The Old Man Looks Back

The Old Man's Post has been flagging so far this year! January is never my best month. So in order to keep the blog going, I will mention that much of my computer time was spent poking around with my photo albums and trying to deal with some of the mementoes kept for many years. Somehow I will have to be brutal about disposing of the stuff, and hopefully be a bit more careful than my successors will be about deciding what goes in the garbage, what gets shredded and what is given away.

In the last week or so I came upon a box containing a bunch of notes and memorabilia from a driving tour of the States after my retirement a quarter century ago. It was in the spring of 1985 when my wife and I used the Rotary International Convention in Kansas City as an excuse to see some of the country of my birth and to touch base with cousins I had never met in the Mennonite region of eastern Kansas.

Among my notes in that box was a steno pad containing a sort of handwritten daily journal, from which I will copy a few lines for your consideration. We had started out from Vancouver at 2:30 PM on May 21, 1985, stopped at Bellevue, Washington for supper at Denny's, getting a full course senior's turkey dinner at $2.99 each, and reached Yakima about 8:30 PM where we booked into a Motel 6 for $23.66 including tax. After nine in the evening I went for a walk, then wrote the following as part of my first journal entry for the trip:

I took a walk to downtown Yakima and found an all night Arco market. It had been hot all day and by 10:00 PM it was still 75 degrees F. The town was pretty well shut down. A few taverns, card rooms and eateries had some activity and young people hung around, drove around downtown, restless, having no apparent respect for or fear of institutions or older people. They didn't bother with me at all as I walked along minding my own business, but I felt a certain uneasiness in the strange place. At one point a convertible with five teenage girls in it was stopped by a patrolling police cruiser, lights flashing, and the girls were questioned. When they finished the girls pulled away and drove slowly around the corner while I waited for the light. They were beautiful young ladies but were giggling among themselves about the cop and when they got just out of sight of the police car the girl driving turned around and thumbed her nose at the cops. I also walked past several clusters of boys just hanging out, yelling and generally looking for trouble. This was before ten at night and I'm sure they found it later. I saw some long hairs, some shaved heads, some normal, but the pit of my stomach told me it could be one of those "long hot summers" for the young. They obviously haven't enough to do, and perhaps too much money to do it with. They seem to be looking for something. They won't be cowed and disciplined as the youngsters of the thirties were. Today they are not awed, much less over-awed, by wealth, position, or power, and I think they have a good idea of their own power. Let's hope they don't hold the rest of us to ransom with it.

So that is the first issue of the Post for February 2010. Perhaps I'll find something new and more interesting to say in the next issue.

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