by Donna Swagerty Shreve
I was fascinated early on with how much had happened during my grandfather’s life in the history of the world. Elmer was born in 1890 during Benjamin Harrison’s administration and died during Jimmy Carter ‘s presidency. As a child, Elmer rode in a covered wagon when his family moved back and forth between California and Oregon. By the time he died in 1979, we had put a man on the moon. It seemed like he had witnessed such rapid changes within his lifetime. He once told my brother he had lived in the best of times.
I then tried to figure how that range translated into my lifetime. I was born during Truman’s administration in 1945. World War II had just ended and countries had to adjust to the new order. Penicillin was finally being used for the general population instead of just for soldiers. The life expectancy in 1945 was 66.7 years. By 1946(Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer) ENIAC was created at the University of Pennsylvania, which was a first in electronic digital computing in its crudest form. In 1947 Jackie Robinson became a Brooklyn Dodger and the first baseball player to break the race barrier. The sound barrier was also broken by Chuck Yaeger. My mother gave birth to me in a naval hospital at Mare Island Naval Base. My father was on an aircraft carrier and was not expected to come home and be discharged for another three months. Dad’s ship came to San Francisco and his commanding officer signed the proper papers and told Dad to go home to his wife. Dad arrived three days after my birth as a complete surprise. My parents’ beginning as parents was totally tied up with the end of the war.
In 1948 the world started reacting to the end of the war. Racial segregation ended in the military, The Nation of Israel was proclaimed. The Berlin airlift began. Communists seized Czechoslovakia. DDT began being used to kill insects and was prevalent in the valley where I lived among the farmers. As a three year old, I was unaware but these events affected my parents who were shaping me. My father was teaching in Linden and welcomed home many Japanese students who returned from the internments camps to reenter school.
Had we moved too fast? 1949 brought in conservative movements. South Africa began apartheid. Republic of Ireland declared independence from Great Britain. The United States recognized Israel as a state. By 1950 the Korean War had begun. The development of the hydrogen bomb started and the era of McCarthyism began. Term limits for our president were passed with the 22nd Amendment. Our first nuclear plant was built. Apartheid in South Africa would influence the 1968 olympics as that country was not allowed to participate. My sister participated in those games and received a bronze medal. The top swimmer in the world at that time was from South Africa and could not compete.
By 1953 the world started turning in another direction. The Korean War had its armistice. In 1954 the Senate condemned Senator McCarthy for misconduct. Rosa Parks pushed the Civil Rights Movement forward in 1955 when she refused to give up her bus seat in the south. Our attention turned to more scientific endeavors in 1957 when Russia launched Sputnik and the space race had begun. Our schools started emphasizing science and math so we could compete on the world stage. Little Rock Arkansas was forced to integrate Arkansas High School by the Supreme Court. My father taught in racially mixed school and had obtained a copy of the movie about Jackie Robinson to show to the entire school. He brought the movie home over the weekend and made sure we saw it.
I can remember, as an elementary school student in 1957, entering a flag design contest for the new states of Hawaii and Alaska. In 1960 John F. Kennedy was elected president and the black sit-in happened in Greensboro, North Carolina. The first weather and communication satellites were launched. The civil rights beginnings were quite remote in my childhood within the bubble of Lincoln Village that quite white with little to no diversity.
We took a step back in 1961 and broke diplomatic relations with Cuba. The Berlin Wall was erected. OPEC was founded. Then in science, our first astronaut Alan Shepard rocketed up 116.5 miles in space. The Russians got Yuri Gagarin to be the first man to orbit earth. By 1962 we had the Cuban missile crisis and John Glenn orbited the earth three times.
In 1963, 15,000 “ military advisors” arrived in Vietnam. We attempted the first artificial heart implant. Unknown to us at the time, one of my mother’s uncles had a heart transplant in 1958 that worked for three days before he died from complications. In Civil Rights, thousands marched on Washington D.C. and Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech. But to counter that, Nelson Mandela was sentenced to life imprisonment in South Africa. Three civil rights workers are murdered in the south. By 1965 the Civil Right, movement watched Malcolm X shot to death. The Watts section of Los Angeles in California rioted out of despair for days. Where I lived in Lincoln Village, a suburb of Stockton, these events were known only by watching the evening news on television.
By 1966 Medicare coverage began for older Americans and policemen now had to give each potential criminal their Miranda Rights. The pill became available for easier and safer birth control. A sexual revolution began which furthered a generation gap between my generation and our parents. In 1967 Israel and Arab forces had a Six Day War as the tensions kept rising in their area of the world. Two leaders for civil rights, Martin Luther King, and the Democratic Party, Robert Kennedy, were slain. I can remember where I was for all three of those assassinations as they rocked our security.
Other social movements began with the Stonewall riot in New York City that started the gay rights movement. Years later my youngest son would benefit from those early pioneers in the gay rights movement. Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin took the walk on the moon. Hippies gathered in New Hampshire and had a celebration at Woodstock . To contrast this in 1970, four protesting students were shot at Kent State by nervous National Guardsmen.
