bottoms so flared a person could hide a cat curled up around each ankle, and pasted everywhere, yellow happy faces with black eyes. Then there were beads, beads, beads—as jewelry, purses, furniture, chairs, vests, and even doors. The ultimate sign of friendship was to give a necklace or bracelet of colorful love beads. No teenager’s room was complete without a lava lamp, incense burner, dream catcher, bricks-and-boards bookcases, patchouli oil, disco ball, empty Chianti bottle as a candleholder, and black-light posters that glowed with fluorescent abandon when the regular lightbulb was replaced with a special dark purple one, much to every mother’s dismay.
We couldn’t walk through someone’s living room without tripping over driftwood sculptures, sand art, and homemade candles. My dad elevated candle making to new heights by polishing rocks in a tumbler, mixing them with hot colored wax, and using a blowtorch to shape the concoction around a wick. When friends saw the safety mask and blowtorch in the basement, I think they were inclined to give him a wide berth. Since Dad was already the absentminded professor type, wandering around in a plaid, double-brimmed Sherlock Holmes hat with a smoke dangling from his lower lip, this merely added to a sort of serial-killer detachment.
My mother covered the entire dining room wall with a forest mural, a bold decor statement that could only have been considered a good idea during the psychotropic seventies. As a result, holidays and birthdays were spent in perpetual autumn. Even the cat was freaked out, sometimes heading outside thinking he was going in, or peeing against the birch tree near the electrical outlet. Anyway, the mural covered the doorbell chime, so when that broke we no longer had a doorbell, as my mother wasn’t willing to hollow out a tree trunk to fix it.
During the seventies, it was virtually impossible to approach a patio, porch, or bathroom without clunking your head on a fern or spider
plant in a handmade macramé hanger. A 1973 book, The Secret Life of Plants, informed us that house- and garden plants possess extraordinary powers to feel emotions, diagnose diseases, act as lie detectors, and read minds. Meantime, macramé was thought capable of solving all life’s problems and was employed to weave owls, cloche hats, ponchos, caftans, guitar straps, place mats, belts, bracelets, headbands, and tote bags. The sartorial possibilities were endless, hence the phrase wearable art. World peace through macramé was undoubtedly just around the next nubby wall hanging.
At parties, our mothers took pictures using Instamatic cameras with Sylvania Blue Dot flashbulbs that left us temporarily blind. We are white faced and red eyed in all these photos, not unlike albino guinea pigs.
Brightly hued Volkswagen Beetles and microbuses were parked on every street, complete with Saint Christopher statues on the dashboard and bumper stickers proclaiming Make Love, Not War, and Join the army: Travel to exotic distant lands, meet exciting, unusual people and kill them. Station wagons the length of hearses were avocado green, turd brown, or harvest gold, with simulated-wood paneling along the sides. Sort of a den on wheels.
It was about this time that the electric bug zapper arrived in the suburban Midwest. I didn’t notice any reduction in the bug population, but it certainly provided people eating outdoors with a whole new topic of conversation. The chirping of crickets and tinkling of wind chimes would suddenly be interrupted by a tremendous charge of electric
current, and someone would exclaim, “Wow, that must have been a real hugger-mugger!”
My friends’ older brothers and sisters scraped together money from paper routes, babysitting, and mowing lawns to buy cars—used Pintos, Novas, and Gremlins were favored by the girls, and for the boys, muscle cars like Camaros, AMC Pacers, Monte Carlos, and Firebirds that were souped up with larger tires and louder engines. The cat’s meow was to have a big pair of fuzzy dice dangling from the rearview mirror above the dashboard, while faux leopard or zebra velvet covered the bucket seats. All interior space was taken up by speakers, stereo equipment, and eight-track Queen cassettes in order to effectively blast “We Are the Champions,” “We Will Rock You,” and “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Girlfriends finished off back windows by attaching a stuffed Garfield with suction-cup feet. The end result was known as The Love Machine. A van tricked out with mattresses in the back was called a Shaggin’ Wagon.
