From the archives.
Put another way, a stalling tactic while I polish my M335i article.
Not that I want it to completely but my life has calmed down enough (three days off in a row!) to encourage me to get back into writing. The following is a mashup culled from an Adobe InDesign document I’ve been sporadically adding to for a year now. FWIW.
My first in-person F1 race was Watkins Glen 1970 where I watched Jackie Stewart run away from the field in the brand new Tyrrell until an oil leak sidelined him, handing a maiden victory to an unknown 23 year-old racer named Emerson Fittipaldi. My most recent, and probably last, was Montreal 1998 in the midst of Jacques Villeneuve fever. In my dotage I content myself with the first two international sports car races of the year held here in Central Florida, Daytona and Sebring, and with our version of Monaco, IndyCar at St. Pete. I have little desire to sully my real-life F1 memories attending the likes of Miami or Las Vegas. Of course, there’s always COTA, a mere fifteen hour drive from where I’m sitting: a natural terrain road course with (presumably) the option of actually walking around.
But holy moly, isn’t Formula One perfect for TV? Las Vegas last weekend was visually spectacular and a pretty good race. In fact, the 2024 season has been the most enjoyable I’ve witnessed in recent memory, costing me all of $3.48 cents per race weekend via F1 TV Pro. That’s for every practice session, qualifying, sprint race and grand prix, plus more before-and-after shows, technical features and interviews than I’ve had time for... UNINTERRUPTED BY COMMERCIALS! A couple of years ago I even had a choice of two commercial-free feeds, the other being Sky via ESPN because cable was included in my previous HOA. Wonderful!
With IndyCar’s new OTA/cable Fox contract starting in 2025 that doesn’t include a streaming option I can’t see going out of my way to buy a DVR and digital antenna to record the races to watch at my leisure but we’ll see. I say that now…
Regarding the anti-Boomer sentiment I read incessantly on various platforms, at 72 I’m an outlier. My father was skipper of a T2 tanker at Normandy, a politically-connected maritime labor union president during the fifties and sixties and eventually a CIA spook in Southeast Asia and Easter Europe. He imparted healthy, skeptical viewpoints unavailable to most kids my age but also a dearth of regular, everyday financial wisdom. My Greatest Generation parents never owned a house when my father could have easily taken advantage of the GI Bill to buy one in the fifties, much to my mother’s chagrin, choosing instead to rent fancier places than anything they could afford to buy, and never bought life insurance, thus sticking my brother and me with their end-of-life expenses. But we always ate at the fanciest, most elegant restaurants in Boston, travelled to Europe at an early age and wore Hong Kong tailor-made clothing in high school. Neither parent drove, another oddity perhaps explaining my car enthusiasm as a reaction to automotive deprivation as a youth. Because of that I got to choose our first “family car” at age 16: a brand new, factory ordered 1969 Dodge Dart GTS 340.
I also never had kids so I have no real sense of how old I am.
Life as a young King man had its moments. But one size doesn’t fit all in the anti-Boomer discussion and I currently rent a room in Floral City, Florida, rather than sitting on a mountain of equity. Details of that grim reality will make it into my memoir, Blue Lightbulb, if I can overcome inertia and resume it. As I said at the top, this compendium is my attempt to get back into the habit of writing.
Anyway, I’ve never felt OK, Boomer quite applied to me.
More Boomer stuff. The following, or at least portions of it, appears to have been in response to Jack Baruth on his Avoidable Contact Forever column… or maybe I never actually posted it, who knows?
Great analysis, Jack!
Your first paragraph is accurate.
Your second paragraph is also accurate except that at the time I believed a lot of our shit was “really good shit” (a George Carlin line, a believe). Like hastening the end of the Vietnam war, demonstrating for equal rights, little stuff like that.
However, on reflection… Wednesday, November 7, 1972, I was walking down Longwood Avenue in Boston when Mass Art classmate Ron Laffin approached, threw his hands in the air and shouted, “We lost!” “Yeah,” I replied, in a suitably anguished tone.
Immediately – and I swear this is true – I thought to myself, did we?
My vote for McGovern in the only state that went his way was the first of many losing presidential ballots I would cast over the years, preferring to “vote my conscience” for third party candidates, from Libertarian to Green Party and even goofy Ross Perot. I never voted Democrat again but I voted for more than one losing Republican candidate, presidential and otherwise. I also worked on a (losing) Republican Congressional campaign in Massachusetts as a marketing professional a few years ago, designing/developing the visual ID and logo, direct mail, signage, print ads/collateral and website.
My response to the original poster was of the reflexively defensive “my g-g-generation” variety but because of Substack’s peculiar threading scheme I haven’t been able to find the post to see exactly what set me off.
Fun fact: of the 42 guys I graduated with from my all-boys Catholic prep school (35 remaining above ground) most who feel they “changed the world because (they) smoked some weed and watched Joan Baez sing a song” have made large sums of money NOT peeling potatoes. One even took it a step further and hosts a five-nights-a-week show on MSNBC. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he was one of three St. Sebastian’s Arrows to graduate from Harvard. I’ll bet he makes a ton more loot than any of the bankers and utility company CEOs he graduated with from St. Seb’s! And carries a lot more clout!
I trace the Classic Rock plague to WBCN, the legendary Rock of Boston, that (mostly) stayed true to its roots from 1967 to 2009. While playing current rock throughout its history the station never stopped playing earlier music, seamlessly blending every era to perfection, but just couldn’t leave it at that. So in the early nineties it launched a weekend show called Back To The Future, playing, well, classic rock. Its ratings were so good that the parent company launched WZLX Boston, the first station in the country devoted full-time to the classic rock format. A little broadcast history for you.
Music
A little period-correct interlude: