ALAN writes:
One night last year, in the darkness just before I fell asleep, my eye was attracted by a light in an upstairs window of a neighboring house. It prompted me instantly to recall nights in the Autumn of 1965 when I glanced out my bedroom window just before going to sleep and saw a light in an upstairs window of the house next door. And that memory brought a trainload of others with it.
In late summer that year, we moved to a new residence in south St. Louis in the “Mount Pleasant” neighborhood, where daily life was indeed pleasant. I was fifteen and going to classes in a Catholic high school. To me at that age, life was still inviting and enchanting. The whole universe lay before me, or so it seemed. In one corner of my bedroom, I kept a small collection of books and magazines about astronomy, a prism, binoculars, and a telescope. On a wall, I placed maps of the night sky and the moon. I was blissfully ignorant of cultural trends and wholly unaware that a cultural revolution was taking place in America.
It was mostly a serene time in our lives. Both of my parents were in good health, as were my grandfather and aunts, uncles, and cousins. Of course I made the mistake of taking it all for granted.
As I lay there in the darkness, I gazed at the light in the window next door, but I had no particular curiosity about it. Nor did I think about the people who lived there, whom we never met. The light was just there, an ordinary feature in the landscape of everyday life.
My impression in 1965 was that most Americans were still confident and optimistic about the future. Those qualities could be seen in American manned space flights. From June that year, I remembered the flight of Gemini 4, with astronauts James McDivitt and Edward White, and the crystal clarity of the color photographs they took and that appeared in LIFE magazine a week later, and the spacecraft Mariner 4 that sent back photographs of the planet Mars a month after that. As I walked through our new neighborhood that summer with my transistor radio, I heard the song “I Got You Babe” by a new act called Sonny and Cher.
Those recent events and the night sky were a few of the things that occupied my thoughts on those nights. So was the song “Harlem Nocturne” and the night of Tuesday, Nov. 9, when we listened to news reports on television about the Great New England Blackout. I thought about those things because we had visited friends in New York City in June, when they took us to see the sights and taught us how to ride the subway.
By that time I had become a viewer of late-night television. Before we left for New York, I was naive enough to imagine I could get tickets for NBC’s “The Tonight Show” simply by writing and requesting them. Turned out that such a request had to be made months in advance. So I wrote instead to ask for tickets to “The Merv Griffin Show”, which also originated in New York City from “The Little Theater” off Times Square. I was delighted when they sent me two tickets.
I also remember another late-night program called “The Pamela Mason Show”, in which the actress and her daughter talked mostly about themselves. It seemed rather strange to me, but that was probably because of my youthful ignorance.
All those people and the confidence and optimism that were still tangible in American life that year are now long-gone. I did not know it then, but it was the twilight of a comparatively decent era in American life.
Of course it never occurred to me that a light in a window late at night sixty years later would prompt me to remember the light in that window on those tranquil nights in 1965: Sixty years of life bracketed between the lights in two windows.
I still have the two tickets to “The Merv Griffin Show”. But it might be a little too late for me to use them. They are stamped valid for Aug. 3, 1966.
