Dec. 1 is a day for the record books. On this day in 1881, brothers Virgil, Morgan and Wyatt Earp were exonerated in court for their involvement in the gunfight at the OK Corral. Today also marks the 64th anniversary of Rosa Parks’ refusal to move to the back of a public bus in the deep South.
Closer to home, 50 years ago this evening, millions of Americans huddled around their TV sets as the first draft lottery since 1942 got under way. I was a 21-year-old senior at the University of Southern California, and, like every other baby boomer I knew at the time, watched as Rep. Alexander Pirnie of New York randomly picked all 366 dates of birth out of a bowl and then posted each one on a tote board next to a corresponding number (1-366). Within minutes, the relative peace we enjoyed as college students shattered before our eyes
Everything about that dreadful night was surreal. After all, wasn’t this the evening 850,000 able-bodied young men, born between 1946 and 1950, learned their fates as continuing students, national guardsmen or worse — grunts on their way to Vietnam? Turns out Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, David Eisenhower and Dan Quayle were among those watching and waiting.
If your date of birth was among the last 200 or so selected, you were on Easy Street. About the only way you were going to be drafted was if President Richard Nixon himself knocked on your door. But, if your birth date was among the first 150 selected, as mine was, you all but saw your life flash in front of you. I ought to know. I “won” the draft lottery that evening. Yes, Sept. 14 was the first date Pirnie selected. (So you know, Trump ended up No. 356; Clinton No. 311; Eisenhower No. 10; and, Quayle No. 210.)
Watching the sun come up the next morning, I couldn’t help but think about the other earth-shattering events my generation had witnessed on the airwaves. From the launch of Sputnik to President Kennedy’s funeral, and from the Beatles’ first appearance on the “Ed Sullivan Show” to Neil Armstrong stepping on the moon, television always had brought us together. Now, it was tearing us apart. Fifty years ago, TV was driving home, night after deadly night, the unspeakable images of war into our living rooms — fracturing the nation’s psyche to this day.
On one hand, we were the generation of peace and love, out to change the world forever. On the other hand, we have become the spitting image of Nixon’s “silent majority.” How else do you explain our silence about the outrageous rise in hate crimes, the unconscionable fleecing of senior citizens or the constant poisoning of our water supplies and coastal shorelines? It’s heartbreaking to believe that we baby boomers, once so full of promise, have become more interested in winning the weekly lottery than winning the fight against gun safety, teen pregnancy or illiteracy.
Maybe that fateful night 50 years ago took more out of us than we ever could have imagined. Maybe it didn’t. I really don’t know. What is clear to me is this: The Earp brothers and Rosa Parks knew what it meant to fight the good fight on Dec. 1. I wonder if my USC fraternity brothers, with whom I watched the draft lottery take place half a century earlier, feel the same way I do today — that it’s time to honor our generation’s credo and enlist in the war on opioids, poverty, injustice and cruelty. In a sense, isn’t this what we were supposed to be fighting for in Vietnam?
Maybe it’s time for another version of the draft lottery. Only this time around, let’s make everyone a “winner.”
Denny Freidenrich was born and raised in Palo Alto. He graduated from USC in June of 1970, and reported for his military physical in August, which he did not pass as the result of falling off a cliff in Santa Cruz in 1965 and fracturing three vertebrae. He lives in Laguna Beach.
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