Pop Goes The World
Joann Ware
For several months The News-Gazette has been asking for people’s memories of the Bicentennial. I was only 5 years old in 1976 so my memories are few and the ones I have are faded like so many Kodak moments tucked away in an already overstuffed drawer.
What I do recall is the great abundance of red, white and blue. Those colors were present in all things from the paper plates we used at picnics to the iron-on T-shirts we wore to the bunting we draped on our front porches.
The build-up to that bright burst of July was slow and steady and the preparation was both exciting and sobering. Looking back through the papers of that year, each week added another detail to the tapestry. Children participated in patriotic projects at school, making flags, reenacting historic events and creating murals honoring the forefathers. Car dealerships beckoned customers to come in for a Bicentennial new ride. A local family planned to be a part of a wagon ride along the Wilderness Trail from Tennessee to Valley Forge, Pa.
Supermarkets lured shoppers into their stores with full page ads. The area was dogged by the twin curses of double-digit unemployment and out of control inflation, but the need for proper celebrations called for hamburgers and Schlitz beer to wash them down. Coke and Pepsi products sufficed for the teetotalers. The prices seem like a steal now with a pound of ground beef going for 63 cents at the County Supermarket and a six pack of Old Milwaukee costing a cool $1.49 at Layne’s Grocery.
In the March 3 edition of the paper, a front page story outlined the events planned for the Fourth. The introduction mentioned arts and crafts displays, a jousting tournament and demonstrations of old farm equipment.
But perhaps the most anticipated event was something the paper described in a headline as “udderly shocking.” The event was a cow milking contest in which Rockbridge County officials were pitted against their Lexington city counterparts.
I don’t recall being one of the 200 community members bearing witness to this countrified competition. Surely the spectacle of civic leaders shedding their sports coats and rolling up their sleeves to cosplay dairy farmers would have made an indelible impression on me. In the end the county officials prevailed, perhaps having had some practice during their youth. The paper’s political cartoonist at the time just had to take a pot shot at contestant Mayor Charles F. Phillips Jr. depicting him dressed as Uncle Sam and milking a cow with the words “I’ve Seen It All!” in a speech balloon over its head.
I don’t know if this happened on the Fourth of July, but I recall that my aunt Wanda staged a play in her living room with my cousins depicting various figures from the Revolutionary period and wearing clothing that Wanda sewed herself using McCalls dress patterns. My cousin Jenny, playing Betsy Ross, donned a floor-length floral dress and a mobcap as she pantomimed putting together the first American flag. Cousin Bo wore black velvet knee breeches. I’m not sure who he was supposed to be but seeing him in something other than his usual Toughskin jeans made me laugh a little.
No, I don’t remember a lot about that day. I’m sure the family had a picnic with lots of good food and all of us kids were running around crazy. Once we settled down we probably spent some time in our grandparents’ backyard glider swing or collected lightning bugs in jars only to get all riled up again when it was time for the fireworks.
I most likely went to bed that night with a belly full of barbecue and smelling slightly of sulfur while listening to the snap and crackle of store-bought fireworks from the neighbors who weren’t all tuckered out from the day.
The crackling of pyrotechnics must have sounded to me, always an imaginative child, of the firing of rifles 200 years before when the farm boys of Rockbridge walked away from their homesteads and fought for their fledgling nation, some of them putting aside milking duties to take up muskets and let freedom ring.
