The Big Picture –
By Glynn Wilson –

On June 17, 1972, when Nixon’s CREEP burglars broke into the Watergate Hotel in Washington looking for psychological dirt on Democrats — 50 years ago Friday — school was out in the suburbs of Birmingham, Alabama.

I was only 14 and listening to “School’s Out” by Alice Cooper, released in 1972, mostly oblivious to national politics.

Link: https://youtu.be/2Oo8QzDHimQ

George Wallace was running for governor again, but that’s not what I was thinking about.

It was baseball season, after all, and it would be my last season playing Little League baseball. Even though the 1972 Major League season was shortened by the first big player strike, my hero Hank Aaron tied and then surpassed Willie Mays for second place on the career home run list. He also drove in the 2,000th run of his career that year and hit a home run in the first All-Star game played in Atlanta.

As the year came to a close, Aaron broke Stan Musial’s major-league record for total bases reached (6,134), a record he was the most proud of, he often said, more than his home run record since it reflected his overall performance as a team player. Aaron finished the season with 673 career home runs, and I got to see him hit a few — since my dad sometimes took me to Turner Field in Atlanta for games.

The whole family often visited Six Flags Over Georgia, which was only a two hour drive from Birmingham at the time. That’s where I saw Kenny Rogers and the First Edition, in my first year as a drummer in the junior high school band. I was just beginning to transition from sports to music as a primary interest about that time.

Life was pretty good back then, I recall, as I sit here on Father’s Day weekend and try to think back on it. It was so long ago and seems so far away. It’s almost like the 1950s came to a screeching halt that year and the 1960s finally made it down to Alabama.

After baseball season was over, and the Alabama Crimson Tide football team went undefeated in the fall but lost to Nebraska in the Orange Bowl, I met legendary coach Paul “Bear” Bryant about three weeks after that game during basketball season at Coleman Coliseum in Tuscaloosa. He was wearing his famous hounds tooth hat. He was stumbling drunk and smelled of beer and whiskey, perhaps depressed by the loss to Nebraska. I got his autograph anyway.

He mumbled something unintelligible, and I ran back to tell my friends and basketball coach. As it happens, our church team won the Southern Baptist Basketball League championship that year, playing in Tuscaloosa, as well as the year before and the next year. We went undefeated for three years in a row, until we challenged the Erwin High School B Team to a game. To the best of my recollection, they beat us by one point — at the buzzer.

In spite of his guilt and corruption, Richard Nixon was inaugurated for a second term on January 20, 1973. Of course he carried Alabama’s nine electoral votes. He carried every state but Massachusetts. George McGovern only got those 14 electoral college votes, and the three from Washington, D.C.

While Woodward and Bernstein, The Washington Post, The New York Times and CBS News celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Watergate break in this Father’s Day weekend, I’m thinking about the 50th anniversary of my father’s death.

On March 1, 1973, when I was 15, my first dog Bullet disappeared. Then on March 5, my dad died of a massive heart attack while napping in a chair sitting in the den in front of our RCA color television set, on which my mom and I watched the Senate Watergate Committee hearings in May, still stunned by our family loss.

By the time Nixon resigned on August 8, 1974 — claiming he was no crook — I was 16 and had started growing my hair out long and put together my first rock and roll band. I played the drums, but dabbled on bass, guitar and piano. We practiced in our suburban basement there, where my dad had his watch repair shop and all his tools.

Over time I took it over and transformed the underground bunker designed for the “nuclear era” into a hippie man cave with the walls covered in black light posters, many of them purchased at Six Flags. That’s where I picked up my first black light.

If walls could talk.

The next five years are pretty much a blur. I made it out of the garage band to the big stage a few times. It would take a few more years, but by the summer of 1979, I found college classrooms and an interest in journalism and politics — just in time for the “Moral Majority” to help start the so-called “Reagan Revolution” in the election of 1980.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Now we have the internet and social media, and we face an even worse constitutional crisis than Watergate.

Dog help us all.

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