A walk down memory lane: The 50-year time frame

I was interviewing Shirley Stewart of  Smyrna for a life story that will appear in the near future, and tears came to her eyes. She was speaking of a particular memory that really mattered.

I enjoyed the interview, as I usually do with folks who are a little more seasoned than me. I marveled at the way she lived, the roads she traveled and the things she saw.

Shirley started me to thinking about memory time frames that stick with us. They are usually not of the immediate past. Mine is of 40-60 years ago.

It was a time when we said, "A dollar's worth," to the gas station attendant, and he poured four gallons of gas into your tank, checked your oil and washed your windshield.

Now we stick a card into the pump, dispense $16 worth of gas ourselves, gamble that our oil is fine and head out with dead bugs obstructing our view.

It was a time when we produced our own gasoline and aspired to own a luxury Cadillac, Continental or Imperial. Now we fight wars left and right with our crude oil suppliers and aspire to own electric go-karts.

In 1957 I happened to catch the Richland-Stadium (Tacoma) state tournament basketball game on TV.  I figured the nickname Bombers was chosen because Richland bombed the nets regularly. I had no idea it was borrowed from Hanford.

I wondered how a high school came to be called Stadium or how a stadium came to be known as a high school. Did the students sit in bleacher seating?

About 1960, Dad found some old hickory-shafted golf clubs in a trash can in Sunnyside and brought them home, along with some scuffed, scarred and cut golf balls. My brothers and I had no idea how to play, but we had a pasture.

We sat around the TV on Sunday afternoons and watched Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus battle. Then we went to the pasture and tried to emulate them with our baseball grips and swings.

In 1960, a handsome young man who showed promise came onto the national political scene. I didn't care if he was Irish, but I thought it would be cool to have a Catholic president.

I was attending Central Washington University about three years later when John Kennedy was killed by Lee Harvey Oswald. Like many others, I thought the world had come to an end.

But we survived. We even grew up. As the truth about JFK and all the Kennedys, especially their father Joe, made its way into our history books, we realized we were all flawed.

That same 1960, an Olympic hero started a professional career that would change boxing, and all of sport, dramatically. He played us for suckers, and we fell into his money trap.

Taking a page out of professional wrestling, Muhammed Ali made himself a villain to a majority of us and created the $25 million fight. We paid to watch him lose. 

But he wouldn't. In the end, most us ended up admiring him. He predicted the round of a knockout and accomplished it. 

Ali truly floated like a butterfly and stung like a bee. He had the fastest feet and hands we'd ever seen. It was knockout by machine gun burst.

In 1963, Sandy Koufax, of my beloved Brooklyn-turned-LA Dodgers, blossomed into the best left-hander ever. Batters swore he threw a 100-mile-per-hour heater. And he had a wicked curve that dropped and looped and terrorized hitters.

The heart of Koufax's career came in the mid-1960s. For five years he was king. He pitched every four days and soaked his arm in ice water after every stint so he could have a career.

Koufax was a true ace. He did not participate in losing streaks. He stopped them. His greatest moment - mine too - came in the 1963 World Series when he struck out five straight of the hated Yankees, including Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris.

The highlight of my time frame of memories was "A giant leap for mankind." The world changed when Neal Armstrong stepped down from that ladder onto the moon.

I took my telescope to the front lawn that summer evening in 1969 and studied the moon more than ever. From then on, the sky would truly be mankind's limit.

There was a book titled "1984" that made a big splash while I was in high school. It foretold the future. Everybody read it. 

Except me. I didn't want to know. My future was at the end of the asparagus row. 

I still haven't read the book. I don't want to know what I've missed.