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THE YEAR WAS 1963
12. Ozalid and OswaldI have not used the real names of some of the people in this account.There is only one year in my entire and somewhat lengthy life that I have maintained a journal. Aspiring writers are regularly told that this is a good thing to do, and I agree. That is most likely why I started keeping a journal on January 1, 1963, faithfully writing in it every day until December 31. According to that journal, my date with Beth to see How The West Was Won (written about in chapter 10) occurred on Friday, July 5, 1963. It also says that the tickets cost me $5.60! Not each. Both. That journal also records a change in my employment in that year of 1963. I have mentioned my job at the College of Pharmacy where I helped Mrs. Norris take care of pharmacy students and their supplies. That was not the only job that helped pay my way through school. The College of Pharmacy was going through some hard times financially, so they decided to cut all student assistants from the payroll. They had just built a new building, the one we called The Wedding Cake because of its shape and design. That is where the money was going. The college would be transferring all its operations out of Old Main to the new building about two blocks down Second Avenue. Mrs. Norris was offered a position in the new pharmacy stockroom. The other student assistants and I were not. Meeting my university expenses without an income would be a challenge to say the least, so I took the matter to the Lord in prayer, asking Him to guide me to the job He had for me. I was without work for one week, and then the Lord sent Mrs. Norris to my rescue. Mrs. Norris knew the Registrar, and she knew that Central Records was a huge office under the Registrar’s direction. She knew they hired a large number of student assistants to help with filing and making the numerous copies of records required to keep up with the changing situations of the several thousand students of the university. She called the Registrar and then sent me down to the Administration Building about four blocks down Second Avenue to see Elizabeth P., the lady whose job involved supervising the multitudinous volumes of paper work our students generated. Lizzie, as we came to call her, behind her back, of course, hired me on the spot. My school job changed from the deep, dark basement of Old Main to the bright wide expanse of office space filled with desks that was Central Records. Here every record of every person who had ever been a student at WSU was kept. That was a lot of records! There was a student named Ima Pearl Button, a name I came to use regularly in puppet plays years later, and, my personal favorite, Positive Wasserman Jones. These were real names I noted on files as I worked at my job each day. It occurred to me that the Lord was quick to respond to my request for a new job, but that He had not been so quick to respond for my request for a wife. I now know, of course, why that was so. In that summer of 1963, when I began working at Central Records, the girl the Lord would eventually give me to be my wife was only 15 years old. It would be another four years before He would send her into my life. My duties at Central Records included filing, making copies on the Ozalid machine, and copying really ancient files on microfilm, and counseling the girl student assistants in their problems, especially their problems with boys. I don’t know why that happened. I don’t know why they came to me to discuss their boyfriend problems, but they did. Perhaps it was my personality. After all, Beth had felt comfortable discussing her problems with me. Maybe it wasn’t so far-fetched for me to be a pastor after all. I enjoyed working at Central Records. The work was easy and there were lots of people around, both full-time employees and student assistants, to talk to. I really enjoyed talking to people. My journal records an event that happened on Monday, October 7 involving one of the University's Ozalid machines. The Ozalid machine had become my specialty. It was a copying machine into which we fed transparent masters with the grades of our students on them. Light was passed through the master onto paper with a bright green coating on its surface. The paper than passed through fumes produced by liquid ammonium which fixed the markings produced by the light on the paper’s surface. The paper came out smelly, sometimes damp, and occasionally readable. Careful adjustments had to be made in brightness and contrast controls in order to make a readable copy of the record. I was pretty good at setting the proper controls. 
