Memories sparked of elections past

The election is now in the rearview mirror, so maybe it’s safe to share some stories from elections past.

Stories like:

•My first moment of political awareness had to come when I was 7 going on 8. It was 1956, and Dwight D. Eisenhower was running for re-election. He was bald. He was grandfatherly. And he had what was to a 7-year-old the coolest slogan ever: “I Like Ike.”

Two memories stand out. Some buddies and I had ventured into an upstairs room in a building on Main Street where the GOP had its campaign headquarters. It was as if we had ventured onto another planet. But the Republicans were giving cool stuff away, and when you are 7, that’s what counts.

I took home an “I Like Ike” button. My parents, though they were Republicans, weren’t particularly thrilled about having their kid make a political statement. The Ike button ended up in a drawer somewhere.

•Four years later it was Republican Richard Nixon vs. Democrat John F. Kennedy, and I had a preference. Kennedy smiled. Nixon scowled. That was enough for me.

It also helped that we were hosting an American Field Service high school student from Uruguay who was head over heels for JFK. Her enthusiasm was infectious.

But there were no buttons or pins that I recall. My GOP parents weren’t big on Nixon; my mother had watched his style of dirty politics in California and didn’t care for it one bit.

So the campaign year was essentially a draw.

•Another four years later and I was 15 going on 16 as the election neared. In other words, I was old enough to have my own opinions. I’d gone through the shock of the Kennedy assassination, had warmed to Lyndon Johnson as he pushed through civil rights legislation, and was appalled by the extremism of Republican candidate Barry Goldwater.

My parents kept their views to their selves. They tended to be Republicans in the Rockefeller or Scranton mold. (You can look those references up on Wikipedia if you want to know what I’m talking about.)

As for me, I didn’t have enough sense to keep my views to myself.

I wandered by Jay County Democratic headquarters, which may actually have been in the same upstairs room on Main Street where I scored my Ike button, and picked up an “All the Way with LBJ” bumper sticker.

My parents were not pleased, though I suspected they were either going to vote for Johnson or skip that part of the ballot entirely. On top of that, my father hated bumper stickers in general.

I stuck it on some tin box on our back porch. And I’d come to regret even that.

•Four years later, I was 19 and getting ready to turn 20 a couple of weeks after the election. Any affection I might have had for LBJ was long gone because of the conduct of the war in Vietnam. So was much of my hair. As a college student, I got “clean for Gene” and campaigned door-to-door during Eugene McCarthy’s long-shot anti-war candidacy for the Democratic nomination for president.

It was instructive. Maybe we should just leave it at that.

The Quixotic campaign succeeded in getting LBJ to relinquish his spot at the top of the ticket, but a chaotic and dreadful Democratic National Convention set the stage for the election of Richard Nixon — yup, same old Nixon— in 1968.

I couldn’t vote that year because the voting age was still 21.

•Oddly enough I am not sure who I voted for in 1972, when Nixon ran for re-election. I only know that it wasn’t Nixon.

Positions had hardened, much like today. Democrat George McGovern was at the top of his party’s ticket, but the party was in disarray. Voters knew that McGovern was going to lose and lose big, so some cast their ballots for fringe anti-war candidates like Dr. Benjamin Spock, the guy who wrote the book on baby and child care that had shaped our generation.

•Then came Watergate, skullduggery, secret tapes, a presidential resignation, and a presidential pardon. And about the same time, along came inflation.

The U.S. economy started behaving in ways it had not before, and the folks in charge — of either party — didn’t seem to have a clue what was going on.

One night, about a year before the 1976 election with inflation running wild, I made a bet with a guy I had known since high school. I took the Democratic field. He took incumbent President Gerald Ford, a nice guy who had been thrust into a nearly impossible situation. The stakes: $10.

I won.

That’s enough for now, Maybe once the dust settles from our most recent contest I’ll return to the subject.

We’ll see.