No hero, but smart enough to avoid danger
- Mike Dewey: Life Lines
- September 7, 2024
- 382
“Watergate does not bother me —
Does your conscience bother you?”
From “Sweet Home Alabama”
—Lynyrd Skynyrd
(1974)
About the last place you’d look for political insight 50 summers ago would have been from a band steeped in the Confederacy.
And yet …
If you weren’t around for Richard Nixon’s resignation in disgrace on Aug, 9, 1974, you missed out on history with a sense of humor.
Where else but America could someone as crooked as Tricky Dick, who had to be screwed into his pants like a light bulb, ascend to the highest office in the land, only to be doomed by trying to cheat in an election he eventually won by carrying 49 out of 50 states?
That kind of stupendous paranoia defies explanation. It was as if Galileo, not content to merely be the father of physics, astrology and, oh yeah, the guy who figured out gravity, decided to sneak into the Vatican and rig an election that would pick the next pope.
Nixon had to have been six shades of stupid to pull such a stunt.
I was 19 the day he gave up his futile quest for exoneration and flew back to California with tail between his legs, destined to become the poster boy as democracy’s most mutant and despised president, and I celebrated the only way that made any sense at all.
I went to a party and not just any party … the event of the year.
The timing was serendipitous, a happy accident, since the date had been scrawled on our calendars all summer, but that’s how life is.
When opportunity collides with necessity, you just ride the wave.
I didn’t have a car because my family was vacationing in Michigan, leaving me behind, which was fine because I was working at the college, mowing grass every day after having cleaned the restrooms on Fraternity Row with a toothbrush, a job so odious that, being the “new guy” on the crew, I had no choice but to do.
You haven’t lived until you deal with puke and other bodily discharges every day for 12 weeks. It can mess with your outlook.
Then again, I was determined to save enough money — getting the princely sum of $2.30 an hour — to buy a component stereo system, a beast that would shake Dillon Hall to its 19th century foundations after I’d gone back to Notre Dame for my sophomore year that fall.
After having survived as a freshman, owing to the grace of God and the burgeoning friendship of my soon-to-be roommates, I was ready to finally submerse myself in a total collegiate experience.
I figured a turntable, a cassette deck, an amp that pumped out 100 watts per channel and a pair of speakers that weighed 50 pounds apiece would pretty much guarantee a conquering hero’s return.
Unlike Nixon, I understood the value of planning the next step.
Which brings us back to that summer Friday evening in 1974.
My job, which I was lucky to land, may not have paid as well as the factory gigs some other friends home from their schools had, but it had the distinct advantage of allowing me to work outdoors for most of my eight-hour shifts, which I never took for granted.
Especially those weeks when the campus hosted cheerleader camps.
I won’t fall into a Nixonian trap by divulging and/or acknowledging all that I saw and/or did that summer. Suffice it to say the hourly wage I earned was more than I bargained for when it came time to observe girls in cutoff shorts and halter tops.
This was the mid-’70s, after all, and even though I didn’t have much in the way of social skills, I was a pretty quick learner.
As I’ve mentioned, my parents and siblings were far away up north somewhere, leaving me on my own with only the family dog to tend to. She was a bit of a termagant, a mongrel dowager who barely even noticed who fed her and walked her and made sure she still ruled the roost, a station in life she was more than used to.
I was gratefully copacetic with that arrangement, letting sleeping dogs lie, as it were, particularly when it came to entertaining a girl.
On the evening of Nixon’s leaving for good, she and I set off on foot, walking to the party that was probably 5 miles away, perhaps farther, but I figured that, sooner or later, we’d get picked up by someone I knew, which is precisely what happened. What I hadn’t counted on was her condition when we left four hours later.
Decorum prohibits me from going into more detail, since I am a gentleman, something any of my former girlfriends would attest to.
So on the night Nixon skedaddled, I slept in the same bed (that of my parents) with a girl, but it wasn’t like that, not at all. What I did was make sure a young lady in need made it through OK.
When you’re 19 and on your own, you tend to make mistakes, some of which can have lasting consequences. I didn’t do that.
To answer Skynyrd’s question, my conscience didn’t bother me.
Mike Dewey can be reached at Carolinamiked@aol.com or 1317 Troy Road, Ashland, OH 44805. He invites you to find him on his Facebook page, where Dick Nixon’s legacy is always debatable.