Hello/Goodbye: June

Born, June 1979
Jun 1st - Santana Moss, American football player
Jun 5th - Pete Wentz, American musician (Fall Out Boy)
Jun 8th - Derek Trucks, American guitarist
Jun 8th - Pete Orr, Canadian baseball player
Jun 12th - Wil Horneff, Englewood NJ, actor (Ghost in the Machine, Sandlot)
Jun 12th - Dallas Clark, American football player
Jun 17th - Nick Rimando, American soccer player
Jun 19th - Quentin Jammer, American football player
Jun 20th - Charlotte Hatherley, English guitarist (Ash)
Jun 20th - Charles Howell III, Professional Golfer
Jun 20th - Cael Sanderson, Olympic Wrestler
Jun 20th - Lani Billard, Canadian actress
Jun 21st - Chris Pratt, American actor
Jun 22nd - Joey Cheek, American speed skater
Jun 22nd - Brad Hawpe, American baseball player
Jun 23rd - LaDainian Tomlinson, American football player
Jun 24th - Craig Shergold, British internet folklore subject
Jun 24th - Petra Němcová, Czechoslovakian-born model
Jun 24th - Mindy Kaling, American actress and TV producer
Jun 25th - Katie Doyle, American actress and reality television star
Jun 25th - Busy Philipps, American actress
Jun 25th - Richard Hughes, Scottish footballer
Jun 27th - John Warne, American musician (Relient K; Ace Troubleshooter)
Jun 27th - Kim Gyu-ri, South Korean actress
Jun 29th - Abs Breen, English singer
Jun 30th - Matisyahu, Hasidic Jewish Reggae singer
Jun 30th - Rick Gonzalez, Hispanic-American actor

Died, June 1979
Jun 2nd - Jim Hutton, actor (Ellery Queen), dies of liver cancer at 45
Jun 3rd - Arno Schmidt, writer, dies at 65
Jun 6th - Jack Haley, actor (Wizard of Oz), dies of cancer at 79
Jun 7th - Forrest Carter, American author (b. 1925)
Jun 9th - Cyclone Taylor, Canadian ice hockey player (b. 1884)
Jun 11th - John Wayne, actor (Green Berets, True Grit), dies at 72
Jun 13th - Darla Hood, actress (Our Gang 1935-45), dies at 47
Jun 15th - Ernst Meister, writer, dies at 67
Jun 16th - Nicholas Ray, American film director (b. 1911)
Jun 17th - Lou Frizzel, actor (Dusty Rhoades-Bonanza), dies at 58
Jun 29th - Lowell George, rocker (Mothers of Invention, Little Feat), dies at 34

The Way We Work

Those of us who toil in the cube farms of America are well versed in the use of spreadsheets and word processors, now pretty much exclusively Word and Excel.  It's hard to imagine doing work by hand anymore.  This was not always the case, of course.  Our work lives changed in June 1979 with the announcement of the first commercial spreadsheet, VisiCalc, and the release of the first commercial word processing software, Wordstar.  

Visicalc, which would be released on the Apple II later in 1979, was the work of Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston in the winter of '78-'79.  The next year, they founded Software Arts to manufacture the software, to be distributed exclusively for the Apple II, elevating the Apple from a hobbyists' toy, to a business tool.  It was also was one of the softwares bundled into the IBM PC in 1981.

WordStar was developed by MicroPro International, led by its owner, Seymour Rubenstein and their chief developer, Rob Barnaby.  Originally devloped for the CP/M operating system, it was released in June 1979.  It was reconfigured for DOS computers and by 1983, it was the leading commercial product in word processing.  Curiously, it became the processor of choice for William Buckley, who used the product for the rest of his career, even years after other, more user friendly options appeared.

Saturday Flashback: Let's Go!

The Cars had their breakthrough the previous year, but it was the release of Candy-O in June of 1979 that locked them in.  Featuring an original Alberto Vargas pinup style cover, especially commissioned for the album, Candy-O would be a teenage favorite that year.  A strong sophomore release with several great songs, the boys from Boston (although Ric Ocasek and Ben Orr are from Ohio) hit gold with "Let's Go", one of my favorite pop singles of the year.  Enjoy!

