The clock flew past midnight. 1963 arrived. Tides of change were already roiling on day one. The weather was an overture. Birmingham, Alabama was struck by a rare winter treat when eight inches of snow blanketed the state in a sea of white. The Heart of Dixie would witness more gales that year, hot waves of cultural and racial disturbance. Black people battered for seeking dignity and equality. New Orleans was preparing to host the annual Sugar Bowl game. The Big Easy wouldn’t be spared, nearly five inches of snow mischievously massed on the ground in the outburst that swept through the South. Jazz and football lovers panicked and turned to alcohol for solace in the French Quarter because of the untimely tempest. Crimson Tide coach Bear Bryant wasn’t pleased. His team was scheduled to play Ole Miss and the cross helmsman may have been God in Alabama but even he couldn’t control the elements. Elsewhere, stirring at the entrance to the Gulf was a massive hurricane. Cuba would quiver in its path. A secular disciple of Marxism named Castro was not perturbed. The CIA couldn’t dislodge him and neither could Mother Nature. Maybe the Good Lord smiled upon the Communists after all. You would have to ask Dylan about that, he wailed that the answer was Blowin’ In the Wind.
It did seem like god-fearing congregations were seeing gusts of Red everywhere. Red had a different connotation before it became nomenclature for mentally petrified American states. Then again, maybe the multitude were seeing Blue. Better for politics but perhaps not in romance. Bobby Vinton recorded one of the huge hits of the year with Blue Velvet, then kept the tears flowing with Blue on Blue. Sobbing was becoming a national habit, Andy Williams expressed those sentiments with I Can’t Get Used to Losing You, but there was a reprieve from the heavens as the Angels sang My Boyfriend’s Back. The English were more celestial in their musical tastes, Telstar by the Tornados was named after a recently launched space satellite. Meanwhile back on earth, surfin’ music was making waves on the charts. Jan and Dean took you to Surf City where you could meet the Beach Boys’ Surfer Girl, and one of the biggest hits of the year was the latter’s Surfin’ U.S.A.
Betty Friedan made a splash when her seminal work, The Feminine Mystique, instigated ripples of discontent. Martin Luther King stabbed the country’s conscience with Letters from the Birmingham Jail. King would later utter a cry for the ages in the nation’s capital with his enthralling ” I Have a Dream” speech. For those with simian sensibilities, Planet of the Apes by Pierre Boulle furnished some hair-raising reading. You could take a Valium if the tension meter tilted you into a tizzy. The anti-anxiety antidote was introduced in 1963. Take two or three and don’t call me in the morning. Nerves back intact, you could dive into a true-crime narrative with Escape From Alcatraz. Author J. Campbell Bruce wasn’t monkeying around when he took you inside and outside the fabled bastion of punishment. Coincidentally, you could close the book on Alcatraz Prison. The icon of incarceration which hosted kind-hearted visitors such as Machine Gun Kelly and Al Capone, shut its gates for the final time just weeks before Campbell’s chronicle shot to fame. Surely the inmates had many cherished memories.
Maybe all that page turning wasn’t for the faint of heart. That’s okay, you could still remain upbeat because Michael DeBakey performed the first human heart transplant in Houston, Texas. Then as now, nothing said progress like Texas. The Lone Star State has always posed as a blazing beacon of edification for the whole country. The Gospel clearly took hold over generations of rectitude. Why most of their girls there have committed to almost total chastity all the way up to third grade. It would be remiss not to mention the good ole boys. What would Texas be without football and fertility? The youngsters came storming out of the tunnel wearing a helmet and rushed back in without one. Humping out to the West, there was an explosion of cheers for the Trojans as USC won the college football national championship on New Year’s Day, 1963, by squeezing out an exciting 42-37 victory over the Wisconsin Badgers in a tight battle. On the pro circuit, the Giants would be rendered horizontal as bridesmaids again, losing this time to the Bears 14-10 at Soldier Field in Chicago. The NBA finals was almost a foregone conclusion. It was the Boston Celtics as usual, taking the crown over the frustrated Lakers, four games to two. And as usual, the Yankees blazed into the World Series after winning 104 games during the regular season. They seemed invincible until they ran into the unfathomable … a whirlwind force of the likes which never may be witnessed again. Koufax, Sandy Koufax. A left-hander for the Dodgers who had toiled in obscurity during the team’s tenure in Brooklyn, was now attaining stellar heights. After posting a 25-5 record with a dazzling ERA of 1.88 and eleven shutouts in leading Los Angeles to the National League title, he faced New York in Game One. The baffled Bombers flailed away to the tune of fifteen strikeouts. Down one. Pride wounded, the luster tarnished and the bluster sapped, the now meek Yankees also dropped games two and three. Then it was Koufax redux and the predictable finale. Pen that as a sweep and long plane ride back east for the vanquished, sobbing and swilling the whole way home.
Despite the detours into despair, surely there was much to rejoice about in ’63. Indeed, watching the Yankees crumble was almost as delightful as viewing Elizabeth Taylor in the year’s blockbuster film Cleopatra. The versatile Taylor managed to steal time off from the set to commit adultery with co-star Richard Burton. It all proved too much for producer Walter Wanger who would later die, of a heart attack. Cleopatra was snake-bitten financially unlike the more wholesome The Sound of Music. The hills were alive with the stream of money and helped Fox recover from the losses on Cleopatra. It was time to raid the Valium bottle again if you flocked to the theater to see another Hitchcock masterpiece. The Birds were out in full force and pecking away at anything that twitched. It really was horror with a bite to it. Comic relief was in order after such an ordeal and Dick Van Dyke, Janet Leigh, and Ann-Margret provided it in Bye-Bye Birdie. The parade of star-studded casts continued with Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, and a host of others in The Great Escape. It would set the standard for films of that genre. It was verily a year of drama and death, but the world also welcomed Tatum O’Neal, Johnny Depp, and future director Quentin Tarantino. The latter would pile up the corpses in his own inimitable fashion.
The cadavers would also gather in a far-off land called Vietnam as the American commitment in resources and manpower expanded. Before 1963 was out, there would be 16,000 U.S. military ” advisers” in the country, this included a large contingent of Green Berets. They were deployed by President Kennedy to prevent Southeast Asia from turning Red. To convince peasants of the merits of democracy, you slaughtered their families. In early November, the president of South Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem would be ousted in a coup and executed. Americans were complicit in the political intrigues. The puppet masters were in with both feet now and there was no exit strategy in sight. The South practiced democracy with the crack of a rifle. Civil Rights leader Medgar Evers was slain for the cause in Mississippi. Nina Simone responded with a musical outcry, Mississippi Goddam. The assassin score would rise. On November 22 in Dallas, Texas, JFK would meet his shocking fate. Texas taketh away and Texas giveth: Vice-President Lyndon Johnson from Texas replaced Kennedy. He inherited a land drowning in a cavity of gloom and heartache. 1963, a year teeming with historical tides. Was it a prologue for the rest of the decade?
smokingmule 