Stories of a life Ron Scollon first draft March 2008
first draft March 2008
This is a starting draft of a set of stories of events and people in my life. I don’t know how long the whole set will be any more than I know how long my life will be. There is no particular order. I’ve written them as they’ve occurred to me. Maybe in a later draft I will move things around. As it is I keep revising bits and pieces of these as I think of things in reading them over. I doubt if I’ll ever discover a plot.
1939
In the year I was born Germany invaded Poland and occupied Bohemia and Moravia. Japan extended its occupation of Chinese territory taking over Hainan Island. Both Britain and France declared war on Germany.
Is it a surprise that in my first year the US declared itself neutral? The US economy was booming again from arms and war materials orders after a long depression. Nylon stockings first appeared, the first baseball game was televised, and Armstrong invented the FM radio. Americans’ favorite popular songs were Over the Rainbow, Beer Barrel Polka, and, in this insulated North American world finally made prosperous again, God Bless America. Is the US civil war movie Gone with the Wind more characteristic for such a country or The Wizard of Oz? Both of them were released that year.
That year Grandma Moses became famous while Yeats, Sapir, and Freud died. Hitler’s Mein Kampf appeared in complete English translation as did Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, Dewey’s Freedom and Culture and Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath.
While I didn’t fly until twenty years later, scheduled commercial flying was quickly becoming a success. BOAC was established and Pan-American Airways began commercial flights between US and Europe.
More ominously, in the year I was born Sikorsky made the first helicopter, Muller synthesized DDT, polyethylene which would soon begin to bury the world in packaging materials was invented and Curie demonstrated the possibility of splitting the atom.
In such a volitile world my birth on May 13, 1939 was a distinctly minor event.
So that you don’t have to look it up, that makes me a Taurus in the Western horoscope and a Rabbit in the Asian one. It is beyond me to know what it means to be that combination of signs born in May of 1939, but if you would rather know abstractly and theoretically what I am there are hundreds of books or willing interpreters to tell you.
These stories and musings are a more direct approach. Hovering now near 70 I still don’t know what to make of myself or even what I have made of myself. I’m writing these things to try to pin down some of the threads of the tapestry I tend to call my life