David
Womack
Betty
Only Needs One
I grew up on Glenwood
Drive. It was a wide tree-lined street,
the kind you see in real estate brochures and Norman Rockwell paintings. The houses in my neighborhood seemed bound
by the specific principles of suburban architecture. Every home had a matching lawn - spacious and
fertilized, water and mowed. Every home had a two-car garage.
Nearly every home contained a family as well.
On school day afternoons, or in the cool twilight hours after hot summer
days, a small herd of children often convened on the street. Glenwood Drive was our street, and a great
place to kick balls, ride bikes and play tag. The world of our street was friendly and
familiar; cars slowed and waved when they passed. We were surrounded by people we knew- families,
friends, and friends of friends. Our
street was our extended home and, even though we all obediently went inside
when the streetlights came on, we knew it was a safe place.
Below our street were smaller tree-lined streets with residences not bound by
the uniform standards of our suburban enclave.
The world of these streets seemed
more compact than that of Glenwood Drive.
Single-family homes stood between duplexes and triplexes. There were
small stucco apartment courts and older, gabled houses that had been converted
into rental units. A few families raised
their children there, but most of the living situations were more fluid, homes
with roommates or young couples - short timers – people we did not know. These “other” streets only lacked the glossy
veneer of Glenwood Drive, by any proper standard the residences were well kept. However, nearly every block seemed to contain
one anomaly, one house that would stick out, an eyesore with broken screens,
chipped paint and rusty cars parked on the lawn. These were the houses where loud music blared
out of balcony windows, and where people seemed to come and go through all
hours of the day. These houses were,
according to our parents, where the hippies lived.
I doubt my parents, or most of the neighborhood parents, had much of a concept
of what hippies were. They probably took their profile from the Seven O' Clock
news: Hippies took drugs, lived in communes, had naked babies, and took their
hygiene cues from the Bronze Age. Hippies
had ideas that did not conform to the safe, suburban ideal. As a child I took this all at face value. My
world consisted of dirt clods, kickball and riding my bike, I didn't have much
time to learn about free love. So when I passed a house with too many cars out
front, with music blaring or with incense burning, I kept walking. Glenwood Drive was where I idled my time.
Nothing below my street really sparked my interest. I was not judgmental; I was just concentrated
on the spritely activities of youth. I
was not an elitist; I was just a tag player, a bike rider and a ball
kicker. I never gave much thought to the
hippies until the chalkboard showed up.
Now, to be fair, I don't even know if the chalkboard was in front of one of the
so-called hippie houses. I do remember exactly where the chalkboard stood (for
those of you keeping track on Google, it was on the corner of 11th and Pine in
Riverside, CA), but I know nothing about the occupants of the house. They were people with a chalkboard and
something to say. We never met them. We
never saw them. We just drove by their yard and saw their daily message.
The first message I remember reading was: “Only 170 Days to Christmas.” To my eleven-year-old sensibility, the
message seemed funny because it was presented on a hot July day. Summer vacation was eons away from Christmas
and presents and winter. It never occurred
to me that the chalkboard was taking a swipe at the tidy orthodoxy of our
world, and the obedient consumer culture that that orthodoxy spawned. The purveyors of the chalkboard were not
bound the rules of our suburban contract.
Their world did not revolve around having a perfectly manicured lawn, or
making sure that their garage door was kept closed after the dinner hour. On subsequent days, there were other clever
messages about pop culture and consumer culture, and what it meant to erect a
chalkboard on a residential street corner.
The messages may have represented an alternative point of view, but they
were tongue in cheek. I'm not certain,
but it seemed no one minded the messages in the beginning.
I always looked forward to the chalked notices. They seemed to be a window on a
world I knew nothing about. My father also admired the chalkboard. It was
obvious he liked the easy humor of the messages - he was never one to stray
from a joke or a witty remark – but I’d also like to think he valued the
chalkboard as a mechanism for free speech. Our family car trips always seemed
to bring us past that corner. Dad would often read the messages aloud, just to
make sure we were all privy to the quip.
Over time the tone of the messages seemed to change. What was once innocuous
became more overtly political, and perhaps a bit controversial. This was the
post-Watergate era, and politicians were ripe for skewering (as they still are
today, but in the 70's there were no blogs, no twitter and no TV chalking Glenn
Beck for that matter.). The keepers of the chalkboard had positions and
beliefs. They had a voice, and it often countered the period’s official
"party line.” Gerald Ford was in
office and our country was involved in sloganeering. Perhaps this is what Nixon
had learned by going to China. We had new slogans for every new cause: we were
"Whipping Inflation Now," "Beating the Energy Crisis" and
doing something or another to the Vietnamese. The chalkboard had it's own
less-traveled propaganda, seemingly made up by the chalkboard writers. I can't
remember much about the anti-slogans, I was only eleven, but I know they were
subversive because people started talking and people started complaining.
Apparently, making fun of the weather was covered under the 1st Amendment, but
posting political messages on the street corner broke some sort of zoning laws.
I do have a clear memory of one particularly pointed chalkboard headline. It
was posted on a sunny summer day. We drove by it as we went to church. The
chalkboard read: "Betty Only Needs One." I did not get the meaning
until my sister explained - Betty Ford had just had a mastectomy. My mother
complained. She thought the message was mean spirited. When I tried to defend
the chalkboard (I always sided with the chalkboard), she wouldn't hear it. Mom
was firm in her belief that such matters weren't to be taken lightly. She was
particularly sensitive about the issue because her mother had just had a
mastectomy as well. She knew the truth up close and personal: Breast cancer is
ridiculously awful. The mastectomy is a painful operation (probably even worse
then) for any woman - trading a chunk of your body to save your life. As a
child I did not fully understand these consequences, but I knew one thing:
Beside my grandmother, Betty Ford was the only woman I knew who had had the
surgery. Betty Ford's surgery was all over the news. We watched updates every
night during the dinner hour.
Betty Ford may have had the first public mastectomy. I'm sure that was
difficult for her, and I understand my mother's inclination to decry the
"easy" humor of the chalkboard. However, I'm not sure the message was
mean spirited. It didn't say, "Betty Only Has One," it said
"Needs." In the pageantry of the public eye, all players must somehow
be perfect, and whole. It is hard to be perfect when surgeons just ripped off
part of your body. Betty kept going, she went public, and she stayed strong.
She kept up her end of the bargain even after fate gave her a difficult choice.
I'd like to think the keepers of the chalkboard were celebrating Betty. Even
though they decried the politics of Nixon, and satirized the stultifying
slogans of the Ford administration, I hope they could still find a bit of sympathy
for Betty.
The chalkboard did not survive the summer, let alone the Ford administration. I
heard there were official complaints - people always decried the work of the
so-called hippies. Eventually, there was
some action by the city. The chalkboard
disappeared one day, another short-time resident on those “other” streets.
Betty Ford did survive. She survived cancer
and addiction (and who knows what else) until she died on July 8 at the age of
94. If I had my own chalkboard today, I
certainly would not be an apologist for the Ford or Nixon administration. But on the day that Betty Ford departed, I
would have put aside political feelings and remembered the strength of that
woman. My chalkboard might have
read: “Betty Was One We Needed.”
