Betty Only Needs One

I grew up on a wide tree-lined street. Every home had a matching lawn - spacious and fertilized, water and mowed. Every home had a two car garage.

There were several families on the block, and the neighborhood children often convened on the street. It was our street: Glenwood Drive. Our street was a great place to kick balls, ride bikes and play tag. Cars slowed and waved when they passed. Our parents knew each other, and the neighborhood kids knew to go inside when the street lights came on.

Below our street were smaller tree-lined streets with older structures and older cars parked curbside. These houses and apartments were mostly rentals - younger couples, roommates, short timers - people we didn't know. For the most part, these streets seemed safe, and only seemed to lack the polished suburban veneer of Glenwood Drive. Not every lawn was green. Not every garage door was left close. And while most of the residences on the "other" streets were well kept, there always seemed to be at least one anomaly. One house that would stick out - an eyesore with with broken screens, chipping paint and rusty cars out front. Sometimes the cars even overflowed onto the lawn. This was, 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 rarely, if ever, took showers. Sounds pretty awful. 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 wasn't an elitist; I was just a bike riding, tag playing, ball kicker. I never gave any thought to the hippies until the chalk board 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 were 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 don't know who the occupants of the house were. We never met them. We never saw them. We just drove by their yard and saw their daily message.

At first the messages were pretty innocuous - "170 Days to Christmas" on a hot July day, perhaps, or other slightly funny remarks about pop culture, about life in Southern California, about what it meant to place a chalkboard on a suburban street corner. I'm not certain, but it seemed no one minded the messages in the beginning.

I always looked forward to the messages. They seemed to be a window on a world I knew nothing about. My father also admired the chalkboard. He was never one to stray from a joke or a witty remark. 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 satirical and pointed, 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 official "party line" of the time. 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 proprietors. 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 joke 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 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 wasn't easy 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. Betty Ford did survive. She survived cancer and addiction (and who knows what else) until she died last week at the age of 94.