A walk with Jesse

A close friend of mine recently told me a story from his childhood that upon hearing, I felt needed to be shared.

It's a story about race relations but instead of tearing at the nation's fabric like the sad events in Ferguson or New York it inspires hope. 

It's about the clarity of  innocence and embracing instead of fearing our differences.  

It's about a child meeting a hero that he'd never heard of before who looked different than anyone he'd ever known.  

It's a story about how we should be and not what we are. In his own words, I bring you a story from my friend Thomas...



 My most awesome early memory: meeting Jessie Owens.

My name is Thomas and I have lived, for most of my life, in Phoenix, Arizona. I was originally born in Illinois, but our family moved to Phoenix in 1969. I had been only a little over 1 year old when we moved.

According to this website: http://doney.net/aroundaz/celebrity/owens_jesse.htm, Jessie Owens settled in at Heritage Heights, a subdivision of northeast Phoenix. Our house had been at 32^nd street and Cortez which is a little north of Heritage Heights.

I thought it important to note where he had lived to try to correlate the location. My parents had said that he lived in the area, but didn’t know exactly where.

The events I can remember are nebulous at best because I was so young when it happened. None of this could ever hold up in court, but I’m convinced it was him.

I’d been walking around the neighborhood in what seemed to me to be late-afternoon. I don’t remember it being cold, and I had been walking alone. I’d walked to the corner of 30^th street and Sierra, and I believe I’d decided it was time to go home. I must have been a little bit on Sierra street because I remember turning around to get back to the corner. The route back to my house had been 1 block south on 30^th street to Cortez. When I turned around to get back to 30^th street, I saw him.

I had been so young that nothing like fear or panic or anything like that ever entered my mind. The best guess of my age would have to be about 4 or 5 years old, and my concern at the time was just to get home. I know I began to walk towards the corner, and we started talking. I think I was curious more than anything else because he was African-American. I’m a white as can be Caucasian. The concept of skin color hadn’t registered yet.

I can’t say he had been the first African-American I’d ever seen, but he’s the first one I remember. I’m unable to remember how the conversation began, but I might have asked him about what he did. I had been familiar with the concept of work since my dad went there every day.

So the first thing I can remember is that he said that he ran very fast. He said he received a medal. I know he talked a little about running, but I can’t, for the life of me, remember much about that part. But, I asked how he did that. And, he said he drank a lot of milk. I then rather quizzically asked if it had been chocolate milk. It made sense to me that his skin color must have been from drinking a lot of chocolate milk. He laughed pretty good on that one. He then asked me if he had been the first black man I’d ever seen. (He actually did use the term black and not African-American.) I’m not sure what I may have said; I’m sure I was terribly confused. He said that was the color of his skin. He stretched out his long arm, and let me look at his hand.

I grabbed on to his huge hand, and he rotated it around a bit. Naturally, his palms were a lighter color than most of the rest of him. He said, “See? This is just how my skin is.” And, again, a lighter colored palm meant, to me, that it got lighter from washing his hands. So, I asked if he could just wash it off. And, again, he just smiled and laughed some more. He just said in a soft voice that it doesn’t wash off and that the color of his skin was natural.

I think it pretty much ended there. This might be in error, but I thought I heard him say he was going to see some friends. Although I wish I had been old enough to figure out what he had meant at the time. Back then, he made no real impression on me. I didn’t know he was Jessie Owens, and won gold in the Berlin summer Olympics. I’m sure I just went on home, ate dinner, and forgot all about it. The memory of that day didn’t come up again until my parents had said he’d lived near our area in my teenage years. I told them what I remembered though I’m not sure they believed me.

Now, forty years later, what I do know is that he was very gentle, smiled and laughed at what I said, and wanted me to drink milk. I think he also figured out, right quick, that I wasn’t going to get down the idea of skin color no matter how much he tried to explain. It is one of the earliest memories I have, and it most certainly is truly awesome. He had been truly an ambassador of goodwill because that sums up, exactly, how I feel about my memory of him.

The good old days.

Vintage Atari Computers and peripherals

I've been rummaging around the house and I came upon a box.

Nothing uniquely special about it but when I opened it I found the contents magical.

