Dec 18, 1966

 This clip aired fifty-four years ago today, on Dec. 18, 1966. It is part of the Andy Williams Christmas special that year. For a couple years starting in 2015, one of the over-the-air free channels that airs old television programs showed these old specials during the Christmas season. I watched this one during the weeks my father was dying from cancer. When I saw it, it reminded me so much of the world was like when I was very young---the world that went completely away so quickly. 

Everything about reminds me of the pre-1968 world that still fascinates me. Andy's parents are exactly of the same type as my grandparents and people of that era. They were Iowans too, from Wall Lake, which is less than thirty miles from where I grew up. My maternal uncle used to go water skiing there as a teenager.

It's quite possible that the two-year-old me watched the original broadcast.

I've cued up the special at the 30:28 mark, where Andy begins ironically showing "home movie" (i.e. unaired footage) from the previous year's special. I love the musical number he does with his family in this clip: Mary's Boy Child.  This song was popularized by Harry Belafonte, who was one of my late father's favorite singers in the 1960s.  His Belafonte LP collection was one of his prize possessions until the infant me scratched some of them up. I probably was trying to "play" with them the way I saw him do.

My father loved Belafonte in part because he was passionate about civil rights and racial social justice, as we would call it now. I got that from him as well. I still believe in more than ever. That's one reason why I am fighting for the things I fight for.  At the end of his life, my father and I didn't see eye-to-eye on how to bring this about in America and the world.  I could not stay with his politics. I had to leave his side to honor what he was fighting for back then in the 1960s, and what I believed in. This was hard on him to experience, but it did not come between us in his final days.

 I know why he couldn't do see what I was doing with pain and confusion. I know why so many people I know still are stuck in what I see as a Cult that has usurped the goodwill of those movements, adopting its surface gestures and slogans through the hypnosis of mass media, all the while creating a hellscape of tyranny that is opposite of everything those slogans supposedly mean. The Communists fooled a lot of people, including me for a long time. 

My mom too would have loved this clip, especially the part after the clip-within-a-clip in the "present day" of 1966, when Andy speaks French with his kids, as they had learned French from their mother. Her father, may grandfather, was a professor of the French, Italian, and Spanish Languages at a midwestern university (Iowa State). He was the embodiment of post-war middlebrow America, which saw refinement in things like learning French. He is the reason I was determined to master French in high school, and have a pretty decent accent because I learned it young enough (not as young as Andy Williams' kids). 

My grandfather was a very poor kid from a small town in Indiana. He served in the Army in World War II, becoming an intelligence officer transmitted encrypted messages.  He got a Purple Heart after being strafed by a German airplane near Anzio. Like many men of his generation, he went to college and got his Ph.D. using the G.I. Bill. The universities were booming and needed professors.

Towards the end of his insisted at the end of his life that two adjectives described him: "Catholic" and "Marxist."  He was not happy about the Fall of Communism. In 1989 he scolded me for celebrating the end of the Soviet Union.  

According to his brother-in-law Clayton, whom I spoke with in my grandfather's little hometown in Indiana in 2012, and who knew my grandfather as a young man, my grandfather learned German in high school on his own because of the war, which was already underway in Europe. He knew it would be useful to know.

He stayed in the Army Reserve his whole adult life until he retired, eventually becoming a Lieutenant Colonel (the only time I ever saw him in uniform was when he was lying in his coffin). As part of his professorial work in the 1960s, he was a faculty liaison to Cuban emigrés who had been resettled in Iowa to work at the university.  

According to Clayton, he did this for the CIA.   Clayton mentioned the CIA so casually in conversation that it startled me. When it said it, my grandfather's life made a lot of sense to me. I suppose it was nothing very cloak and dagger.  Probably just relaying information and being a general handler to people who needed adjusting to American life. 

Clayton's own son, my mother's cousin Kevin, is an American astronaut who piloted the Space Shuttle. When I visited Clayton in his house, there were framed photographs of his son, and awards and certificates ,all over their paneled wall, in the old school midwestern way of turning your living room into a photo album mosaic. Clayton gave me a tour of the town and pointed out where my glass-blowing ancestors had lived, and showed me my great-grandfather's grave in the cemetery.

If you knew my grandfather's family background in Indiana, and what he and his sister (Clayton's wife) went through, this fact about Kevin being an astronaut would seem mind-blowing.

The last letter I wrote to my grandfather was in Italian, which was the third of his languages that I attempted to learn. The first line of the letter was "this is my first letter in Italian." I was so proud to write him a letter that way.  By then he was living in Florida in retirement. One of his next door neighbors had been in the Wehrmacht. The old enemies became close friends, joking that they spent the war shooting at each other. Somehow the youth of today probably wouldn't approve of that kind of reconciliation, but of course they know much more than my grandfather.

 On Christmas Eve 1993, two months after I sent him that letter, he collapsed and did not regain consciousness before dying six days later.  It was a huge shock to all of us, that such a titan of man could be gone so quickly. My mother never got over it until she died herself in 2017.

When he died, we flew down to Florida over New Year's hastily for the memorial service. As we sat in mourning with my grandmother, she mentioned that it was ironic that my grandfather collapsed on Christmas Eve, because one of his favorite songs had been Mary's Boy Child. "Man will forever more because of Christmas Day," she said, as a matter of declaration like a creed. I got the idea that it was one of my grandfather's favorite songs too.