How Do You Chose Your Heroes?

A hero of today.

Even as a little kid in the fifties, I was hyper-aware of how much grown-ups disapproved of Elvis Presley and of how much teenagers seemed to adore him. Some young women almost seemed to worship him.



One of the chief complaints that grown-ups always seemed to have against Elvis the Pelvis (as I often heard him called) was the bumping and grinding motions of his hips and pubic bone during his singing. They seemed more than suggestive to the generation that had survived the Great Depression and World War II. (Well, some of them survived it.) This parental objection only led the kids to love him all the more.



Parents in the south had one more gripe against him. He had accepted and even begun to specialize in a form of music which was strongly influenced if not outright created by America's black citizens. Many southern parents called it "jungle music" and believed that it would result in a general degradation in the morals of American society.



Sure enough, within a decade we had such phrases as "free love" and "the new morality" being bandied about. None of this was caused by any one race. It was caused by a national acceptance of a lower standard of behavior. It all referred to the new "sexual freedom" which many young people felt they should and could enjoy because of two or three changes which had occured in the world in recent decades. One was "The Pill." A girl could have as many partners as her appetites demanded and still not get pregnant, at least usually not. Then there was the fact that virtually all venereal diseases had been conquered, we thought, by the wonder-drugs called antibiotics, a new class of drug which had been pioneered by the almost accidental discovery in England of Penicillin.



Sex with impunity! No wonder it was our generation, the generation of the sixties, that coined the phrase "free love."



This new "life-style" as some liked to call it, quickly took over, and even television and movies began to depict protagonists ("good guys") as having casual sexual liaisons with just about anybody when they both felt like it. This grew and grew in the seventies. It became common for people to live together as though they were married but not be married and have no plans to be married.



Communes - groups of people living in a form of voluntary socialism - sprang up all over the country. Those who wore the clothes and accepted the philosophies of this movement (sometimes called "the counterculture") were known generally to the older generation as "hippies." Often, it was pronounced as "longhairedhippiefreaks." Genuine antagonism was felt against them, so it was probably a good thing that most (if not all) so-called hippies practiced the peaceful principles they preached or there could have been a blood-bath in the late sixties and long into the seventies.



There was a lot to be angry about back then, it seemed. Some people hated the very idea of communism and looked down on someone who would burn a draft card or flee to Canada to avoid service in Vietnam, the latest of a series of "brush wars" in which the U.S. tried to stop the row of "dominoes" that General Eisenhower had talked about from toppling into the control of the USSR and the Red Chinese. It was a really confusing time, in some ways, because, the kids who fought the war and those who demonstrated, sometimes violently, against it, were all of about the same age and had been raised in very similar ways.



But now they were at each others' throats. Perhaps the most glaring example of this came at Kent State University in 1970. Young demonstrators and young National Guardsmen clashed in an uncontrolled manner which quickly became a shocking news story. A boy, his blood already a pool around him on the sidewalk, was face down as a high school girl who had sluffed class to be there for the demonstration, opened her arms in a cry for help which became one of the most famous photos of the twentieth century.



By the time Elvis died in the late seventies, the World War II generation was older and more tired than they'd ever been. And suddenly millions of people seemed to be grieving about an entertainer as though he were a hero.



This was confusing to the older folks. To them, entertainers were to be loved and followed, but real heroes were either political or military in nature. I saw an interview in the late eighties with the great historiographer Barbara Tuchman. It turned out that she only had 3 months to live when she gave the interview. When asked what she worried most about in America's future, she unhesitatingly said that young Americans no longer had real heroes. They didn't know what heroes were. They mistook football stars and movies stars and recording stars for heroes. She pointed out that, in her generation, any American child asked who his/her heroes were, would begin by listing people like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln. They might also throw in Thomas J. Jackson, Robert E. Lee, and other Confederates. But they were heroes because they had given their lives trying to improve society, regardless of the actual outcome.



I was moved by the interview with her. I wrote her a letter, telling her how much I agreed at heart with what she'd said and how grateful I was for her accomplishment of rendering into a few sentences a great and dangerous truth that threatened us all in the late eighties. She was kind enough to write back a brief post card which is among my prized possessions today.



My memory of Elvis's death is quite clear. The Word War II generation was almost disgusted by the upset that it caused. "What," they seemed to be asking everywhere,"had this boy ever done to make the world a better place? Why is he being treated like a hero?" In that same decade two women had tried to shoot President Gerald Ford. Poor marksmanship and lack of familiarity with their weapons seem to have saved him, but these two poor ladies will never see the light of day again in this life. These two attempted assassinations were both covered a lot, but they didn't seem to excite as much public outcry as Elvis's death. We were changing. If President Jimmy Carter had died at about the same time as Elvis, surely both would have received much press coverage. But we see what has happened to the Elvis legend since his death. He has become bigger and more admired and imitated than ever. Jimmy Carter, on the other hand, has been largely forgotten by anyone who wasn't an adult during his one four-year term.



