Author Archives: Mark M. Meinero

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5 – T AND R ARE THE FIRST TWO LETTERS

My parents, especially my Mom, were big fans of the political dramas of the 1950s and ’60s.

“Advise & Consent,” “Seven Days in May,” “Fail Safe,” “The Manchurian Candidate” and “The Best Man” were all movies they either watched at the movies or when they came on TV.

But in this era of malevolent reality TV (unlike “Queen for a Day” and “This Is Your Life” in the ’50s), the show that unfolded on January 6, 2021 was a political drama that frightened the hell out of half the country.

A mob came to the United States Capitol to thwart the will of the American people, who had voted two months earlier to elect Joe Biden as President of the United States. It came perilously close to capturing some of its targets, including Vice President Mike Pence and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, both of whom would likely have been murdered had the thugs gotten their hands on them.

Five people died within two days of the attack, from causes ranging from a gunshot to a stress-induced heart attack. Four police officers, who were overwhelmed by the crowd, committed suicide shortly after.

The images of the attack were stunning: the mob smashing through the windows and doors, beating police officers with clubs, occupying the Senate chamber and destroying property.

But what would have bewildered anyone in 1954 – anyone at any time in American history, perhaps even the Civil War – was that the violence and chaos, the attempted coup, was triggered by the sitting president.

Maybe that’s a little overstated. The idea that a losing incumbent president would seek a violent return to power might have been buried in our minds’ recesses. It’s what happens in countries where the political institutions respect power more than government, might over civility.

It’s just that we never thought it could happen here. We believed Americans were better than that – that our tradition of peaceful transfer, George Washington’s great gift, was still strong in its third century.

Instead, it was as fragile as the ego of a conman.

Donald Trump probably didn’t expect to win the presidency. He’s always been looking for a buck, especially since he’s not particularly good at managing or keeping them. He probably figured there was a way to make big real estate licensing deals or sell crappy branded products by running.

But he won. He appealed to the anger of people who feel elites are ruining the country – forgetting the fact that he’s always claimed to be among the elitest (that’s not a typo) of them all. 

Trump claimed to be a great businessman, despite filing for bankruptcy multiple times. He claimed to be unbigoted, despite a family history of racism. He claimed to be the voice of those who’ve served in the military, despite calling them “suckers” and “losers” in private.

Winning the presidency probably multiplied the self-aggrandizing in his head. And it led to a disastrous term in office. Losing the respect of our allies. Dividing the nation over immigration and race. Kowtowing to dictators like Putin and Kim Jong-Un. And his crowning achievement, mismanaging the worst pandemic in our lifetime.

Trump and his henchman seeded the crowd on January 6, organizing the rally that started the chaos and making sure that opposition to them was weakened. He told his followers that “…if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”

And then they marched to the Capitol with their obscene flagpoles, their knives, their bear spray, their Mace. They literally and figuratively defecated on American democracy.

Brave men and women stopped them. What we owe the defenders of the Capitol on Jan. 6 can never be paid in full. 

Brave men and women continue to try to stop them. They’re prosecuting the participants and their record is spectacular. They’re the people in news organizations countering the stupidity with the truth. They’re lawmakers and officials, some of them spurned by their fellow Republicans, seeking to show what really happened and do whatever they can to prevent it from happening again.

But treason isn’t so easily put out. It has been 159 years since the South lost the Civil War – and some people still believe the Confederate flag is still something to revere. Trump is running again – and there are polls showing the possibility that this disgrace of a human being could win.

My parents didn’t live to see January 6. But I’m maudlin enough to think they and our other ancestors watched over us that day. Hopefully, they’ll continue to keep us safe from treason – whose first two letters are not the only thing in common with Trump.

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6 – NOPE, NO GREEN CHEESE

Here’s a strange thing about one of the human race’s greatest achievement: Putting people on the moon almost seems as far-fetched in 2024 as it did in 1954.

It hasn’t happened in more than a half-century – the last U.S. Apollo mission ended in December 1972. So there are whole generations of people who have never known first hand what it’s like to see men – yes, they were all men – on the lunar surface.

But the idea of manned space flight – or space flight of any kind – wasn’t particularly widespread 70 years ago. The closest thing to it were the rockets launched by Germany against Britain in World War II – and the scientists who created those rockets were divided between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.

