Dan DiNicola remembers the 1960s
http://www.cbs6albany.com/news/0px-1272343-oral-1960s.html
March 26, 2010
Michelle Kim
In April of 2006, I was an intern at CBS 6 and in the midst of a
final paper for my 1960s American Studies course at Skidmore College.
Dan DiNicola kindly agreed to be an interview subject for the oral
history project, and he shared his memories and insight from that
time period in a series of interviews. In the spirit of remembrance
and celebration, I've included an edited version of the paper below.
- Michelle Kim
--
Coming of age in the late fifties to early sixties, Dan DiNicola
graduated from Siena College in 1963 before entering a teaching
career. A father by the time he was nineteen years old when many of
his peers, free of such responsibility, were building themselves up
into fervors of protest across the country and recalling himself
as "conservative… but at the same time, a rebel," DiNicola defies
the popular image of the 60s generation.
DiNicola has since become a television reporter and commentator, but
he recounts the 1960s from a teacher's perspective he uses the
opportunity to tell stories from the decade as a teaching moment,
eager to break down traditional delineations of the 1960s and explore
the complexity of the era. In particular, he invokes contemporary
cultural texts literature, film, and music to ground his
discussion of the events and the moods of the time.
For DiNicola, the urge to rebel stemmed from the "perfection" of the
fifties the quiet, unquestioning respect for elders, for authority,
for the government. That was the cold war consensus, when the U.S.
government led the nation into the belief that they were invincible
and that they were, above all, right:
"What you have to understand is that the kids who grew up in the
sixties, people who were teenagers in the sixties, is that they grew
up with a World War II mentality. I mean, the World War II was a
popular war, it was a good war, we were on the side of right, so we
just assumed that anything that we did was going to be right. We had
immense trust in our government. It was I can't begin to describe
how almost perfect that it was, that the government would not do
anything to hurt us."
And later, DiNicola says, describing his feeling of intense loyalty
and dedication to a government that promised safety and security for
the country's citizens: "I was ready let's put it this way in
1962, I was ready to go. Cuban missile crisis I was in ROTC, I
mean, I was ready to take off. And Vietnam, if I hadn't been single
at the time, if I didn't have two kids, I would have been there, too.
That's the way we grew up."
By the time he was eighteen, DiNicola was married, and at nineteen, a
father of two children. Studying English at Siena College -- already
a very "square" institution, he says DiNicola remained fairly
conservative with a new sense of responsibility: "I was a little
different because I was someone, in my situation, I was, you know, I
was married at eighteen. So, I had two kids by the time I was
nineteen, twenty years old. So I was I had to be a little bit more
conservative… I was very straight, very good, very traditional."
DiNicola hesitates as he says that, but the hedging turns resolute
when he describes the anger and restlessness he began to feel: "I was
a rebel. I was a rebel, but I didn't know I was a rebel." The new
defiant attitude of the sixties would sweep in and prod him to act on
those compulsions, to react against establishments and institutions
by which he felt betrayed: "In the sixties, it helped me release
those instincts I had within."
Still, for the early part of the decade, things generally remained
peaceful. "A lot of people, they think the sixties were right into
the riots," he says. "It really wasn't, it was some kind of calm."
The "tremor" began with President Kennedy's assassination in 1963:
"It was traumatic… we no longer felt safe anymore. Something was
wrong, something was starting to go haywire," DiNicola says. His
trust in the government had shattered; with Kennedy's assassination,
a feeling of vulnerability emerged and his faith that the United
States was insuperable and untouchable faded quickly.
'It All Came Together'
"Then, suddenly, it all came together, the real rebellion came
together, for me the time that I changed, I remember I changed,
when I said, 'This is all a bunch of bullshit' in 1967. That's when
my friends started getting killed in Vietnam."
