We
have things in common, Sally Draper and I. We’re both about the same age. We’ve
both lost beloved grandparents. We both watched President Kennedy laid to rest
in black-and-white on TV for three solid days. We both love the Beatles. We
both want a pair of white go-go boots.
But
that’s pretty much where the similarities end.
Sally
is the daughter of Don and Betty Draper. Don is a well-to-do ad man in New York
City; he’s now divorced from her mom and Sally lives with her two kid brothers
and her mother (who’s getting fat) and her politician stepfather (whose
horrible mother babysits her) in a haunted mansion in upstate New York.
In
the year 1966, right next to the “Mad Men” parallel universe, there’s me, living
in blue-collar Berwyn, Illinois, with my working-class parents and friends
whose parents couldn’t afford a divorce – their fathers just took a powder.
Sally
Draper seems like a pretty lucky girl. She gets to spend weekends in a
penthouse in New York City with her dad and his glamorous new wife, who takes
her on shopping sprees to Bergdorf’s and Bonwit Teller.
But I
was lucky, too. I had a Mafia-wife godmother who bought me cool dresses from
Bramson’s in Oak Park, a gold Baume et Mercier watch, and bequeathed me her
expensive tastes that my parents could only indulge with orders from the Sears
catalogue.
I
also never saw my step-grandmother-in-law giving head to Roger Sterling. I learned
about sex around the same age, but it was from a whispered conversation with
Maureen Hannigan at a Girl Scout Christmas caroling event at the local old
people’s home. And anyhow, Maureen Hannigan was lying. There was no way our
fathers and mothers were doing that disgusting stuff.
I
wonder if Sally has any friends. There are no allusions to any on the show, and
that’s a damn shame. The only friend she really confides in is the creepy
former neighbor boy, and he’s off at a boarding school and probably has
ulterior motives of getting it on with Sally’s mother.
If I
knew Sally, I would have invited her over to my house for the weekend. We’d
kick off the festivities by watching “Dark Shadows” on Friday afternoon, then
go to the movies at the Olympic Theater with my friends. Then we’d have a big pajama
party, with everybody wrapped in blankets in our front room floor, playing
Beatles and Herman’s Hermits records all night long.
My
mother would make a pizza from scratch and we’d put our hair up in big plastic curlers and
read about our fave raves in 16 Magazine, tell Polish jokes and get goofy until
my father would yell from upstairs to goddamn it keep it down, he had to get up
early for work tomorrow.
It
probably wouldn’t be sophisticated enough for Sally – who had grown up with a
maid, who knew all about sex, who with her brothers and dad frequently assumes
the role of mother, sliding into that frigid, stone-faced efficiency so
perfected by Betty. No, if Sally hung out with us, she’d get a chance to
actually be a kid – although there would be nobody embargoing the news for her.
It would be blasting out of our TV set, out of the radio while we listened to
WLS Top 10 and Barney Pip or Ron Britain on WCFL.
She
might be scared, considering Chicago is where that guy killed those eight
student nurses, the guy who had scared her so much that her grandmother-in-law
had to give her a Seconal and she ended up falling asleep under the sofa with a
butcher knife clutched in her hand.
I
remember July 14, 1966, when we first got word about the slaying of eight
student nurses on Chicago’s South Side. I’d been riding in our 1964 Ford
Falcon, going somewhere with my parents, bopping in the back seat to the Top 10
Countdown on WLS. It was summer, the car windows were open, and I was nagging
my father to switch stations when the news or the commercials came on because
all I wanted to hear was the music: The Beatles’ “Paperback Writer,” Tommy
James and the Shondell’s “Hanky Panky,” The Trogg’s “Wild Thing,” The Lovin’
Spoonful’s “Summer in the City.”
When
the news came on, I wanted to switch, but my mother shushed me. It was a
bulletin, saying the girls had been killed. It was shocking and scary. Back in
1966, things like this didn’t happen.
The
murders happened on a Thursday, so maybe it was Saturday that I was riding
around with my parents. My mother worked nights during the week, so the only
time we would have all been together would have a Saturday or Sunday night.
Speck was caught four days later -- on a Monday. My mother would have been at
work then. I seem to remember something about her actually taking the day off –
something very unusual for her. But she may have been too freaked out to work.
But
even though Speck had been on the loose here in Chicago, Sally could feel safe
with us. My parents didn’t drink martinis or go out much – my father worked in
a factory and my mother worked in a factory and their idea of a good time was
an occasional trip to a local Italian restaurant, where they might have one
drink apiece.
And
my friends may have had their share of neuroses, but worrying that Richard
Speck was going to come and get them was the least of it. We were glad when the
news told us he’d been caught four days later, but I’d never felt that any of
us were at risk of being hurt by him or anyone like him. We were just kids,
safe and secure in prosperous, post-war America. Who’d want to hurt us?
Speck
died in prison in 1991, sporting a pair of hormone-induced fake breasts. He
never even made 50.
Today,
the Summer of ’66 is barely a blip in the modern American collective memory.
But in the intervening years, the legacy of Richard Speck has permeated the national
zeitgeist, cropping up in new generations of serial killers, “Saw” movies and
the fictional world of Sally Draper. Whose fear of life that summer, it turns
out, was right all along.
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