Three years after I was born, the Soviets launched the first man-made satellite, Sputnik. The U.S. had been working on space flight as well, but the urgency – in light of the Cold War between the two nations – grew with the launch.

The Soviets were also the first ones to put a human in space, Yuri Gagarin, in early 1961. About a month later, Alan Shepard’s sub-orbital flight – he went up and came down – put the U.S. in the space race.

After that, President John F. Kennedy spelled out the nation’s goal – putting an American on the moon by the end of 1969. 

It happened, after years of triumph and heartbreak. On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the lunar surface and, early the next day in UTC, walked on it.

There were more 500 million people watching them on live television. Seeing it was as much a marvel to us as the idea of being there. Everyone in my family stayed up late – the moon walk began at 10:56 p.m. ET on the 20th and lasted past midnight.  We watched something that was wondrous to my parents and amazing but expected to me, my brother and sister.

After the final Apollo mission, there was not nearly the motivation to either go back to the moon or to another planet, Mars or Venus. The focus went to building the International Space Station, a United States-Russia collaboration with assistance from several other nations. There have been missions to some pretty deep parts of outer space, but nobody’s been on them.

That’s likely to change in the next few years. The United States is planning a return to the moon in 2026. Japan and India are looking to send people to the moon in 2028. And, in 2029 or 2030, China – in consortium with other nations – plans a manned mission to the satellite. That’s not to mention the plans to go to other planets that have been bandied about.

Because it has been so long and the level of crazy in our world has hardly abated, there are those among us who think that the lunar missions were faked. 

Back when I was a kid, the moon was depicted as being made of green cheese. That’s obviously not true – you can see some rocks picked off the surface at the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum in Washington, among other places.

But it’s more likely that there’s green cheese on the moon than anyone elaborately faked what Armstrong called “one giant leap for mankind.” And given the lives lost in pursuit of this dream, blithely labeling the moon landings a hoax is incredibly disrespectful.

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7 – TALL BUILDINGS

In 1954, the Empire State Building was the tallest building in the world.

But by 1973, New York had two taller buildings: The twin towers of the World Trade Center.

They were kind of lackluster architecture. If they weren’t so tall, they wouldn’t have drawn much attention, looking like all the other straight, white or glass towers being built throughout the world.

It was their location that distinguished them. They stood slightly apart from the cluster of buildings in lower Manhattan, close to the Hudson River.

So when there was a picture that was supposed to say “New York” instantly, it was the picture of the towers against a backdrop of either New Jersey or the rest of Manhattan.

Unfortunately, those pictures of New York’s skyline inspired a Saudi madman who wasn’t even around in 1954.

Osama bin Laden, born three years after me, hated the United States for a number of reasons: its support of Israel, its perceived decadence that went counter to his warped conception of Islam, the fact that these evil Americans used Saudi Arabia as a base for countering Iraq dictator Saddam Hussein’s incursion into Kuwait.

bin Laden saw the pictures and saw a target. Through the planning of his henchman and 19 suckers who would carry out the act, four U.S. jetliners were sent careening toward prominent buildings. 

One hit the Pentagon, killing 184 people. One was taken down in a Pennsylvania field through the intervention of the plane’s passengers, some of the bravest people in American history.

And two hit the Trade Center, causing them to collapse to rubble and killing more than 2,700 people, all of whom were either just going about their business or were safety workers – policemen and firemen – trying heroically to save lives.

Like the Kennedy Assassination, we know where we were on September 11, 2001. We remember the horrible feeling about who were lost and the fact that some spoiled brat terrorist could find a weak spot – because how callous do you have to be to kill like that?

9/11 shook us all and changed this country. At first, the country came together to mourn and comfort our friends and family.

But the reaction to September 11 took a dark turn. We became security mad and turned airline travel into among the more unpleasant experiences. We didn’t trust anyone, and created a wave of anti-Islamic hatred that lingers.

President George W. Bush, at first an inspirational figure who promised to take down the people who took down the buildings, didn’t get bin Laden. But he did lead the U.S. to get rid of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, who had nothing to do with 9/11, leaving 4,500 American soldiers dead.

Even the most prominent hero of the day, New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, ended up with a tarnished legacy through his effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election on behalf of Donald Trump – who bragged on 9/11 that his building was now the tallest in lower Manhattan.

