The tomatoes in my garden needed a day of rain, and I did too.
I consider myself to have an enviable life. I’ve been retired for more than a decade, and I fill my time with things I enjoy. Sometimes during the summers, I overfill.
I enjoy being outdoors. I keep busy with slow-pitch softball and golf, I volunteer Tuesday mornings with Unity Gardens, and I help others when I can. This year, I’ve devoted most of my leftover hours to turning my backyard into an organized maze of flowers, fruits and vegetables.
I’ve been feeling unusually tense, and I didn’t realize why until the rainstorms arrived Sunday and Monday. I had been bothered by the world around me and had lost perspective.
I grew up on a farm. During my teen years, I spent nearly every summer day in hayfields, collecting enough money to pay my way through college.
The old saying “Make hay while the sun shines” is a real thing. The lesser-known saying would be “Make repairs whenever it rains.” On most days when we weren’t in the fields, we would replace broken parts on our hay equipment or do other fix-up work around the farm. I can’t remember sleeping late or watching TV all day.
I’m now a gardener, not a farmer, and a grownup, not a teen-ager. If I really want to take a nap, I could. On that rainy Monday, I decided to spend half an afternoon with my magazine pile.
One of my odd hobbies is collecting and reading old Life, Look and Saturday Evening Post magazines. I find them at antique stores or at online auctions. I have some that go back to the early 1940s, but my favorite era is from 1965 to 1975.
I choose that period mainly because it resembles our current times. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of difference between Nixon’s “silent majority” of 1968 and Trump’s “make America great again” crowd of 2016.
The 1960s had race riots in major cities. We still do. They had a corrupt president facing jail time. They had runaway inflation. They had Russia threatening to use atomic weapons. Rich people were buying luxury cars while poor folks suffered. Public schools were not measuring up. Church leaders saw empty pews. Morality was in decline. Kids hated their parents.
We changed a little to survive that. We can survive this.
The Life and Look magazines I saw Monday had fast-paced stories about the assassination attempt on Gov. George Wallace, the murder of Malcolm X and the slaughter of nurses in Chicago by Richard Speck. There also were insights about the strategies and expectations about how we would win the war in Vietnam.
I read a lot about pop culture. Advertisements showed the new Chevy Cutlass and Swanson TV dinners. Articles warned of the naughtiness of see-through fashion and topless swimwear. I saw an obsession with Elizabeth Taylor’s love life. Critics fawned over such new musicians as Long John Baldry.
I ended up googling Jodi Exler to see if “that magnificent girl in The Love Machine,” featured in a Look article in August 1971, ever made another movie.
She didn’t.
The undertone in nearly every magazine is frantic – desegregation, pollution, overpopulation, corruption, disrespect in schools, guns, exploitation of children, immorality.
I can keep this list going, but the Temptations did a fairly good rundown in their 1970 song “Ball of Confusion (That’s What The World is Today).” Great Googamooga, it’s like reading a 1970s Life magazine table of contents. You can listen to this The Temptations – Ball of Confusion – Bing video before we continue here.
For a generation that had survived so much, this all was getting to be too much for folks to manage. America was on the verge of a nervous breakdown then, just as we seem to be now.
In this magazine pile, I found the July 27, 1971 edition of Look, with the cover story “Peace of Mind.” The magazine staff quizzed 16 prominent Americans about how they achieve inner peace in a chaotic world.
TV news anchor Walter Cronkite said he escaped by taking his small sailboat into a big ocean. Novelist James Michener took walks with his two dogs. Interestingly, Michener wrote a 1,104-page book, “The Source,” detailing the rise of three major religions in Palestine, but he failed to include his dogs’ names in the Look essay.
Give up, folk singer Joan Baez said, because peace is impossible in a corrupt world. Norman Vincent Peale, author of “The Power of Positive Thinking, and Cardinal Terence Cooke suggested finding Jesus. Congressman Patsy Mink and Black activist Julian Bond said we should work harder.
Be better organized, said heart surgeon Michael DeBakey. Be more selfish, said jazz musician Duke Ellington.
I read all 16 profiles. No one with their enviable lives suggested taking a day off from work and watching the rain while reading about the Great Depression, the Spanish flu epidemic, Prohibition and the rise of communism in Europe and America in the 1920s.
Our grandparents survived those too. Magazines from those times might have saved Walter Cronkite a trip to the sea or given Julian Bond a restful afternoon off from his work.
But maybe not. For some of us, everything always seems so new.