“Don’t think twice, it’s all right”

by Lou Groccia ’73

Television has been bombarding us lately with an endless stream of so-called “reality-based” programming.

     I have watched none of it. No time wasted by me on Survivor. No brain cells lost to Big Brother. No turning to Real World. No rides with Cops. No catching America’s Most Wanted.

     Don’t get me wrong. I like TV. I waste my time and lose my brain cells on sports, news talk shows and ’70s reruns. Having at one time been a television columnist, I try to keep up on TV trends. So why haven’t I checked out this new trend? It’s that grating phrase “reality-based.”

     There’s no “reality” in these shows.

     If the television pooh-bahs really wanted “reality” then they should look back to my UMass student years of 1969 through 1973. You want television reality? You got it during those years. You want Big Brother? Try watching Richard Nixon live on television explaining why we would never bomb Cambodia.

     You want Cops? Try watching the Chicago police live on television cracking heads at the 1968 Democratic Convention. You want Real World? Try watching news footage from Vietnam as the body counts kept going up along with the Pentagon’s lies. You want America’s Most Wanted? Try following the trial of the Chicago Seven. Or was it Eight? What seems like yesterday seems so long ago.

     And do you really want Survivor?

     Well, there was an event that aired on television in 1969 that makes the current Survivor look like a joke. One television show, one night, real drama. This one show directly affected how thousands of young Americans would survive the war years. Now that’s “reality” TV. I’m talking about the first U.S. draft lottery since World War II. It would be the first of four drafts, ending in 1973.

     Men ages nineteen to twenty-six were the targets. There were about 850,000 of us in that first gene pool. It was held the night of Dec. 1, 1969. Live, on TV. The Vietnam War was at its peak (which is a strange way to describe a war), and this supposedly random lottery would decide who would serve in the military and who would not.

     The seventeenth-floor lounge in Kennedy Upper was crammed with dozens of students around the lounge television. (I lived four years on the sixteenth floor of JFK in Southwest during those years, but that’s another story). Even under such morbid circumstances, there was a party atmosphere to the night (this is, after all, Southwest). We cheered and/or groaned as the 366 blue plastic capsules were pulled from the tumbling drum.

     Each capsule had a day of the year in it. The capsules were drawn one by one, from one through 366 (Can’t forget the leap-year babies). The conventional wisdom was that any number lower than 100 meant you were toast. Anything from 100 to 200 meant you might not get called and any number higher then 200 meant you could breathe.

     Of course I was scared stiff. I was a sophomore then, majoring in protests and strikes and long hair and cutting classes. My birthday, Feb. 12, was assigned a 68, which is a decent number for Tiger Woods but way, way too low for the draft. My life was ruined. Why study? Why go to class? Why bother? But amid the alcoholic fog in my brain the next morning, two words kept blinking in the gloom: college deferment, college deferment, college deferment.

     I may have majored in long hair and cutting classes back then, but I was also from the solidly blue-collar city of Worcester. As the saying goes, you can take the boy out of Worcester but you can’t take the Worcester out of the boy.

     So after my college deferment ran out in 1973, the draft board sent me a letter asking me how I liked wearing green. But blue’s always been a better color for me, so I joined the Air Force. Tradition played a part here. My father had belonged to the Army Air Corps in WWII.

     I had been a political science major at UMass and the Air Force saw right away from their psychological tests on me that I would make an excellent editor for one of their base newspapers. They really didn’t want me near any planes or weapons. So I spent four years protecting your country in Rome, N.Y., at Griffiss Air Force Base, editing a weekly “advocacy journalism” newspaper.

     Which gave me a career in newspapers. Which I love.

     Which must make me one of the winners of the original Survivor show. And to think that I thought I had lost when my number came up.

     I guess it was just a simple twist of fate.

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