I was recently going through some old photos and came across this one of my Uncle Merle and my son Chris playing chess.
It must have been taken about 1986 at a family reunion in Pocatello, Idaho the home of Merle’s brother Reed. This was the next to the last time I saw Merle he died in 1993.
Seeing the photograph I started wondering what my cousins on that side of the family have been up to maybe some were blogging. Well if they are I didn’t find them, but I did find a memoriam about Merle. I didn’t see Merle too much when I was growing up he was at Columbia in the fifties, the University of Wisconsin Madison in the sixties, and he was Dean of the School of Education at Berkeley in the seventies.
I remember one family get together when he was telling us about the Anthropologist Margaret Mead. They were at Columbia at the same time. Apparently a group of young students and professors were meeting with Professor Mead at a get acquainted gathering. After they had talked for sometime she said let me tell you a little about each of you, and proceeded to go around the circle nailing it for each one based on their speech patterns and other clues they had revealed during the conversation. She told them where they were born, where their parents were from and how she knew. Merle thought it quite remarkable.
I also remember him talking about the demonstrations at the University of Wisconsin at the beginning of the war in Vietnam. I was a little bit slower realizing what a travesty that war was but by 1968 it was obvious to any thinking person what a terrible mistake we were making. That was the beginning for me and I suspect a lot of other baby boomers of a transition from a conservative middle of the road point of view to a much more radical outlook. Values that we had held as teens being called to question.
The reason so many of us are so cynical about the current administration the patterns the statements are starting to sound and look a lot like they did in the Sixties and Seventies. A few years later Merle said to me at a family gathering, speaking of my political evolution, well it took you a little time, but I never had any doubt where you’d finally end up.