So yes, the attack was a shock, something unthinkable the day I was born. In fact, even after actually seeing it happen, we find it unthinkable that anyone could conceive of something so evil.

My Dad worked in the World Trade Center for a few years just after it opened. It was an awful location to commute to from Long Island, particularly after the collapse of a portion of the West Side Elevated Highway in 1973. His company, Firestone, moved the office after only a short time.

One of the things I found in my parents’ house after they died was the key to Dad’s office in the  WTC. It’s stamped “WORLD TRADE CENTER. DO NOT DUPLICATE.”

It’s now one of the most tangible pieces left of what were once the tallest buildings in the world.

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8 – THE AUDACITY OF HOPE

On the day I was born, the mother of the 44th President of the United States was a 12-year-old in El Dorado, Kansas.

Even Stanley Ann Dunham might have found the fact that she would be the mother of the nation’s first Black president bewildering. 

But she did. On Groundhog Day in 1961, she married Barack Obama Sr., a classmate at the University of Hawaii-Manoa and the first African student in the school’s history. That summer they had a son.

How did Barack Obama become president?

In 1954, a Black man wouldn’t have had a chance. The idea would have seemed impossible – even to Black people themselves, who weren’t able to use unsegregated public facilities in much of the country.

Black men and women had run before. But their candidacies were more about advocacy than actually getting the nomination. 

Shirley Chisholm was a congresswoman from Brooklyn seeking to make a statement about a new generation of Americans. Jesse Jackson won some primaries but couldn’t overcome the dominance of Walter Mondale in 1984 and Gary Hart in 1988. Al Sharpton ran a spirited campaign in 2004 in an effort to advance the policies he advocated.

It was in 2004 that America was introduced to Obama. He had graduated from Harvard Law and published the least likely book any future president ever wrote, “Dreams from My Father,” about his struggles as a boy in Hawaii and Indonesia. 

But his main gift was his ability to speak. If Barack Obama isn’t the greatest orator in American history (yeah, I know about Lincoln), he’s certainly the greatest in our lifetime. He’ll always hold a special place in my heart as the commencement speaker for my son’s graduation in 2016.

Obama’s speech at the 2004 Democratic convention in Boston propelled him. He was elected U.S. senator from Illinois and, four years later, he stunned presumptive nominee Hillary Clinton to win his party’s nomination.

There were other things going for him.

He was lucky. Obama came to the fore when the nation was going through the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression and after George W. Bush dragged the nation through an unnecessary military action in Iraq. 

Obama was relatively young. He was 47 when he ran and seemed a lot younger; not many men his age in public life are willing to be photographed bare-chested in the Hawaiian surf. He was in terrific physical condition and that vitality spread to his campaign. And he knew how to talk to young people in contrast to the awkwardness of most politicians.

He also understood how the world was changing. In particular, Obama and his campaign had a feel for the emerging world of social media – Facebook and Twitter were in their first years.

My Mom, after initial disappointment that Hillary Clinton wouldn’t become America’s first female president, came to love Obama. She watched him every time he showed up on MSNBC and had a huge campaign poster in her bedroom.

What seems wistful now is how optimistic people who supported him were in 2008. I downloaded a bunch of songs from iTunes extolling his virtues. Their theme is the joy that this man would unify the country and show that the nation was moving past the bigotry of the past.

But, instead, it almost seems as though the forces of backwardness dozed in 2008, perhaps numbed by the financial crisis, and woke up with a venegance the next year. The Tea Party. Denying that Obama was born in the United States. The phony fiscal concern. 

As amazing as it is that Barack Obama became president, it’s almost more shocking that his successor was someone so completely different and anathema to what Obama represented.

The path from the audacity of hope of 2008 to the fear of democracy’s end in 2024 is painful and urgent. Stanley Ann Dunham would hope we would choose the optimism she instilled in her son.

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9 – MEET THE METS

My parents, both baseball fans, knew when I was born that I would root for a team from New York.

I’m sure they expected it to be their team, the Yankees. The Yanks had just won the World Series for the fifth straight year. And given the Italian heritage of the team – Lazzeri, Crosetti, DiMaggio, Rizzuto and Berra – it seemed likely.

