ever know’d any Cathlics?”
“Naw, but I think one come in the truckstop a week or so ago.”
“How’d you know it was a Cathlic?”
“He’s wearing a white shirt. Who else ’round here wears white shirts?”
If Elvis was the first break between the Baby Boomers and their parents, then John Kennedy — at least in rural Georgia, which was my only horizon at the time — was a second. Kennedy never started the youthful explosion that Elvis had, but there was something about the man that appealed to us. It was later described as “vigah.” Although I was too young to vote in the 1960 presidential election, I did my part to elect Kennedy by running down Richard Nixon.
I was born under Truman and then came Ike. The General was okay, but I didn’t like the way Nixon, his vice president for eight years, looked even then. He already had those jowls, and when he talked, it seemed like his mouth was full of spit and he needed to swallow.
I also was never able to understand how Nixon fathered any children, because I was convinced he slept in his suit. I suspect Richard Nixon was born wearing a tiny little suit and tie, and his aunts and uncles probably stood around his crib and looked at his beady little eyes and at his jowls — I’m sure he was born with them, too — and said things like, “Well, let’s hope and pray he grows out of it.”
He didn’t, of course. The older he got, the shiftier he looked, and that’s why Kennedy beat him in 1960. When they debated, Nixon looked like a 1952 Ford with a busted tailpipe and foam rubber dice hanging off his rear-view mirror; Kennedy was a Rolls Royce in comparison.
All the girls at school liked Kennedy, too. “He’s sooo cute,” was their usual adept analysis of his platform.
Historians who have looked back on the brief thousand days that John Kennedy was our president have failed to note that Kennedy did, in fact, accomplish an important feat with his looks. Remember his hair? John Kennedy’s hair was sort of fluffy. Nixon probably greased his down with whatever it was I used to slick down my ducktails.
In the early 1960s, most men were still using Vitalis and Wildroot Creme Oil on their hair. But I don’t think John Kennedy used anything like that on his. In fact, Kennedy may have been the first American male to show off “The Dry Look.” It was only a few years after Kennedy became president that we celebrated the death of “The Wethead,” and American men poured their hair tonic down the drain and spent millions on blow-dryers and hairspray.
Looks are important to a president, and Kennedy was the most handsome American president since Andrew Jackson — who wasn’t any Tom Selleck, but at least he didn’t have one of those cherub-looking faces like John Quincy Adams, and he didn’t wear a powdered wig.
Look at the appearances of our presidents over the years. The pictures of George Washington that were in our history books made the father of our country look like somebody’s sweet little grandmother. Abraham Lincoln was no day at the beach, either, and Rutherford B. Hayes had that long scraggly beard, and William Taft was fat. FDR was fairly handsome, but he used that long cigarette holder that made him appear a bit stuffy, I thought. Truman wore funny hats and bow ties, and Eisenhower was militarily rigid and grandfatherly.
John Kennedy, however, was the torchbearer for the new generation. If the times were Camelot, then he was certainly Arthur. He seemed more of an admired, understanding big brother to us than an awesome patriarch ruling from some distant perch.
The youth of the early sixties knew little of the system, other than what we had learned in Civics class, but here was a man with whom we were able to relate — if not to his substance, then most certainly to his style.
The Cuban Missile Crisis brought us even closer to him. He told the Russians where he wanted them to stick their missiles and in the meantime created several marvelously exciting days at my high school. I didn’t pay a great deal of attention to the crisis at first. Basketball practice had started, and that had me too occupied to consider the end of the world as we knew it.
I was in Jacobs’s Drug Store in Newnan eating a banana split the night the president went on television in October of 1962 and told the nation that we were about this far from having to sink a few Russian ships and maybe start World War III. I hesitated and watched and listened for a few moments, but then I went back to the banana split.
The next day at school, however, our principal, Mr. O.P. Evans, called the student body together and began to prepare us for the nuclear attack he seemed certain would come before the noon lunch bell.
Mr. Evans was a tall, forceful man with a deep, booming voice that was a fearful and commanding thing. He ran the school with a Bible in one hand and a paddle in the other. The school was his passion, and even an imminent nuclear attack would not deter him from making certain that we would be a model of order until the last one of us had been melted into a nuclear ash.
We were told that when (I don’t think he ever mentioned an “if anywhere) the call came to Mr. Evans’s office (probably directly from Washington) to inform him that the bombs and missiles were on the way, we would be hastened back to assembly for further instructions. At that point, a decision would be made on whether or not to close school and send us home. In the event we could not safely evacuate, we would remain at school and be given subsequent assignments as to where we would bed down for the night.
That idea caused a great stirring of interest among the boys. Would we get to sleep near the girls? Could we slip around and perhaps catch them in nothing but their underpants? Bring on the bombs and missiles. Mr. Evans quickly dashed our hopes, however, by stating that the boys would be herded to the gymnasium, while the girls would sleep at the other end of the school in the cafeteria and the student activities room, where the Coke and candy machines were also located, damn the luck.
He instructed us to bring canned goods to store in our lockers the following day, presuming there was one, in case the school ran out of food and we had to spend the winter inside the building waiting for the fallout to subside. Students also were to bring blankets and soap, an extra toothbrush, and a change of clothes and underwear. The sacks of clothes and underwear were stored on the stage in the assembly room. Having been shut out of actually getting to see our female classmates down to their skivvies, a group of us went for the next best thing and sneaked into the assembly room during the post-lunch rest period and went through the sacks trying to match girls with panties and bras.
The possibility of an attack did lose some of its glamour, however, when Mr. Evans further announced that as long as a single teacher survived, classes would continue and gum chewing would remain a capital offense.
The attack never came, of course, but we did find out that Gayle Spangler, who always was going off to Atlanta on weekends and was allegedly keeping company with college boys and going to wild fraternity parties, had a pair of panties with the 1962 Georgia Tech football schedule printed on the crotch.
John Kennedy was hailed as a conqueror after backing down the Russians and their missiles, but the triumphant mood of the country was short-lived. One moment Camelot was there, and the next it lay in bloody ruin.
It was the autumn of my senior year. November, 1963. I was changing morning classes. I had just finished Spanish, which I hated. I particularly hated those silly records they played to us in Spanish class.
“El burro es un animal de Mexico, Espana, y Norte Americana, tambien. Repeata, por favor.”
Thirty students with heavy Southern accents would repeat: “El boorow ez uhn anymahl de Mexeecoh, Espainya, why Gnawertee
