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What does this all have to do with Science Fiction? You may ask. You may say, "this is reality, not fiction, much less Science." The reality is the key.
The summer of 1958 was the year after Sputnik was launched. I don't recall for sure but I think my pubes curled that summer. For entertainment we had a short wave radio. I recall listening to foreign language and Morse code broadcast. I don't recall listening to regular broadcast. Perhaps we were to far back into the hills or the radio just would not pick them up. There was no TV. I spent most my free time hunting with our dog Bullet (he was mostly beagle). If we killed it we ate it. I was good at shooting ground squirrels but I wanted to catch one. Bullet helped me do it one day when he ran one into an empty can down by the spring. I built a cage for it and kept it until we moved to Seattle. I then released it back into the wild. Yes, I did eat the others that we killed. They really did not taste that bad. It was the fact that they looked like small rats when you skinned them that was a little disturbing. The worst thing I ate was a large woodpecker. It was not appetizing at all. Of course, I never killed another woodpecker after that so I would not have to eat it.
I remember that Bullet started killing the chickens. Dad caught him one day, with a chicken, down by the hog pen and beat him till blood ran out his mouth. I have to fight to hold back the tears, even now, as I recall the image and hear the sounds of Bullet yelping. I loved that dog. He was my constant companion. But a lesson was learned with this. The fact was that we had to have the chickens for eggs and food so Bullet had a choice to either quit killing the chickens or we had to kill him. Bullet never killed another chicken. I see the parallels now with the capitalist control. The Capitalist have to beat us into submission till the blood flows out of our mouth or they will have to kill us. We, the poor, are a dog being beaten by the Capitalist.
Where is the Science Fiction? Was I abducted by a UFO? No. I did see my one and only UFO that summer of 1958. It was a bright light that flew across the sky in a way that no airplane, satellite or natural object could. But the reality of the summer of '58 still lingers so I have more to say.
We basically were dressed in rags. That is probably why it doesn't bother me to wear rags now, with holes everywhere and I now see the vainly dressed city people as weird. The city homeless of today are much better dressed than we were. I had absolutely no medical attention beyond home remedies. I had an open running sore in my ear for months. Like maybe six months and the remedy was probably yellow root and honey. It eventually did get well so maybe it worked. It just took it a long time. We would take free food from kinfolks and I recall I got a fish bone stuck in my neck. It was there for a long time. My recollection is like a week or so but it was probably only stuck for three or four days. The remedy for a fish bone stuck in your throat is eating a lot of cornbread without liquid. It didn't work.
OK, Science Fiction time. Now that I have told you of the cold reality of being a poor Hillbilly abused by the Capitalist state. Remember for entertainment we only had that short wave radio that probably didn't work . There was one other source of entertainment. The Bookmobile. The Bookmobile was a traveling library that would come around every two weeks or so. I would always check out Science Fiction books. I read many, many. I had read a lot before the summer of '58. They had always been like Jules Vern's or writers that followed his style. Meaning everything they wrote was logical. It was believable. It could be real and of course in Jules Vern's case it did become real. They were like a dream of a better tomorrow, for the world, through Science. But in 1958 they changed. Science Fiction writers would just assign a new fantastic power to one of the characters whenever they wished. It was done to defeat one or more of the established characters in the story. It was like you were going along with all this logic and understanding and suddenly there was this new power that was defeating the logical thinkers. The new power, by the way, was just anything.
So the reality of Science Fiction was gone. The possibilities of Science were gone in favor of, I guess we could say, Supernatural Powers. So my dreams of a better tomorrow were shattered by the Supernatural Science Fiction that came with the Summer of 1958. And only the harsh reality of my own lot remained.
I notice that I have no photographs from the Summer of '58. We could not afford a camera, or film. I only have the sounds and images in my mind and a few pages from a journal that I made out of discarded wallpaper trim and cardboard. I bound it together with radio wire.
Jack Bowman