Please hold your applause

I turned 77 today.  So much for dying young and leaving a good-looking corpse.

Here’s how old I am.  I am older than baby boomers, since I was born during WWII.  FDR was president.  No black players were in the major leagues, and the American military was segregated.  Women had received the right to vote only 22 years previously.  The atom bomb had not been developed.  Nobody had a television set.

When I played in the high school band for Memorial Day, the ceremony featured a Spanish-American war vet.  I was forced to pray in school.  Lady Chatterly’s Lover was considered obscene.  

I put hay away loose, picked potatoes by hand, husked corn by hand, and helped to butcher pigs, chickens, and steers.  Everybody smoked.  Cars were air conditioned by opening little wing windows. Polio was a constant threat.  We sprayed DDT in the barn to kill the flies.  Relatives visited without calling first.  

In 1942 Trump had not yet been born.