Four times a year, we printed copies of every active student’s record and sent the copies to the students’ advisors, and to the students themselves. That meant that thousands of copies had to be fed through the four Ozalid machines in our office. This also meant that student assistants, who usually got to work in the ammonia-fumed Ozalid room, earned some overtime in producing the copies.This particular night several of us worked until nine o’clock making copies on the Ozalids. As the senior student employee, I was in charge. The ammonia was kept in huge barrels, one behind each machine, with plastic tubes connecting a nozzle on the top of the barrel to the back of the Ozalid machine. The ammonia flowed through these tubes. The whole assembly was supposed to be leak-proof, containing the odors ammonia is so well-known to produce. But it didn’t always work. We had to come out of the room sometimes for some fresh air. Sometimes just for air, fresh or not! Part of my responsibility was to shut down the machines when we were finished. There was more to this procedure than simply pressing the “off” button on the front of the machine. The valve which controlled the flow of ammonia from the barrels to the machines also had to be shut off. Failure to do so would cause ammonia fumes, and perhaps even the liquid that produced them, to flow unrestrained into the room. We finished our work and I shut down the machines. No one would be back to the office until Tuesday morning when the full-time people returned. I went home, tired, but feeling good about being trusted with the responsibility of leading my fellow student assistants in an important task without any supervision from the full-time staff. My good feeling was to be short-lived, however, for shortly after I got home, I realized that I had not turned off the valve of one of the ammonia barrels. By Tuesday morning, with ammonia flowing uncontrolled all night, well, the air would be unbreathable. And I might not be trusted with such responsibility again. I might not even be employed in Central Records any more! I explained the situation to Dad and asked for his car. I needed to go all the way back down to the building and find a custodian who would let me in and shut down the machine properly. Dad said OK, and I started out on the twelve-mile journey back to WSU from Lincoln Park. On the way I thought about the real possibility that the custodian would not believe me and not let me into the building. Why would a custodian believe my story? As far as he would know, I could be a disgruntled student intent on changing my records or causing other havoc in the Record’s Office. I am glad it was the 1960's, however, and not post nine-eleven. Today he would call Homeland Security and I would be thrown in jail for being a terrorist! But the custodian I met at the entrance to the building was easily convinced. I had suggested that he go in and shut the valve off, or at least go in with me to be sure I did not do anything I was not supposed to do. But I think he was a little unsettled about the prospect of breathing ammonia. He opened the office door for me and told me he would wait in the hallway while I went in and shut the valve properly. 
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Prologue The Ozalid room already reeked of ammonia as I opened the door. I literally held my breath as the noxious fumes clamored to enter my nose and mouth. I turned off the valve to the machine and the ammonia stopped its fruitless journey to the shut down machine. I hoped the ammonia would dissipate overnight so that there would be no odor when the full-time people — including my supervisor — returned to work the next day. I thanked the custodian (in my journal I called him an "engineer") for helping me save the day, and went home for the second time that evening. Tuesday afternoon when I went to work I expected to hear about the odor in the office that morning. But no one said anything. So I didn’t either. Until now. After all, what could Lizzie do to me now after all these years? I am certain Lizzie, who appeared old to me in the 60's, is not at the University today, and those who are, I would think, do not even know what an Ozalid machine was. 
It was a dreary, rainy Friday in November when, my morning classes completed, I headed for the second-floor employee’s lunch room at the Ad Building and for the event to be recorded in my journal that night. I sat in the lounge eating my brown-bag lunch Auntie had made, listening to music playing on the radio. It was about 12:25; I had about half an hour until I was due at work.