Then, the other day, a man very much like Elvis in his nerve and his willingness to take the next stride forward in changing our culture's morals, died unexpectedly at age fifty. As we discussed all the uproar over his death, my father (a personal hero of mine who sprinted down to the Navy Recruiter's office on the day he turned 17 in 1945) pointed out how much we had changed. He opined that, if someone had shot the current president, these people wouldn't have been any more upset than they were about the death of the entertainer. If he wasn't right in this opinion, he was very close to right. He was merely commenting on how much we've changed since he was young, when his generation would weep for the loss of Major Glenn Miller but feel a much more fundamental loss when FDR died.



I was shocked and hurt to hear two people who are very important to me say that my father's motive in the comparison was a racial one! I knew that nothing could be further from the truth. If he had said that the people wouldn't have been as upset over a Carter assassination as they were over Elvis's death, people would never have assumed that the comment was about race. And his comment about Michael Jackson and Mr. Obama was not a racial one, either.



African-Americans have struggled for many decades to achieve political equality in this country. Now that it has been done, we must not insult them by treating them with kid gloves. They can take the lumps that other politicians can take. They can represent the changing morals of the country as well as earlier leaders have done. Let them do it.

The Best Kind of Father's Day Present

Autumn Marie (Haeberle) Mulverhill

Last night, Sheryl and I said our family prayers preparatory to reading scriptures and some other reading. Before I could get to the word Amen, there was a good, sharp knock at the front door. I thought of picking up the walking stick that I made a couple of years ago as I walked through the house. Sheryl had left the front porch light on earlier and I had dutifully turned it off before going to bed. Now, in the little bit of light from the street, I could see a small, female form with long hair through the beveled glass in the door.





Agressively, I flipped the porch light back on and cautiously opened the door, peaking around it to see who might be with the disarmingly feminine form visible through the glass. She smirked at me, watching closely for my reaction. That reaction was as natural as anything I've evcr done, because it was one of genuine "shock and awe" (to use a presidential expression.)





My little girl had come all the way up from Winnetka, CA several days early, just to surprise me for Father's day. I couldn't stop telling her, during our prolonged hug, how happy I was to see her. Little Aubs had come to see me, and life, which had seemed pretty rotten earlier in the day, was suddenly full of bright promise and joy and hope.

What Am I Doing Wrong?

Reasonably sane Dad/Uncle Jim pretending that his friend's BB gun is a real firearm.

I have been trying to make light of this Alzheimer's thing, but only Clark answered or made comment on my last post, so I guess everyone's getting all weirded out about the disease. I am convinced that, if I keep taking all the goodies I've been given, most of you won't notice a difference in me at all for a long time, if ever. In other words, I'll be just as annoying or delightful as you've always found me. But I'm doing something wrong, because everyone seems to be afraid to comment any more.

Everything I've said in the last two posts is correct as far as I know it, but we're dealing with very long periods of time here. Although it didn't strike me as funny, what the doctor said about a stroke or a heart attack taking me out before the Alzheimer's gets that far is probably quite true. I could be around for many years, sending out annoying emails, dumb jokes, and politically incorrect proclamations.

In other words, the disease is virtually stopped in its progress at this point, and it's perfectly alright to treat me as you always have. In the case of virtually all of you, that was pretty good.

Now, does anyone have a good .45-70 or .223 they'd like to let go for cheap? I have years and years of recreational shooting ahead of me, and I'd like to get back at it.

The Choice Seems to Have Been Made for Me

Yes, I know I've used this before, but it's the only portrait of myself I've liked in maybe a hundred years!

If I'd ever had the experience of having someone walk up to me and say with an authoritative air that I had to choose between losing my short term memory and losing my long term memory, I suppose I'd choose to keep the long term memory, because that's where my babies live and that's where I experienced youth and all its thrills and first-time experiences. That's where Shayne lives. That's where my missionary and military service are located. That's where I last had hair! :) My first crush, first date, first kiss, first driver's license, first .22 rifle, my discovery of the beauty and power of language, my first experiences with great music, and the warmest memories of home and family -- all of these live in the long ago.

