Looking at proximity to presidents

I was 5 years old, born in Santa Cruz in 1960 and living in Olivehurst, north of Sacramento. Just a generation ago, it was a village settled by migrants from the Dust Bowl. My father was a Methodist minister and we lived in a boxcar parsonage. We had frequent mild earthquakes and watched in fascination as shock waves rippled across the linoleum floor in the living room. Mom said the house dreamed of its youth when it rode on the rails. It was not a wealthy community, but the sons and daughters of migrants were the first generation to be literate, and they achieved middle-class levels of achievement that surpassed their parents.

This became evident one October day when my family dressed in their Sunday best to join our similarly dressed neighbors and drive to park in a field next to a cow pasture. I asked, “Is this really the place?” Mom said: “A little further.” So the beautifully dressed residents of Olivia walked onto the railroad tracks, and women in high heels struggled over the gravel, rails and sleepers to stand on the tracks. My sister was asleep in my mother’s arms, and as the crowd closed in, I told my dad, “I can’t see!” So he picked me up and put me on his shoulders. Everyone looked at the tail of the train, parked on a single track, at the observation car with a rear balcony where people in suits were gathered. The young man made a short speech, which was applauded several times. When the speech ended, the train pulled away and I waved goodbye to the man. As we were leaving, I showed my ignorance of the election process by asking, “Is he president yet?”

These memories are quite vivid, and although I thought the man was Senator John F. Kennedy, when I was growing up, I was told that in the 1960s there were no national whistleblowers in California. I assumed that these childhood memories belonged to some local candidate. Then I found a report on the Internet that Kennedy had stopped in Fresno on the same line that passed through Olivehurst.

Teddy Roosevelt

Dad was a Roosevelt Democrat and Mom was a Teddy Roosevelt Republican. Teddy visited Santa Cruz in 1903 during his conservation tour of the West, promoting the concept of protecting America’s wild places. Mom’s father, Poppy (later a Santa Cruz resident), reminded her that their family helped found the Republican Party, free the slaves, secure equal rights, and preserve the Union. Poppy went to a rally for Roosevelt in 1912, who was on the Bull Moose Party ticket at the time, promoting progressives and conservationists. Poppy and his friends arrived to a crowded ballroom without a stage. With standing room only, his comrades stood at the back while Poppy pushed forward into the crowd. Finally, in the front row, Poppy found a couple of empty seats and took one.

Roosevelt then came in and, to Poppy’s surprise, sat down next to him as the speaker introduced the President. Poppy suddenly realized that the room was so crowded that he was at the edge of the crescent of seats for special guests, facing the crowd. Poppy was expecting to be ejected when Roosevelt turned to him and asked, “I forgot where we met.” Poppy was a Harvard graduate, so he asked, “Harvard, sir?” And Roosevelt replied: “Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes! It’s so nice to see you again!” Upon hearing this, none of the officials began to kick Poppy out, because he unwittingly became the personal guest of the president!

During the 1960 election campaign, Mom and Dad watched the presidential debates on television. Kennedy acted casually, casually, and good-naturedly, as if he had been president all his life. Nixon was pale, nervous and frowning, his five o’clock shadow making him gaunt and he was sweating like a guilty man. Nixon was vice president under Eisenhower, a man whose simple slogan, “I like Ike,” helped create appeal in a scary Cold War era when we knew the D-Day hero could keep us safe. But attractiveness was not Nixon’s focus. And my mother was torn about loyalty to her party. There were rumors that John Kennedy’s father was a bootlegger who bought his candidacy. However, Kennedy’s son-in-law and campaign staffer was Sargent Shriver. As a child, Mom met Sargent Shriver’s children as her playmates one summer, and she thought Shriver was one of the most intelligent, compassionate, and progressive men she knew and followed his impressive career as she grew up.

Santa Cruz County’s votes increased from 24,858 for Nixon to 16,659 for Kennedy. Nationally, Kennedy won the popular vote by 112,827 votes (a margin of 0.17%), and the Electoral College selected Kennedy by 303 points to Nixon’s 219. Dad, as a sermon writer, liked Kennedy’s speaking style. Mom always invited us children to listen to Kennedy speak on television, whether it was his wonderfully worded speeches or press conferences where he was spontaneous, insightful and witty.

He was the president of central casting, which is what Hollywood thought presidents should look like, but that rarely happened.

Nixon in Santa Cruz

Meanwhile, a defeated Richard Nixon decided that he could have a presidential rematch with Kennedy later in 1964 if he was first elected governor of California in 1962. After World War II, California was a strong Republican stronghold, and all of its postwar governors and senators were Republicans until 1958, when Democrats Pat Brown became governor and Claire Engle became senator. The key point was that California had a “Big Tent” Republican Party where conservatives, moderates and liberals were all at home. Nixon toured the state in 1962, holding a telethon in Sacramento on October 16, several rallies in the San Francisco Bay Area on October 17, ending the day at the Pasatiempo Inn near Santa Cruz, where he opened a press office and spent the night. . (Nixon Route, Nixon Library).

