Sixty-five years ago today, the Russians fired Sputnik into the October sky.
Sputnik. NASA photo. Public Domain.
Of all people to kick off the Space Age—the Russians!
“Humiliation” does not capture the angst of a twelve-year-old American boy, which is what I was at the time.
“Disaster” would be closer.
Some adults may have been startled that humans had flung a projectile into space—a basketball-sized object that immediately took up a patrol of the heavens, blinking and beeping its way across the sky once every ninety-six minutes.
No twelve-year-old boy—as I was, at the time—batted an eyelash at the fact of space travel. Robert Heinlein, Lester Del Rey, and other fiction writers had conditioned us to expect it with confidence. But it was to have been done by Americans.
That the Russians launched the satellite was wrong on four counts.
First of all, the Russians were Bad Guys. They were communist dictators. They mocked everything we, the Free World, stood for. They tried to undermine us. They were evil.
Second, everybody knew the Russians could not invent anything. A-bombs and H-bombs, they had acquired by trickery. Spies like the Rosenbergs had given them our secrets. Virtually all goods in Russia—cars, airplanes, telephones—were copies of American models.
Third, since Russia was our enemy in a colossal struggle for world power, having their hardware pass over the United States sixteen times a day raised the specter of a surprise attack from outer space—maybe in the near future. This was a big-time worry for Pentagon planners.
My Own Nemesis
The fourth consideration was peculiar to me. Sputnik arrived on a day that was already my downfall. We were moving from Streator, Illinois (population 17,500), to Kenosha, Wisconsin. Kenosha was a much larger city: It was industrial, foreign, and most of all, it was not Streator, where I had oodles of friends.
I was hardly in a mood to understand the great advantages of my father’s upward job change.
On Saturday morning, October 5, the one appliance that had not been packed in the moving van was a small table radio. Mom was about to unplug it to put in the car with the other odds and ends when the CBS Radio News announced the launching of Sputnik. They even played a recording of the new satellite’s strange, plaintive beep.
That beep signaled that not only had my parents betrayed me by uprooting me from my accustomed home, but the treacherous Russians were piling on. The failure of America’s Vanguard rocket a few months later only added to the misery.
#
Now that it’s sixty-five years past, I’ve learned to be philosophical about it. I even have some good memories of Kenosha. But the emotions of a star-struck young lad still resonate after all those years.
I hope all your orbits, Gentle Reader, will be happy ones.
Saturday I attended the 60-year reunion of the Mary D. Bradford High School Class of 1962.
It was a great time.
I lived in Kenosha, Wisconsin, only a few years, from 1957 to 1962. I arrived as an eighth-grader at Lincoln Junior High. So my friendships among high school classmates were not of the kind that went all the way back to first grade.
But one of the things you learn when you are old, Dear Reader, is that it’s always great to gather with friends you have known for more than half a century. Even if you hardly knew someone way back then, you have so much in common sixty years later! So, at a reunion you can bond closely with someone you hardly knew in days of yore.
Our class started with 831 freshpersons and graduated 537 seniors. In those days, there was a lot of attrition.
At least 147 of our 537 graduates have passed on—a frightful toll, considering that we are only in our late 70s. Of the remaining 390, some are now in poor health, while others live at a great distance.
Among the 75 classmates who showed up for this year’s reunion, there were many whom I remembered, and who remembered me. None of them were especially good buddies sixty years ago—but they were long-lost pals now!
Wayne Blackmon was there, who used to sing a very suggestive verion of the innocent 1920s song, “Does Your Mother Know You’re Out, Cecilia?” I exchanged greetings with Armand Mattarese, our legendary quarterback, who also shared a beachfront beer-and-bonfire bash with me and a few nice girls on our graduation night.
Rose Marie Pellegrino, who used to be one of the real spark-plugs of our class, spoke with me of the books she likes to read. She commended Louise Penny’s mysteries to my attention, and I mentioned to her Romain Gary’s excellent 1961 memoir, Promise At Dawn.
