By CHARLES KOOSHIAN
Los Alamos
I cast an early vote Tuesday, along with much of the rest of the community, at the municipal building. The staff were friendly and competent, and I was in and out quickly after an entirely positive experience.
As I walked out, I thought back to the first time I voted. It was the presidential election of 1952, General Dwight D. Eisenhower versus Illinois Gov. Adlai E. Stevenson. Voting age back then was 21, my age. I had already registered.
I was in the US Air Force, stationed at Hamilton Air Force Base just north of San Francisco. As I was due to ship out to Korea soon, I was given a pass to visit my family in Pasadena, about 400 miles south. In those days hitchhiking was an acceptable mode of transport, and if you were in uniform you barely set foot on the highway before you were offered a ride. Moreover, on a long trip, you were rarely permitted to pay for your lunch.
The travel was uneventful and I spent a happy time with family, relatives, and friends. My departure day coincided with Election Day. In those days there was no early voting, the community, the nation, turned out on that first Tuesday in November. Absentee ballots, especially necessary for the military, could be mailed in. But as I had expected to be home on Election Day, I didn’t do that.
In my “Class A” uniform, which in those days was required military attire in public, I bid my parents and brothers farewell and walked over to the nearby polling place to vote before I got on the road to stick out my thumb. Again “in those days” voting precincts were small and correspondingly, so were the polling places. Accordingly, when I entered, I wasn’t really surprised to recognize everybody in there, voters and poll workers alike. They were all the neighbors who had watched me grow up, whose kids I had played with, whose lawns I had mowed, and who had on occasion reported my misbehavior to my parents. Most notable was Miss O’Neill, my 8th grade English teacher, who got a little emotional at seeing that the undisciplined sloppy kid she tried to teach had somehow been transformed into a clean cut, polite young man in uniform (entirely attributable to some no-nonsense World War 2-veteran drill instructors).
I cast my vote, got handshakes and expressions of goodwill from everybody, a hug from Miss O’Neill, and set out, my civic duty done.
Leaving the municipal building 72 years later, again my civic duty was done. But I couldn’t help wistfully recalling the time when Election Day actually had national significance and provided a sense of community – and I knew everybody in the polling place.