Parliamentary

The first international election in history took place between June 7-10, 1979--  the election of a European Parliament.  There were 81 seats up for grabs in the each of the four leading nations:  France, Italy, West Germany and the UK.  The Netherlands had 25, Belgium 24, Denmark 16, Ireland 15 and Luxembourg 6.  Previously, member nations sent representatives that had already won office in their home countries.

The campaigns varied.  Former German Chancellor Willy Brandt campaigned in several countries, but former French President Jaques Chirac used it as a dry run for a potential 1981 match with Valéry Giscard d'Estaing.  Voter turnout was mixed, as well.  In the UK was low, under a third, but all other countries saw over 50% participation.  Italy saw over 80% of its citizens vote.

Ultimately, the European Parliament hasn't meant much, sort of a continental UN.  But the ramifications continue today.  We recently saw that Greece entered the European Economic Community in the spring of '79.  Now?  Their economic condition, in the absence of able leadership, might bring the entire Eurozone down.  A toothless European Parliament can only sit and watch...

Saturday Flashback: Rockpile

On June 9, 1979 (the day I graduated from college), two of the best records of the year were released:  Nick Lowe's Labour of Lust and Dave Edmunds' Repeat When Necessary.  They were really records by the same band:  Rockpile.  Edmunds and Lowe (along with Billy Bremner and Terry Williams) had been touring together as Rockpile since 1976, but due to their own solo contractual obligations, they could not record as such.  They would actually get it all together in 1980, put out a band record, Seconds of Pleasure, and then promptly ... break up.

But in '79 the boys were still releasing "solo" records.  Lowe scored a major hit from his, the power pop gem, "Cruel to be Kind".  The video features the band, with Edmunds acting as chauffeur, and Lowe recreating his nuptials to Carlene Carter, daughter of June...

Edmunds had a lesser hit with his nice cover of Elvis Costello's "Girls Talk":

Enjoy!

Neither Moral Nor a Majority

There are few bigger political players in the last 33 years than the religious right. Time and again, we’ve seen republicans shuffle over to Liberty “University” to pay fealty to the christianists. The primary vehicle for fundamentalist political activity was the Moral Majority, founded in June of 1979. The above reference to Liberty ties directly to Jerry Falwell, the Baptist preacher who is generally credited with the creation of the MM. As it turns out, Falwell needed a push to get into the fight over abortion and other “values” issues.

In fact, in the aftermath of Roe v. Wade, the protestants in the anti-abortion movement were vastly outnumbered by catholics, led by long-time republican operative Paul Weyrich. (Weyrich, in 1984, said: “We are different from previous generations of conservatives... We are no longer working to preserve the status quo. We are radicals, working to overturn the present power structure of this country.”)

Falwell was more concerned about something closer to home: the revocation of tax-exempt status of racially segregated christian schools. It took Weyrich, who named the group, to get Falwell, Pat Robertson and the rest to form the Moral majority:

"I was trying to get those people interested in those issues and I utterly failed," Weyrich recalled in an interview in the early 1990s. "What changed their mind was Jimmy Carter's intervention against the Christian schools, trying to deny them tax-exempt status on the basis of so-called de facto segregation."

In 1979, at Weyrich's behest, Falwell founded a group that he called the Moral Majority. Along with a vanguard of evangelical icons including D. James Kennedy, Pat Robertson and Tim LaHaye, Falwell's organization hoisted the banner of the "pro-family" movement, declaring war on abortion and homosexuality. But were it not for the federal government's attempts to enable little black boys and black girls to go to school with little white boys and white girls, the Christian right's culture war would likely never have come into being. "The Religious New Right did not start because of a concern about abortion," former Falwell ally Ed Dobson told author Randall Balmer in 1990. "I sat in the non-smoke-filled back room with the Moral Majority, and I frankly do not remember abortion ever being mentioned as a reason why we ought to do something."

