All About MeAnd you may ask yourself Every time I hear this David Byrne song, Once in a Lifetime, I can’t help but reflect on my life. It always leads to a look back and attempt to figure out how I got here. Was the water just holding me down, or -- too mix water metaphors -- did I manage to navigate my ship to the various ports I’ve visited over my life? I’m not too keen on the age-old religious argument about pre-destination. I’m more interested in Francis Galton’s controversy of nature versus nurture (Fulkerson). Long as I can remember I’ve marched to the beat of a different drummer. Sometimes it’s a Ron Bushy (Iron Butterfly) solo on In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida (Iron Butterfly), other times it is Tito Puente’s Oye Como Va on the timbales (Tito Puente). Both choices are wonderful songs, but have you ever tried marching to either? I’m from a large family, including four sisters and two brothers. They are all reasonably normal, went to college following high school, successful in their chosen careers, happily married, starting families after they were financially stable. I’ve jumped around on a number of careers, had my first child while still in high school, was a single father while barely an adult, and have chosen to go to college after working for 27 years. I always thought my desire to be unique was something I’d grow out of, but here I am 44 years old, and despite a small taste of financial success, still the black sheep in the family. Why? My siblings and I were all given similar upbringings. We are each close to one year apart, so we are all of the same generation. The seven of us had as close to the same outside influences as possible. In the age old debate of nature versus nurture, these facts would lead to the nature side of the controversy.
I was born in 1958; the third of what would eventually be seven children.
The year was toward the end of the post-World War II baby boom
(Figure 1), and also toward the end of
the seemingly idyllic Eisenhower Era. My father was an accountant at
the time and my mother was a housewife. We lived in California,
originally in Pacifica, a Northern California beach community,
but moved south to Richard Nixon’s
hometown of Whittier. I have fuzzy memories of Whittier, but my
earliest clear memories of my childhood are all based in San Jose,
where we moved when I was five, and my father became a computer
programmer.
Many of my early memories were political. My parents tell me I could recite the Presidents of the United States in chronological order before I could recite my alphabet. They bought me a set of small presidential statues from a grocery store. I got them one statue at a time, for only 79 cents each with the purchase of groceries. I loved my little statues and wanted to find out as much as I could about each one of them. This led to my interest in things political, specifically the Presidents of the United States. One of my earliest memories was the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald. I have no memory of John Kennedy being shot, but Oswald’s shooting is very clear because I saw it on TV. Despite being only six years old, I remember the Presidential campaign of 1964, and remember arguing with friends that Barry Goldwater would bring us closer to nuclear winter. Scotty Reston, of the New York Times wrote, "Johnson’s supporters were not so much excited about Johnson as they are afraid of Goldwater" (489, Perlstein). It wasn’t hard to imagine Goldwater blowing up the world after the commercial run by the Democrats: Open with a little girl in the middle of a field:
The year 1968 was a watershed year in my life. Up until that time I wasn’t too different from my peers and siblings. I was much more interested in politics than the typical 10 year old, but in that era even that wasn’t too far out of the ordinary. My behavior was to change 180 degrees as the 60s came to a close. The year 1968 didn’t just affect my life; it affected the United States in ways that can only be judged in hindsight: The Tet Offensive and MyLai Massacre in Vietnam (though thanks to government cover-ups we wouldn’t find out what happened in MyLai until 1969); Lyndon Johnson’s decision not to run for re-election; the Soviet’s invasion of Czechoslovakia; the emergence of the Silent Majority during the 1968 presidential race; riots in Chicago, Baltimore, Washington D.C., Berkeley and numerous college campuses; the passing of artists such as John Steinbeck, Upton Sinclair, Marcel Duchamp, and Helen Keller; and most of all, the brutal assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, all had a lasting affect on both the U.S. and a 10-year-old boy growing up in San Jose. I grew up in a lily-white area of San Jose. We were aware of Hispanics, they lived over on the east side of town. We were also aware of Negro’s. I hero-worshipped Willie Mays from afar. My Mom talks about when I saw an African-American in a grocery store, I shouted out "There’s Willie Mays." Despite this white upbringing, my parents instilled a concern for the rights of those less fortunate. I marched in San Jose for César Chávez, and still avoid shopping at Safeway (Safeway refused to stop stocking grapes boycotted by the United Farm Workers.) I followed the Civil Rights movement, and specifically the activities of Dr. King (we did share a surname) with enthusiastic interest. It was Dr. King who made me search the library for books on Mahatma Gandhi. I was passionate against the war in Vietnam and just as passionate for Eugene McCarthy, and later Robert Kennedy. My first memory of Vietnam was during the Tet Offensive. As a ten year old, I couldn’t see any reason for us to be fighting this far-away war. After some