The Main Street novelty shop did a good trade in whoopee cushions, Mad Libs, rubber dog doo, plastic vomit, black soap, red-hot chewing gum, joy buzzers, and fake cans of peanut brittle that surprised the opener with flying fabric snakes. These were the main attractions at parties, along with piercing each other’s ears using a needle, ice cube, and potato. Over the next decade, such forms of entertainment would slowly be replaced by handheld video games, ear-piercing guns, and prescription drugs.
The Attica Prison riots, the bloodiest battle between Americans since the Civil War, made national news in 1971. More than a thousand of the state’s worst criminals staged a revolt at the overcrowded Attica Correctional Facility, thirty miles southeast of Buffalo, during which they took thirty-three guards and four civilian employees hostage. Inmates stormed the prison yard and seized the central guard station. Windows were broken, buildings torched, and fire hoses cut. Eventually the prisoners issued a list of demands, including minimum wage for their work, elimination of overcrowded cells, freedom to practice their religion, an end to censorship of reading materials, better rehabilitation services, less pork in the dining hall, and amnesty from punishment for the uprising.
Negotiators agreed to almost all the prisoners’ demands, except for amnesty, which became especially difficult after one of the injured guards died in a Rochester hospital. After the state issued an ultimatum demanding the release of the hostages, the prisoners dangled some of them over gasoline-filled trenches in public view and displayed others with knives held to their throats.
On September 13, four days after the riot began, one thousand New York State police officers and National Guardsmen moved in with tear gas and guns blazing, while helicopters hovered overhead. The prison was reclaimed after four hours, but the cost was heavy: four guards, ten hostages, and twenty-nine prisoners were dead or mortally wounded. Subsequent autopsies revealed that all the hostages had died of police fire—not at the hands of prisoners, as many claimed at the time. After examining the bodies and finding the bullets of law enforcement weapons, the coroner described it as a “turkey shoot.”
Being a New York State Supreme Court reporter, my father was oftentimes required to accompany judges to Attica Prison for trials. Dad would spend half the morning going back and forth through the metal detector, emptying his pockets and removing his shoes and socks and layer after layer of clothing, until he was down to the metal fillings in his mouth and his boxers with metal snaps. The judge was permitted to go around the metal detector. Perhaps they’d heard about Dad’s blowtorch.
Influenced by what we’d seen on TV, and aware of the prisoners’ complaints about the food service, for many years after the prison riot, kids at school would bang their trays in the lunchroom and shout, “Attica! Attica!”
In school we were often asked to give money to plant trees in Israel and to save pagan babies in Africa by funding their conversion to Christianity. On the evening news, I watched the trees in Israel burning amidst war and terrorism and the pagan babies in Africa dying of malaria and starving to death in famine after famine.
In the wider world, Governor George C. Wallace was shot on May 16, 1972, while giving a speech for his third presidential bid. The news described it as the bullet of a would-be assassin. This begged the question: Exactly how important must one be in order to be assassinated as opposed to just shot? Wallace was the man who famously stood in front of the schoolhouse door at the University of Alabama to block desegregation in 1962 during his first term as governor, and who proclaimed, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever.” He lived another twenty-six years, but was permanently paralyzed from the waist down and eventually turned the corner on the segregation issue.
The radio pla
yed Joan Baez’s version of “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” Janis Joplin’s cover of “Me and Bobby McGee,” The Doors’ “Riders on the Storm,” and Cat Stevens’s “Wild World.” In the fall of 1970, rock-and-roll icons Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin overdosed on drugs. He was twenty-seven and she was twenty-eight.
At any given moment, at least one radio station was playing Judy Collins singing “Amazing Grace,” though, based on the news updates that followed, people felt much more lost than found.
Eleven
The Tundra Years
The energy crisis of the seventies loomed large and still comes to mind every time I see a light left on in an empty room or enter a house where I don’t begin to shiver uncontrollably without a sweater. My childhood was a never-ending cold blast of parents yelling: “Turn it off!” “Do you think I’m made of money?” “Are we heating the entire neighborhood?” “Who left the lights on?” and “Who was the last person in this room?” When my mom dies, she’ll see the light at the end of the tunnel and then promptly switch it to off.
