Dad would have probably let us get a dog if it was a chain-smoking beagle, an animal close to his own denatured nature.
Cigarettes and hitchhikers wouldn’t be the trip’s only imperiled sights. Our drive itself is among the last of its kind, a summer car ride without benefit of seat belts or air-conditioning or FM radio, and nothing to pass the time but the sack of Tootsie Roll Pops Mom stows in the glove box to keep our mouths occupied on long trips. Those suckers keep our hopes up too. If one of our Tootsie Roll Pop wrappers features a boy dressed as an Indian, aiming his bow and arrow at a shooting star, we will win free Tootsie Roll Pops for life. Everybody knows that, even if nobody we know will ever collect on it.
This particular urban legend will gain such cultural purchase in the 1970s that hopeful children who mail their lucky wrappers to Tootsie Roll Industries on Cicero Avenue in Chicago (and for a time more than a hundred children a week will do this) eventually receive by way of reply not a Mayflower moving van full of Tootsie Roll Pops, backing up their driveway, but a letter headlined “Legend of the Indian Wrapper,” facsimile-stamped TOP SECRET in red ink. The letter tells the story of an American Indian chief who shot an arrow at a star and in doing so created “lollipops with a chewy candy center.” The letter is signed “Chief Shooting Star”—he sounds made up, like Iron Eyes Cody, not an authentic American Indian—and its bureaucratic tone becomes an early lesson for many children in the manifold disappointments life has in store for them.
A child who studies television closely enough in the 1970s will quickly learn the secret code that signals things are not really what they appear to be. Among the adult phrases that whisper something is a rip-off are “Batteries not included,” “Some assembly required,” “These items sold separately,” and the agonizing “Six to eight weeks for delivery.”
Television exerts an outsized influence on our lives, a cathode-ray hypnosis. The moon landing is not even the first time TV and space have conspired to mark a watershed in my young life. I was born twenty minutes before sunset on the last summer day of 1966, “The Long, Hot Summer,” as a headline in that day’s Chicago Tribune put it, the summer The Lovin’ Spoonful sang “Hot town, summer in the city.” The end of that summer meant the start of a great many other things: me, of course, and fall, a season fraught with the giddy anticipation and inevitable disappointment of a powerful annual event, the start of a new television lineup.
I was born at the start of the most exciting fall season of all, the first season in television history in which every prime-time program (bar news specials and old movies) on all three networks was broadcast in color. “In living color” was the vital phrase of the day, because for all the supernatural powers conjured by the sorceress in Bewitched or the genie in I Dream of Jeannie, they were still rendered in a monochrome that defied magic. That changed when I was born, at the moment the world—as in The Wizard of Oz—abruptly switched from black-and-white to Technicolor.
At 7:30 p.m. central time on the evening of September 22, 1966, while I was passing my first forty-five minutes of life at Elmhurst Memorial Hospital, a new show on NBC, Star Trek, in an episode titled “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” marked the network television debuts of Captain Kirk, Sulu, and Scotty. “Welcome aboard the United Space Ship Enterprise. Where it goes, no program has ever gone before…” read the display ad in the Tribune, which my father had folded into quarters in the waiting room, at which he had hastily arrived from O’Hare, having just flown in from urgent Mickey Mining business in Cleveland.
It is not impossible that Mr. Spock’s was the first face my mother saw after giving birth to me, or the second face after mine, given the time of Star Trek’s airing and—more crucially—the series of bowl haircuts she would direct me to get, in the basement, as my father manned the electric clippers for years to come.
My older brothers, Jim and Tom, will be exempt from these bowl cuts—Jim because he will cultivate a russet ’fro that will wax and wane throughout the 1970s, expanding and contracting as if it were a paper bag into which God was hyperventilating. Tom’s Brillo-pad hair likewise won’t lend itself to any form of basement taming. By the time Tom is seven, Bernie the Barber, scissors snipping in one hand, will survey his head from every angle and finally grab a handful of hair in exasperation: “Your hair,” he will announce, “belongs on a dog’s butt.” The statement is no less cruel—and possibly a great deal more cruel—for being true.
Still, there is something about his hair and his ears and his freckles that suit Tom. His constituent parts, like the various accessories of a Mr. Potato Head, are not much to look at separately. But assembled on the blank tuber of his face, they complement one another. Everyone says Tom looks like the MAD magazine cover boy Alfred E. Neuman. Hearing this often enough, Tom will take on Neuman’s behavioral traits as well. He will become a stirrer of pots, lighter of farts, collector of friends, and charmer of girls, forever riding his bike away from me.
So I, the third-born of three boys, will get the bowl cut, and Mom, to compensate for bedhead, will blow it dry and crimp it with a curling iron on school picture day, Macing me with a cloud of Final Net hairspray through sixth grade, the only flourish to the Spock bangs I’ll wear through junior high, evidently in homage to my birth at the birth of Star Trek.
To say that Mom might have wanted her third child to be her first girl is a matter of historical record. “What happened to the girl?” asked a well-meaning neighbor in a congratulatory card, which my parents thoughtfully preserved for me in a Tupperware memory box. Dad was pleased with a third consecutive son—indeed, My Three Sons was airing on CBS opposite Star Trek that night. I’ve been told he said, “I maintain my perfect record,” clapping his hands together in the waiting room. My father idly thumbed the Tribune while waiting for news of my arrival. The day’s horoscope contained a small addendum:
If Your Child Is Born Today: He or she will be a very practical person and want security from earliest youth. Otherwise the nature will be an unhappy one.
I am happy on this day, in this car, as we speed toward the Minnesota state line with windows halfway rolled down. Dad changes the station whenever our AM radio is fouled by music, including the ubiquitous hit in the middle of its six-week run at number one, “In the Year 2525,” a dystopian vision of man’s nightmare future.