Tennis seemed popular among adults at the time, much more than seems the case today. Today we have thriving school-sponsored tennis programs. That's great but it might be nice to see a bump upward in unstructured tennis among older people who really could uses the exercise.
I'm not exactly setting the best example myself. Today the example I'm following is more like Bryant McKinnie, the just-released Minnesota Viking. He's big but doesn't that make him hard to run around if you're a defensive lineman?
Apparently the new Vikings coaching regime felt Mr. McKinnie needed to be more of an athlete. He could have used some rigorous sets of tennis on those lighted courts in Benson. This was in the early 1980s.
I remember they also had a lit basketball court where the light switch could be flipped by users - an honor system. I remember thinking this whole facility for tennis/hoops enthusiasts put forth a great example.
I played tennis there with a high school classmate. The classmate (initials A.C.) was an electronic media worker who started out in Benson and moved on (upward) to Willmar.
Benson is smack-dab in between Morris and Willmar. So Benson continued as an appropriate meeting point.
I'm sure we drank pop at the VFW even though the fear of God had not yet set in regarding DWIs. I'm not sure if it was a case of penalties not yet being real severe or of law enforcement not being real vigilant in enforcement.
Whatever, I think I was at an age where the novelty of alcohol consumption, at least for me, had worn off. So we probably sipped on Coca-Cola and listened to the kind of "juke box" music that gave the essential backdrop to these charming gathering places.
Of course we noticed those rows of framed photos of "past commanders" and "past auxiliary presidents" that provide terrific Americana at these purely American institutions.
Such people represented the heart and soul of these communities.
My tennis partner and I noticed some blank frames along the rows.
"Those are the ones who voted for McGovern," my friend chortled.
That was quite the quip. It also said a lot about the public mood of the time. It assigned George McGovern a place on the fringe for no good reason.
McGovern was the Barack Obama of his time without the baggage of being outside the Caucasian mainstream. Another difference is that he didn't get elected, at least not as president.
He was caricatured to a large extent. This is always a peril for Democrats who must defend government intervention as a way of assuring continuity and a safety net in our lives.
Richard Nixon sold himself as a conservative but was far more a centrist or pragmatist. Nixon had also deteriorated badly as a human being.
Gerald Ford would later say Nixon was a "sick man" at the end of his presidency.
Republicans really had no choice but to say this. Nixon's paranoia couldn't be defended on any political grounds.
And McGovern? He became a tragic hero in the eyes of a huge portion of the boomer generation.
He was the skeptic about our war-making. He connected with the less-well-off and wanted to be an advocate for them. This was a time when boomers were idealistic. Later they would become "yuppies" and finally worship at the altar of money as bad as any previous generation.
But in the '80s we still saw ourselves as different and as especially blessed with an altruistic disposition.
I was in Salzburg, Austria, when I saw the Time Magazine cover that had McGovern and Thomas Eagleton together. It was a star-crossed campaign. The two were coming out of the kind of tumultuous Democratic convention that marked those times.
National conventions in fact had much greater importance than they do today. The Democrats had a terrible time getting their act together in 1968 and '72.
McGovern gave his acceptance speech at an ungodly hour in '72. His choice of Eagleton as runningmate became doomed when it was learned Eagleton had a background of mental health treatment. Those were much less enlightened times when it came to such things.
Nixon put together a criminal enterprise to crush the Democrats. Odd, because Nixon was the overwhelming favorite vs. the "dove-ish" McGovern anyway.
Nixon drew people into his organization who should have known better. Most of them would have known better had they not been drawn into the human trap of deferring to authority figures.
Ford proclaimed Nixon "sick" but apparently Nixon wasn't too sick to write several books post-presidency.
Nixon did the David Frost interviews but at that point, who really cared anymore? Nixon was just part of a bad dream that us boomers had awakened from. Nixon seemed embittered.
No so McGovern. He came from the Dakotas which are hardly a hotbed of left wing thought.
McGovern entered the national picture when the U.S. was going through very turbulent times. The clash of generations was painful and unfortunate.
The boomers weren't just different, they were oh so plentiful.
"We didn't know what to do with all of them," was a quote I remember reading from an older person about the kids of the '70s.
At my church in Morris, the kids were arranged in rows for our confirmation photo. Today that church only has three or four confirmands in many years.
We rejected war and racial prejudice and felt government had more altruistic aims than to try to apply the hammer to Communism.
Somehow McGovern got enmeshed in our values and there was a schism where our elders shunned him. Thus my friend's quip "Those are the ones who voted for McGovern."
It seems tremendously silly now, how political figures were so caricatured as to reflect the culture clashes of the time. Someday when McGovern passes on to the next world - his next convention stage - I think we'll see a spasm of affection and nostalgia among people my age. It will take us back to a time when we did things we would never confess to our own children.
Those were peccadilloes, many of which became an odd sort of badge. We'll try to overlook those while embracing memories of crusading against war and for justice - yes, even "social justice" of the kind that the Glenn Becks of the world decry as being "socialism."
And look out, world, as we age further and become more conscious of the need for a social safety net, we'll be a force that you cannot stop. No one has ever been able to stop the boomers.
We've been lying in the weeds for a few years but you'll hear from us again. We are fickle and revisionist.
So when we start needing help, we'll be sure and get it. We'll revert back to the McGovern-ish style of thinking.
Yuppies? What's that? We'll re-kindle the values that went contrary to materialism.
We'll remember when McGovern was a beacon for the better way.
You see, time doesn't really draw a misty curtain.
- Brian Williams - morris mn Minnesota - bwilly73@yahoo.com
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