December 29, 1964
Hello, hello! - at 2:05 AM. Ho- - Hum. Sat at T’s tonight, got $2.55. Remember what I said about tipping with the Ts? Yep. They gave me 35 cents extra. Oh, well., I’m grateful for that. I’m also pooped out. I heard a swell joke on Johnny Carson last night. The Ajax Knight and Katey Winters get married and for their honeymoon they go around spearing people in the armpits.
Everyone is reminiscing about 1964. I’ll say this - what with Goldwater, the Beatles, and Nikita Kruschev it’s really been something. I hope 1965 is better.
December 29, 2022
I think we can assume that I considered the Beatles arrival in America a high point of 1964. I saw all of their Ed Sullivan appearances, and by the end of the year owned two of their albums. Barry Goldwater and Nikita Khrushchev both suffered major defeats in 1964, Goldwater at the hands of the American voters. (486-52 Electoral College votes and 61% of the popular vote, a landslide for Lyndon Johnson.) I am fairly sure that Barry Goldwater drove my mother out of the Republican Party. Up to that time, she and my father had routinely concealed out each other’s votes. But Goldwater’s vote against the Civil Rights Act and his perceived hawkishness against the Soviet Union turned her off, as it did many other moderate-to-liberal Republicans. All I remember is the famous “Daisy” political ad, featuring a sweet little girl and a nuclear explosion, which was enough to scare the bejesus out of the “duck and cover” generation. Nikita Khrushchev, an even scarier figure from my childhood, was deposed by his political opponents. A quick review of the Wikipedia articles on both men confirms my suspicion that about all I knew about them was their names. Don’t be fooled by the current events notes in my diary. We got a daily newspaper, but all I read was the comics.