My Dad had grown up in Brooklyn and been to his share of Dodger games, especially during World War II when kids got in for bringing old tires or scrap metal to the gate. He had a soft spot for them – they were the team of Duke Snider, Carl Furillo and Jackie Robinson. And they were pretty good, having won the past two National League pennants.

Neither of my parents were fond of the Giants, who played in Manhattan across the Harlem River from the Yankees. But the Giants had inspired all of baseball in 1951 when Bobby Thomson’s famous home run capped a spectacular comeback. And they were getting their young phenom, Willie Mays, back from two years in the military.

So which of those three teams would the new gleam of their eye cheer for when he turned 70 years old in 2024?

Meet the Mets.

No, kids, the Mets did not exist in 1954 – although you could have confused them with the hapless Washington Senators of Douglas Wallop’s best-selling novel, “The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant,” which was in the process of becoming a Broadway musical.

New York baseball fans did not imagine that the Dodgers and Giants would leave. Maybe the Giants, although they won the World Series in 1954 with the help of Mays’ play known simply as “The Catch ” Brooklyn loved the Dodgers and Ebbets Field, the bandbox where they played, and that bond seemed unbreakable.

But Walter O’Malley – who bought the Dodgers in 1950 – wanted a new, modern stadium – and he wanted it in downtown Brooklyn, where the Barclays Center arena is today. The city, in the person of “Master Builder” Robert Moses, offered him a place in Flushing instead, thinking O’Malley was bluffing about moving the Dodgers to Los Angeles. 

Bad call, Bob. O’Malley took the team west – and convinced Giants owner Horace Stoneham to go to San Francisco.

From 1958 through 1961, New York had one team. The Yankees. But there were way too many National League fans for that to last too long. After a lot of threats to form a third league, New York was granted a franchise to begin playing in 1962.

There were a lot of things that made the Mets attractive to me. They were building a stadium very close to where we lived in Flushing. My Dad took me to the ground breaking for what would become Shea Stadium in 1961. 

And then, when Yogi Berra was fired as manager after the Yanks won the pennant but lost the World Series in 1964, that was it. My grandfather and I were Mets fans.

Being a Mets fan is a lot harder than being a Yankees fan. A lot. Mets fans have suffered through some of the worst baseball ever played. The team still holds the modern record for the worst season ever – 40 wins, 120 losses in 1962. There are a lot more losing seasons than winning ones. Yes, there’s the occasional miracle – see 1969 – but heartbreak is the default mode.

And we’re fatalistic to a flaw. 

One time, my Mom and I were watching a game entering the ninth inning with the Mets up 4-2. I said “Goodbye, Mom.” And she responded, “How can you leave? Don’t you want to see them win?”

I said. “No, I don’t want to see them lose.”

My mother was too used to rooting for a team with Mariano Rivera as its closer. “Oh, ye of little faith. Stay and watch them win.”

“OK,” I said. “I’ll stay to prove my point.”

Which the Mets did. Final score: San Francisco 5, Mets 4.

But it’s also a lot more fun to be a Mets fan. When we’re winning, we’re happy and loud, full of braggadocio for a team that more often doesn’t have much. Met fans brought clever banners to the ballpark and embraced quirky players from Marvelous Marv Throneberry to Daniel Vogelbach. They’re the team of Hayden “Sidd” Finch and Chico Escuela, who don’t really exist, but the Mets went along with the joke. 

It seems like work to be a Yankee fan – if the team doesn’t win the World Series, the whole year is an abysmal failure.

So let Los Angeles have the Dodgers. Let San Francisco have the Giants. Let the Bronx have its Bombers. They might have all been here in 1954, but two of them are gone now.

We have the Mets. LGM!

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10 – CHARLES F. FROST

Do you know him?

You’ve seen his name a gazillion times. You just can’t place it.

Here’s a hint: I can almost guarantee you have thrown out junk mail with his name on it this year.

Charles F. Frost, or C.F. Frost, was an ad executive at Ogilvy & Mather in the 1950s. One of the firm’s clients was American Express, and it was getting ready to roll out a new product. But it didn’t want to use a random name because it was afraid of lawsuits.

So they put Frost’s name on the new product: the credit card. His name has appeared in just about every prototype of an American Express card since its introduction in 1958.

Whoa, young’uns! I know what you’re thinking. 1958?