There are almost as many theories surrounding the energy crisis and whether it was real or manufactured as there are about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. No matter. The fact remains that just as Kennedy was undeniably gone, we were undeniably cold. And it wasn’t a dry cold, either, but a really, really damp one.
It’s common knowledge that in the sixties and seventies, energy consumption in this country increased by 50 percent. United States’ oil production could no longer keep pace with demand and, thus, we became reliant on the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), which translates to buying oil from the Middle East. In 1972, OPEC began raising their prices. In 1973, when Israel won a decisive victory in the Yom Kippur War with assistance from the United States, angry Arabs retaliated by raising oil prices again. On October 17, 1973, OPEC increased the price of oil from $3 a barrel to more than $5 a barrel. A day later, production was cut by 5 percent a month. Then Iran, with the consent of other oil-producing nations, called for an additional price hike to $11.65 per barrel. The result was a new phrase in the lexicon of the American motorist: gas lines.
For the Middle East, it meant the start of petrodollars pouring into countries like Kuwait, which had until then been devastatingly poor, and an overnight transition from riding camels to flying Learjets. For the United States’ economy, which was heavily dependent on industry, it translated into a huge drop in growth, the start of hyperinflation, double-
digit interest rates, unemployment, and an increase in the poverty rate. Or what President Jimmy Carter so poetically summed up as a “terrible malaise.” (Fortunately we had the comic relief of his boozy, chain-smoking brother, Billy, acting as a paid lobbyist for the anti-American Libyan government and introducing his own line of beer, Billy Beer.)
In the midseventies, the energy crisis temporarily subsided, and although prices didn’t drop back down to previous lows, fuel became more available. In 1979, however, OPEC again jacked up prices and curtailed production. A major cause was the revolution in Iran, one of our largest oil suppliers, where fifty-two United States embassy employees were taken hostage. We quickly halted imports from Iran as they enthusiastically canceled our contracts. All this touched off another round of inflation combined with a stagnant economy. Eventually, in the early eighties, OPEC was no longer able to keep some members from overproducing and once again prices dropped.
For most of the seventies, 30-watt bulbs were put in light fixtures meant for 60s. Kitchen ovens were left on with the door open for extra heat, and, as a result, this was usually the warmest room in the house. Grown-ups huddled in chairs around the oven to talk, while children played cards on the floor, as if the stove was a campfire. When it came time for bed, families would fight over who was sleeping with the dog, nature’s very own electric blanket. I’d be surprised if it wasn’t a Buffalonian who came up with the expressions “two-dog night” and “three-dog night,” which describe how many hounds are necessary to keep a body warm in a punishing climate.
People talked about America generating more of its own power. This would supposedly be done through nuclear reactors. On March 28, 1979, a plan to shift toward nuclear power turned nightmarish when a major accident occurred at “fail-safe” Three Mile Island near Middleton, Pennsylvania, only 230 miles southeast of us. For a few tense days, we fretted about being annihilated by radiation poisoning in what Walter Cronkite described on the evening news as the “worst nuclear power accident of the atomic age,” followed by the dire warning that “the potential is there for the ultimate risk of a meltdown.” Some Catholic churches in the Middleton area were giving entire congregations general absolution, a sacrament offered only when death is imminent and usually reserved for armies going into battle.
There were no casualties, but citizens would think twice about welcoming a nuclear reactor into their town, city, or even state. A growing number of Americans questioned the safety of nuclear power and marched on Washington carrying placards that said Babies Die First! and Hell No, We Won’t Glow! Witness the birth of NIMBY—it’s a great idea, but Not In My Back Yard—which would also extend to the construction of low-income housing, prisons, mental institutions, and other necessary but undesirable or unsightly facilities.
Inflation approached 14 percent in 1979 and climbed to over 20 percent in 1980, the worst level in decades. In October of 1981, the interest on a fixed-rate thirty-year mortgage reached 18.5 percent. Unemployment hovered around 6 percent in 1979 and by December 1982 was 10.8 percent nationwide, the worst since the Great Depression.