more visits to the library I was even more convinced. My visits did give me a new hero to worship in the person of Ho Chi Minh, convincing me that we were fighting on the wrong side of the war. The concept of the domino theory and stopping Soviet aggression made no sense to me. Originally, I was "Clean with Gene," though at the time there was no need for me to cut my flat top shorter or shave. I remember celebrating with fifth grade classmates I had convinced about McCarthy when he won the New Hampshire primary. When Lyndon Johnson withdrew from the race, we again celebrated, believing the war would be over soon. It was a short celebration. Five days after LBJ’s withdraw from the race, word came that Dr. King had been shot. It was unbelievable. How could this holy man’s life be over? I supported the Black Civil Rights in an abstract way; it was an issue I supported without involvement. The South seemed so far away and where I lived I saw very little of the prejudices toward Blacks that existed in other parts of the country. His murder upset me but didn’t seem to affect my life. Then they killed Bobby. I stayed up as late as I could on that Tuesday night of the California primary, only falling asleep after being convinced Bobby would win the primary. I knew how important our state was after his loss in Oregon. He wasn’t going to win the nomination here, but without California he stood no chance. I still remember waking up the next morning, right away asking my Dad if Bobby won. When he told me he had been shot I couldn’t believe it. It had to be a mistake. I maintained hope when I heard he was still alive. I got in a fight at school that day with some older kid who celebrated Bobby’s assassination. My prayers went unanswered, and Bobby died, and politics (and praying) would never be the same for me. The 60s died later that summer on the streets of Chicago during the Democratic Convention. Richard Goodwin, a friend and speechwriter for both John and Bobby Kennedy, wrote: "As the convention, subordinate to Johnson’s will, proceeded to its ritualistic endorsement of the past, thousands of young people arrived in Chicago to protest the war, the nomination of Humphrey, the Democratic party’s symbolic repudiation of what they had mistakenly thought to be the inevitably triumphant spirit of the sixties" (7, Goodwin). Fast forwarding another decade to 1978, and not only is it a different America it is also a drastically different Dan King. While the country survived withdrawal from Vietnam; the fall of Saigon; Watergate; Richard Nixon’s leaving the White House; Gerald Ford; Jimmy Carter; and even disco (Chronicle), I survived wild years starting shortly after 1968. Watergate was a big deal in the King house. After what had happened in 1968, I was politically jaded by the time of Watergate. Nothing politicians could do would have surprised me. But for my Mom, it was a big deal, shocking her to learn that the President of the United States could so easily lie to us. She followed the Watergate hearings daily and we would often discuss that day’s hearing after school. When you look at the what, when, who, where, and why of the Jimmy Carter Presidency from 1977 to 1981, the most interesting question is why? We haven’t had that much of an unknown elected president in our recent history. How did a little-known Georgia governor become President of the United States? Even discounting his lack of national exposure, Carter was the first southerner elected President since Zachary Taylor in 1848. "’The idea of Jimmy Carter running for President was absurd on its face,’ said political reporter Jules Witcover. ‘A seemingly ludicrous proposition that the country should put itself into the hand of a peanut-farming one-term governor of a Deep South state.’ When Carter told his family that he intended to run for president, his mother reportedly asked, ‘President of what?’ Atlanta businessman Marvin Shoob recalls that he came to a 1974 luncheon to discuss Governor Carter’s intention to run for president, Shoob assumed Carter was aiming for the presidency of the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce" (486, Hayward). But Carter managed to position himself between the Democrat front runners George Wallace on the right and Ted Kennedy on the left. He also took advantage of the Watergate scandal, playing up his conservatism and outsider status at a time when the people where not likely to vote Republican. Americans were tired of the liberal ideas of the 60’s but not about to put the White House back in the hands of Nixon’s party. Carter managed to take advantage of the general skepticism of the country. The national cynicism that elected Carter president matched my own personal cynicism. My changes weren’t terribly different than the changes that took place between the Flower Child 60s and the Me-decade 70s; between LBJ and Carter. I went through my wild years, partaking of sex, drugs and rock n' roll. I lost complete interest in school, getting by in high school on D’s, knowing if I strung enough of them together they'd give me a diploma. I even had a plan: I would finish high school and be a carpenter. I managed to accelerate the process, convincing a girl I barely knew that being parents in high school would be cool. She was also anxious to get out of her house and went along with my idea. She got pregnant the summer before our senior year and we were married that November. Anthony Louis came in March of 1976, the year I graduated from high school (Tony made it to both his parents' high school graduation ceremonies.) By 1978, I left restaurant management -- the carpenter career wasn’t going to work out when I learned they generally starved in the winter -- to