Here’s something that might seem shocking: credit cards were virtually non-existent in 1954.

The only credit card was Diner’s Club, formed in 1950 after some businessman forgot his wallet when dining with clients and was forced to call his wife to bring it from home. But its uses in 1954 were still limited to restaurants, mostly in New York.

American Express, which was a financial services company specializing in freight shipments and foreign exchange, had been looking to get into the credit business since just after World War II. Once Diner’s Club was established, it provided the impetus to go big.

The first American Express card was, well, a card. Made of paper. You know that assortment of plastic in your wallet or purse? Not until 1959 did AmEx become the first company to issue embossed plastic cards. It was more of a charge card than a credit card – you were expected to pay the balance when the bill came monthly.

American Express charged what was considered a steep fee for its card, $6 a year. But it carried a certain caché to flash the card at a restaurant or hotel. It was a big deal in our house when my Dad got his Amex Card in 1968.

The nation’s banks were slower to get to the market. In the ’60s, they formed two alliances – BankAmericard, named for alliance leader Bank of America, and Intercard, also known as Master Charge. Their names evolved to Visa and Mastercard.

People snapped up the cards. Banks were part of both alliances and soon were the backers of the cards issued by individual retailers and service providers. And they made fortunes on the interest they charged when they allowed people to pay a minimum of their balance each month.

That’s not an unmitigated good. Many Americans forget that the card only means you’ll pay for whatever eventually. They rack up thousands of dollars in debt that becomes very difficult to repay.

In the 1970s, banks began issuing debit cards, a different kind of plastic that deducted funds from checking accounts. And debit cards led to another thing that seems as if it has been around forever: the automated teller machine, or ATM.

The idea that you can get cash from a machine at 3:22 a.m. on Sunday is another thing that might have been beyond the wildest dreams of people in 1954.

Most of us have at least two go-to credit cards to handle expenses. In fact, there are more and more places where they don’t allow cash transactions – if you want to get a hot dog at a Met game, you need a credit or debit card.

Don’t leave home without it.

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11 – CROWNING ACHIEVEMENT

By 1954, Americans could again buy a wide range of vehicles, now that the restrictions on building cars during World War II and the retooling of plants were over.

Wide range, of course, of cars built in the United States.

The fact is that the Big Three automakers – General Motors, Ford and Chrysler – accounted for about three-quarters of all the cars produced in the whole world in the early 1950s. It was a domination that did not seem likely to end.

It did.

The first car I remember my Dad driving was a beige Dodge. Most of his cars, which were given to him by his employer, Firestone, were Chevrolets. He once drove a Studebaker Lark, which he wasn’t crazy about – Studebaker stopped making cars in the mid-’60s. He also had a Chevy Corvair for a few weeks – it was a car that, as a 7-year-old, I could not fit in its back seat.

The Corvair is what some people see as the start of the decline of American automotive dominance. It was an attempt to build a smaller car for people who wanted one – and it was not particularly well thought out.

It was, in fact, “Unsafe at Any Speed,” the title of the book written by attorney and journalist Ralph Nader, who researched lawsuits filed against GM about the Corvair. 

American cars, once thought to be the paragon of the industry, were starting to be seen as poorly made, with constant recalls and safety issues. And as gas prices rose in the 1970s, they were also seen as not economical, often getting less than 10 miles per gallon. “Lemon” and “gas guzzler” entered the vocabulary.

The exact opposite was happening on the other side of the world.

A Japanese company, Toyota, had struggled to find its place in the vehicle industry. It needed a bailout from the Bank of Japan in 1949, but only after management and labor agreed to cost cutting and productivity improvements.

They succeeded. In 1952, Toyota built its first passenger vehicle, the Crown. Six years later, it tried the U.S. market – and failed. 

But it kept coming. Toyota and the other Japanese companies, Honda and Nissan (originally Datsun), found the niche in economical smaller cars. And they focused on quality as the Americans foundered.

By the 1980s, it was an intense battle. The Big Three saw it as a point of pride that Americans should buy cars made in the U.S.A. But more and more Americans just didn’t want them – the Japanese cars were safer and easier on gas.

For a while, the Honda Accord and Ford Taurus battled for supremacy. Then came the Toyota model named for its original vehicle: the Japanese word for crown is Camry.