I learned of the lives, the trials and triumphs of classmates Sandy Zacho and Lucille Turco. Len Iaquinta put in a good word and followed up with an offer to connect me with a Southeast Wisconsin podcaster. Abby Cohen Schmelling was fascinated to hear I had written a novel based on my family’s genealogy.
Walter Modjelewski had a wonderful long career in the metal castings business and is doing great. We exchanged health info. “I take nothing,” he said. I’m in awe. I think I’m healthy, but I depend on three or four regular pills.
Joyce Sawicki, a beautiful girl then, is still a knockout–and a caring friend.
Some of my Class of ’62 friends even knew about my forthcoming book, said they had pre-ordered it, and wished me good luck.
But selling books was not the main point of the exercise. Mainly, I was just glad to learn I was not the only survivor.
Blessings,
Larry F. Sommers, Your New Favorite Writer
Price of Passage
Norwegian Farmers and Fugitive Slaves in Pre-Civil War Illinois
It was the size of a double-wide house trailer, but flashier. Green and silver and glass and shiny, like a future mode of transportation.
I didn’t think Galesburg had seen anything like it before, and in fact the old town might not be ready for it yet. It was only 1963.
I leaned on the lampost at Simmons and Cherry, watching. In five minutes, the thing did not move. The only hint of its identity was a big sign on a steel pole: CHARLIE NASH’S BIG GUY.
Some clue.
The green panels are now red, and the sign has changed; but in six decades, the future mode of transportation, pictured here with a couple of present modes of transportation, has still not moved. Photo from Google Earth 18 July 2022.
I went in. Tables and chairs stood along the front windows. On the other side, a short man in a white shirt stood behind a counter. His crewcut head resembled a ripening peach.
“What is this place—a restaurant?”
“Could be,” the man said. “You need a job? Where you from?”
“Kenosha. Wisconsin.”
“Kenosha, fancy that. I’m from Fort Wayne.” He stuck out his hand. “Charlie Nash, the Fort Wayne Flash.”
Perhaps I gave him a strange look, for he winked. “That’s okay. I need a busboy-dishwasher-salad set-up man for the noon rush. You can be the Kenosha Flash. Think you can handle it?”
I mentioned my weeks of service at the Keno Family Drive-in Theater concession stand.
We shook hands.
#
Charlie Nash turned out to be a peach of a boss. He taught me to run the dishwasher and how to set up salads and garnishes. When things were slack, he taught me to grill hamburgers and manufacture his signature sandwich, the double-decker “Big Guy” with shredded lettuce and Charlie’s special secret sauce. “It’s just tartar sauce,” he said, “but we’re the only ones that use it on hamburgers.” Contrary to my expectations, it was tasty.
In between rushes, he taught me all I know to this day about sports betting. If I give you Notre Dame and six-and-a-half points, my team needs to beat the Irish by a touchdown.
I worked all that autumn from eleven to one, six days a week, at a dollar per hour, which was standard for scullery work in those days. I believe Harley made a dollar and a quarter an hour, or maybe a dollar and a half. Harley was the actual fry cook, spinning out Big Guys and all sorts of other burgers during the thick part of the noon rush.
Harley was gaunt, lanky. He had a tattoo on one hand and smoked Kools, a dire mentholated cigarette brand. Harley was a rough customer, with greasy black hair and a wasted look, like Johnny Cash before June Carter got hold of him. He was middle aged—like forty-five, only maybe he was thirty-five and looked ten years older, if you know what I mean. Haggard look aside, he seemed like a nice guy, quiet and reserved.
Charlie Nash’s only reservation, which he told me in private, was that periodically Harley did not show up on Monday morning. That meant he was “off on a toot” and would come dragging in two days later, after the hangover had passed and he remembered he still needed money.
