General Memories

I was born in 1960 and have collected a few memories.

I had a world atlas when I was a boy that showed Egypt and Syria as the United Arab Republic. The union didn't last because so many Syrians felt that they were effectively being ruled by more populous Egypt. Egypt continued to call itself the United Arab Republic, I had a later atlas showing that. The name was later dropped altogether. The same atlas showed a country in the Himalayas, called Sikkim, which later voted to join India.

We landed in Canada in 1965, just before I turned five years old. We settled in Niagara Falls. It is mostly forgotten today but not long afterward there was a massive electrical blackout that started in Niagara Falls and shut down Toronto and New York City.

Around the same time Canada chose it's current flag, the red and white maple leaf. I remember that there were a significant number of Canadians who didn't like the new flag, "Why does everybody else's flag have three colors but our's only has two? Is the government just trying to save money on ink"?

Canada had a great celebration of it's centennial in Expo 67, held in Montreal. There were advertisements for it everywhere.

In the late-mid 1960s there was a boat stuck in the river just above the American Falls at Niagara. It had been there for years. They finally got it out.

There was a museum just at the Canadian end of the Rainbow Bridge. It was known simply as the Niagara Falls Museum. There was a mummy from Egypt that spent over a century in Niagara Falls. The actual identity of the mummy wasn't known. It was later found to be that of Pharaoh Ramesses I, who had begun a new dynasty in Egypt. His grandson, Ramesses II, is one of the best-known pharaohs. The mummy was later returned to Egypt.

Just before we moved from Canada, in October 1968, a politician emerged who would soon become prime minister. It was Pierre Trudeau, the father of the present prime minister. Canada is usually a little bit more low-key than the U.S. about politics. But there has rarely been such enthusiasm for a politician. It was called "Trudeaumania".

The first major event after our landing in the U.S. in October 1968 was the election of Richard Nixon as president. He was running against Hubert Humphrey and Wallace. Most people around seemed to prefer Humphrey, who was the current Vice President, but Nixon won.

The other major news around the time were, of course, the Apollo missions to the moon. Apollo 8 went into orbit around the moon, but didn't land, around Christmas of 1968. The following July Apollo 11 actually landed astronauts on the moon. A few months later Apollo 12 landed on the moon again.

With the moon landings space shows were on television all the time, with people traveling in and colonizing space. There was Star Trek, Lost in Space and, the Jetsons. Later there would be Star Wars. Computer technology was primitive at the time. What would happen is that computer and communication technology would advance much faster than space travel. Instead of sending humans far into space robots and computers would make the journey and instead of people exploring space they would be exploring cyberspace.

The word "ain't" was very commonly used in the late 1960s and early 70s. Teachers used to scold us that "ain't" isn't a real word and isn't in the dictionary. The interesting thing is that now the word is in the dictionary it is hardly used any more. As for other words, "cool" has taken over the world but "groovy" has been left in the Sixties. I actually used to think that being cool was good but being groovy was even better.

In early 1969 came the news that a man had hijacked a plane and ordered the crew to take him to Cuba. It turned out to be the unfortunate Anthony Bryant. Instead of finding paradise he would be thrown in jail and finally released in the Mariel Boatlift of 1980. Back in the U.S., having lost his sympathy for Communism, became a conservative talk show host.

The summer of 1969 was filled with news. Not long after the landing of astronauts on the moon came the famous concert at Woodstock. Four hundred thousand young people, mostly from the New York City area, got together for four days of music.

If anyone remembers the rock music of the summer of 1969, and is keeping track, we have come nearly 10% of the way to the year 2525.

At a nearby department store, K-Mart, an old car was on display. The body of the car was full of holes. It was the first I heard of the 1930s outlaws Bonnie and Clyde. They had been killed in their car by machine gun fire. Their car was being taken around on display.

Probably the most dreaded word in the language was "cancer". It usually amounted to a death sentence. More than once I heard the dreaded news that someone had been diagnosed with cancer, meaning there was probably not much that could be done for them. Fortunately those days are gone.

Another area where dramatic progress has been made is in plane crashes, which used to be in the news all the time killing hundreds of people. Does anyone remember the crash of the plane that was landing at Toronto Airport in the summer of 1970? The plane suffered a tail strike and was going to circle around and attempt the landing again. But the plane came virtually straight down into a field, killing everyone on board. Fragments of human bone, as well as scraps of clothing and bits of luggage, were being found for a long time afterward.