Meanwhile, across the Sea of Japan, South Korea began to have ideas about building cars. Some businessmen built its first one in 1955, two years after the truce halting the Korean War. Hyundai built its first car twenty years later.

The American auto industry almost died for good in the Great Recession. Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama intervened to bail out the industry, and American carmakers have recovered a little of the ground lost to the companies from Japan, South Korea and luxury vehicle makers in Europe.

But it’s somewhat political. On the East and West coasts, non-American cars dominate the roads. In the middle of the country, where the nation’s remaining auto plants are located, GM and Ford hold sway.

My Dad was disappointed when my wife and I started buying Toyotas in the 1990s. Firestone was closely aligned with Ford, but my first two cars were Fords and they were not particularly reliable.

He finally sort of came around with my Highlander, an SUV that was a lot easier to drive and maintain than the clunkers GM was still cranking out.

Dad didn’t live to see me switch to Hyundai in 2018. 

And that’s what led me to this thought: How would you go back to 1954 and explain to anyone – maybe even anyone in Korea – that there would be millions of Hyundais and Kias on American highways in 70 years?

상상할 수 없는!

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12 – WHY WOULD I PAY TO WATCH TV?

TV was free in 1954. 

Well, free after you bought a set, which was an expensive proposition. A 21-inch black-and-white inside a large wooden cabinet sold for about $250. That already seems like a lot, but we’re also talking 1954 dollars. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, that set would cost nearly $2,900 today.

The first color TV set for the public went on sale in 1954. That cost about $1,000. Then. That’s the equivalent of about $11,000 in 2024. That’s a lot of loot, considering only NBC aired prime-time programs in color, and all news and sports was in black and white.

Which is why barely more than half of the country had sets in 1954. Add to that the expense of mounting an antenna on your roof – you had to do that to get the signal until they started building smaller sets with their own “rabbit ears.”

After that, TV was free.

But, as you probably surmised, TV prices dropped. While just about everything else you can think of has soared in price, TV set prices, accounting for deflation, have fallen more than 90%.

TV became a bargain. By the 1970s, most people had color sets. And everything was broadcast in, as NBC used to put it, “living color.”

The problem is that a sharp TV picture – something we take for granted – was hard to come by. Antennas sort of worked, except in big cities and rural areas. People would sometimes stand by their set because they believed that through some static electrical phenomenon it improved the picture.

The solution was to deliver TV service a different way – through cables attached to a system that got its signal from another new invention, satellites. 

Not only would the new cable systems show regular local and national programming, but it would open up lots of space for new and different channels. That included channels that could show the more intense films being released in theaters without cuts.

There was a catch: You had to pay for cable TV.

We do it routinely now, for it or satellite or fiber-optic. But older people, among them my parents, found the idea offensive. They held off as long as they could.

It took my parents into the 1980s to give in. But give in they did – in their later years, they loved watching shows on HBO (as we discussed in No. 19 last week). And, of course, they couldn’t get the YES Network, the channel of their beloved New York Yankees, fast enough.

What they found was that the quality of the picture was infinitely better. So much so that people were able to use TV sets with high definition – a picture so clear that professional sports now use it to determine if a game official called a play correctly.

But if you had told them in 1954 that they would spend more than $1,000 a year to get a TV picture, my Dad would say, as he often did when something seemed ridiculous, “Get outta here!”

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13 – DALLAS

Most people cognizant on November 22, 1963 know exactly where they were and what they were doing when they found out President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas.

But I think the details are more shocking – and would have been to people in 1954 – than the idea that an American president could be murdered. It had been nearly a century since Abraham Lincoln was murdered, and two other presidents had been slain – James Garfield in 1881, William McKinley in 1901.

That’s not to mention the attempts. In my parents’ lifetimes, a gunman missed then President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt in Miami, killing Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak (there’s some question as to whether Cermak, not FDR, was the target). And just in November 1950, a Secret Service agent died foiling an attempt to kill President Harry Truman.

But President Kennedy’s death hit Americans harder. It’s not that he was universally loved – he was facing a tough re-election fight against arch-conservative Barry Goldwater, who happened to be a friend of his.

It’s partly because he was a relatively young man – JFK was 46. It’s partly because he was on the upsurge in popularity, having stood up to the Soviets in Cuba a year before and negotiated a nuclear weapons treaty. 

