Remembering Life Before Disney Went Woke
by Henry Schulte
Although I’m going to start at the beginning –, which may be familiar territory for some of you –, I’m going to come full circle from my last column.
I recognize a number of my readers are younger and some of what I write may not necessarily be applicable at this time, but it will be.
How many of you remember when you were five years old? Were you thinking then about being twenty, fifty?
You probably never even gave it a blink of thought.
I lived in a modest home in Pasadena. I remember enough to know we had dinner as a family every night. The dining room was the kitchen. I clearly recall having to sit in the dark for hours on end until I ate my vegetables. My parents did not relent, which I now respect.
The evenings we spent as a family in the living room watching a twelve-inch black and white TV. It had thirteen channels on a knob that you had to manually turn, but there were only 12 available channels since the number one did not exist. Reception came via a set of “rabbit years” (antennae). I recall my father taking me to some retail store to look at the first color TVs coming out. The picture had a reddish tint and was not very pretty.
I was fine with black and white.
TV shows were much different. Sunday night was the best. We had “The Wonderful World of Disney” captivate us, with Walt himself sitting on the edge of his desk opening every show. Then there was “Bonanza” and the Cartwrights. My favorite of all, which I had to cry to be allowed to watch past my 7pm bedtime, was “Zorro.”
The shows were clean, family oriented, heartwarming and unified the nuclear family.
We moved to Santa Barbara when I was in the third grade. I entered San Roque School where I was taught catechism, went to church every day and we prayed in the classroom. We stood before the American flag each morning, covered our hearts, and said the Pledge of Allegiance.
Surfing the Waves, not the Web
We had recess and the kids played. We interacted. We talked to each other. And when we went home, after homework, we dashed outside to play. We never stayed in the house except for Saturday morning cartoons. Outdoors was the hub of activity. Climbing trees, making lousy skateboards using a hundred nails to hold steel skates on a piece of plywood. We ran around in parks and went to our friends’ homes to play.
I ordered a .22 rifle from Sears and would hike, alone, for miles up San Roque creek shooting squirrels, or trying to. No one thought it strange to see a ten-year-old carrying a rifle.
I was never good at group sports and discovered surfing. I could do it alone. I liked surfing more than school, but it saved my life. I had been severely bullied for reasons unknown to me. The entire neighborhood would encircle me throwing small stones and sending in girls to take punches at me. It was rough for a while. Surfing gave me independence, a purpose, and I didn’t need anyone else.
Santa Barbara was much different then, as I imagine many other small cities around the country were too. State Street turned to dirt at Five Points leading out to the lemon orchards. My mom would get stuck in the mud on Las Positas taking us to school.
For a period of time, I lived with my third-grade teacher. I would take a city bus from San Roque to downtown State Street and get a milkshake at Woolworth’s five and dime, a long-time forgotten department store. From there I would either walk miles to Oak Park where my teacher lived or take the bus.
Flash to the Future
Families don’t eat together anymore. Moms are gone all day working. TV shows are infused with political correctness. Kids don’t play outside. They have their heads buried in their phones. There are no PE classes. You would not feel it safe to allow a ten-year-old to travel across town on a city bus. The American flag has become a political punching bag. It’s lost respect among way too many Americans. And if a kid were spotted with a rifle walking through your neighborhood, SWAT and helicopters would descend upon the child and have him locked up before he could give his name.
There were no school shootings. Kids respected the teachers. There was no cursing in class. Even though I was a bit of rebel… okay, a rebel, I still didn’t do things that would harm anyone. I was a teenage boy trying to cross the line from kid to (young) man.
Many of my classmates got married during high school or soon thereafter. And many of us are still married. It will be 52 years for my wife and I.
My father gave us six months.
When you look back on the world, it couldn’t have changed more.
Is it for the better? I would guess we all have our own thoughts on that. There’s no way we could have prevented or stymied where we are today. For many, climbing trees, playing in a park, and eating as a family will be lost to the memories of a time gone by.
