NOVEMBER 9

“For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.” (2 Timothy 1:7)

Have you ever watched the film, “The Rain Man”? Autistic savants are fascinating people, aren’t they? While many autistic savants are unable to understand or complete simple tasks, many can not only tell you what the weather was like on any date over the past few decades of their lives, but they can tell you what day of the week it fell on and exactly what they were doing on that day.

I’m no autistic savant, but I can tell you what I was doing on Friday, November 22, 1963, on Tuesday, September 11, 2001, AND on November 9, 1965. I THINK November 9, 1965 was a Tuesday. At the time, I was a 6th Grader. Those were the days before the advent of “Middle Schools”. In Canton, Massachusetts, in those days you went to Elementary School for Grades 1-6, Junior High School for Grades 7 and 8, and High School for 9-12. (Those were also the days BEFORE they had public school Kindergarten in Massachusetts.)
My 6th Grade teacher was very young (maybe 22) and very tall, (maybe 6’5”). His name was Mr. Ippolito and that was his first year teaching. Around 5:20 p.m. I was sitting in the kitchen at home. (Our house had a large combination kitchen and dining room which was more of a kitchen than a dining room, and my mother always lamented that fact.) My mother was cooking supper- I don’t remember what the meal was that night.

I admit that I can be a very sensational and dramatic person. I got quite a genetic predisposition to that stuff. My father had a booming speaking voice and was an intense personality, and my mother was VERY emotional and VERY dramatic. Suddenly on that evening in the kitchen in Canton my mother got very dramatic like you’d expect to see in a spectacular stage performance. Making all the appropriate gestures and motions she announced, “I’m gonna faint! I’m gonna faint! I’m gonna faint! Everything’s going dark! The light is getting dimmer and dimmer! I’m gonna faint!”

Well, in fact, the lights WERE suddenly getting dimmer. This was the days before battery operated clocks, and we had a typical 1960s electric clock that old Mr. Warren of Ashland (inventor of the electric clock) would have been proud of. That clock even had a little pengulim which quickly moved back and forth counting out the seconds. I glanced at the clock and noticed the pendulum had greatly slowed down.

“You’re not gonna faint!” I announced like a typical obnoxious 11-year-old.
“Look at the clock, the pendulum’s slowing down, we’re losing electricity!”

One second after I’d finished saying that, we were plunged into total darkness.
Looking out the windows, we couldn’t see any light anywhere. My mother quickly regained her composure and took out a transistor radio.

“We need to find out what’s going on,” she said, “maybe this is affecting all of Boston.”

Reports began quickly coming in that most of Massachusetts and in fact most of New England had no electricity. Strangely, the towns of Braintree and Norwood, Massachusetts had NOT lost electricity but just about everyplace else had. Reports came in that New York City had no electricity and in fact most of New York State had no electricity. During the height of the cold war in 1965, this was very scary news. People began to speculate whether a nuclear bomb had been dropped, say on the power station at Niagara Falls. Looking back, there was even the potential for rioting in the streets and utter panic that night, but the World War 2 generation held themselves and everyone else together and people remained fearful but calm.

As I recall, the electricity came back on around 11 p.m. By the next morning it was being reported that there had been a massive failure of the power grid at Niagara Falls that had knocked out most of the northeast, but that it was NOT the result of any enemy attack. (Incidentally, the towns of Braintree and Norwood did not lose electricity because they generate their own electricity and are not part of the northeast power grid.)

The next day at school, Mr. Ippolito had to listen to a bunch of whining eleven and twelve-year-olds complaining that we couldn’t get our homework done because we’d had no electricity. (I guess we forgot about old Abe Lincoln doing his arithmetic by candlelight!)

Yup, November 9, 1965. Forty-four years ago. And I remember it like it was yesterday.