work in the mail room of a computer firm where my Dad worked, and our second child, Regina Elizabeth had arrived that March. My interest in politics had waned, though I still did my share of non-fiction reading. I went from believing in the economic theories of Karl Marx for Adam Smith; John Maynard Keynes for Milton Friedman. My heroes went from the Kennedy brothers, King, Mays and Chávez to Jimi Hendrix, Che Guevera, Huey Newton, and Joe "Willie" Namath. While Libertarianism would come later, following years of working for the government, I was definitely in my cynical stage, not trusting politics or politicians. Did the changes of 1968 affect my life as much as I like to think, or did they just speed my rebellious nature along? When I was going through my more damaging years, my parents tried numerous things to get me to "snap out of it." Nothing worked, but while I was in trouble I was aware of their efforts. When time came to "grow-up" I knew they hadn’t given up and they were still there for me. Other friends’ parents had given up on them and many of them never did recover. I still march to my own drummer. I went from that job in the mail room at a computer company to a computer operator, and eventually a computer engineer. I spent many years working at NASA as a computer scientist (always felt funny with that title -- NASA rocket scientist) and left there to take a huge pay cut and help start an internet company. I was a single father of two children, who I tried to raise to be open minded and loving. I sometimes shave my head and other times grow my hair to 60’s lengths. I currently live in a retirement home, where most everyone is a generation older than me, and from there I drive to EVC, where most are at least a generation younger than myself. My Dad died suddenly two years ago. It was an unexpected blow to my siblings and me, but mostly it was a blow to my Mom. At the funeral my older brother mentioned that we all wanted to grow up to be like our Dad. It was my turn, following my brother; even then contrarious, I said, "The last thing I wanted to be growing up was my Dad. But I now notice myself more like my Dad than I ever expected. How did that happen?" I asked my siblings and in-laws for their views on my non-conformity. The prevailing wisdom seems to be that closely following my older brother led to my rebellion. My brother, less than a year older than myself, was always a good student, class president, soccer star, and became "born again" while we were still in high school. I disagree with that theory, never having been competitive by nature, and not recalling much competition between myself and my brother. My sister-in-law related the story when she first met the family at a New Year’s Eve party in 1983. My younger brother had told her all about the King Clan, "It didn’t seem possible there could be so many class presidents, star athletes, fine students in one family; but that’s what I’d been led to expect. I was terrified." When she arrived at the airport from Southern California, there I was in a mismatched tuxedo, Hawaiian shirt, carrying an open bottle of champagne. "You never know how much I appreciated you at that moment. All I could think was, ‘Thank God, at least one of them is normal. Maybe they aren’t quite as intimidating as I’d imagined!’" I like that. I never thought of myself as normal. To me my siblings were the normal ones and I was the non-conformist. I still think of myself as off-center, but I like that at least for a short time I was seen by someone as the normal one and my siblings as the ones that were abnormal. How different would my life be had Bobby Kennedy not been assassinated? Would I have remained interested in political action? In hindsight I think I would have eventually lost interest in politics. My opinion is that politics require a certain amount of ignorance of its followers. Much like sausage, to enjoy it you really don’t want to see it made. I’ve always been a reader, and enjoy reading positions that are the contrary of my own. I think eventually my cynicism of politics would have happened. But I also believe I might have avoiding my early rebellious years. Rather than recreational drugs and free sex, perhaps it would have been a different sort of rebellion. Without those years, I might not have been in the hurry to grow up and move out. That could mean there would have been no Tony and Gina King. Much of my non-conformity as an adult has grown out of my being a single, young father. What will the future hold for me? The past has demonstrated how poor a job I do at fortune telling my own life. I’ve never had a clue about "where does this highway go?" But I have discovered I really enjoy being a student. The original idea was to go back to school, get a degree and get on with another stage of my life. But so far I’ve found that the life of an older student fits my non-conformist nature just fine. Following a degree, it could be on to graduate school and then who knows from there. Perhaps I can milk this student gig right up until it’s time to start receiving Social Security benefits. Looking back on my attitude to school when I was younger, it is hard to imagine I would become a student at this stage in my life. But then there is very little of my life that has followed a set path. Nature vs. nurture? Who knows? Anecdotal evidence is never going to tell us the whole story anyway. I’d tend to believe something inside me made me a contrarian, but that outside events, especially events of 1968, influenced the nature and speed of my non-conformity. Works Cited
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Figure 1: The Congressional Institute
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