Up and Coming Weekly is a weekly publication in Fayetteville, NC and Fort Bragg, NC area offering local news, views, arts, entertainment and community event and business information.
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THIS WEEK WITH MARGARET by MARGARET DICKSON THIS WEEK WITH MARGARET Confessions of an English Major I have heard people say that they come from a long line of plumbers, dentists, barbers, doctors, lawyers, politicians or some other defi ning activity or characteristic they believe runs in their families. I come from a long line of liberal arts majors. My mother majored in English Literature and loved it so much she went on to I worry about our young people during our ongoing Great Recession. Some of them get entry-level jobs that lead nowhere, and some of them fi nd no jobs at all. In Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell posits that even with talent and smarts, success is often a matter of luck — of being in the right place at the right time. The reverse of that, of course, is that even with talent and smarts, a lack of success can be a matter of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. He recounts a group of highly intelligent and superbly trained lawyers during and immediately following the Great Depression. Despite all their positive attributes, this group did not fi nd the success of generations before and after them. It is a worrisome chapter in Gladwell's fascinating dissection of success. Increasingly, I have had conversations with both parents and students about college fi elds of study. Increasingly, too, they are opting for courses of study that open clear and growing career paths, often in some area of healthcare. One Precious Jewel chum majored in construction management at a UNC school but with the slowdown in the building industry, he has wound up in banking. It seems to me that college is now being viewed more like people used to view trade schools and community colleges, as a career path more than an education. There is nothing wrong with this outlook, of course. It makes practical sense at a receive a master's degree in English for her thesis on Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, one of his lesser known, or "problem," plays. It was either political science or history for my father, but I cannot remember which; and he is not around to ask. Political science for my husband as well. The Precious Jewels continued the family tradition. We have another political science, English literature, art history and history. Each of these is an intriguing fi eld of study, but none of them is likely to bring hoards of prospective employers to beat down the door, nor have they. The Late Great Class of 1968 by PITT DICKEY What is so rare as the month of June? Once again June returned and high school graduations abound. 'Tis the season of commencement addresses, caps and gowns and overindulgence in adult beverages by the underaged. It put me in mind of my own personal high school graduation on June 5, 1968 from dear old 71st High School. Just 44 short years ago, 71st was way out in the boondocks. The only store around it was Godbold's, which was fronted by a large rocket and delivered Pepsi for 15 cents and honey buns for a quarter. Bobby Kennedy was assassinated the day the 71st class of '68 graduated. Welcome to the real world. 1968 was one of those rusty hinges of history that squeak loudly and get a lot of attention. Dousing the entire year with WD-40 would have been an improvement. Being limited in our ability to change the past except by rewriting it, let us take a stroll down memory lane of that bucolic time. Large, dark historic items stand out. We will get them out of the way in a hurry to get to the frivolous events of 1968. The year was crammed with ugliness: the My Lai massacre and Tet offensive in Vietnam, assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy. The North Koreans seized the USS Pueblo. LBJ was President. Hubert Humphrey, who made Joe Biden look like a sphinx, was Vice President. The Russians invaded the country formerly known as Czechoslovakia crushing the Prague Spring uprising against the commies. Celine Dion was born. John Wooden's UCLA team defeated UNC in the NCAA national basketball championship game 78 to 55. The horror. The horror. Enough of the bad times — let us revel in the profound goofi ness that was 1968. A stamp cost a nickel. Unemployment was at 3.8 percent. 2001: A Space Odyssey was in the theaters of America. The movie was extremely slow until the light show at the very end, which woke up the hippies and evoked the universal exclamation of the time "Oh Wow!" The Grammy for the Album of the Year went to Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band paving the way to main streaming psychedelia and impoverishing barbers everywhere. The Dow Jones stock average closed at 943. A new house cost $15,000. The average income was $7,800 a year. A gallon of regular gas cost 34 cents. You could get into a WWW.UPANDCOMINGWEEKLY.COM movie for $1.50. The minimum wage was $1.60 an hour. During my senior year at 71st, I drove a school bus for the county for $1.25 an hour. Coach Ted Chappel was in charge of the bus drivers at 71st. He gave the drivers the best advice I ever got. Coach said, "If an animal runs in front of the bus, hold on steady and don't swerve." I have given the same advice to my sons. It may save their lives one day. Thanks Coach. Nehru jackets were popular. If you can't remember who Nehru was, then to the Great American West. Grasping the disjointedness of the era, Jerry Jeff Walker mourned this sale in his classic song, "London Homesick Blues," writing the heart tugging lyrics, "Even London Bridge has fallen down/ And moved to Arizona." Entropy reigned in 1968. Console stereo equipment the size of small coffi ns became popular. Some stereos even got something called FM radio, which had nothing on it. Jackie Kennedy married billionaire Greek tycoon and tragic human/frog-cloning accident Aristotle Onassis, thus offi cially ending Camelot. The fi rst Big Mac went on sale for 49 cents. The long running TV show 60 Minutes fi rst appeared on television subjecting America to 40 years of Andy Rooney whining. Helen Keller died spawning a spate of really bad Helen Keller jokes that swept the country among the misguided and insensitive. 1968. As Charles Dickens' once wrote in a slightly different context: "It was the best of times. It was the worst of times." PITT DICKEY, Contributing Writer, COMMENTS? Editor@ upandcomingweekly.com. JUNE 20-26, 2012 UCW 5 you probably don't remember what his jacket looked like — a sartorial pity. They were groovy threads. For $79, you could buy a behemoth 8-track tape player to put in your car to cruise the Torch Drive-In on Raeford Road to the sounds of "Up, Up and Away" by the Fifth Dimension. Eight-track players were not standard equipment. They had to be mounted below the dash where they would come into constant painful contact with your knees. The 8-track tapes compensated for their lack of sound quality by the sheer bulk of their size. Entrepreneurs bought and dismantled the London Bridge and moved it time when our economy is sluggish and traditional industries are either changing or fading away altogether. A bird in the hand and all that….. I still believe there is a place for the study of liberal arts. My own study of English literature and the other liberal arts courses I took along the way may not have prepared me for a specifi c job — my fi rst job out of college was as a gofer on a Congressional campaign, but it has enriched my life every day since. When I graduated from college at 21, I had no burning ambition to be a doctor, a lawyer or an Indian chief, but I did have — and still do — have a curiosity about the world around me and the other people who inhabit it with me. My liberal arts courses exposed me to writings from other places and other cultures, to ideas about why people behave the way they do, to what people have done in the past and why we should or should not do that again. It introduced me to what is beautiful both in my own culture and in others and instilled in me a sense of wonder about so much of our world. cannot believe I have actually seen. It infected with me with the travel bug to see the rest of the world, a bug that is still putting me on long-haul fl ights to faraway places I I became an expert in nothing, but I did learn the tools I needed to fi nd the information I wanted to deepen my knowledge in areas that interested me. I had acquired other tools as well — the self-discipline to do my assigned work in the required time, how to communicate my thoughts both verbally and on paper and a budding sense that collaboration with others is often more productive than working alone. The Dicksons have no graduates in the family this year, but plenty of families do and plenty of those graduates are waiting for lighting to strike and direct them into a career that will be both meaningful and pay them enough to support themselves and those they love. Until that day comes, learning about the world and how it has worked in the past and where we might be heading is a blessing. Applying for a job and waiting with a liberal arts diploma in hand may be unnerving these days, over a lifetime there is much worse than a liberal arts education. MARGARET DICKSON, Con- tributing Writer, COMMENTS? Editor@upandcomingweekly.com.