Even religion has taken a back seat. Whether you’re religious or not, the benefit of having a faith and going to church has played huge roles in people’s lives. Churches used to bulge with parishioners. Families would gather afterwards and socialize. Christmas and Easter brought out Christians in droves. I’m not familiar with the Jewish religion so I can’t speak to that, but like the Jews, Christians have increasingly become more persecuted. Liberal ideology has been painting people of faith as bad and we’ve witnessed it in our colleges; if you support terrorists, you get a pass. Youth are being taught it’s acceptable to attack religious beliefs; that hate is okay.
I for one bemoan the passing of those days building cheesy skateboards, climbing trees, and watching Disney before it went woke
Nice stuff, Henry. My parents divorced early, so I and my two brothers grew up with our dad, who was often absent (for work). We had lots of free time. Often though, that free time led to doing stupid and dangerous stuff. Two things I recall doing that were never smart: hanging on to the back of a city bus after a snowfall and being pulled along for a ride in the slush; building match guns out of clothespins (made with metal springs) and shooting each other with "strike anywhere" flaming wood matches. But, hey, we (most of us) made it through (though my younger brother lost the hearing in one of his ears when a firecracker went off prematurely in a pipe)...
Beautiful and touching, Henry. I'm 72 so I do know what you're talking about. I spent my first fifteen years in Altadena, as you know, above Pasadena. My mom thought Disney was a propagandist and didn't take me to see Bambi. Instead, she and my dad took me to see foreign films at The Esquire on East Colorado. So I'm quite possibly the only person of my generation who wasn't traumatized by the death of Bambi's mother. Instead I was traumatized by Jeanne Moreau in Liaisons Dangereuses. Disney was a client of my father's so we did go to Disneyland. I miss the old rides, that's true.
I didn't grow up in an innocent time. Nonetheless, I had an idyllic childhood in Altadena. I rode my horse into the mountains. My brother vroomed his go-cart up and down our street. But I wasn't allowed to walk to school or by myself. There were kidnappings and murders of children. The family next to us was beyond dysfunctional. The mother had a breakdown and wandered our street until her son and husband would get her and lock her up. My mom tried to intervene on the woman's behalf, but she got nowhere.
As a family we also watched tv shows together, but we thought the ones you mention were just good for laughs. I grew up on Mad Magazine. Which we all read as a family. And which means way more to me now than Disney. If I need cheering up I watch old Dragnets.
My family moved to Santa Barbara when I was fifteen. And then I did go to Disney movies - at the drive-in in Goleta. My stoner friends (I myself never liked or smoked weed) and I howled over Disney's The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes and the other hapless Disney films of the 60s. Sometimes we'd go to Disneyland. My friends would drop acid. I never did, so I drove us home.
I see this current Wokeness of Disney as just more Disney crap. I feel much sorrier that kids today don't grow up on Mad Magazine. Which today would be demonized for not being Woke and for making fun of Woke pieties.
But I never thought family life was better then. The next door woman I mentioned earlier shot her son in self-defense and killed him when he was sixteen. One of the Altadena girls of my generation went on to become a prominent Manson Girl.
What I feel pain over losing in all this isn't innocence, but my beautiful old and highly imperfect neighborhood in Altadena. It's gone now. The fire took it away. A Google photo of my street and childhood home looks like a bomb dropped on it. This has made me incredibly sad. And nostalgic. Because for all its human flaws, Altadena was a wonderful place to grow up in. And I mean because it was full of humans with flaws. In 2012 I wrote and performed a one woman show about growing up there called “Bad Role Models and What I Learned from Them.” My theme in my show was that it's often the most imperfect of people who teach us the best life lessons. After the fire an Altadena woman I didn't know wrote me via my website and told me how much my show meant to her and how much it means now because that Altadena, with all its imperfect characters is gone. And what Scott Weiner will try to build in its place will be an inhumane 15-minute city with perfect but deadly Wokeness.