On the morning of October 18, Nixon went to Beach Street across from the Boardwalk Casino, where he was to begin a campaign to prevent informants aboard the Nixon Express to Los Angeles. It all started with a half-hour Santa Cruz rally on the train. In the 1962 gubernatorial primary in June, Nixon became the Republican nominee with 11,015 votes in Santa Cruz and Nixon’s 735 write-in votes from local Democrats. Brown won the Democratic nomination with 9,984 votes from Santa Cruz Democrats and 117 write-in votes from local Republicans. After Nixon’s rally in Santa Cruz, local officials left the Nixon Express, which chugged along to Watsonville for another rally. Nixon then arrived in Salinas, where he took part in a three-hour telethon on KSBW-TV, then traveled up the coast to San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara and Los Angeles before touring Southern California. Polls showed Nixon favored to win, and Pat Brown made a late start to the campaign.

In the run-up to Election Day, the Cuban Missile Crisis came to light on October 16, 1962, when Soviet nuclear missiles were discovered in Cuba. When Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev said, “We will bury you,” on November 18, 1956, most people believed that this was Russian foreign policy. The missile crisis caused panic as people began to calculate how far Cuba would hit where they lived. Kennedy’s advisers wanted an air strike on Cuba followed by an invasion. Richard Nixon publicly advised Kennedy that we needed a small war to prevent a big war. Instead, Kennedy chose to avoid declaring war by calling the military blockade of Cuba a “quarantine” to avoid the consequences of a state of war. Tensions eased on October 29 when Kennedy and Khrushchev agreed that the missiles would be removed in exchange for a promise not to invade Cuba.

Nixon continued to lead the race for governor of California until Election Day on November 7, 1962. But to everyone’s surprise, Nixon lost by 5%. Nixon blamed the press and said bitterly, “You won’t have Dick Nixon anymore!”

It was a treat for the whole family to go see “PT 109,” the story of Kennedy’s harrowing experiences during World War II in the Pacific. It appeared in June 1963. Five months later, classes were interrupted by a messenger. Our teacher conferred quietly and then told the class that Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. He was hospitalized with what were believed to be life-threatening wounds, so the school was closed and students were sent home. At home, we all listened to the news until that terrifying moment when Walter Cronkite, through suppressed emotions, said that Kennedy had died.

Eisenhower

In 1964, I was 9 years old and living in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada near Auburn. Jonas Salk’s sugar cube polio vaccine was a miracle of prevention. When I came down with a mild form of polio, I was told that without the vaccine I would likely be crippled. I had to be homeschooled for a year, but my Boy Scout troop met at my home so I could still participate in activities. I entered a national Girl Scout competition by writing an essay about why I love America, saying, “I love to dream, draw, and explore. I am free to learn about the wonders and mysteries around me. And I can grow up free and try to make some of my dreams come true.” To my surprise, I won the George Washington Medal of Honor, presented by General Dwight D. Eisenhower. (Auburn Journal, January 28, 1965). But I was even more impressed when Walter Cronkite read my name to the nation on CBS News.

Gov. Pat Brown cited University of California President Clark Kerr as a key figure in developing the California Master Plan for Higher Education, adopted in 1960. Bill, and then the baby boom of new Californians that followed. Ronald Reagan became anti-communist around 1947 while president of the Screen Actors Guild, but was also a Truman Democrat. In 1962, Reagan was fired as a representative of General Electric and registered as a Republican. In 1965, he decided to take on Democratic Gov. Pat Brown by running a law-and-order campaign against things like the 1964-65 Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley, believing that “academic freedom” was UC propaganda. full of communist teachers.

Reagan held a fundraising dinner in Santa Cruz on December 10, 1965, and returned in 1966 to give a political speech to the Ice Cream Retailers Association at the Riverside Inn on Barson Street. That same year, Reagan told UCSC planners that “we should not subsidize intellectual curiosity” and “there are certain intellectual excesses that perhaps we should do without.” (George von der Muhl in Seeds of Something Else – Volume 1, page 172). Donald Clark said, “He kept talking about higher education as a privilege.” (Ibid.). Reagan offended Republican liberals but defeated Pat Brown in the November 8, 1966 gubernatorial election. Reagan wanted UC President Clark Kerr to expel the free speech protesters, and when Kerr refused, Reagan fired him, sparking protests from both faculty and students. Reagan visited the UCSC campus in May 1967, staying at the Dream Inn.