Current is grateful for P&R Publishing’s permission to serialize Marvin Olasky’s memoir, Pivot Points: Adventures on the Road to Christian Contentment.
Career to Careening
In May 1970 the Yale administration offers students a choice: finish spring course requirements and get grades that can burnish graduate school applications and career prospects, or take “pass” on courses and spend the month protesting.
My roommate has a car—O blessed Yale affluence—so the next weekend we are among the 500,000 demonstrating on the Washington Mall. Two days later we are among hundreds of elite students prowling congressional office buildings looking for senators and representatives to corner and harangue. As poet Ginsberg might say, O blessed Ivy League arrogance.
We come up empty until 5:30, when in the Capitol itself we spy the chambers of House Speaker John McCormack, whose South Boston district is next to mine. McCormack is an Irish Bostonian, so I tell his secretary “I’m Olasky from Boston” (not mentioning that my name has no apostrophe) and want to discuss similarities between the Irish revolt against the British and the Vietnamese revolt against the French and Americans.
She conveys my message. Astoundingly, it works. She shows us into the inner office, where McCormack—tall, cadaverous, silver-haired, and sixty-eight—awaits.
He twinkles as he listens to my orating. He counters with an explanation of the difference between freedom and totalitarianism. After twenty minutes, he thanks us for the conversation but says it’s time for him to have dinner with Harriet, his wife, as he does every night.
Then McCormack says he’ll show us something special. He takes us into the House chamber, points to his large Speaker’s chair, and invites each of us to sit in it. We swivel around, radicals reduced to grandchildren. McCormack smiles and waves goodbye. We spin a few more times under the watchful eyes of an aide.
Our next stop is Philadelphia, where the Democratic Party is split between supporters and opponents of the Vietnam War. My roommates and I go five days before the primary to help the campaign of an anti-war candidate for the US Senate: “Norval Reece for Peace.” A sixty-year-old Communist Party member who fought in the 1930s Spanish Civil War gets the assignment to introduce me to door-to-door campaigning. His name is Isaac—the first Isaac I’ve known since the Talmud teacher I abandoned.
My job as a poll watcher on primary election day is to shadow Abe, the local Democratic ward boss and an opponent of Reece for Peace. The irony hits me: Isaac versus Abe. I walk alongside Abe outside the polling pace and listen in as he reminds approaching voters of how he fixes their parking tickets or does other favors. Now he wants their votes.
At 4 p.m. Congressman Joshua Eilberg, local head of the pro-war Democrats, hops out of his limo. He asks Abe how it’s going. Abe says fine, except for “this punk from Yale.” Eilberg says, “Get out of here, kid.” I respond, “It’s a public sidewalk.” Eilberg walks past me, then turns and kicks me in the rump. The story amuses Communist Isaac, who says, “Now you know how America works, kid.”
My next stop is an ambition-fulfilling Boston Globe summer internship. Under the supervision of a smart and crusty editor who never went to college, John Burke, I expose overspending by county officials, including (in today’s dollars) $16,000 wood carvings depicting “Justice” and “Moses,” a $2,000 fireplace set, $1,000 sand urns for cigarettes, a $9,000 chalkboard, and so on.
I see myself as crusading against bad government, but (as in high school) a deeper manipulation is underway. Burke says my story makes the front page because Globe editors prefer weaker counties and a stronger state government, so Boston ideas will trump small-town sentiment.
After that internship, I’m set to graduate at the end of the next school year (my third) and become a Globe reporter. And yet, Reich’s favorite novel, Sometimes a Great Notion, is still on my mind as I sit in the stacks of the Yale library writing a senior thesis about Mark Twain. I absorb Twain’s concern that “writers of all kinds are manacled servants of the public. We write frankly and fearlessly, but then we ‘modify’ before we print.” Is that what will happen to me at the Globe?
My Twain research has an unlikely byproduct. Tracing his elderly life in Hartford by cruising the Connecticut history section of Yale’s library, I run across an 1890s memoir of one of the first persons to bicycle across the United States. That lights up my imagination: I could pivot to Oregon!
Some letters with samples of my Globe writing head west. A reporting job offer arrives from The Bulletin in Bend, Oregon, a small daily newspaper. It’s a step backward career-wise from sticking with the Globe, but it’s an adventure! How to get there?
On a ten-speed bicycle, of course, with saddlebags over the rear wheel. As I plan my trip, there’s a question of who will go with me. I don’t want to cycle alone.
