A privileged baby boomer baby
Excerpt from the yet to be published Memoirs of Bill Calkins
I always remember the opening line in the old Steve Martin movie, The Jerk (1979), where Steve says, “I was born a poor Black child.” In case you don’t know Steve, he is not black. So, in addition to how cliche that opening line was, it was laugh out loud funny at the time because of how untrue it was. Also, it was 1979, I was 17, and everything Steve Martin did was hysterical. But this isn’t about Steve Martin. It’s about me.
I was born a privileged white child on December 23, 1962, in a prominent white family in the tiny, mostly white town of Kimball Nebraska. We were prominent because my father was one of two town physicians. Dad did everything from sewing stitches, delivering babies, treating severe injuries like when someone’s foot was mangled by a lawn mower, and whatever kind of surgery townspeople required.
Dad was on call day and night for absolutely anything that could happen. Not infrequently, a Kimball County sheriff’s deputy would knock on the door in the middle of the night and take him to a car crash on nearby Interstate 80 because the coroner required an MD to certify a victim’s (or victims’) death.
One time, he was somehow wrangled into treating someone’s pet bird. It was either a parrot or a parakeet, I don’t remember. He had no idea how to treat a sick bird, but along with a sympathetic coworker, he tried anyway, to the point of administering anesthesia. He never directly answered when we asked if the bird survived.
Because my dad was the town doctor, everyone knew him, and by extension, our family. I think a lot of things were overlooked at school and elsewhere because as doctor’s children, we were assumed to be bright and quite special. My kindergarten teacher, for example, often pointed out to the rest of the class with haughty righteousness, that Bill’s father was a doctor. I couldn’t imagine how that ever had anything to do with anything.
As a prominent family in a small town, we were more visible, and more wealthy, than most of Kimball’s other residents. And as such, a certain, unspoken requirement was that we look the part.
We always went to church at First Presbyterian, we had to behave perfectly in public (and as a matter of fact, in private too), and our best car (we had two) was a large, green, deluxe 1967 Buick Electra.
Unlike most cars at the time, it had cruise control and a power antenna for the AM radio. I loved moving the switch that made the antenna rise out of the back of the car and recess as if there were no antenna at all. It had a back window defroster and air conditioning. It truly rode like a dream so that most bumpy spots on the road were unknown to the passengers. It had armrests in the middle of both the front and back that you could pull out of the seat itself and fold back in as if they were never there. It was, I believe, our first family car with enough seatbelts for all six of us.
That’s right. All six of us could fit in that car. Like many 1960s American cars, the Buick was huge. Families of six in the 21st century require Range Rovers with removable back seats and USB ports for the children, if their individual screens aren’t adequately charged. We didn’t, of course, realize that we were riding in style, so we spent long trips fighting over which station to play on the AM radio.
Not realizing that we were already as ostentatious as we dared be, I thought our car should also have “electric windows” that went up and down at the touch of a button instead of the common type where you had to manually grab a handle and roll the window up or down.
I must have seen electric windows in a Cadillac on TV or something. My mother made it very clear that we couldn’t have electric windows because she knew of other children who stuck their heads out and strangled as the window went up without stopping.
I don’t personally remember the social conflict that so affected the rest of the world. In Kimball, I never saw race riots. To me, Viet Nam was just a thing that Walter Cronkite talked about every single night of my life. I didn’t know much beyond a few snippets that accidentally passed through my well controlled, carefully constructed childhood world. I vaguely remember asking my older sister Sue why was crying. She explained the bare minimum, but was too upset to discuss the assassination of Robert Kennedy with me. I had no idea who Robert Kennedy was. No one else ever mentioned it at all.
But my parents were as aware as any white people in Kimball who watched Walter Cronkite or occasionally read Life Magazine could possibly be. They wanted us to grow up to not be racist like those ignorant white Alabamans and their idiot of a governor (George Wallace). In fact, I was later told, my mother was terrified that on one of our visits to Denver, one of her small children would point and loudly announce, “Look Mom! There’s a black person!”
We were very deliberately told on multiple occasions that, “Black people are just like white people, only their skin is a different color.” Period. I doubt if my parents gave much thought to what we later called structural racism, or how the slavery that supposedly ended 100 years before continued through jim crow laws and segregation.
But the strict admonition that Black people were no different from ourselves was a pretty good basic concept to start out with. It laid the groundwork for a lifetime of discerning the unfair treatment of all kinds of “different” people. It was never much of a jump for me from the concept of racism to the other evils of sexism, ageism, ableism, or homophobia.
I didn’t know any Black people when I was six years old, but I did know that when a baby sitter once said she didn’t like to go to Omaha because of all the “n*rs” there, that she had said a very bad and hurtful thing that I would never, ever say.
When I was seven, my family uprooted away from tiny Kimball to the big, scary city of Omaha. But that’s a story for another time.