In the beginning of 1970 a new passenger plane was introduced, the Boeing 747 which could carry many more passengers than the standard Boeing 707. The maiden flight of the 747 was made from New York to London, by Pan Am, and seemed to be getting the 1970s off to a very promising start. More than seven years later the crash took place that remains the worst aircraft accident not involving terrorism. Two aircraft collided in dense fog at Tenerife, in the Canary Islands. The Pan Am 747 in that crash was actually the same one that had made the maiden flight.

There was a lot of concern about pollution and the first earth day was in 1970. Today the issue is not with visible pollution but with global warming. But America, being a very visually-oriented culture, is less enthusiastic about battling global warming because it is more abstract and less visible.

In April 1970 America's Nixon administration widened the Vietnam War by sending soldiers into neighboring Cambodia. There had already been protests against the war for years. This widening of the unpopular war brought an explosion of protests on college campuses across the country, including nearby Buffalo State College. It resulted in four students being shot to death by the National Guard at Kent State University, in Ohio.

In music the so-called "British Invasion" was going on at the same time as America's Vietnam War. The two events usually didn't have much to do with each other but there was one great exception. The Moody Blues did a song in 1970 for American listeners who were dealing with the Vietnam War, and it produced some of the most memorable lyrics of the rock music era. The song was "Question" and the question was "Why do we never get an answer when we're knocking at the door with a thousand million questions about hate and death and war"?

In September 1971 there was the Attica State Prison uprising, over prison conditions. A group of prisoners took over the prison, holding prison guards as hostages, and presented a list of demands. Negotiations did not resolve the crisis. I was near my 11th birthday. I came out of school and a number of parents were waiting for their children. One parent was listening to the news on the radio and I heard him say to another that they had stormed the prison.

A monumental event was U.S. President Richard Nixon's visit to China in 1972. It was on television every day. Before that, the U.S. and China didn't even have diplomatic relations. This visit changed everything, creating the global economy that we have today, with Chinese-made goods to be found everywhere.

Christians had their own version of the Woodstock Concert in 1972, Explo 72 in Dallas.

Let's have some respect for mice. They are the only creatures, other than humans, to have been on the moon. 

Does anyone remember going to school in the dark, in the autumn of 1973, because the countries that had fought against Israel in the Yom Kippur War cut off the supply of oil to the countries that supported it? But the crisis didn't last long.

I was watching television when U.S. President Richard Nixon was about to address the nation. It was not known what the address was going to be about. What a shock it was when the president announced his resignation over the ongoing Watergate Crisis. Nothing like this had ever happened in U.S. history before and there was a great deal of uncertainty about what to expect.

The so-called Manson Family committed two sets of horrible murders in Los Angeles in the summer of 1969. The reason was to make it look as if black militants had done it. This would then set off a race war which, in the twisted mind of Charles Manson, would be the beginning of the apocalypse foretold in the Bible. The end result would be Manson reigning over the world as Christ. There was a member of the Manson Family who had not been involved in the killing, Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme. Almost as shocking as the original murders, six years before, was her sudden emergence and attempt to assassinate U.S. President Gerald Ford, in 1975.

If you listened to short wave radio during the Cold War jammers could be heard, which was basically just noise generated on the same wavelength as western broadcasts by the Communist countries that they were trying to broadcast to. 

During the 1970s music was listened to, aside from directly on the radio, on vinyl records that were played on turntables, cassette tapes and eight-track tapes. Eight tracks were used to create a stereo effect by recording from different angles on eight separate tracks. Eight track tapes have long since fallen into ancient history. Cassette tapes were instrumental in the Iranian Revolution of 1979 as Ayatollah Khomeini, while in exile, extensively recorded sermons on cassettes, which were then smuggled into Iran and became very popular.

I had an early pocket calculator almost as soon as they became popular. They were the size of a small book. But electronic calculators supplanted the slide rules which had long been necessary for complex calculations.

I was living in Canada for it's centennial in 1967 and in the U.S. for it's bicentennial in 1976.

An epic local event was the Blizzard of 1977, in the Buffalo-Niagara area. The snow was not new snow. Lake Erie, which is the only one of the Great Lakes that freezes because it is shallow, froze over early in the cold winter. Then there was a continued snowfall and the snow piled up on the frozen lake. Next, very strong winds from the southwest picked up the snow and deposited it across the Buffalo-Niagara region. A lot of chemical waste had been buried in Niagara Falls NY decades before, and a neighborhood built over it. The volume of water from when the snow melted in the spring caused the chemicals to reemmerge to contaminate the neighborhood. The drainage of water into the Niagara River was blocked by a highway that had been built. The result was the disaster known as the Love Canal. Has there ever been a "perfect storm" where more factors have come together?

