Our world today is filled with news outlets like CNN or FOX or MSNBC that run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. There are so many news outlets now, that it is hard to get away from news, and all of it seems to be bad.
Dominating news in just the past few weeks has been the new war in Israel, the plane crash in the Ukraine, the Ebola virus outbreak, the ferry disaster in Bangladesh, toxic algae polluting the water in Ohio – all of this could lead one to believe that we are living in one of those “..worst of times” as that line from A Tale of Two Cities goes.
Yet, even with Iraq and Afghanistan thrown into the mix, I still don’t feel as unnerved as I did as a kid through the 1960’s and 1970’s.
There were some scary things going on when I was a young person, things right here at home, that affected me, or people I knew.
We only had news once, or sometimes twice a day. It came on around dinnertime, and my parents usually watched what was then known as The Texaco Huntley-Brinkley Report on whatever our local NBC channel was back then in south Florida.
Chet Huntley and David Brinkley were the hosts, and they were pretty much the entire face of whatever news reports I paid any attention to until I was in high school. Huntley older than my Dad, born in 1911, while Brinkley was a few years younger, born in 1920.
News then was delivered in a very somber manner. There was nothing like you see today on MSNBC or FOX where the hosts will do everything but call their competitors names. And news as comedy, as done by Jon Stewart wasn’t even something that most people would have dreamed about.
News, as it was delivered in the 1960’s, was a serious business, delivered in somber tones, by adult men, and since most of it was delivered at the dinner hour, and so much was happening in the 60’s, it was the driving force for having the television take a seat at the table along with the rest of the family.
The 60’s started off with a bang, with an event I don’t personally recall – but shaped history nonetheless. The televised presidential debate between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy showed that style can often beat substance as Nixon came across looking terrible, while John F. Kennedy looked suave and sophisticated. It allowed a lot of Americans to forget he was a catholic – which was a big thing in those days.
In 1961, the Soviets and the East Germans erected the Berlin wall. I don’t recall this either – I was only six, and 
news events for a six year old, even today, don’t make much of a splash unless they are up close and personal – like getting an extra scoop of ice cream because it’s your birthday, or having German chocolate cake for desert.
There was the trip to Berlin that JFK made, where he won the hearts of the Germans with his speech that included the now frequently seen clip of his “Ich bin ein Berliner” statement. Looking back, I can’t recall if I saw it live on TV, or if I am simply remembering seeing clips of it multiple times since then.
Oddly, I don’t even recall much about the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, even though we lived barely 100 miles north of Havana at the time. Perhaps it was because in 1962 I was attending a private church school run by the local Seventh Day Adventists and we didn’t have any of those “duck under your desk” drills that you see in TV shots from those days. My parents didn’t discuss it at the dinner table, so I was pretty much oblivious to the whole event.
I do remember the 1963 March on Washington, and the “I Have a Dream” speech on TV. I sensed from the adults in my life that they were a bit afraid, all those black people in one place, making trouble. In those days, in the place I grew up, segregation was just something that was – as matter of fact to me at age 7 1/2 as library paste, 
gecko’s and having to eat my vegetables. I grew up in a place where there had always been water fountains and bathrooms marked as “white only” or “colored only”. Where black kids went to one school, and white kids to another. As a 7 1/2 year old child, I never wondered why black people were treated differently, and for some strange reason, I thought that maybe the bathrooms marked as “colored only” were perhaps dirtier than the ones used by white people. Silly of course, and I have no idea how that thought was planted in my head, but it surely had to do with the attitudes of the adults in my life and culture in which I was raised.
Just three months after this momentous event, I clearly recall being sent home from school early. It was November 22nd, 1963. At that time, we walked to and from school. My brother David, 16 months younger than me and only in 1st grade, and me, freshly turned 8 had about a mile to walk. Most of it was alongside the Hillsboro canal – which used to be a river from the Everglades to the Atlantic Ocean, but in the early 20th century was dredged into a deep straight canal. Only a few locations had guard rails, and there were no sidewalks at all – we just walked along the side of the road – and would often stop just across from the old general store and climb the palm trees that hung out over the bank.
We lived next door to my mothers parents, and her grandmother had a small house on the property as well, and 
we loved stopping at Nannie’s house – cookies and milk were always available. We burst into the tiny house – excited about being home early – to find every adult we knew staring at the TV – and we were promptly shushed. John F. Kennedy has been assassinated. For days, the TV seemed like a window into pomp and circumstance and it was all draped in black crepe, the the sound of horses hooves clopping on the pavement as they drew the casket down Pennsylvania avenue.
This was pretty somber stuff for an eight year old, and kind of set the tone for the next decade of what I remember from the news.
There continued to be a political and social upheaval, with the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the march on Selma, Alabama in 1965. George Wallace, Martin Luther King, Malcom X, The Black Panthers, Huey Newton, Angela Davis – all these names dominate my memory of the news of my youth.
There were also spectacular crimes, that often led to odd nightmares. Charles Manson and his gang in California, and Richard Speck and the eight murdered nurses in Chicago from 1966. 1966 was also the year of the Texas Tower shootings where Charles Whitman climed a 27 story tower and killed 14 people and injured another 31. People remember Columbine, do they remember the University of Texas?
I am quite sure that the person I am today is partly the result of what I saw on the news when I was young, partly due to growing up in a segregated south, and partly due to influences I can’t even begin to name or recall.
Today’s children will look back in 40 years and remember this time as “special” in the same way I view the 1960’s and early 1970’s, of that I am sure. The current events of my youth – the assassinations, the political upheaval, the massive cultural change – even the wild Woodstock Music Festival – are all now considered “history”.
It’s kind of startling to look back and realize that events you lived through are now part of some young person’s History class.