James Francis Cahillane

Whether you grew up in the Pioneer Valley, like I did, or arrived more recently your view of the world is likely to be skewed. By and large our fellow citizens are a caring lot who do for others year in and year out. It could be going on a charity walk or run or donations of time or money to the survival center, the homeless and every other good cause in between.

Community is not a swear word, and giving a hand doesn’t cost any one of us an arm or a leg.

When we disagree, it’s about candidates and their stands on policy. As a rule we resist the temptation to demonize those on the other side. Democracy demands elections by informed voters. In this new electronic age, more information is at our fingertips than a dedicated historian could assemble in years of study.

Consequently, when we encounter it, ignorance stands out in sharp relief with no excuses.

Therefore, when hate surfaces on the American landscape, I find it difficult to give stupid statements and action the benefit of any doubt. Today, as I compose these thoughts, all the prognosticators are forecasting a Republican Party about to return to power in the House of Representatives and maybe the Senate. I find either scenario abhorrent.

For both to occur would, in many ways, set aside 2006 and 2008 election victories by the progressives in our great country.

Eight do-nothing years when President Bush blew up the budget surplus in tax giveaways, and then blew up Iraq, which never attacked us, and then created a false government in Afghanistan, a country recently described as a 15th century society with no inclination toward democracy. The U.S., the British Empire and the Soviet Union have all tried and failed to conquer the Afghans. We could and should leave. It’s not a matter of if, but when.

Just like during the Vietnam War era, when patriots protested long and hard before an awakened public caught up with the facts. In the end it didn’t matter that the protesters were often beaten and jailed for speaking truth to power. My country right or wrong is a grand if not grandiose thought, but it seems to deny facts in play.

Despite the progress made since Jan. 20, 2009, we have protesters who claim their taxes are too high, they’re not. That long-awaited government health care is a form of socialism, it’s not. And that President Barack Obama is a foreigner and a Muslim – equally not true!

Notwithstanding, any of the above stupidities, the dumbest thing I’ve heard from what used to be called “man on the street interviews” is that a shockingly large number of men and women, mostly young, but not all, are not planning to vote Tuesday.

As Jon Stewart jokes, painfully, when voters do something that thoughtless, “the terrorists win.” A little more thought and a lot more action is required to fulfill our compact with the country we live in.

Exactly 50 years ago, I became involved in presidential politics. Massachusetts Sen. John Fitzgerald Kennedy, a handsome war hero from a wealthy Catholic family, was boldly seeking the Democratic nomination.

I say boldly because he was only 43 years old and because a Roman Catholic had never won the presidency. Gov. Al Smith of New York was nominated in 1928; Smith’s loss to Herbert Hoover was blamed on his faith. Accepted wisdom became “Catholics can’t win.” Kennedy’s task was to prove that shibboleth wrong.

In contrast to Al Smith, Jack Kennedy appealed to many constituencies. His good looks didn’t hurt with women voters. Veterans liked him as one of their own. The Irish wanted the same. Harvard eggheads identified with Sen. Kennedy’s cerebral side, admiring his writing ability. Jack’s first book, “Why England Slept,” examined errors leading up to World War II; his Pulitzer Prize-winning “Profiles in Courage” praised nine senators who voted against the pressures of party politics or public opinion to do the right thing for their country, a quality even rarer in our 21st century. Its title gave his political opponents this easy zing: “Kennedy should show less profile and more courage.”

In August 1960, I was a 27-year-old father of three boys; we lived at Hampshire Heights. I sold new and used cars at our family’s automobile dealership. Our son Chris was only three months old, business was moribund and my father had served his third and, as it turned out, last term as mayor of Northampton.

I was too busy working to get involved in dad’s 1959 re-election campaign, but enthralled by the prospect of a President Kennedy. To follow the action I began reading the New York Times. I found time to distribute colorful Kennedy brochures door to door, although his home state was a lock. All year long strong opinions rang out at Northampton’s Junior Chamber of Commerce meetings, which usually wrapped up over beers at Rahar’s Inn.

Winning the nomination required Jack to beat his Democratic opponents like Hubert Humphrey in primary after primary. When West Virginia, a heavily Protestant state, chose Kennedy over Humphrey the “Catholic question” was answered; Kennedy’s nomination was in reach.

However, the feasibility of electing a Catholic president still loomed large upon the land. Kennedy, like Obama did in his Philadelphia speech on race, resolutely decided to face the issue head-on by addressing the a ministers’ group in Texas in September.