Another employee, who probably made a dollar ten plus tips, was Winnie. She was, like me, a Knox student. Only she was a first-semester freshman, whereas I was a sophomore. She was a bustling hive of competence, her waitress uniform packed with capabilities.
It was a joy to watch Winnie work. I was not the only spectator. I think quite a few of the regular lunchtime guys actually came to ogle Winnie.
One day in late October, lunch counter heroism was called for. There was no Harley, which was not terribly unusual. But there was also no Winnie. More than sixty dollars was missing from the till.
“We won’t see them again,” Charlie said. “They’ve probably gone off to Peoria, and who-knows-where after that.” Sixty bucks could take them quite a ways. It would be a couple of weeks before they really needed to work. They could be in Wichita by then.
Charlie looked fuzzily forlorn, let down by those he had trusted. But he took the loss like a philosopher, not being the kind of guy who would hold a grudge.
His wife, whose name I no longer recall, issued quite a few “Hmpfs” as she dashed about the small diner, taking orders and clearing tables. But she was a loyal trooper. You could tell this was not the Nashes’ first disaster.
We survived the day and carried on.
Harley’s absence got me promoted to approximately one-half dishwasher-busboy-setup man, and about one-half short-order cook. By then I knew the menu and could turn out each item flawlessly, thus giving Charlie the breathing space to schmooze with the customers, a vital necessity of trade.
#
One day a month later, as I was shucking my apron to return to campus for afternoon classes, an old kibbitzer at the counter made some wisecrack about “what Kennedy got,” which puzzled me. I paid attention to the news in those days, but I didn’t know what Kennedy had gotten.
The Galesburg Register-Mail’s printing plant was just a block west of my route back to campus, and I jogged over there to see the morning’s headlines. The pressmen always wrote them in crayon on a big sheet of newsprint and taped it in the window before they took the afternoon paper to press.
This day no headline sheet was posted. The big press visible through the window stood idle, no pressmen in sight.
As I walked back to school, I saw no other pedestrians. No cars cruised the streets. I seemed to be the only citizen at large.
A figure came toward me from Seymour Union, the main gathering place for Knox students. It was Ray Gadke, a campus personality.
“Hi, Ray,” I said. “What do you know?”
“They killed him,” he said, tears flowing down his cheeks. He kept walking.
In 1963 there was only one television on campus. It was in Seymour Union. The place was packed. The television lounge was full, students and faculty members spilling into the halls. People leaned against walls. Some lay limp on the floor, sobbing.
JFK in Dallas, 22 November 1963. Photo by Walt Cisco, Dallas Morning News. Public Domain.
Martin Agronsky. Public Domain.
You could not get near the big floor model TV set in the back corner of the lounge, but the volume was turned all the way up. Martin Agronsky, an NBC reporter, his voice trembling, stated that President Kennedy had been pronounced dead.
#
Harley and Winnie never did come back.
Neither did John Kennedy.
Blessings,
Larry F. Sommers, Your New Favorite Writer
Price of Passage
Norwegian Farmers and Fugitive Slaves in Pre-Civil War Illinois
Ray Bradbury in 1975. Photo by Alan Light, licensed under CC BY 2.0.
“The best hygiene for beginning writers or intermediate writers is to write a hell of a lot of short stories. If you can write one short story a week—it doesn’t matter what the quality is to start, but at least you’re practicing, and at the end of the year you have 52 short stories, and I defy you to write 52 bad ones. Can’t be done. At the end of 30 weeks or 40 weeks or at the end of the year, all of a sudden a story will come that’s just wonderful.”
—Ray Bradbury, from “Telling the Truth,” the keynote address of The Sixth Annual Writer’s Symposium by the Sea, sponsored by Point Loma Nazarene University, 2001
What a challenge! Your New Favorite Writer is champing, as they say, at the bit. For the next year, I shall endeavor to write one new story each week. Why? Consult George Mallory (R.I.P.) on the joys of mountaineering.