But I'm glad no one asked me. Instead, the choice has been made for me. Today I met with Reed Hendricks, a counsellor at BYU-I whom I've been seeing for some time. When I got out to the car I told Sheryl that Reed had been in the same mission as our family practitioner, Jeff Hopkin. To my astonishment, she said, "Yes, you told me that a couple of times before." This shocked and hurt me. I had been telling myself for days that maybe I could beat this Alzheimer's thing, and there I was having an Uncle Harvey moment.



Sadly, that's about the only thing I recall about Uncle Harvey, my grandfather's brother. He was pretty deep into dementia by the time I knew him. I remember that we addressed him as Uncle Harvey and that he was very kind and friendly, but John and I could never figure out why he kept telling us stuff as if he hadn't already said it several times in the past few minutes. We looked at each other and shrugged. This was in the fifties. The world was a sweet, safe place in the fifties. I know. I lived through them. Others may have had other experiences with the Korean War or the Cold War or organized crime taking over Las Vegas, or the beginnings of the overdue Civil Rights Movement. But for this little middle-Tennessee boy, the world of the fifties was a safe, green, happy place.

The happiest place to be was my grandparents' home in Tullahoma, Tennessee. There were woods out back for playing in and for gathering blueberries and blackberries which my grandmama would then turn into pies and cobblers. The lightning bugs (fireflies) made every summer night a mystical experience, and the moss that covered every tree and stone and brick seemed like it had been put there to soften the world for little boys.



I have a dim recollection of being told that Uncle Harvey had died. Death was a strange concept to me back then. I had seen it portrayed in movies and on the B&W Zenith TV we'd had for a year or so, but this wasn't like that. I don't recall seeing my mother cry for her uncle, although I suspect she did. I don't recall anything upsetting about it. A bit somber, maybe, but not upsetting. Besides, death was only a temporary thing, right? Johnny and Bucky and I and lots of other little kids ran around the house and around the neighborhood in more-or-less constant combat. We might be fighting criminals, Apaches, Yankees, or Nazis, but we were always fighting someone. Matching the year, make, and style of firearm to the historical setting of the conflict never really occurred to us. They all had infinite magazine capacities and could make shots at phenomenal distances if we only willed it so. And every time one of us got hit, he was only out of play for a matter of seconds. Death was only a minor inconvenience.



All my life I was told by anyone and everyone who was even a minute older than me that I was sort of a carbon copy of my granddaddy. Now, for those of you under about 40, a carbon copy is sort of like a printed copy except less clear. But one thing that became clear to me over the years was that being compared to Clifton Ellis Templin was not always a compliment. If I showed a great aptitude to recall details of events that had happened long ago, then I was told I'd gotten that trait from him. If I spelled everything correctly and aced a test, then at least part of the credit went to him. And I was fine with that. I loved him.



Gradually, though, especially as I got into my teens, I would be told that some utterly undesirable trait of mine was "just like him." This seemed to imply that I had a choice to make. Keep being just like the guy I loved, or change and abandon him. I know, that's silly, but that's also how it seemed.



The last time I saw him was in June of 1978 when the whole family formed a caravan to tour the sites and homes of importance to our clan. His hair was a bit whiter, but he seemed the same to me. Some years later my mother went back east to stay with my grandparents while my grandfather was dying. He had Alzheimer's too, but he also had cancer. Mother said that he got to chat with loved ones who'd already gone beyond the veil as he was preparing to do so himself.



I was comforted by this sort of thing. I was so comforted that his death didn't seem real to me until the next family caravan to the east which occurred in 1990. Only when I'd walked through every room of the house on West Side Drive could I be sure that he wasn't there. Grandmama, who had always been precious to me, seemed terribly fragile during the days of that stay. I stared at her as much as I could. When we finally said goodbye, I kept reaching out to touch her just one more time. Since her death, I've had the thought maybe a thousand times that I ought to call her to tell her about something or ask her about something. I guess that's normal. Until just a few years ago, I kept having the idea of calling Mike Ruskievicz, too, and he's been gone since '71! Maybe I'm a slow learner.



To be losing my ability to manage all my own affairs is pretty scary. Sometimes I think that I haven't really lost any abilities. I think that maybe they've just atrophied, because Sheryl, like every other girl who ever decided that she loved me, does so much for me that I almost forget how to do for myself. But I know it's different this time. It may take a long time. In a way, I hope it does. Like Dr. King said, "Longevity has its place." But remember when he said it?



I expressed my concern to Dr. Vance about becoming a drooling vegetable (uncooked, if you please) who doesn't recognize anyone and can't recall from one minute to the next what day it is. He laughingly said that a heart attack or stroke will probably take me out before that eventuality. Somehow, I was not comforted.



