On the morning of Sunday, October 29, 1978, Janice and John
Pershing welcomed their daughter, Catherine Leigh Pershing, into the world,
bright and early at 1:13 AM, in Mesa, Arizona.
They agreed to call her Katie.
Their daughter was something of a wedding present; John and Jan had been
married only about a week. They would
have married sooner, but had to wait for Jan's divorce to be final. Katie's brothers and sisters (well, half
siblings, anyway, they were all much older) had an ambivalent reaction to her
arrival. Her oldest brother, Joe,
remembers it as "the best of times and the worst of times." He stopped by to see his mother and new baby sister
on his way out of town to report to Navy boot camp. Her oldest sister, Irene, was likely spending
the weekend with a friend, although she doesn't remember for sure; what she
remembers most clearly was frustration with their mother for being pregnant in
the first place. The fifteen year old
was uncommonly responsible for her age (a label which was never applied to Jan)
and thought that, perhaps, some reckless decisions had been made. Middle siblings Bill and Diane did report
their activities on this day when questioned; however, in an attempt to protect
the innocent and the unindicted, those activities will not be reported in this
forum. Happily, it all worked out in the
end, or as Irene put it, "We decided to keep you," and they all lived
happily ever after. Actually, that last part is
categorically untrue, but all of that is beyond the scope of this paper.
That Sunday was special for more reasons than Katie's birth. Millions of Americans woke up happy to have
an extra hour of sleep, due to the end of daylight savings time that
morning; in fact, Katie was born during
the hour of the time change, causing some historians to question just how long,
exactly, after midnight the birth occurred.
Later that morning, many Americans read Sunday papers with their coffee,
many of which would have included this Garfield comic:
Like all fall Sundays in the United States, football was on
the afternoon menu. The box scores and
some of the statistics from that day in football can be found here:
Perhaps more interesting, and more representative of typical
American life at that time, is this string of commercials that played during
the football game that day
Less interesting but
pertinent to the assignment is the Billboard Chart's #1 song that week, which
was Nick Gilder's Hot Child in the City.
If you are like me, you have never heard of this song. If you are like me, you are glad you've lived
your life this long without having to be exposed to this truly terrible song,
and will not choose to listen to this YouTube of it:
If you foolishly listened to
that, you have only yourself and the terrible musical taste of young people in
the late Seventies to blame.
In more serious news,
according to the front page of the Dallas Morning News, the President of the
United States was struggling with a crisis in the Middle East, a local police
officer and politician was caught up in a scandal, and voters were bitter and
apathetic. Wait, that was this week, in 2014. Wait, no, it was 36 years ago, its just that
pretty much nothing has changed:
For more national and
international news, I looked at the Washington Post. This story: http://libproxy.utdallas.edu/login?url=http://search.proquest.com.libproxy.utdallas.edu/docview/146872025?accountid=7120
discussed the Pope meeting with East German leaders. Other stories listed covered issues with the
Soviet Union, including relations and allegations of spying in the United
States. Those stories, in particular,
struck a note with me today, because those nations are gone with the Cold War
wind, but it doesn't feel that long, to me, since they were around. By the time my three year old daughter is old
enough to care, the Soviet Union and all the Eastern Bloc countries will have
been gone for over thirty years, long enough to feel like ancient history.
Even though the events chronicled here are from the day I
was born, obviously before I was aware, they are not that removed from my memory
times gone by. The hairstyles, the
clothes, the newspapers and comics, all look very similar to what I remember as
a little kid. Even though I'd never
heard of my birthday's number one song, many of the others on Billboard's chart
for that year were radio frequent flyers when I was growing up (1978's
Billboard charts to be found here: http://www.billboard.com/archive/charts/1978/hot-100
. If I'd been born a week later we could
have had Anne Murray's awesomeness in this piece, but alas, I was born to into
bad luck). For the first time, I'm
beginning to feel that I'm no longer part of the generation that's coming up;
I'm part of the generation that's on its way out. While I, hopefully, have more years ahead of
than behind me, those years are passing with a lightning swiftness I couldn't
have imagined when I was 18 or 20, and I'm suddenly very conscious of the fate
that awaits me at the end of this journey.
Wow. This has been a very uplifting assignment.
