Here Comes Trouble - Michael Moore [110]
I lost my bid for reelection and retired from public office at the age of twenty-two—to pursue a more quiet life. I kept in mind that it took the consent of only twenty people to start me on this road. I realized that this was the big secret of democracy—that change can occur by starting off with just a few people doing something. You don’t need a whole movement or even a whole school district. It can start with just twenty people. Even twenty stoners. It was a good, but dangerous, lesson to learn at such an early age. The intimidating thing about democracy is that it seems so impossible, so unmanageable, so out of reach to the average person. By twenty-two, I knew that to be a myth. And I was grateful to Davison for teaching me what a great country this is.
But I never got my hair cut at Jesse’s Barber Shop again.
Raid
I BECAME A NEWSPAPERMAN at the age of nine. St. John the Evangelist Catholic Grade School did not have a student newspaper, so I thought I would start one. I did not ask the nuns for permission. Why would I? I only wanted to cover our sports teams—mostly. I also wanted to write about what happened during science class last Friday. Mrs. LaCombe had wheeled the school’s one TV set in on a movable cart and turned it on so we could watch a science lesson on NET (National Educational Television), a special channel devoted for use in the classrooms across America (it would later become PBS).
I loved these special days when we got to watch TV in school. It seemed like we were getting away with something. And I loved the science shows, especially when they would blow something up in a test tube.
As we were watching the lesson, the picture on the screen was abruptly interrupted and all of a sudden Chet Huntley, the anchorman on NBC News, broke in with a bulletin.
“We have just learned that President Kennedy has been shot in Dallas…”
Mrs. LaCombe let out a gasp and left to get the Mother Superior. She came in and watched the report with us. When they said he was still alive and had been taken to the hospital we were all instructed—and the other classrooms were alerted—to head directly over to the church, get on our knees, and pray, pray, pray that he would live.
Proving once again that either God has a great mysterious plan that none of us can alter, or he does indeed occasionally take a day off, Kennedy succumbed. We were all sent home early. When my dad got home from the factory, my mother went outside to greet him. It was raining. We ate fish silently that night.
Two days later, as I was sitting on the living room floor watching the live broadcast of the Dallas police transferring the alleged assassin, Lee Oswald, I saw Jack Ruby put a gun in Oswald’s abdomen and fire a shot. My mother was vacuuming.
I screamed at her, “Turn the vacuum off! They’ve shot Oswald!”
She couldn’t hear me so she kept vacuuming. I reached over and pulled the vacuum’s plug out of the wall.
“They shot Oswald! I just saw it.”
Not all nine-year-olds get to watch a real person being killed, live on TV. Over the weekend I decided I wanted to write about that. I asked my dad if I could start a newspaper.
“How exactly would you do that?” he asked me. We were a GM factory family. We didn’t start newspapers.
“I was thinking I could write it up on a piece of paper. You said you have a new machine where you work that will print pages of paper. So if I wrote something on a couple pieces of paper, could you make thirty pages of that?”
He thought about that for a minute.
“Well, it’s called a mimeograph. And it’s in the foreman’s office. I’d have to type it up for you and get permission. Let me see.”
The following Monday Dad came home and said he could make twenty-five copies of my two-page paper. Excited by the prospect, I sat down with my pencil and wrote up Page One: my thoughts on why we no longer had a