In a serious dialogue he set forth his belief that no Catholic prelate should ever tell a president how to act, nor should any minister advise his or her congregation how to vote. Freedom of religion, to worship or not do so at all, Kennedy said was, “the kind of America in which I believe.”

Jack may not have converted many that day, but he earned respect for standing up to religious prejudice.

Kennedy’s energy, good looks and positive themes, “Let’s get America moving again” and “Leadership for the 60′s,” brought out crowds as he criss-crossed the country in “Caroline,” his propeller-driven plane. His brother, Bobby, managed each campaign day with an abrasiveness that saw him hated by many of the old pols he pushed around in the cause of “Jack,” but Bobby’s single-mindedness paid off as one by one the primary states fell to the Kennedy juggernaut.

The first Kennedy-Nixon debate revealed Kennedy to be far from the novice the GOP had portrayed. He came through as a candidate in tune with the issues and eager to debate Vice President Richard Nixon toe to toe. Oddly, those who heard that debate on radio pronounced Nixon the winner, yet television told another tale. Kennedy was cool, calm and unflustered. Nixon’s makeup was poor; he perspired and looked nervous. We Democrats thought Kennedy won, Republicans chose Nixon. Independents luxuriated in having it both ways with plenty of time to make up their minds by November.

After Kennedy defeated Nixon by the narrowest of margins, one tenth of one percent in the popular vote, everyone could relax and contemplate what had happened.

In 1961, Theodore White’s “The Making of the President, 1960″ set a new standard of political inside-baseball and won the 1962 Pulitzer for non-fiction. All election books that followed owe much to White’s innovative look into the gamesmanship of politics.

Which brings me to the book I’m reading now: “Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime” by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin. The hard-fought 2008 primary campaigns of Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and Barack Obama are revealed. We lived through it not all that long ago. Hillary was the confident candidate who promised us she’d be the Democratic nominee; Edwards was John Kerry’s hair-apparent who lived two hopeful years in Iowa; Barack Obama was a first-term Illinois senator who’d made a Kennedyesque impression with his 2004 keynote speech at the Democratic Convention in Boston.

Just like Yogi Berra says of baseball games, elections are not over until they’re over, and a terrific reporter writes the book. I always look forward to the next chapter.

The recent Advertiser story (200 homes planned for sports ground 27 July) took me back to 1953 when as a twenty-year-old Airman 1^st class stationed at nearby RAF Fairford I started dating a Swindon girl who lived off Shrivenham Road. Maureen Stone was a dedicated tennis player whose every free hour was spent playing on the BR Sports Ground courts; she reminds me that her annual club dues were exactly ten shillings.

We were introduced at the Majestic’s Saturday dances, with a live Big Band, at the bottom of the town. In minutes we discovered a number of common experiences and location names. I was but two years out of St. Michael’s High School in Northampton, Massachusetts and Maureen had recently graduated from Notre Dame High School in Northampton, England. More Saturday dances followed before we met, outside Holy Rood church, for our first date, which, as it turns out, hasn’t ended.

At any rate my nearly two-year courtship of this tennis player greatly revolved around meeting her at the BR and watching her matches. I didn’t play tennis at the time so was reduced to the role of spectator. It’s not totally in jest that I describe those days as her enjoying herself on court while I viewed the world through a chain link fence.

In time I ingratiated myself with her folks to the point that I attended other events at the BR Ground. My future father-in-law, Eddie Stone, bowled there; mum Evelyn took me to a meal in the main hall, and all of us putted around its golf greens. Many years after his retirement from his electrician job at the GWR, Eddie worked part time at the Sports Ground and invited me to join him for skittles and beer. That may have been the moment that he and I bonded forever.

Our visits to Swindon over the decades often saw us playing tennis and having a drink at the BR. It was the only “pub” in walking distance. In 1994 we visited because, as a writer, I was heading down to the South coast before ferrying to Normandy to take in the preparations for the 50^th anniversary of D-Day. Over at the BR we ran into Roy Ferris who, like Maureen, was still playing tennis. On a whim Maureen asked Roy if he knew the whereabouts of Joan Burroughs, her Euclid Street Secondary School classmate. Roy did, and Joan rang us the next day.  Joan and Maureen connected like they’d never been apart; she and her husband Les Morris of Bishopstone are our fast friends to this day.

Those are just a few reasons why we fondly remember the salad days of the BR Sports Ground. Its planned redevelopment into housing will be a boon for newcomers as it also closes the gate on thousands of memories like mine, and maybe yours.