Here’s how you can help this project: The stories I will post here are first drafts. As Bradbury implies, they may not all be perfect. The one quality they will all share is that they have been written down.
So please read them, and let me know what you think. Praise them, pan them, suggest alternative plots or endings, criticize the style. This is a learning exercise for me, Dear Reader—and I hope for you as well. To help you with time management, I have begun posting read times at the head of each blog post. If you don’t have time now, come back for it later when you do have time.
Engage me in dialog by posting a comment below, by posting a comment on my Facebook page, or by emailing me: larryfsommers@gmail.com.
Today’s story starts right below my picture. Happy reading!
The bozo who had knocked me sideways was halfway down the grassy embankment, galloping through the Tuesday night crowd at the Washington Park Velodrome.
Right behind him ran my 20-year-old granddaughter. Her face as she zipped by said she was up to her neck in trouble.
Trouble? I knew that girl. Naught but mortal danger would fling her pell-mell across people’s blankets, right through picnics and cuddle sessions, and across the floodlit track, heedless of bike racers sprinting at sixty miles per hour.
My granddaughter? Impossible. At age twenty myself in July 1964, I did sports for KENO-FM, always after the human angle, anything beyond times and speeds. Too busy for girlfriends, not to mention marriage.
How could I have a granddaughter my own age?
No time to think. She chased that nasty-looking leather-clad thug. My inner grandpa could not help it: I plummeted down the bank after them, disrupting carefree cycling fans for the third time in ten seconds.
“SPECTATORS OFF THE TRACK!” bellowed the P.A. announcer as I crossed the banked oval in the paths of two Schwinn Paramounts, which swerved perilously to miss me. On the green infield, a cop gave chase. I jinked to the right behind the red Kenosha Scouts Rescue Squad truck, where my granddaughter had gone, right behind the hoodlum, just seconds before.
Plunged into the truck’s half-shadow, I stopped cold. Where had they gone?
Pinpoint sparkles, shimmering in mid-air, formed a bead curtain of the beatnik variety. I dove through it.
Crowd noise vanished. Dusk became night—not gradually, as is customary, but all at once. I lay on damp grass, knees and hips aching. Had I hurt myself?
The joints screeched as I pushed off the grass to stand up. My hands looked funny, too, even in the dark. The floodlights atop their tall poles had gone out. No crowd sat on the embankment. The Boy Scout rescue truck, all the cyclists, bikes, and spare wheels, all the coaches and helpers were gone from the infield, too.
Tuesday night had vanished.
I stood dizzy and gasping. What’s wrong with me? I felt the urge to punch something. I clenched my fists but stopped when my stiff knuckles complained. Just then a bright beam struck my eyes.
“Gramps!” I’d know that sweet voice anywhere. “Is that you? What are you doing here?”
I splayed my hands in front of my face. In stark silhoutte, the fingers looked bumpy and twisted.
The dazzling light went away. I squinted towards the vector of her voice.
She called, “It’s me, Gramps. Kaitlyn. I’m over here.”
Kaitlyn? What kind of name was that?
I spotted her near the picnic shelter, fifty feet away. She waved her light above her head. I staggered towatds her. Why can’t I walk right?
“What are you doing here?” I asked. “You’re not supposed to be, that is . . . .” What do you say to someone who can’t exist, yet whom you love like life itself? Yet even her name eludes you? Mister Hot-shot Radio Guy was fresh out of glib.
She took my hand. Her other hand touched my shoulder. “Are you all right, old-timer?”
“Old-timer? Who, me? Well . . . I don’t know.”
“Oh!” she cried, pure concern on her winsome face. “How can I help?”
“Look. I need answers. Like, what happened to that hood you chased? If you ask me, he’s not your type.”
“You’re confused. He wasn’t wearing a hoodie.”
Hoodie? “Not wearing a hood!” I snapped. “He is a hood. Come on, don’t play dumb. Let me in on the gag.”
