Tuesday, March 31, 2015

September 17, 1967 The Fall, The Airport, The Material and The Scarce News


Dear Mother & Daddy,

"It gets more like fall every day. We had a tiny bit of rain last night and everything is damp and cold looking. But it isn't cold. The leaves have started to fall and some of the trees are turning. It sounds like fall.

ISU Yearbook photo
Yesterday I could hear the college band practicing and the town is full of students again--almost 11,000 of them at our school alone. We are going to the first football game tonight.


It hardly seems possible that Bob could have been here yesterday morning and won't be back home until Christmas. I haven't missed him much yet because I was so used to him going to work but it will hit me before long. B and I both went with him to the airport a little before nine. He was happy to be going and should have been back in the dorm by mid-afternoon. We sent a box of clothes ahead of him and just hope it doesn't take them too long to get there.

I hope Daddy is all right by now. Lots of people around here have had colds and a sort of flu. Ann had some cold but didn't feel too badly.

It sounds as if Maxine has a nice family. I'm glad she is all right.

My material finally came and matched fine so I've been working a little on my dress. It wouldn't take long to finish it if I could stay with it but there is always something else to do. I'm tired of having it around, too and don't really want to work on it. Ann has a cotton print cut out and basted but we haven't sewed on it, either.

I was supposed to go to a Pen Women tea in Princeville, Ill. tomorrow but we have to go to one here in Normal so I had an excuse.

I'm going to start working with the children at Sunday School again, too, so I'm going to be busy this year. Our new preacher is putting everyone to work.


News is scarce so maybe I should sew a while. Hope you both are fine by now."

                 Love,

                    Bonnie


NOTES: While news was scarce at home, that certainly wasn't the case otherwise. I can recall Mom's phone conversation about the daughter of a friend who renounced her citizenship and moved overseas to work with the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a radical and influential student group which was experiencing rapid growth at the time. This was big news for a small, midwestern college town.  Sadly, the girls' parents told her never to come back home, which was in Mom's terms, "heartbreaking".

Although the 1960s were relatively calm on the ISU campus, there was bit of excitement in 1967 when the basketball team was included in the NCAA national tournament. About 1500 students marched to the president's home demanding that classes be dismissed in order to attend the game! Our dad, who seemed always to support the students within reason, commented that their requests and actions were much more reasonable by comparison, than what was happening on many other campuses at the time.

Nightly news was always discussed between my parents and Mom wanted to hear the commentary, more than the news itself. She would often say, "Let's hear what Sevareid has to say." (Eric Sevareid was a CBS commentator from 1939-77, and the winner of the Peabody Award for Radio & TV News Analysis and Commentary in 1967.) The biggest news items of the fall of '67--Vietnam, Drugs and Civil Rights. And all were fair game for the nightly news. More on Sevareid here:  http://www.nytimes.com/1992/07/10/arts/eric-sevareid-79-is-dead-commentator-and-reporter.html

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