I first heard of personal computers that were meant to be used by the average person with the Commodore, in 1977. This wasn't the first personal computer but previous ones were built from kits, and were not really intended for the average person. But the screen was all text. A graphical user interface was still a long way off.

The two Voyager spacecraft, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, were launched in 1977. Voyager 2 was actually launched first. These two spacecraft have been a fantastic success, far exceeding expectations. I consider this as really the highlight of space exploration. One Voyager or the other have visited all of the outer planets. Today they, on different routes, have both left the Solar System and are still sending back data. They have time capsules for anyone who may ever find them.

In my opinion the best song of the rock music era is "Gimme Shelter". But I have changed my opinion before and might change it again. It is a 1969 song but I didn't pay attention to it until nine years later. Ironically it is a song about the apocalypse. Not necessarily the biblical Apocalypse but about the world falling apart into war and crime. The lyrics are difficult to understand but I think this was done intentionally so that a listener can enjoy the music, if they choose, without getting into the meaning of the song.

I visited my native Britain in the summer of 1978, after completing high school in the U.S. While I was flying over the first successful attempt to cross the Atlantic Ocean in a balloon, the Double Eagle 2, was also going on.

Does anyone remember New Wave music? I see it as a kind of British development. The three songs that stand out are "Teenage Kicks", by a band from Belfast called the Undertones, Kim Wilde seemed to be trying to make it more popular in America with "The Kids In America". "Are Friends Electric" is a gloomy futuristic song by Gary Numan about a guy whose girlfriend is an electric robot, but now she is broken.

The word "inflation" brings back youthful memories. The West rarely has serious inflation anymore. I know exactly why. Millions of people were working in well-paid unionized factory jobs. The trouble is that they were getting paid more than their labor was really worth and the economy was adjusting by way of inflation. It is no coincidence that inflation and the number of people working in manufacturing both peaked in 1979. In 1979 inflation in Britain reached a very dangerous 27%. Margaret Thatcher, followed later by Ronald Reagan in the U.S., purposely induced a nasty recession because that was the only way to stop inflation.

In 1979 I saw the Skylab space station go over not long before what hadn't disintegrated in the atmosphere landed in the Australian Outback. Satellites can be seen when it is dark where you are but the sun is still shining on the satellite. You cannot see a satellite in the middle of the night because the sun is blocked by the earth.

I flew from Toronto to London in the summer of 1980. I liked to read. A few seats away from me a man was absorbed in a book titled "The New Left". For the eight hour flight he was reading this book. That must be a really good book, I thought. Years later I saw him on the news. His name was Michael Ignatieff and he was running for prime minister of Canada. Sure enough he had been teaching at Oxford in 1980.

The highlight of the rock music era wasn't Woodstock. It was Live Aid in 1985. There was an apocalyptic famine in Ethiopia and two great concerts, in London and Philadelphia, were held to raise money to help.

I was watching the takeoff of the space shuttle Challenger live in 1986. There was one line of exhaust. Then suddenly there were two lines of exhaust. The space shuttle had come apart and the seven astronauts killed.

The first popular mobile phones appeared in the 1980s. They were like bricks.

The economic crash of 2008 is often related to the great crash of 1929. But there is one in between, in 1987, that tends to get forgotten.

Likely the most important thing that humans have ever done in space is the Hubble Space Telescope. It's achievements have far exceeded expectations. But the main mirror had been done incorrectly and it took a space mission to correct it.

Don't forget the former Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien. He led Canada to the world's highest rating in the Human Development Index for about eight years in a row.

On 9-11 I was watching live news of the fire high in the North Tower of the World Trade Center, just after 9 A.M. The announcers were saying that a plane had struck the tower. It sounded like the crash was presumed to be an accident. But then suddenly the other plane flew into the South Tower.

On April 27, 2013 I was outside. It was a warm clear night. I have always been interested in space and habitually look at the sky. I saw an orange light moving slowly in the sky. It turned out to be a satellite, called Graham, burning up in the atmosphere. It was definitely glowing orange, although there couldn't possibly be enough oxygen at orbital altitude to sustain a flame.

In June of 2015 the world followed the escape of two prisoners in New York State, one was eventually killed and the other shot and captured. After escaping through a steam pipe that emerged on a street they carried supplies in a guitar case. What happened to that guitar case? I have not read that it has ever been found. The case would be a significant artifact if it could be found.