“There’s no gag, Gramps. Did you see where he went?”
I sighed. “No.”
“And why are you here all by yourself on a Monday night?”
“Monday? It’s Tuesday.” I saw she didn’t believe me. “At least, it started out Tuesday.” She looked askance. “And why did you chase that hooligan?”
“Hooligan?”
“Hood, slimeball, thug—”
“Just protecting and serving, Gramps.”
The murk in my mind turned muddy. “What are you talking about, girl?”
“Didn’t Mom tell you about my new job?” She held up a slim rectangle of metal and glass. Tiny colored lights glowed on its face. She tapped it with her finger, and a shiny gold shield appeared on a field of white. “Kaitlyn Caruso,” she announced, “Special Agent, Temporal Fugitive Warrants Division.”
That dumbfounded me.
She tried to ease my befuddlement. “Think of me as a time ranger. A skip tracer on the Space-Time Continuum. My job is to nab felons who abscond from the twenty-first century.”
Twenty-first, did she say? “But, what happened to—”
“Guys like Jared Quickshift, for example. That creep you saw me pursuing. I had just collared him in 1964, but he slipped away and jumped back to now. He should be around here somewhere.” She swiveled her head, on the alert.
“This Jason—”
“Jared, Gramps. Although come to think of it, Jason applies. He’s on a quest for the Golden Fleece.”
“I knew it. What’s his game?”
“The warrant says intellectual property theft.”
I waggled my brow. “Isn’t that like trademark infringement? He looked like a more violent type.”
“He’s dangerous all right. That’s why I go armed.” She pointed to a holster on her hip.
“Oh, my.”
She winked. “He can’t have gotten far, though. Stand back.”
Two doors stood side-by-side in the pavilion’s back wall. She stationed herself smack dab between them, about ten feet off, and drew her weapon. “Police, Jared! We know you’re in there. Come out with your hands up, or we’re coming in.” She leveled her weapon.
What did she mean, “we”? I hoped she would not tap me as a reinforcement. I felt weak and vulnerable.
After a tense silence, the door marked WOMEN banged open. The creep in the leather jacket burst out. He sprang sideways.
Kaitlyn twisted, her weapon on the criminal. “Halt!”
He didn’t halt.
A Pop!, like champagne being uncorked. Jason Nogoodnik sprawled on the concrete floor of the pavilion. He howled and wiggled in uncoordinated spasms.
Kaitlyn leapt on him, handcuffed him, looked up at me, and smiled.
I approached with caution. “Is he dead?”
She laughed. “Naw, he just wishes he were. Look here.” She whipped out her steel-and-glass rectangle and tapped one of the lighted squares. A bright beam leapt out from the tip of the thing. She aimed it at the crook’s head.
“Pretty good shot,” she said, matter-of-factly. “I had to find an unprotected area.” She pulled two small darts from the back of his neck. “These might have just bounced off his leather jacket.”
“What kind of a gun is that?”
“Called a taser. Less-than-lethal takedown option.”
The man lolled helpless on the floor of the park shelter. I guess it took him down, all right.
Kaitlyn delved in his leathery pocket and drew out a black metal tube half a foot long, with a bulge at one end. “Here’s what it’s all about, Gramps.” She twisted the thing and light sprang forth. A further twist focused the beam to a spot on Jared’s face. “It’s a Mini-Maglite. He hoped to smuggle this into 1964, for reverse engineering by pirates. He stood to make a bundle.”
“I’ve never seen a flashlight like that.”
“No? They’ve been around since 1984. Mom always says you’re not very observant.”
“1984? How can that be?”
“I don’t know, Gramps. Look, here’s the point. What if this creep had pre-introduced this invention twenty years before its time? Think how that could twist up Space-Time. It’s lucky I managed to chase him back to now.”
I shook my head to try to clear the cobwebs. “I don’t understand.”