So the choice has been made for me. My short term memory, never my strong suit anyway, will fade out first. I don't know how long they can keep the long term stuff alive. I'd like to think that, right up to the end, even if it's many years from now, I'll still be able to tell you what was at stake at Agincourt, Antietam, or The Bulge. But if there's anything life has taught me for sure, it is that there are no guarantees except that we will pass through whatever we agreed to pass through before we came here.

The Latest Snake Oils for Dementia

A 58 year old man with a 109 year old rifle. One of them still functions quite well.

For quite a few years I've suspected that something was wrong in my head. It's easy to joke about such things, but I really did think it. Most folks with whom I confided this concern tended to pooh-pooh it, whether out of genuine conviction or simple kindness, I never knew.

Recently, however, a diabetes specialist said flat out the thing I'd feared for many years. I am in the early stages of Alzheimer's Disease.

For many of my teaching years I used a weekly publication to play a current events game with my high school kids. There were pages of eight or ten questions each on several different subjects. There was a page on current politics, a page on History, a page on medicine and science, a page on the entertainment world, and, for no reason I could divine, a page on sports.

Early in my career I was leading a group of Senior Government students in this game. We were on the medical/scientific page. The answer to the next question was "Alzheimer's Disease." I read the question. No one seemed to know it. Then, all at once, a boy named Bob slapped his hand on his desk, rose half-way out of his chair, and triumphantly shouted "Old Timer's Disease!" I laughed till I cried and it took several minutes to get the game back under way.

At one time I could have told you his last name. But no more. Lots of things have been slipping away from me like that for years now. My mother is quite the opposite. She can remember the name of every person she's ever met and much of their genealogy. I've tried not to hold it against her, but it hurts to realize that your parent has a brain that is more supple and reliable than your own.

Dr. Vance assures us that everything we do to fight the diabetes is also fighting the Alzheimer's. This is mildly cheering, although it would have been so much more so had he simply said, "If you get your blood sugar down to such-and-such a level and your triglycerides down to so-and-so, you won't have to worry about Alzheimer's any more." I waited in vain yesterday for him to say that. Among the things I must now begin doing is 30 minutes of daily exercise. He smugly said into his transcription recorder that I have "butter for blood." As if that's a bad thing!

Self-administered B-12 shots, fish oil pills, and some other stuff that doesn't come to my diseased mind at the moment will round out my treatment. I've given myself shots before, so the former is no big deal. The fish oil pills, however, seem a bit - fishy.

Kind-hearted-Carla, one of Sheryl's cousins who lives in IF and who was widowed last year, has offered to do the nagging for me to see that I get the exercise I need. She has also offered the use of a reclining, stationary bicycle. At first it sounded pretty good, but I have doubts as to the advisability of my assuming a stationary and reclining position. I mean, isn't that part of what led to all these problems in the first place? And how good could it be for my health to have more than one woman nagging me?

There is something almost liberating about knowing that I have a disease which, sooner or later, is terminal. It might take years, but it's still a killer. It has made me feel that I can share with others (like Carla) a list of things that I've wanted to do for a long time and which I still want to do before I check out:

1) Take a big bear with a powerful rifle, either my 9.3x62mm or a .45-70. An American Buffalo would be a thrill to get, too.

2) Take a wild boar with a spear, just like our European ancestors used to do it; there are ranches in Texas where they'll let you do that - for the right price, of course.

3) Own, tame, and reload for a number of fine firearms which I once owned and had to sell in Boise, particularly a .223, a .45-70, several S&W revolvers, and a couple more Mauser battle rifles. While we're being greedy, why not throw in a .30'06 rifle and a 1911 .45 ACP Government Model pistol as well? Or, failing the latter, how about a 1917 Smith & Wesson chambered for the same cartridge? I had one once and was forced to sell it in Boise. I still have my custom-made holster for it with my initials on the flap. A good, solid .22 pistol, probably a Browning Buckmark, would round out my satisfied greed very nicely, I think.

4) I would dearly love to tour my mission cities again and take as much family as can be wedged into the airplane. Because of its expense, this is the most unrealistic dream of all. But I still dream of how wonderful it would be.

My awareness of the sweetness of life has been heightened by the presence of Dante here this week. He speaks way too fast and is a bit wild, but I've never met a more loving child. And his intelligence is nothing short of amazing! He looked up at my five-year-old self on the wall the other day and asked whether it was a picture of himself. A valid question. We seem to be a lot alike. There's comfort in that, too. I only wish all my children were so sure of their affection for me.

There's a three-hour meeting block tomorrow, and I'm pretty tired, so I'll apply a recent portrait of the demented old thing to the top of this little article and then head to bed. All the best to all of you.