By 1971 busing was instituted to achieve racial desegregation in the public schools. The Vietnam War helped to spur the movement to lower the voting age to eighteen with the passing the 26th Amendment. The summer Olympics of 1972, held in Munich Germany, resulted with eleven Israeli athletes being killed by terrorists. On the political front Watergate break-in scandal began and lead to a resignation of President Richard Nixon in 1974. Gloria Steinem’s Ms magazine was launched and women started to organize for equal rights. I had the first copy of that magazine and certainly wish I had saved it.
In 1973 a ceasefire was declared in Vietnam. Several of my high school mates were killed in the Vietnam War and I have found them on the memorial wall. The Supreme Court passed Roe versus Wade giving women the right to choose. The United States set up Skylab our first space station and in 1974 Apollo and Soyuz from the United States and Russia link up in space. Civil Rights for blacks moved forward in 1976 when the Supreme Court ruled that blacks and other minorities are entitled to retroactive job security.
A television network took a gamble in 1977 and showed a multiple part program called Roots, which paid off with an audience of over 130 million viewers. The long used quota system for college admission was barred. I remember the shock when I found out in 1964 that U.O.P. my alma mater had a strict quota system for admissions. The first test tube baby was successful. A few revolutions happened in 1977. The Poll Pot regime in Cambodia fell and the Shah of Iran was forced to leave. I had various students in my classrooms several years later whose families had escaped to the United State. The Soviets invaded Afghanistan. By 1980 the U.S. hostages were finally released in Iran and Anwar Sadat was assassinated in Egypt. President Reagan appointed the first woman to the Supreme Court, Sandra Day O’Connor. There was progress in some areas and regression in others.
By 1983 the war on drugs escalated when crack cocaine began showing up in the U.S. To add to the unstable world situation, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated in India. Apple introduced the Macintosh personal computer. In 1989 I used my inheritance from my grandfather to buy our first Apple computer for my family and made our encyclopedias obsolete. In the science world, scientists reported an enormous hole in Antarctica in the ozone layer. Other bad news from the science world was the nuclear accident at Chernobyl in the Soviet Union. The U.S. space shuttle Challenger exploded on take-off. Teaching at the time, I turned on the classroom T.V. and we all watched in horror as the news was relayed to us. In 1988 NASA warned Congress of global warming.
1989 ushered in more civil unrest and scientific achievement. In Tiananmen Square, China, thousands of protestors were killed. The Berlin Wall was opened. The Czech parliament ended Communists’ rule followed by Yugoslavia ending 45 years of its communist rule. Nelson Mandela got released from prison in South Africa. In technology the first World Wide Web server and browser were created in England. The Hubble Space Telescope launched to explore outer space.
On the worldwide scene in 1991, South Africa repealed apartheid laws. The Soviet Union broke up into smaller countries. Japan experienced its worst nuclear accident. Reacting to the fall of the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia becomes two countries of the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1992. Many years later I would visit both countries and see the evidence of Soviet rule. NAFTA is set up for free trade between countries and the World Wide Web became available to the public.
1994 brought in more social change with once jailed Nelson Mandela becoming president of South Africa. The IRA declared a ceasefire in Northern Ireland after years of unrest. In 1995, our nation sat glued to news media for the O.J. Simpson trial, which pointed out we still had race issues. The Million Man March was held in Washington D.C.
On the women right’s front, Madeline Albright became our first female Secretary of State.
Unrest developed in 1997 with the Oklahoma City bombing and two people being convicted in the New York City Trade Center bombing attempt. The Columbine High Shooting followed this disaster, in 1999. All of this led up to 2001 when terrorists attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon with four hijacked passenger planes. Three thousand citizens were killed that day. By 2003 the United States began its war against Iraq and soon Afghanistan. In space, the shuttle Columbia exploded. Again as a teacher I received word over the intercom and watched the television with my students as these events were shown to our nation.
2004 marked a social change with Massachusetts becoming the first state to legalize gay marriage. California approved to fund embryonic stem cell research. In 2007 an explosion happened in the electronic world. Apple introduced the iPhone giving anyone access to the web any where they went. Facebook created a way to connect people from all over the world. Also created was the cloud, which was a system to store huge amounts of data. We were now tethered to our devices.
2008 ushered in social changes such as our first black president, Barack Obama, which would be followed by a Supreme Court ruling making same sex marriage legal in all states. Revolution spread to the Middle East and in 2011 the Arab Spring Movement was born. Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the 2001 terror attack was found and killed.
Following those social changes, in 2012 a shooter came into Sandy Hook elementary school and killed 26 students and teachers. As a nation we still could not pass any restrictions on guns even after the pleading by the parents of those killed children to each law maker in Washington. The Higgs Boson particle was discovered which could be the key to life and diversity in the universe. The life expectancy in the U.S. was 78.7 years.
I guess what I learned, from chronicling my place in history, is how we seem to move forward and then slow down a bit and sometimes even move backwards. I hope I live long enough to see the forward movement again, which must follow this recent downward turn of events if history is any teacher of human behavior.
Swagerty-Aldrich Family Web Site 