“Suppose some ’sixties car mechanic makes a quick repair out on I-94 on a snowy night because he’s got a flashlight small enough to hold in his mouth while he tapes two wires together. Otherwise he would have had to tow it in, the customer might have been late for his sales call the next morning, and—”
“It might have changed the course of events.”
“Bingo.” She nodded emphatically. “But we’ve got Jared and the Maglite, right back here in 2021, where they belong. So, no harm done.”
Suddenly, it all came clear to me.
Well, no. It was half clear to me.
I held up my hands in a gesture of supplication. “Let me just get one thing straight. You followed this bozo from 2021 to 1964 to apprehend him?”
“That’s right.”
“And now you’ve brought him back to 2021.”
She nodded. “So?”
“So, how do you do that?”
“Do what, Gramps?”
“Travel from one time to another.”
She snorted and jerked her head towards her prisoner, who now sat upright. “Guys like him figured it out before we did. The crooks are always a step ahead of the law, you know.”
“It was ever thus. But do go on.”
“Who knows how much damage they did to the future—that is, the present—before we caught on? We’ll never have any idea. However, we now know there are special places where time-holes open up for brief periods. You can just step through from one time to another.”
“Special places?”
“Velodromes, to be precise.”
“Bike tracks. Like Washington Bowl.”
She smiled as she hoisted the now-docile Jared to his feet. “But only on Tuesday nights in the summer.”
“Because?”
“Something about a certain mass of chromium-molybdenum alloy—such as custom racing bike frames—orbiting a given spot at high speed. Sorry, I’m no scientist.”
“Ahh.” Neither was I a scientist, yet who can resist chromium-molybdenum alloys?
“So I left 2021 six days ago—last Tuesday night. I tracked Jared down right away, got the drop on him, and stashed him in a safe house off Sheridan Road until Tuesday night. As we crossed Washington Road on our way to the velodrome, he got away from me in the crowd, ran across the track, and jumped back into 2021. With me right on his tail, naturally.”
“Sounds suspenseful.”
“All in a day’s work. What knocked me sideways was finding you here in the middle of the chase. You still haven’t told me what brought you here on this particular night.”
“Isn’t it obvious?”
“If you don’t want to say, that’s all right. But my prowl car’s just over on Eighteenth Avenue, where I left it six days ago. Let me drive you home so you can get some rest.”
“Nothing doing, you young whippersnapper.”
“Gramps, what’s the matter with you?”
“I’m fifty-seven years too old, that’s what!”
She made a face as if I spoke gibberish.
“Listen,” I explained. “I started this night on Tuesday, July 21, 1964, but somehow ended up here, in the Buck Rogers era. It’s aged me some.” I held up gnarled, shaky hands.
“Who’s Buck Rogers?”
“Look him up in your Funk and Wagnall’s. The point is, to get home I’ve got to go through that curtain thingy backwards.”
Jason the Hoodlum spoke up. “He’s right, Madame Copper. You gotta send him back to the Sixties. Me too.” He gave a massive heave, to wrest himself out of her grip. She was too strong, too fast, too smart. Put him in a painful hold and knelt him back on the ground again. That’s my girl.
“Shut up, you.” She turned to me. “Gramps, what you say is impossible. No one can go forward in time, to the future. It doesn’t work that way.”
“How can you say that? You and Jason just did it.”
“No, we didn’t. We used something called Nerdleman’s Law to go from the present to the past. Then we used Axenberg’s Corollary to Nerdleman’s Law to return to our original time frame, that’s all.”
“Yes, and I came along, right behind you.”
She looked exasperated. “If you had, that would shatter our whole model of Space-Time. You’d be a resident of 1964 going into the future. That’s impossible, just as it would be impossible for Jared and me to step into, let’s say, the twenty-fifth centiury.”
“Why?”
“Because that’s our future, just as—if you were a 1964 person—now would be your future, a place you can’t get to except by the normal passage of time. Don’t you see?”