I was only half paying attention to the music on the radio until it suddenly stopped and the voice of Dan Rather, who was then a young reporter for CBS news covering the president, began speaking. “President John F. Kennedy has been shot,” he announced to the nearly empty room. The news stunned me. How could the president be shot? He was surrounded by Secret Service men and modern cars with bullet-proof sides and windows. The president couldn’t be shot. Then came the voice of Rather again, more somber and subdued. “President John F. Kennedy is dead,” he said, “of an assassin’s bullet in Dallas, Texas on this day, Friday, November 22, 1963 at about 11:30 am Central Standard Time.” I reported for work as usual, but the only subject of conversation was the news from Dallas. I don’t believe much work was accomplished. We did not have a radio in the office, but people — employees and students — would come into the office with the latest news. At five o’clock, quitting time, the office closed and we went home to spend three days in front of the television set watching live pictures of events unfolding that would change our lives and our country forever. Television was about to grow up and become a key player in world-changing events. The images were often fuzzy, black and white pictures with a definite lack of detail. But they were live. They were real. We were watching events take place as they took place! We were the first Americans to witness such historic events on live television. Saturday was a confusion of conflicting reports about who did it and why. Lee Harvey Oswald was the chief suspect, but he would only say he did not kill the president. He told the live TV cameras that the black eye he was sporting was the result of a policeman hitting him. Saturday night we watched as lines of people extending for blocks around the Capital building paraded softly and quietly and tearfully past the flag draped dramatically over the closed casket that bore the president’s body. Segments of Dvorak’s New World Symphony, especially the slow, somber piece known as Going Home, played as the people filed past the casket. Sunday, as was my custom, I went to services at First Baptist Church and heard Dr. Mac put the events into a Scriptural perspective. I arrived home at about 12:20 or so. The TV, of course, was on with Dad, Mom, Auntie and Lynne intently watching. Something dramatic had just happened, on live TV. Jack Ruby had shot Lee Harvey Oswald and killed him as he was being transferred to another location for further questioning. I didn’t see the live event, but the networks were learning that a significant event can be replayed over and over again. The fairly recently developed technology of videotape made such repeats possible, and the networks made certain the new technology was tested to the limits. Monday dawned bright and beautiful in Detroit, as it was in Washington, D.C., the day of the funeral. Wayne State University joined most of the nation in closing for the day. We stayed home and watched the events continuing on the little black and white face in our living room. We watched the riderless horse with the boots inserted backwards in the stirrups. We watched the parade of world leaders led by the Kennedy family, Jackie, Robert and Ted in front in a place of prominence, Ted looking young and slender, with no hint of the large, old and too-liberal senator he would become, and Robert young and handsome, and just five years away from his own tragic death. We watched the funeral service at the Catholic Church, and then the procession to Arlington National Cemetery. I remember distinctly the church bells ringing sadly in the background as the clopping sound of the horses’ hooves on the pavement rang through the brisk November air. The images and sounds of that day remain clear in my mind forty years later. I especially remember the image of the little boy in short pants saluting as the casket bearing his fallen father passed by, the same little boy who would one day be the subject of another television news event as he and his wife flying their airplane to a family wedding went down in the bay as they approached Martha’s Vineyard, the body of water in which he and his dad, the President of the United States, had played while vacationing there. As the late fall sun began to sink and cast long shadows over the scene, we watched as the President was buried and the eternal flame was lit. The U.S. flag which had covered the President’s casket was neatly and ceremoniously folded and handed to Jackie. And it was over. The next day the country would begin its return to normal with Lyndon Johnson as President. I would return to classes and work at WSU. And the TV networks would again air their mixture of music, comedy, drama and news to a populace just a little overwhelmed by what the medium had shown them in the past four days. Nearly everybody who was alive at the time knows where he or she was at 12:30 pm Eastern Standard Time on Friday, November 22, 1963. It would be nearly thirty-eight years before another event of that magnitude would draw the cameras and microphones of a very sophisticated televison news force that would witness and record the fall of two major towers in New York City, two towers that on that November day in 1963 had not yet been built. Although the sixties were a difficult and challenging time, I remember feeling confident that no matter what terrible events shook this old world, God was still in control. In fact, one of the songs we used to sing at our youth group meetings then began with the words What though wars may come with marching feet and the beat of the drum, for I have Christ in my heart. November 22, 1963 was not the day referred to by the prophet Zephaniah when God said "the whole world will be consumed." That day is yet to come. This is still the age of grace in which God works all things out for good to them who love Him. I could be confident solely because I, then as now, have Christ in my heart. JFK motorcade image by Victor Hugo King who released it into public domain. From Wikipedia.
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| Copyright © 2008, Thomas M. Parsons, All Rights Reserved. - 69 | ||