And it’s partly because Americans watched this crime unfold on television in real time.

They saw Walter Cronkite tearfully delivering the bulletin of the president’s death. They watched the casket come off Air Force One in Washington that evening. They were glued to their TV sets for the president’s lying in state at the Capitol and the chilly funeral procession to Arlington National Cemetery. They watched Jackie Kennedy bear up and 3-year-old JFK Jr. salute as the caisson passed.

And Americans – including my Dad and I, who were waiting for my Mom to dress for a dinner out to celebrate their 12th anniversary – watched live as another gunman emerged from a crowd at a Dallas police station and shot suspected assassin Lee Harvey Oswald.

The impressions of that weekend before Thanksgiving were indelible. And no matter how much you can imagine some cataclysmic event, it’s still shocking to think it actually happened.

The Kennedy Assassination was an event that scarred Americans. There are some on the left who believe the problems of the next 25 years were a result of JFK and his coterie of the best and the brightest – including his brother, Robert, killed in 1968 – not being there.

My mother was devastated. I remember seeing her crying at the door of our first-floor apartment in Flushing as I ran home, in tears myself, from school. She was one who believed in the Camelot aura. 

Much as I said about Vietnam, the country was never the same after the assassination. A presidential slaying was imaginable in 1954. But that doesn’t make it any less shocking.

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14 – PASTA CON PESTO

My father’s father is from the seaport city of Savona in the Italian province of Liguria. It’s in the northwest corner of the country, bordering France.

I don’t have a lot of memories of him. He died when I was 9 in 1963.

But his legacy in our family – preserved by my mother, his daughter-in-law – was a pasta dish we thought belonged to us.

In this dish, the sauce is green. It’s made from basil, pounded with a mortar and pestle, along with olive oil, parmigiano reggiano (my brother, who knows better, says my Mom used pecorino Romano) and pine nuts. The sauce is mixed with a pasta – I think we tended toward linguine – and boiled potatoes (because our people never thought much about carbs). Some recipes include green beans; I don’t remember us doing that.

The sauce is called pesto from the Italian word for pounding or grinding

My mother, who had never had pesto as a kid, enjoyed my grandfather’s dish so much that she learned to make it herself. Thus continuing the tradition in the family. She often left the potatoes out – and my father complained that it wasn’t real pasta con pesto (that’s what we called it; pasta Genovese is more common) without them.

It was a dish we loved as kids. And we shared it.

My mother made it for her father, from whom I get my extremely picky eater genes. It was actually pretty funny to watch him try to eat it – this man who was the most distinguished looking person I’ve ever known picking at it like a kid. But once he started to eat it, he loved it.

So did my friends in high school when they came by for lunch. And so did my Mom’s friends.

But it was something that only we ever had. It was never in any Italian restaurant where we ever dined, because most of the traditional dishes were southern Italian.

Fast forward to 1984.

It’s dinner time at my job in an office above Grand Central Station. I go down to Zabar’s in the terminal. And I noticed that one of the choices is a pasta salad with chicken and pesto.

I was floored. I was determined to try it. It wasn’t bad. It wasn’t my mother’s, but it wasn’t bad.

Throughout the ’80s, it amazed me to see pesto as a dish and as a flavor spread far and wide.

What’s my point?

In 1954, when I was born, the idea that Italian-Americans would blend into the mainstream of this country was not so certain. We were often depicted as crude, the subject of slurs and jokes, and stereotyped as mobsters and other criminals.

That applies to other ethnicities and other races. I’m sure many of you have felt it in your lives at some point.

But the diversity of this country is its superpower. And it often manifests itself in the food we eat – we adopt dishes brought here by others and adapt them to what we know.

And the result is spectacular. On my last trip to Chicago, I had chicken tikka masala tacos. They were amazing. Two dishes from two very different places combining in the middle of America.

That’s what happened to pesto. We Ligurians blended it into the mix and it joined the vast American menu.

My parents and grandparents would probably be a little surprised at how widely accepted something we thought was only ours has become. 

What would be more surprising is one of the people who carries on the pesto legacy in my family.

It’s my grandfather’s granddaughter-in-law. She makes absolutely fabulous pesto.

She was born in Hong Kong.

Happy St. Joseph’s Day!

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