It contained a collection of memories in the form of some old Atari computers.  I'm not talking about an old 2600 or a Jaguar but rather a collection of those old 8 bit wonders from the late 70's and early 80's.  They have names like 800, 130XE and 800XL.

I look on them with the same reverence someone a few decades younger may look on a Nintendo 64 or their first Mac.  They represent a time when technology couldn't come close to our imagination but we tried anyway.

I think those of my age are far more fortunate, however.  If you grew up in the late 70's and early 80's and had any interest in computers then you understand what I mean.  I've been privileged to witness the evolution of personal computers from little more than a novelty to an invaluable tool. 

Strange how things have come full circle in the so-called "post-PC" era of tablets and the Smartphone.  To listen to the pundits you'd think we were on the verge of personal computers becoming a novelty again.

To some extent they're right.   There's not much mystery to computers anymore and I doubt anyone will ever look upon their laptop with the same nostalgia I feel for that box full of Atari's.

When I was growing up I was aware that I was in the midst of a sea change.  When I was small there were no electronic games or home computers.  The few that existed  were crude and more expensive than any suburban middle class parent could justify. 

Childhood was occupied by exploring the world contained within a few square blocks of my house.  Friends, adventures and fun were all very much real.  No virtualization allowed aside from what came from my own imagination.

Atari 410 Recorder

When I got a little older I found myself in the middle of an explosion of technology. The first hand held games soon gave way to the first game consoles and finally my box of Atari memories.

 It was nothing short of amazing.  Turn on the power switch and I could play a game or if I had the patience, I could write my own.

I remember spending hours entering hundreds of lines of code from a magazine article knowing that one mistyped character could make it all for naught.

Looking back now, I was a data entry clerk at 12 and didn't even know it.

By today's standards using such dinosaurs was a tedious and laborious affair.  Hours of work could be lost seemingly without reason.  Cassette tapes and later floppy disks made for a poor archive with more than a few hours of feverish work lost because of them.  "Save now and save often" became a mantra.

I doubt today's teenagers would tolerate the shortcomings of early home computers for long.  Maybe that's where I learned the patience that I rarely see in those that came after me.  Today's world is geared toward instant gratification.  Even those of modest means can instantly satisfy a whim with an Internet connected device.  A feat that would take me weeks in my youth if it was possible at all.

Things moved quickly and before you knew it technology was advancing at an exponential pace.  The novelty was wearing off but it was still an exciting time.  The first modems allowed us to reach out to those similarly enamored.  The BBS or Bulletin Board System was the precursor to the Internet most evident in the millions of online forums that exist to this day.

Atari 130XE

It seemed every corner had a computer store and its aisles contained the stuff of dreams.  Computers, Software and periodicals about them seemed to be everywhere. 

Technology itself was the entertainment medium.  Just standing in the middle of a Federated Department store or a Radio Shack was better than a ticket to Star Wars with a free pizza. 

Even movies and television reflected the culture.    Tron was revolutionary for its visual style.  Wargames made millions of parents nervous about their kid's computing habits.  Both films showed how technology had moved out of the dusty confines of universities and corporations and into popular culture.

By the time the 90's came around the idea of personal computing was no longer in the hands of hobbyists or tinkerers.  They were as commonplace as traffic during rush hour. 

Suddenly the computer store on the corner closed replaced by Supermarket-sized electronics stores like CompUSA and Circuit City.  Technology had become commoditized, outsourced and disposable. 

Computers weren't fun anymore, they were just tools.  Cold instruments hailed as revolutionizing a workforce.  In reality, performing the same mundane tasks as their ancestors: pen and paper, abacus and calculator. 

Instead of being a catalyst to our imagination, computers and technology in general rarely rise above the menial anymore.  Smarter, faster but with no imagination there is no substance. 

A faster computer can calculate your spreadsheet in seconds.  A faster Internet connection can connect you to anything the online world can offer assuming there's anything worth seeing. 

Atari 800XL

Technology isn't the catalyst for change I'd hoped for in my youth.  It's little more than a new means to do the same old crap and that's the real tragedy.

Which makes my little box of memories all the more special.

I think I'll keep it.