http://www.venturacountystar.com/news/2009/jul/05/aging-aquarian-wonders-what-might-have-been/
Sunday, July 5, 2009
by Mary Kolada Scott
I was supposed to be at The Ambassador Hotel the night Robert F.
Kennedy was shot.
Although I had never met the senator, I was a "Kennedy Booster," one
of the high school and college students like those pictured in the
yellow Kennedy bus in the 2006 film "Bobby." My group from the San
Fernando Valley was going to be at the primary victory party.
My mother made me stay home and study for finals instead. She woke me
up the next morning and told me that Robert F. Kennedy had been shot.
"Kennedy was shot after victory speech. I was so shook up about it.
He has little chance of living," I recorded in my diary. I got an A
on my English final, I noted in a subsequent entry.
I was that close to being part of the packed crowd and frantic scene.
I might have been interviewed by the FBI, as my friends were in the
weeks following the shooting. The closest I got was watching the
movie, a fictional account of those touched by the event and reliving
those moments on TV in the actual footage interspersed with the
personal dramas. (My husband and sister point out that it was
providential I wasn't there because I probably would have been traumatized.)
Unlike many of my generation, I remember the '60s. I didn't smoke,
drink, have sex or do drugs, so perhaps I'm not an authentic
representative of that era, but more of a sober witness. During the
summer of 1967, my mother "volunteered" me to bird-dog for the
Democrats. A group of high school students gathered on summer nights
and walked precincts in the San Fernando Valley, and knocked on doors
to solicit unregistered voters. We earned $1 an hour.
When Kennedy announced his candidacy, we joined other students
("boosters") on the Kennedy bus to attend rallies, film TV
commercials and work at fundraisers. Our campaign tour abruptly ended
a few weeks later with RFK's assassination.
A group of us became close, and Ray, a tall, dark and outspoken
member of the group, asked me out. Our first date was at a rally at
LAX for Eugene McCarthy, but Ray, a notoriously bad driver, couldn't
find the venue. He gave me his prized George McGovern pin (according
to my diary, these buttons were "murder to find"), and I started
collecting campaign pins.
Catalyst for movement
My life changed after Bobby's death, as though it were a catalyst for
movement. Some of it was inevitable. Ray broke up with me a year
later and his family moved to Connecticut.
I continued to participate in rallies and collect signatures for gun
control. I worked in several campaigns, among them ones for
Assemblyman Bob Moretti, Sen. Alan Cranston and Mayor Tom Bradley.
"Star Trek" actor Leonard Nimoy signed my bumper sticker at one fundraiser.
Years later, I attended a wedding rehearsal dinner at The Ambassador
Hotel. The valet driver crashed my then-husband's Datsun 260Z into a
wall, so my association with the Ambassador remains unfavorable. The
hotel itself was demolished in 2006.
The decades passed. I became old enough to vote, but politics no
longer held the same appeal as when I was young and impressionable.
My adolescent diaries were replaced by journals. I studied journalism
and raised a family.
My first husband was a Republican who berated me for voting for Jimmy
Carter. My mother died. I divorced, resumed a career, and remarried
(a Democrat). One campaign followed another, and presidents paraded
through my life. None had the charm or promise of the royalty of Camelot.
It's difficult to say how much of my disillusionment was because of
the assassinations of political figures. Certainly, much of the
enchantment of the dawning of the Age of Aquarius was interwoven with
the excitement of first love and the headiness of early ventures into
the outside world.
The formative years of the '60s established the foundation for free
expression and validated a young generation's voice. The ideals
remain. Freedom. Equality. People continue to speak out against
abuse. Movement is slow, but "the cause continues," as a Cranston pin
proclaimed.
As much as things changed, they remained hauntingly familiar as I
watched the movie "Bobby" and the reels of Vietnam War footage that
had accompanied the 6 p.m. news every day as my family (eight of us)
sat down to dinner.
Like a bad rerun, the footage from Iraq chronicles the same senseless
story, but on a different stage with more graphic images. In the
theater, watching the movie, "Bobby," I felt my eyes well as I
watched the fallen soldiers, flag-draped caskets and body bags
dragged across the screen. The peace we had dreamed of and worked for
remains elusive in today's political arena.
I relived the sense of shock at another unfathomable loss,
remembering the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther
King Jr. And I considered the status of those ideals for which they had died.
Poverty is still an issue, the environment remains threatened, and
racism still erupts. The hanging chad controversy in the Bush-Gore
contest echoed voting problems in Kennedy's primary election.
Jarred from complacency
Like the characters' lives in the movie "Bobby," my life was
disrupted on that night. As in the film characters' stories, there
was no resolution, only that brief moment flickering on the screen of
our reality that jarred us from complacency.
It's easy to speculate what impact RFK would have had on the world if
he had not been killed. I wonder how I might have been affected if I
had been there that night. As a member of a generation whose leaders
encouraged Americans to consider the possibilities, I believe that
imagination is a valuable legacy.
Speculation is all this aging Aquarian has. That, a collection of
rusting political buttons and a ticket stub from "Bobby" to slip
between the pages of a dilapidated diary.
-
Mary Kolada Scott is editorial operations manager of The Star. In
addition to her diary, she had written reams of poems chronicling
this period of history. Fortunately for our readers, she was unable
to find them.
.
0 comments:
Post a Comment