The “Majority” would become a key ally in Reagan’s election and would grow in influence throughout the 80s, although their specific influence would wane toward the end of the Reagan years, and the group would disband in 1989. But the influence of the religious right has continued to this day-- look at the nonsense being spewed by the likes of Rick Santorum and Michele Bachman. As with so much of the right’s agenda since 1979, it’s always back to the future…

Coincidentally, 1979 was also the year that George Soros started his own social policy endevours, giving the right their favorite foreign bete noir:

In 1979 Soros began his philanthropic activities by providing funding for black students to attend the University of Cape Town in South Africa. To date he is chairman of the Open Society Institute and has founded many charity organizations that are active in more than 50 countries including Central and Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the United States.

Happy

A true icon of American pop culture made it's debut in June of 1979:  McDonald's Happy Meal.  It's hard to imagine going to the Arches without seeing the latest product tie-in being used to pimp fast food to the little ones. Commonly blamed for contributing to childhood obesity rates, the Happy Meal was even banned in San Francisco for their use of toys, although Mickey D's kinda found a way around it.

Interestingly, while obesity rates in children have skyrocketed, from 4.2% in 1979 to 17% in 2006, the calories in a typical Happy Meal have dropped from 600 in '79 to to 375 today.  But let's face it, the toys and the notion of "fun" (enhanced by a "Playland" or "Playplace") are all designed to sell burgers and fries--  and not just to the kids.  Parents' waistlines have been expanding, too.  So for all you moms and dads out there who've suffered the "pester power" used by kids to get happy, you can point to 1979 as when it all started.

Spill

The Gulf of Mexico is still recovering from the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill.  During the spring and summer of 2010, almost 5 million barrels of oil escaped before the leak was capped, although the real amount will probably never be known.  It was clearly the worst oil spill in the Gulf, but it was hardly the first.  They're all too frequent in the region, often hurricane-related, but the next biggest was the Ixtoc 1 spill that took place on June 3, 1979.

Spewing 3 million barrels into the Gulf it wouldn't be contained until the following March.  It was in much shallower water (170 feet as opposed to the 5000 foot depth in the BP spill), but it still took nine months to cap.  The spill started in the same way as BP, with an explosion, and the same efforts were made to stop it by injecting mud and debris into the hole.  Chemical dispersants were also used.  Prevailing currents directed the slick toward Texas, so officials had some time to prepare.  Cleanup was also helped by bad weather.  Hurricane Frederic punished New Orleans, but pushed tons of oil away from the beaches in Texas.  (Fun fact:  1979 was also the year hurricanes began being named for men.)

While it's beyond discouraging that so little was learned from this spill, there is perhaps hope for the areas affected by the Deepwater spill based on how fully the Gulf seems to have come back from Ixtoc, including the survival of zooplankton and coral that in some cases has grown around and over the oil.  Time will tell...

The Pope

Many people in this country credit Ronald Reagan for ending the Cold War.  (I'm sure his previous six predecessors would have something to say about that.)  In reality, the Soviets were already on borrowed time as the 70s ended.  Two things happened in 1979 that I think signaled the beginning of the end.  In December, the Soviet Army invaded Afghanistan;  and on June 2 the Pope visited Poland.

Karol Wojtyla, John Paul II, had been elected to the papacy the previous fall after the death of John Paul I, who'd only been pope himself for 33 days.  Wojtyla was the first non-Italian pope since the 16th century, a native of Poland.  (He was also the youngest in over a century.)  First ordained in the year after the war, he was elevated up to Archbishop of Poland in the early 60s and by the early 70s was in Rome in the College of Cardinals.  A fervent anti-communist, he made it a point to visit his homeland in the first year of his papacy.

He was greeted by adoring throngs when he knelt and kissed the ground upon his arrival, a gesture that would become his trademark.  His visit had been opposed by the current Polish regime, as well as by Leonid Brezhnev as being too inflammatory.  They were right.  This visit encouraged the Poles to organize and inspired many in the country to begin pushing back against the communist regime.

The next year strikes erupted first at Lublin and then in Gdansk, which would emerge as the birthplace of Solidarity.  In 1983, JPII would meet with Lech Walesa, who won the Nobel Peace Prize that year.  By 1989, Walesa would form the first non-communist government in the Soviet Bloc and the USSR itself would collapse in 1991.  The Pope's visit in 1979 proved to be a tear in the Iron Curtain that became a mortal wound.