For the past two years, I’ve been dating a Smith College student. Each Wednesday she’s been riding the Interstate 91 bus between Northampton, Massachusetts, and New Haven. Each Sunday afternoon she’s returned. We’ve shared Yale food and a Yale bed. We can both graduate in June 1971. She’s willing to ride with me—if we get married.
I skip my last week of classes in May 1971 to join two dozen other student radicals on a hunger strike next to the Yale administration building. The goal is to support striking Yale dining hall workers. Like Harold Abrahams in Chariots of Fire reporting on his own races, I report on the hunger strike for the Globe: “Yale President Kingman Brewster Jr. visited the fasters outside his office yesterday and said he was worried about the students. But some students [this was me] said he did not appear worried enough to ask the university negotiators to make concessions in areas of wages and union security.”
We end the hunger strike after five days with some weight loss but no wage gains for the striking workers. At my graduation in June, I ruin a parental photo opportunity by wearing a “Support Yale workers” sign instead of a cap and gown. The Globe runs my dramatic story of how “two thousand Yale students graduated behind locked gates. Demonstrators surged toward students and professors marching into the commencement exercises but police . . . hit at least two demonstrators with nightsticks.”
My longtime girlfriend and I squeeze in a wedding the day after graduation. No engagement ring. No wedding ring for me. I’m addicted to radicalism: no bourgeois vows for life!
We head west from Boston. Bicycling hour after hour is hard at first, but the Berkshires are beautiful. US 20 through upstate New York is a straight line on a map, but at ground level it’s not flat. We crest each hill only to see the next. Downhills are fast and furious: it takes hard work to get to the top and earn the right to speed. Sing, choirs of angelic trees. Sing, leaves on lollygagging streams. Meals are mostly bread and cheese washed down with water from canteens filled at gas stations. Elderly farmer Lightfoot provides strawberries for dinner and a barn for the night. New York, Ontario, and Michigan bring morning mists and bountiful breezes. Day after day we pass porches in towns and peach trees in the countryside, followed by a tiptoe into twilight and swaddling by night in city parks, wheat fields, and national forests. Rich soil, cranberry bog, white houses and red barns amid oak and pine.
Sometimes we stop at historically significant spots. In Rio, Wisconsin, we see where in 1886 a hurtling train slammed into freight cars. A newspaper reports “wails of terror sent through the morning air. Wails from the crushed and dying.” I turn that event into a metaphor for current American life. The musical score in my brain is the 1965 hit “Eve of Destruction,” with lyrics as cheerful as its name.
But Montana is beautiful with its midsummer snowcaps, its western red cedar and whitebark pine, its icy rivulets, its moments of light bursting through clouds. My wife-for-convenience also likes the trip, and I like traveling with her. We toil up to the continental divide and speed into Idaho, relishing hairpin turns with no guardrails and two-hundred-foot drop-offs to the canyons. One flat tire would have led to a day of destruction, but half a century later I’m still grateful for the excitement.
Still, my story about the travel turns some observations into ideological metaphors. Cannons in front of American Legion halls become evidence of shocking militarization. Every little breeze whispers capitalist sleaze—and by the time I reach Bend, Oregon, then a small town just east of the Cascade Mountains, I am ready to view its politics with that mindset.
In half a year there, it becomes apparent that I don’t know how to live in a community outside Yale or the Boston Globe and respect its values. I view myself as superior because I’ve left those institutions and chosen to deviate from the standard career path. I want to be autonomous, doing things my way.
Let’s count the ways an egotistical young reporter like me can antagonize local politicians. When the governor comes to visit, make fun of city officials who want to please him. To suggest malfeasance, photograph a closed garage door behind which lurks a new car slightly fancier than those typical in Bend. To show the city council who’s boss when members won’t immediately tell me their choice for city manager, prowl through waste baskets and figure out the selection.
I pretend alienating Bend residents doesn’t bother me, but it’s clear I’ve flubbed my first excursion outside the Ivy League bubble. Instead of acknowledging my arrogance and reforming, I grandly resign after a half year and begin writing my great American novel, with a protagonist like Yale janitor Benton Pride.
It’s a mediocre piece of work, and a publisher rightly rejects my sample chapters. I’m depressed. My wife and I drift apart. I’ve given up on a standard career but have not yet realized I am careening, moving fast but out of control, like a car going around a curve on two wheels.