never published, except for the United States Steel Annual Report, for which he wrote much of the copy during the years he worked there as an accountant. He also wrote speeches for some of the top executives at USS, as well as helping to prepare statements made during some of the "trustbusting" trials. He was never paid or given any acknowledgement for this extra work, other than being the guy in the office who was called in when they needed someone who could write. I suppose for my father, it was more exciting than bookkeeping.

He also wrote things (usually poems) for any special occasion in the family: birthdays, anniversaries, holidays, etc. My mother told me a few weeks ago that when he gave her the engagement ring on July 4, 1942, it came with a card saying, "This is the day that you lost your independence." My dad was always way ahead of his time and he understood feminism before my mother did.

He passed away in mid-June, 2004. He was one month away from their 60th wedding anniversary and one month away from his 84th birthday. He could not have written anything for those occasions because he was suffering from Alzheimers and had not written for many years. I still miss him terribly. Even when he was in the Alzheimers home and drugged to kingdom come so that he would not spit on or hit the attendants, he never failed to recognize me when I visited him. We had a special bond that survived all my teenage and young adult rebellion as well as all his attempts to mold my life and character.

Here is a lesson in memoir writing then. Apparently a memoir cannot be wholly a linear story. It is a story that spirals and twists because of the way that memory seems to exist in chains of events. So having taken a trip on several of those chains in the last paragraphs, I can now address 1944.

The books I read from 1944 were a mix of Christianity, history, romance, war and racism. Summarized in that way, it sounds pretty much like everyday life on planet earth, but certainly in the literature are some topics or approaches to topics that were not much found in fiction before, particularly race. I try to imagine living in the United States in that year and get the idea that Americans were just somewhat bewildered in trying to understand what was happening to their world. Clinging to traditional values and questioning them at the same time; being terrified by what is going on in Europe and the Far East but annoyed by rationing. It seems to be a conflicted time.

In film, "Casablanca" won Best Picture and Best Director (Michael Curtiz); "Watch on the Rhine" won Best Actor (Paul Lukas) and "Song of Bernadette" won Best Actress (Jennifer Jones). With two war pictures and a deeply religious one, Hollywood certainly mirrored the times.

Popular music included "Don't Fence Me In," "Swinging on a Star," "Sentimental Journey," and "Accentuate the Positive." Not a lot of sorrow in that area.

In the war, while the Germans were still bombing the heck out of England with their V1 and V2 rockets, they were losing so much ground on the Russian front that certain German generals attempted to assassinate Hitler. The Allies took Rome on June 4 and on June 6 (D-Day) began to take back France. Also the Japanese were being pushed back with much loss of life on both sides. The Russian Red Army occupied Poland and Hungary, setting the stage for the Cold War in the next decade. There is a bookstore in Burbank, CA which places the front page of the New York Times of each day from 60 years ago in their front window. I have been walking by and reading it for years now. Practically the entire page was about the war every day in 1944. It was just about the only news there was and very intense.

However, it was an election year and FDR was elected for an unprecedented fourth term. No changing horses mid-stream for the American people during World War II, no matter how much they hated that income tax. (I may not have this accurately, but I believe there is now an amendment to the US Constitution allowing the same person to serve as President for only two terms.) Roosevelt, at great cost to his health, attended a meeting with Churchill in Quebec and hosted a conference in Washington, DC, to begin talks about forming the United Nations. In the midst of all this, Vietnam achieved its independence from France, but little did anyone realize where that would lead.

The cost of living in the United States rose almost 30% in 1944. Government contracts for war production brought about huge booms in many corporations, including United States Steel, the company my father would return to in peacetime. The first uranium pile was built in Tennessee, the cyclotron was completed in Washington and quinine was finally synthesized, so we could send soldiers and missionaries into malarial areas with less risk.

Life for my future parents was calm in comparison, but they finally overrode their families' wishes and were married on July 15 of this year. It was also my dad's 24th birthday. He got leave from his base in Philadelphia and arrived in Michigan the day before the wedding. That night he came to my mother with something he had written about what he planned for their life together. She thinks she has it still somewhere but doesn't know for sure where it is. I would so much like to see that.

Their wedding day dawned with rain and clouds. The wedding took place at 3:00 pm at St John's Lutheran Church in Port Hope, Michigan. My mother's sister Shirley and my father's sister Lois were the bridesmaids. My mother's brother Carlton was one usher. My father's cousin Walter was supposed to be the other. They had grown up together, but Walter was by this time an alcoholic and somehow missed his bus connection in Detroit. (We assume he was in the bar.) So Carlton's wife's brother took his place. Just as my parents were standing at the altar being pronounced man and wife, the sun broke through the clouds and shone on them through the stained-glass window. Mom took it as a good omen.

The wedding dinner was at the Port Hope Hotel. It was attended by 25 family members and friends. My grandmother Engle made the wedding cake: angel food with the eggwhites hand-whipped by her. In the one surviving wedding picture, my mother stands with the train of her dress arranged around her feet, close to my father in his army uniform. They are young, she is beautiful, he is handsome and they look very happy and relaxed. That night they took off in Carlton's car and spent the night at the Bay City Hotel. After three days in the lovely Lake Huron shore town of East Tawas, they got on a train together and headed for Philadelphia to begin their married life.

It seems odd to me that my dad had not lined up anywhere for them to live, but possibly he hadn't had time. In any case, they spent the first week in Philadelphia staying at the YMCA. It was hot and my mom could not sleep. During the day she learned her way around the city on public transportation and hunted for a place for them to live. After looking at terrible small apartments she finally saw an ad for the second floor of a row house at the end of a street on the last stop of the elevated train and that is where they settled. It was next to a park where they walked to escape the heat in the evenings. On my dad's army pay, walking was about the only entertainment they could afford, but my mom made friends with the local butcher, who would slip sticks of butter and other rationed items into her shopping bag, once he learned that her husband was in the service.

My mom can make friends with almost anyone, a trait she luckily passed on to me. They soon had friends in the neighborhood and found a little mission church to attend. Mom played the organ and Dad took up collection, which pleased the congregation because he was in uniform. When God is on your side, how appropriate to give your church donations to a soldier.

For a while my mom had a job at Wannamaker's, a famous Philadelphia department store, in the stationary department. But her beloved Uncle Howard died in December, so she quit her job to go to the funeral. I don't think she ever had a job again until after my sisters and I were grown. She channeled her musical talent into playing organ, singing in church choirs and teaching her daughters to play the piano. Her considerable common sense and ability to face new situations were brought to bear on running a house and raising three girls. For the remainder of 1944, I am sure she had her hands full keeping my dad in a good mood and figuring out what to make for dinner.