Seen and Not Heard
I sat on my dad’s shoulders and looked over his head at the crowd. It was October, 1962 and I was three years old. My dad wore what he called a car coat, a mid-length tan coat with a dark brown corduroy collar. I fiddled with my mittens and the string they were attached to that was woven through the sleeves of my coat. As I looked over the crowd I felt how the excitement vibrated. I don’t think it was necessarily my excitement. But I am sure it was my dad’s.
We were there to see President John F. Kennedy. It seems we were at Standiford Field Airport, now known as Louisville Muhammad Ali International. But I have so many childhood memories at the window of that airport that I can’t be certain. I don’t remember actually seeing the President. I do remember, however, the feel of my dad’s coat and how I loved being on his shoulders.
JFK was assasinated a little over a year later. Maybe that is why our outing was rarely mentioned in the following years.
It is curious to me that most of my childhood political memories came from the men in my life. Though my mother voiced her political ideas, the ones that landed and stuck with me through the years were from the men.
Dinner at my paternal grandparent’s house was always full of loud bantering. The topic was either sports, particularly basketball, or politics. Even my dad, generally a quiet man who often appeared deep in thought, would raise his voice and occasionally pound his fist on the table during those discussions.
We were a union family and sometimes I felt the hint of fear and danger particularly if someone was on the picket line. The conversation might weave its way to the story of how my grandfather was fired from his job as a Yellow Cab Taxi driver because he attempted to start a union during the Great Depression.
I crawled up on my dad’s lap when he and my uncles began to relive the nights of their childhood when angry or distraught men came to the door of their home, sometimes in the wee hours of the night, to talk to my grandfather, a then union steward of Ford Motor Company. The passion in the room grabbed my undivided attention. I was enamored with the raucous conversations and listened as if it were the first time I heard any of the stories. All the while, my grandmother—always in her hand sewn apron— and aunts cleared the table and served the dessert and coffee. Usually cherry or apple pie, and occasionally spice cake and cookies for my cousins and me.
Only later as a teen, on a visit to Minnesota to visit my dad’s older sister, did I understand “girls were to be seen and not heard.” My aunt later told me that unspoken rule was one of the reasons she moved to Minnesota and avoided traveling back to Kentucky very often. She refused to expose her daughters to those “no talk” dinners. I had failed to pick up on that rule. Or maybe, that’s why only the experiences with the men stuck with me.
My now grown daughters occasionally recall their own childhood political experiences. They grumble as they recall how my husband made them stand in line for several hours to see the then prospective presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton. They recall how he pushed his way through the crowd with them in tow so they could get her autograph. The youngest, now 21, remembers the hug Clinton gave her.
They followed that with adventure to see presidential candidate, Barack Obama.
However, the memory that is most vivid to them was when Obama won the 2008 election and my husband set off fireworks in the street in front of our house. When we reminisce about that time, my oldest daughter always says, “I will never forget that night because we all wondered where he had stashed the fireworks since we had never set off any before. Not even on 4th of July.”
Memory is a tricky thing. I wonder if the flashy experiences of crowds, politician’s hugs and fireworks are really the ones that landed on them and stuck.
I taught the mechanics of voting to my daughters. Still in strollers, I took them with me to the polls and as they got older I explained how to fill in the ballot, how to slide it into the machine, and the importance of using their voices. I instilled my belief that women are to be seen and heard.