It was around 1967 that DiNicola began himself to feel moved by the
spirit of rebellion the massive acts shown on television and in the
papers, but also the local, seemingly isolated acts he witnessed:
"About 1967… Then I knew, in my heart, I just knew it was wrong. That
the country was really screwed. I didn't know that before but I
mean, see, you could have been a maverick before, but you were out
there and nobody knew what you were holding on to. But what the war
protest did not even the war protest, but movies like The Graduate,
Midnight Cowboy what they did, if you sensed even in the fifties
that there was something wrong, what these things gave you was
something to hold on to. Suddenly… it wasn't just you, sitting alone
over here… There was something to object to. When you see other
people thinking the way you do, and sharing your suspicions, when you
start realizing that people you thought were radicals were spouting
common sense, then you get more confidence in your own views."
"Don't trust anyone over thirty" became the phrase au courant among
the youth at the time. With the generation gap growing, however,
DiNicola felt a kind of sympathy for these older members of the war
generation. He thought they had simply been misguided by the
country's leaders. After all, DiNicola and his peers, too, had fallen
under the same power of persuasion not too long ago:
"It was kind of sad, too, because these World War II veterans, these
patriots, these really nice guys they were duped, too… They looked
at kids as awful people. They my uncle said to me, we would run
over some of those kids with tanks if they stayed in the middle of the street."
Then, it became easier for DiNicola to identify acts of rebellion
around him -- and to identify with them:
"I remember, in 1969, I was teaching. And I remember student teachers
from Skidmore came in with black armbands to protest the war. And I
remember some of the teachers, some of the old-time teachers, were
furious how dare these girls from college come to our hometown and
walk into our classroom?
And female teachers weren't allowed to wear any pants. The principal
had a meeting no pants for female teachers. And the next day,
fifteen female teachers from ages 22 to about 50 all came in wearing pants."
For DiNicola, who was already becoming increasingly jaded about his
government, it was the Vietnam War that stirred strong reaction
"that's when kids started coming home in body bags. That's when we
started hearing about stuff at the campus." He continues, "I mean, I
wasn't one of those radicals wearing armbands or anything, you know,
marching and lined up in front of tanks, but I was getting angry. I
was getting angrier and angrier, and it affected every portion of my
life, even church-going." DiNicola, who only a few years ago was
ready to fight for his country at the drop of a hat, was suddenly
seeing things much differently.
The Legacy of the Sixties
It all added up: the repressive fifties, the Vietnam War, the
senseless deaths, the mood of rage and rebellion. And the movies
DiNicola watched, the books that he read, the music he listened to
only helped magnify the conglomeration of what would become his
experience of the sixties.
Through the intensely fragmented sixties, a significant and enduring
trait emerged in DiNicola: He developed a personal quality of
distanced but "healthy" skepticism.
"The legacy of the sixties is, for those who remember, and
unfortunately, it's a lesson that today's youth has to relearn is,
don't trust. Keep a healthy distrust. I say healthy distrust don't
be cynical, because, you know, there is something to patriotism and
loving your country. Keep that healthy distrust."
And continuing to use the opportunity to teach to show the sixties
through a modern-day parallel, DiNicola continues:
"I mean, I could see it happening with 9/11, I mean, people are
totally lost. I mean, they it's like the sixties had never
happened. Today's youth is going to have to learn the hard way. I
mean, the best thing that could happen to a nineteen-year-old kid is
to go to Iraq. Not to die, you know, but to understand. I mean,
nobody's involved, nobody cares."
DiNicola's narrative of the sixties is a personal, complicated one,
intersecting every so often with the traditional historian's
narrative of the sixties. He was not a radical, as he says, nor was
he a hippie or a drug fanatic or a rock and roll enthusiast. He
wasn't really one of the clear strong numbers of any of the various
groups or subcultures that emerged at the time. But he did respond to
what he saw around him, and what he saw was war and the resulting
deaths of "kids" and anger and protest. DiNicola negotiated his
emotional and intellectual response to this changing landscape of the
sixties through the media of movies, literature, and music. Above
all, he positioned himself as a teacher through the sixties, and
decades later, that is one role he continues to return to.
.
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