This Day in 1953 (July 27)

A moment ago I read a NY Times article from this day in 1953: the signing of the treaty between North Korea and the United States. The parties met and signed in silence, and the prediction by many then was that the truce would not last, but somehow we or they have not broken it.

But the Cold War was a grim affair that ground on, and in a way there is now and always has been a cold war in this world. Where there is not a hot one. God! We are a warring lot.

II. Seize the Day. Didn't finish this on the 27th, so here it is the 28th. As the newsreel of that 1953 day no doubt intoned (through the theatrically thunderous, doomsday voice of Westbrook Van Voorhees), "Time Marches On."

What was I going to write? Every time I start to write a retrospective, I think of Kurt Vonnegut's words in one of his fiction-nonfiction curiosities, "Just an old fart with his memories and his Pall Malls." Don't have the Pall Malls (praise God!) but those memories are indeed precious as they get mellower and mellower, and I suppose they gradually become all that an old man (or woman) (or fart) has. The realities of the present day are grim enough and for me growing grimmer by the day.

On the day of that armed truce between the UN and Communist North Korea in 1953, I was one month past the magic age of 14. Let's see: that was the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of high school. ["Sophomore": roughly, "wise moron"] I'd begun to sprout a little, was preoccupied with my complexion, voice, etc. [Voice didn't change until after the mandatory auditions for the choral club, into which I was happily drafted the next year as an eleventh grader. But as usual I get ahead of whatever story a discourse might contain.]

I don't recall anything specific of that day or even of that summer. I could go to the library microfilm and find out what the weather was here in Happy Valley. The impressions I have had of that day in Korea was that there was great darkness, as there was the day in Jerusalem when Christ was crucified. The Cold War was to continue for most of the rest of the twentieth century, and Korea is still divided into two hostile factions at the 38th parallel. (For the record, the latitude of Madison, Indiana is 38 degrees, 45 minutes -- the exact position of the 38th parallel at this longitude is a ways south of Frankfort, Kentucky; but the 38th parallel here roughly approximates the Mason-Dixon line, or as somebody once dubbed it, the Smith-Wesson line.)

I suspect, though, that the weather here in late July 1953 was about like it has been here at present: warm, humid, with that blue film on the green hills in the distance, and mostly sunny enough to cast a shadow from a pale blue sky above.

We had no a-c in that little shotgun frame house, but the house was well insulated, Mother Vi kept it closed up and dark, and somehow it worked. I don't recall that we even had a damn fan, but we somehow managed to keep relatively cool. Daddy Noble was now working as an insurance salesman, Mother was a babysitter and kept her earnings in a baby sock between her cleavage.

Bud had graduated from high school and was getting ready to go to IU. He flipped burgers and washed dishes at the Stop Lite Grill, was an usher at the Ohio Theater, and I think he even managed to get some construction work with incredible money and a hellacious sunburn. Funds from Vi's sock provided extras, clothes, etc. Anyhow, all of the first year at Indiana University was paid for in full. And I didn't see much of him that summer.

For work myself, I carried newspapers and caddied at the country club. I made visits to Auntie and Sister Sadie in Indianapolis, traveling there on the trusty old White Star bus, a Flxible that was as much of a workhorse on the road as the DC-3 was in the sky. Many of those Flxibles are still rolling, many now rebuilt and appropriated for family RVs. We had public transportation then from burgs like Madison; we even had a B & O passenger train that ran between Cincinnati and St. Louis, alongside US 50, which passed through North Vernon and Seymour. I don't recall any RVs then, but a few silver Airstream trailers were around, enough that we little people weren't too puzzled at the idea of Lucy and Desi honeymooning in one in "The Long, Long Trailer."

Linn and Sadie lived in a paint-peeled, gray frame house with Grandma Josie Hudson in the Irvington neighborhood of Indianapolis, a little ways off East Washington Street. I was amazed at how pleasantly wooded it was there. Squirrels abounded! There was a city park and I think a municipal eighteen-hole golf course that was cheap enough for common folk to play. (Yes, socialism existed in the dead center of Indiana! The course, of course, has been sold to Rupert Murdoch or some other capitalist rat bastard since then, I conjecture.)

I wish Bud were here to correct me if my memory fails me, but I believe I visited them at that house during that summer. I recall images from then but not a lot of "hard data." Grandma Josie looked very old-fashioned: she wore her hair in a bun, just like my Grandma Annie did. I was very impressed with the Hudsons' conspicuous consumption. They had a big window a-c and a roomy refrigerator that had ice cream in the freezer at all times. Sadie was carrying in utero the person who would become John Evans Hudson the following October. She smoked like a chimney during both of her pregnancies but had healthy and also beautiful children in spite of it. I was playing with tobacco myself then: I would be a confirmed smoker in another year.

In case you, dear reader, are not aware of it, there is no point to this rambling. "Just an old fart with his memories ..."

To Happy Dog Days. Then and now.