Richard Foye has enjoyed a long career as a creator of Raku pottery and is also a member of Rock River Artists, a fine arts and crafts collective in southern Vermont. Not all his memories are fond: "I haven't even mentioned my dentist's drill which was powered with his foot without Novocain: zhroom, zhroom, zhroom," he adds.
SOUTH NEWFANE-I have been thinking recently about the Good Old Days, back when America was Great.
I grew up during the 1950s, when almost everyone in my small town lived in a house with a mom and a dad. This was a small town just north of Boston with some Irish kids, some Polish kids, and a few Italians among us WASPs. We weren't wealthy, but we weren't really poor, either. My mother called us "lower middle class."
I had to wear my older brother's underwear and shirts and coats. But every September for school I got a new pair of dungarees. My mother would sew a double patch on the knees before I even wore them.
We went to school in an old brick building from the early 20th century. About 14 of us were in kindergarten with Mrs. Warren and Mrs. Toby. We knew who had money and who didn't just by their clothes and how they smelled.
I don't know how I smelled; every Sunday night before bed, I had a bath that I had to share with my brother. He always peed in the water when my mother was not looking. He continued even after we started to bathe separately; he had his bath first in the same tub of water.
On the school bus every morning, I was teased until we stopped to pick up the Bishop kids. They lived above their gas station-market off Route 97 in a very small apartment. There were several of them, and even we kindergarteners could tell they were poor. They kept to themselves. I was relieved when they got on the bus, as the attention was off me.
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To avoid the bus in the afternoon, I would often walk the 3 miles home after school. Some friends and I would get on our bicycles on weekends to go explore the open dump next to a stream where everything eventually slid down into the water. We would throw rocks at bottles in the air pretending to be Hopalong Cassidy with his six-gun.
Sometimes we would go next door to the poor farm to look at the old people who lived there in a broken-down farmhouse. They had a garden where they cultivated their own food and lived on state assistance, and the kindness of the churches. There was no Medicare or Medicaid and barely any Social Security money for them.
If they needed the doctor the local doctor from town would come out to check on them. If they had to go to the hospital they usually never came back. There really weren't any nursing homes. My grandmother came to live with us for five years under my mother's care until she died in her sleep one night at age 87.
Many of my friends' fathers had served in World War II in Europe or the Pacific. They had newly built houses that were paid for through the GI Bill, available to all veterans of that war and the Korean war. Several of them had been Navy pilots and had jobs with Pan Am or American Airlines at nearby Logan Airport.
Almost all of us kids had after-school jobs and summertime jobs from the age of 8 up.
My father knew some wealthy people who needed yard work and someone to groom their horses and muck the stalls. So I got these jobs many summers. Even though I was only 12 or 13, they always complained to me about their taxes. Only much later did I learn that they were still paying as much as 90% on some of their income.
Only the seriously wealthy had stock market portfolios. They were leery because they remembered 1929 all too well. It wasn't until the Kennedy administration in the early '60s that the top tax bracket was reduced to 60%.
Eisenhower used all that money to build the interstate highways and fund the GI Bill, in addition to building all those nuclear weapons. We had Nike missiles right on the edge of town to shoot Russian bombers if they ever showed up. They didn't.
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One of my kindergarten classmates, Tommy Repco, had contracted polio. He had braces on both legs and needed crutches. We saved our nickels and dimes to help pay for an operation on his leg to lengthen it. He still wore braces afterward.
Polio was rampant in the '40s and early '50s. We were among the first group of kids to receive the new Salk vaccine. We never hesitated to receive the needle in the arm because we all could see what would happen if we came down with polio. I have no idea who paid for it, but every kid got one.
Medicare for the elderly and Medicaid for the poor did not arrive until Lyndon Johnson was president. People just got sick and died before then if they could not afford hospital care.
I remember one neighbor, Charley Veinot, who at 41 had a heart attack. He was in the hospital for two days, couldn't pay, and was sent home on the third day. He died a year later.
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After high school, I was able to go to the University of Vermont on student loans from the Defense Department. I was the first person in the family to go to college, and it took me 20 years to finally pay off those loans.
I am eternally grateful to the Department of Defense for providing me with the ability to do this, as otherwise I would have gone to some horrible job in a factory or still been cleaning out stables for wealthy people who are still complaining about the 8% income tax they now have to pay since Reagan and others have lowered it to practically nothing.
I thank the Eisenhower administration for realizing that helping everyone live on a fairly level playing field makes people more satisfied; I thank Lyndon Johnson for making it possible for the elderly and the poor to get health care coverage. They did plenty I don't approve of, but at least they read books and had empathy for those who didn't have as much.
This is what made America great then, for some of us.
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The other thing that made America great was that Japan and Germany were both devastated by the war, along with England and most of the rest of Europe. No battles were fought on American soil after Pearl Harbor.
China was still very poor and recovering from being occupied by Japan. Korea also had been under the Japanese thumb and was recovering from its own civil war in the early '50s. Russia was in bad shape from their part in the war, our efforts to stymie their progress, and the burden of Stalin's repression.
Only the good ol' USA was in the catbird seat. All the world wanted our autos, our refrigerators, our TVs, our movies, and the new rock 'n' roll music that was conquering youth worldwide.
This once-in-a-century phenomenon will not happen again, as much as people would like it to. Nostalgia for a world that lives in some fond memories and myths will not bring back those times.
This Voices Memoir was submitted to The Commons.
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