Mid-century Heroes

In the early 1960’s it was a lot easier to have heroes than it is now. Partly, there was a lot less information around. Mysterious heroes, invested with our own desires, are easier to worship. The cornucopia of information we have now, about everything under the sun, was just beginning. But, those we make into heroes may change our world for the better, or spur us to do it ourselves.

Spread glossy photos of someone across a few magazines, give us a few intimate details of their lives and we long for them. We think we know them better than we do our friends. We want to be like them. Modern heroism requires that mysterious grace under the relentless focus of the camera, without which the media turns away and the beauty, courage or heroism might never have been.

During the first half of the 1960’s, when Line, Marty and Paul are teenagers, their heroes are filtered mostly through television, a few glossy magazines and the growing awareness college gives them. Paul, at home, finds baseball players, astronauts and songwriters to emulate. At college, there is only one television for a whole dorm full of students, and Marty and Line see very little. Marty is focused on studying and several of her early heroes are writers, but Line manages to get out into the world and meet heroes face to face.

Mercury Seven Astronauts during Survival Training, 1960

From the time they are first selected in 1959, Paul loves the original Mercury Seven group of astronauts. Information about them abounds and knowing about their rigorous training helps Paul as he undergoes painful reconstructive surgery on his legs. The career of the young Harmon Killebrew, who comes to Minneapolis with the advent of the Twins in 1961 at 25, matches Paul’s greatest interest in baseball. Paul thrills to his powerful hitting record, worries about his injuries and loves the fact that Killebrew is a quiet person from Idaho.

By 1965, the Beatles have played several times in the US, but most of the national coverage doesn’t individuate them. They are simply the Fab 4, and, in Paul’s world, it is hard to know what each of them does or take any of them seriously. [I have a letter from my mother, written to me at college, which asks, “Did you see the Beadles last night?” She went on to tell me that the audience reaction was the most interesting part!] Of those on the Hootenanny television show, Paul likes Ian Tyson’s guitar playing and the harmonies he sings with Sylvia, as well as the lyrics of the Smothers Brothers and the Chad Mitchell Trio. He has no knowledge of Bob Dylan, who refuses to be on the show because Pete Seeger is blacklisted, though Dylan's songs are everywhere.

For Marty, few images of beauty top the many wonderful photographs of Mrs. John F. Kennedy from the early 1960’s. She is portrayed as intelligent and tasteful, as well as a loyal wife and thoughtful mother. From early foreign films which she sees at college, Marty finds Jean Seberg fascinating in Goddard’s Breathless and Jeanne Moreau in Truffaut’s Jules and Jim, but it is writers who are most real for her.

Marty conceives such a love of Dr. Tom Dooley, whose books The Edge of Tomorrow and The Night They Burned the Mountain tell of his work in Laos and Cambodia up until his early death, that she longs to be a doctor, despite the fact she faints at the sight of blood. Hemingway’s books and persona loom large in the early 1960’s, with Marty being much affected by his spare, powerful writing. But it is the fate of Boris Pasternak, whose poetry and book Dr. Zhivago earn him a Nobel Prize which he cannot accept, which most moves her during this time.

Because she rooms with an exchange student from Spelman College in 1963, Line is told about the unique group of professors and students there who participate in the civil rights movement, including Howard Zinn, Staughton Lynd, Alice Walker and Vincent Harding (who led Mennonite House in Atlanta, one of the few places blacks and whites could meet). By the time Line goes to Spelman herself in 1964, they have all moved on, except for Ruby Doris Smith, who has returned to get her degree. Line doesn’t talk to her, but she certainly knows who she is and of her importance to the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee.

Line doesn’t feel useful enough in the semester she is at Spelman, but marches, to the extent allowed, from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in the spring of 1965. She hears the powerful Martin Luther King speech in which he states that "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." By the summer of 1965, she is at an SDS convention in Kewadin, Michigan (unbeknownst to her parents), where Tom Hayden, Carl Oglesby and other activists leading anti-Vietnam war protests meet.

Some of this experience was mine, but much was not. Putting my characters in a real world is terribly exciting and I love the research which has been required to do so. No small part of it is understanding the access they had to culture heroes of the time. It may be surprising, but it took a while for the doors to the 1960’s to open. And of course, it is a time when Line, Marty and Paul’s experiences begin to vary widely.