Our

   Story

by

Lawrence Abby Gauthier

ace reporter

The Westphalia Periodic News

August 15, 1971

As soon as my column comes out every Thursday, I start to thinking about what to write about in my next column. It’s really the hardest part about writing a weekly column – what to write about.

This week, though, it was not a problem. As soon as I realized that this week’s column would be coming out on August 15, I knew what I was going to write about.

It’s a rare day tucked into the past of a long lifetime that we can recall in detail – like where we were when we heard about Kennedy, or when we landed on the moon, 9/11, births, deaths. Just like that I can recall exactly where I was fifty-three years ago today, on August 15, 1971.

It was a Sunday night. I was sitting in a neighborhood bar in Hillsdale, Michigan, drinking a few beers while waiting for Bonanza to appear on the television. At the time, I was a rookie reporter at the Hillsdale Daily News. It was my job to know what was going on, but I didn’t. I’d gone to good schools and college and thought I knew everything, but I didn’t.

Just as Ben and his boys were getting ready to gallop across the Ponderosa, out of the television and into the bar, the screen went blank.

Then America heard a mechanical voice in the background… “we interrupt this broadcast to bring you a special message from the President of the United States…”

I looked at the bartender and he looked at me. He liked watching Bonanza, too. Everybody did. It was not connected in any way to a way of making a living. It was like a baseball team that everybody could root for.

Then, for a brief moment, the bar went utterly silent.

Usually, on Sunday nights, there was just me and the bartender in the bar. A bar, on a Sunday night in Hillsdale, was not the place where many locals hung out. Hillsdale was a small, conservative town with a conservative college in a rural county on the Michigan/Indiana border where lots of Amish lived. The locals stayed home on Sunday nights. But me and the bartender got to be friends. We’re still friends on Facebook. He taught remedial math to freshmen at the college, part time, and tended bar, part-time, to help make ends meet. His wife was pregnant with their first.

Then, all of a sudden, the television screen was filled with a ghostly image of Richard Nixon. I’m sure it was a color television. It was, after all, 1971 and color televisions had been around for over a decade, and my memories of Bonanza are always in color. But when I try to recall the image of the Nixon that I saw that night, I can’t remember any colors other than shades of gray, like a heavy beard o’er the course of a day.

When the speech ended and Bonanza came back on in living color, the bartender and me looked at one another like “what was that all about?”

As Vietnam was escalating, so too was inflation and Nixon’s base of regular patriotic people were starting to grumble about paying an extra dime for eggs at the store. But it didn’t seem like the kind of thing you’d preempt the Sunday night broadcast of Bonanza for, like out of the blue, without warning.

The big news takeaway was that Nixon had decided to address inflation by imposing a nationwide “cooling down” period of limited wage and price controls. It was the banner headline in the next day’s edition of the New York Times: “NIXON ORDERS WAGE-PRICE CONTROLS.”

It was the talk of the town in Hillsdale, where unionized factory workers were negotiating a new contract with owners of the town’s biggest factory. I went around town talking to people about it and wrote that day’s front-page story in the Hillsdale Daily News. Just another day in the life of a rookie reporter at a small town daily, following the lead of the New York Times like a puppy.

But something about the whole deal didn’t feel right to me. In the newspaper business it’s called “instinct,” or “a nose for news.” A thought mass formed in my brain that I couldn’t quite shake. Somewhere, buried deep within the speech, Nixon had mentioned something about a “new international monetary system.” I didn't know what he was talking about. I didn’t even know there was such a thing as an “international monetary system.” And if it was a new one, then what was the old one being replaced?

Since nobody else was talking about it, I filed the thought mass away in the folds of my subconscious where it lay dormant for thirty years until it was suddenly reawakened by the events of September 11, 2001. So I decided to spend the rest of my conscious life writing a book called Oikos Gnosis, the Greek root of the word "economics."