I filled my gaze with her gorgeous, red-headed earnestness. “Like all children, you’re cute as a button when you know you’re right despite the fact you’re wrong.” She glared at me. “I tell you, I dove—dived—dove right through that shimmering curtain of light behind the Scouts’ rescue truck.”
For the first time, her face showed doubt. She frowned at Jason, still on his knees, in her grip. He made a “How would I know?” shrug.
A brilliant thought came to me. “Listen, Catherine—”
“Kaitlyn.”
“Ah—Kaitlyn—yes. Now, listen. If I’m right, your grandpa will be found alive and well here in 2021 Kenosha—but not in the form of me standing here in Washington Park.”
“You’re saying you’re a duplicate?”
I huffed in annoyance. “I’m saying, I’m twenty years old and I belong in 1964.”
She frowned. Jason, restive in her firm grasp, looked up at me in wonder.
“Here’s how you can prove it. Let’s lock Jason here in your squad car nice and snug. Then let’s go find a phone booth. Call your grandpa. If he answers, I promise it’s not me playing Señor Wences.” I dug in my pocket with shaky, withered hands. “A 1964 dime still work in a 2021 phone booth?”
She gave me a strange look, then sighed. “Okay, you win.”
She shoved Jason all the way to the ground and stood on his neck. Then she whipped out her strange little rectangle, touched a bright patch, then another one. She held the gizmo up to her ear. A sound like a telephone’s buzz was followed by a tinny little voice.
“Gramps?” Her and her eyes went wide. “Where are you?”
Silly question. He answered his phone. He must be at home.
After another string of tinny voice gibberish came out of the thing, Kaitlyn said, “I see. Okay, just checking. Sorry I disturbed you. Don’t lose too much.” She touched the rectangle again and the sound went dead.
I gloated. “See? You found him at home.”
“No. He was at a friend’s house, where he plays poker.”
A poker-playing friend? It had to be. “Lumpy Bernacchi? He still alive?”
Her jaw dropped. She nodded warily.
“See? That proves I’m him. He’s just not me. Not yet, anyhow. I belong back in the Sizzling Sixties.” I turned to go back the way I had come.
“Where you going, Gramps?”
“Back to the time curtain.”
“You won’t find it. It’s Monday night. No bikes.”
I looked back toward the track. Of course. She was right. I scanned the dark, silent velodrome. No spinning molybdenum in sight.
#
Kaitlyn pledged me to secrecy, so I can’t tell you the details. She found a place where I could stay, in reasonable comfort, in complete isolation from all the denizens of 2021—including my old friend Lumpy and my own adult daughter, whom I’ve never seen—for six days, until the next Tuesday night bike races. Then she spirited me over to the infield on a special police pass.
Now, I’m back in my own timestream.
When I first came back, I spent a long while confused. But now that I’ve had almost a year to mull it over, my dilemma has resolved itself.
I’m now convinced Axenberg and Nerdleman got it right. Known facts to the contrary notwithstanding, I could not have paid a visit to the year 2021. My real presence in 2021 would extinguish whatever future I have here in 1965. The only way I can possibly get to the twenty-first century is the old-fashioned way: Clean living and good luck.
My granddaughter’s phone call to my septuagenarian self cuts no ice. I won’t believe I live in 2021 until I actually do. Anyway, how could they have phones like that?
Right now I’m going to listen to the radio broadcast of the Liston-Clay rematch from Lewiston, Maine. I’ll have to break it off to go to the Tuesday night bike races, unless the fight goes short. Who knows? Maybe this time Sonny will flatten him in five.
Cassius Clay, later known as Muhammad Ali. Public Domain.Larry F. Sommers
Author of Price of Passage—A Tale of Immigration and Liberation.
Price of Passage
Norwegian Farmers and Fugitive Slaves in Pre-Civil War Illinois