With Buffalo losing its manufacturing base, the local jobless rate was about twice that of the national average.
Residents continued to leave in search of work. Over the short space of three decades, Buffalo had gone from a thriving industrial center to a resort town—people would resort to anything to escape. It became the first city to allocate money for a self-esteem campaign (Talkin’ Proud), designed not to attract visitors so much as to aid the psyche of locals. While we hoped for the best, we expected the worst.
Having come of age during this stagflation, I’m told that my first conversation opener was “Can you believe the price of sugar?” and that I finally learned addition by counting cars lined up at the gas pump, and subtraction by counting the number of locals who lost their jobs at the Bethlehem Steel plant, one of the largest steel mills in the world, which kept laying off workers.
People recycled like pioneers, not for the sake of the environment, but because of budget constraints. We saved and reused everything, from paper plates, cardboard boxes, egg cartons, and jam jars to rubber bands, butcher string, and pencil stubs. These last three items were usually stuffed into a messy kitchen drawer that eventually could no longer be opened, which was mostly a relief. Mothers had crumpled tissues in their purses dating back to the Eisenhower era. (“It’s perfectly fine—just blow your nose.”) Kids were constantly told, “Eat your dinner because there are starving children who would love to have that food!” “Can we send the peas to them?” was a dicey response if Dad arrived home grouchy after working all day.
Fuel prices climbed higher and higher. At one point, license plates that ended with even numbers could get gas only on certain days and odd numbers on the others. Oftentimes, large signs proclaimed No Gas Today! While driving in our Oldsmobile station wagon, which was approximately the size of a living room set, we could actually watch the needle drop while braking and wondered if we were looking at the gas gauge or speedometer. It wasn’t uncommon to rummage through the seats, ashtrays, and one’s pants pockets for change, and then buy gas in the amount of $1.22, which basically got us as far as the next filling-station line. Hence, large, inefficient Detroit gas-guzzlers came to be known as “fossil burners.”
President Carter reduced the speed limit so that we not only lived like hibernating bears, in dark, cold houses and schools, but now had to travel slowly in order to reach them. My parents s
aw new signs on the thruway that said 55 Saves Lives and apparently thought they referred to the thermostat, because every month the heat continued to be turned down, down, down. Dad’s bedroom/office became positively Dickensian as he warmed his fingers over candles while typing court transcripts.
The day those heating bills arrived in the mail from National Fuel, the local gas company to which all local families tithed a large portion of their income, was the worst. That night we could hear fathers throughout the neighborhood going ballistic as they dragged their La-Z-Boy chairs next to the thermostat to stand (or rather recline) guard over it. And while dads were at work, red-lettered cardboard signs posted above the thermostat warned DO NOT TOUCH! A line made with a black Magic Marker was usually drawn somewhere around fifty-eight degrees to indicate that the red arrow should not be seen even slightly above woolly mammoth territory. The dads who were handy with tools found ways to lock the dial right where they wanted it, on subarctic. Clustered around the television in afghans, we thought the kids in Little House on the Prairie and The Waltons didn’t know how good they had it.
The heat was turned way down or off at bedtime, so when we woke up for school, the house resembled the inside of a meat locker. After a blustery night there’d be a little snowdrift on my window ledge—inside! The most frigid zones were the bedrooms, since they were generally farthest from the furnace. Kids realized that the smart thing to do was take a shower or bath at night and sleep in our school clothes, like minutemen during the Revolutionary War. This way we could leap onto the freezing floor in the morning, pray that someone else’s butt had preheated the icy toilet seat, throw on our shoes and coats, and run to catch the bus. Sleeping in a “Little Match Girl”–cold room also had the effect of curtailing any bed-wetting. One would probably freeze to death.
If there happened to be an unoccupied room in the house (not much chance in my heavily Catholic neighborhood), then the radiator in that room was switched off and the door was closed. Voilà! The family had a walk-in freezer at no extra cost. Or, for maximum economizing, we used duct tape to seal the door until spring.
Buffalo Gal Page 11
