Well Spring of Memory: Sputnik and Mickey Mouse Club

Sputnik and Mickey Mouse Club

                There was anxiety in her voice, Mrs. Bristow I think her name was, my 3^rd grade teacher in

Ithaca,  New York.   I knew I had to respect her, towering, slightly unhappy and mostly not very nice.  She had asked me to read aloud one time and when I came to the word “cupboard” I stumbled, pronouncing it as two separate words, because it was hyphenated across two lines.  She corrected me and quite unnecessarily explained what a cupboard was.  She knew I was her strange student, the one who had lived in India for 6 years and was only with her for one year.

               She radiated urgency and a little bit of fear.  We had our Weekly Reader’s spread out on our wooden desk tops.  The front page story was about something called Sputnik which was apparently a satellite that Russia had launched into space and it was circling the world.  I must have understood the concept of space, although the only air plane ride I had had by that time in my life was when I was 18 months old and did not recall.  I could smell the faint aroma of graham crackers and milk that we had each morning at 10.  The room was over warm with all our small bodies radiating heat.

               I realized that there was something terribly wrong, that America had lost something called the “space race.”  I felt bad for America and for poor Mrs. Bristow who seemed concerned.  We poured over the grainy pictures of what must have been the Sputnik satellite and listened while Mrs. Bristow assured us that America would soon catch up in the race, whatever that was.

               We had periodic drills in school that year when the buzzer would sound and we all went into the hall and got under desks and chairs.  The floors were wood, worn and uneven and smelled like dust as I lay crouched in the hall.

               It was a puzzling year, so out of context for me, things that raised a sort of free-floating anxiety about being American when I didn’t really understand about being American.  I did love the Mickey Mouse Club though, which I watched almost every afternoon, on the giant TV set with the tiny little black and white screen.  M-i-c-k-e-y m-o-u-s-eee.  I thought Annette Funicello was the most beautiful girl in the world and wished for dark, curly hair and her sweet dimpled smile.

               I also watched an episode of Dragnet one night when my parents had left us alone and gone to a lecture class on the Cornell campus.  I was terrified by the music and the ominous discovery of human bones beside a fence which was the story line.

               Before I knew it we were packing barrels, buying quantities of American things we’d want in India, getting physicals and updating passports.  Then we drove to New York city and took a TWA jet liner across the Atlantic and were soon back home in India where there was no Mrs. Bristow, no TV, no fear about Sputnik.  Just my Indian friends who laughed uproariously when I announced in perfect Hindi that I had forgotten all my Hindi.