The year was 1959 and the Second World War had just ended in the previous decade. Or rather the curtain had just fallen on the second act of the First World War, aka the Great War, and a hero of that war--Dwight David Eisenhower--was safely in the White House and all was well with the country. Though not to hear his repeated opponent, Governor Adlai Stevenson of Illinois, tell it. We the outnumbered Young Republicans on American campuses were still humming a little ditty inspired by the Pepsodent radio and television commercials of the time: "Elect Stevenson pres-i-dent and you'll wonder where the-country-went."
I'd driven home to Shreveport from the University of Missouri's respected school of journalism at Columbia, Mo., and had given a lift to a strange student--strange to me, anyway--who was headed to the oil fields of southern Louisiana to work as a roughneck. He was a country boy who'd sacked out on one of the twin beds in my room, but didn't want to bother anybody. So before taking a Continental bus out the next morning, he'd slept on the bed without disturbing it in the least. Wearing a threadbare cotton T-shirt and a pair of worn blue jeans, he'd slept in his stocking feet, having taken off his raggedy tennis shoes and carefully placed them on the floor.
My grandmother, Bubba Rosa, was living with us then and must have recognized in him a fellow pilgrim caught up in the swirling dust storms of poverty, want and general deprivation that she knew all too well. She scarcely spoke a word of English, but the two communicated well enough. Before he left, she handed him a little peckeleh--a package--of cookies and other goodies she'd made, and off he went. We'd driven to Shreveport in my pride and joy, a 1959 white Mercury coupe with snazzy tail fins that I'd wash every weekend to get rid of the road dust.
There are sharp, ineradicable memories of the way things were, and there are dreams that can be stored away in the subconscious. And never the twain shall meet except in the distorted fashion of a picture by Picasso in which art takes precedence over reality. Call it dreamwork.
I'd hated being in the Army and yet in a recent dream I was strangely happy, as if I were in control of my life and not at the beck, call and frequent orders of the Department of the Army, USA, and knew even in in my semi-sleepy state that I could change this dream to please myself at any time.
I spent my weekends dating co-eds at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, not far from the shooting range where we brand-new second lieutenants trained cannoneers for Uncle Sam's army. After seeing the bloody effects of a training accident on the way to my BOQ (bachelor officers' quarters), I had become more safety-conscious than ever. And I knew that if the bubbles on the side of our 105-mm howitzers were off even by a hair, the artillery round might wind up in the middle of Lawton, Okla., instead of exploding harmlessly on the firing range. But in this dream I was safely in control and could change the dream any time I wanted to give it a happy ending.
But all that was just in my dream. Which was in full color. The green of my Army fatigues was greener than green, and the khaki uniforms drabber than drab. The sounds were in stereo, as befit a dream produced, directed and presented by this dreamer. And, oh yes, the vulgarities were even more vulgar than when I'd first encountered them back in the 1950s at places like Camp Leonard Wood in Missouri and Camp Polk in Louisiana, but it took only a few hours to get used to the lingo, and soon it was rolling off my back like any other noise in the background of a sound track produced in that decade.
Suddenly the power to alter even dreams was in my hands but, as any lover of history knows, power corrupts--and complete power corrupts completely. The greater challenge is to alter reality, so that if we but will it, it is no dream. Allow me to dedicate this column to all the skinny, hungry, ambitious kids out there in the Land of Opportunity who take advantage of the chance to make their own dreams reality. Wherever my Bubba Rosa is now, surely she sends her best wishes and highest hopes to the aspiring in this land of the free and home of the brave.
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Paul Greenberg is the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writer and columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Editorial on 08/23/2017