It was 1970, the Vietnam War droned on, the kids rocked, the generation gap yawned. William A. Caldwell was on the adult side of that gap, and so it was not surprising that he found a newspaper column at the Kiwanis Club.
The club could have been anywhere in the United States. It happened to be in Ridgewood, N.J., in the circulation area of The Record of Bergen County, Caldwell’s employer. But the issue the Kiwanis chairman raised was one adults all across the country worried about: kids and drugs.
Some columns write themselves, as this one pretty much did. The 63-year-old Caldwell simply bore witness and spread the message. Because it was a column, it needed a point. Caldwell pondered the chairman’s remarks and found one: It wasn’t enough to catalog the elements of the youth drug problem. The community needed to get to the bottom of it.
This column, which ran in The Record on April 7, 1970, was part of a portfolio of work that won Caldwell the 1971 Pulitzer Prize in Commentary.
Caldwell worked for The Record for 48 years. He covered the opening of the George Washington Bridge in 1931 and continued to write columns for the paper after his retirement to Martha’s Vineyard, where he edited the highly respected Vineyard Gazette.
‘Lousy I am not. Square I may be.’
By WILLIAM A. CALDWELL
After a recent meeting of the Ridgewood commissioners’ select committee on drug addiction, its chairman, B. Franklin Reinauer II, heard himself characterized by a young man as a lousy square.
Mr. Reinauer thought it over.
“Lousy I am not,” he reported at last in his revealing speech to the Ridgewood Kiwanis Club last week. “Square I may be.”
He identified as fellow squares such elders as Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Nathan Hale and Patrick Henry and such contemporaries as Glenn, Schirra, Armstrong, and Gen. Eisenhower, and he added:“If being a square means striving to emulate the principles evoked by these men, I’ll bet that like me you want to be counted in and would help us try to get our sons and daughters to join us.”
Being called a square wasn’t the only shock he suffered during the committee’s exploration of drug addiction in the village. He described as horrendous these incidents:
- A 12-year-old boy, arrested for possession of marijuana, said on his arrival at the police department, “I am not answering any questions until my attorney gets here,” and when he did, he didn’t.
- A teen-age girl puts drugs in the cookie batter, and serves the goodies at weekend parties. She calls them hash brownies.
- A girl has been on 200 LSD trips. Somebody asked her whether she was aware that if she had a baby it might be born deformed.
“She replied that she believed the chromosome structure of a person’s body rejuvenates itself within seven years and, since she didn’t plan to have a child within seven years, the fact (about deformity) was of no interest to her.”
As he told his audience of businessmen, there’s something to be horrified about.
- Using marijuana regularly are 600 students in the high school, many in junior high school and some in the elementary grades.
- About 100 teenagers are addicted to heroin or a like hard drug, and 20 or 30 are fooling around with it, in mixtures so diluted as to extend for a couple months the process of unbreakable habituation.
- “Of more than 60 attempts at suicide in Ridgewood in the past year, half involved drugs. There are pot parties going on every weekend in many homes in this village.”
- “I predict that there will be a substantial acceleration in the rate of use of narcotic drugs in the metropolitan New York area within the next six months.”
- “I predict that within the next few months some Ridgewood teenager will be brought into Valley Hospital dead on arrival from excessive use of narcotic drugs.”
Now, Franklin Reinauer is not a square. He is an urbane, cultivated, sensitive gentleman. So he will be tolerant of this doubt of mine whether he’s talking about the right subject when he warns Kiwanians that with one third of the young people in Bergen County on drugs, one third of us elders will be supplanted by drug users and when he adds:
“As businessmen it behooves you to help eliminate this scourge of our society, for you must protect your businesses and your society if you wish to be in business a decade from now.”
There’s nothing square about this or in his indignation that old and good codes of morality and civility have gone out of style. There might be something deficient.
“No longer does it seem to be Man’s dream to improve his condition by making a better life and situation for himself, his family, his society,” said Mr. Reinauer. “No longer does hard work seem to be the ‘in’ thing.”
He’s right. That’s the way it is. What’s missing is a sense of wondering how and why it came to be this way.
And something’s missing, unless I misread all the evidence, from the program the committee will recommend to the commissioners. Good as far as it goes, it will propose:
- 1. Strengthening the police agencies and calling in the FBI.
- 2. Establishment of a drug information center dealing in educational material and keeping a hot line open 24 hours a day.
- 3. Education in the schools starting with parents of children in first or second grade and bringing in the children at age 9.
- 4. Development of rehabilitation clinics and reinforcement of family counseling.
That’s it, and what’s missing, I suggest, is something as square as this:
5. Initiation of a systematic effort, manned by scientists and adequately financed, to find out why the children of highly educated and motivated parents in one of the most affluent of the suburbs, processed by one of the great school systems, take to drugs.
What they’re doing the elders know. That’s not the problem. Why they do it is the problem. To solve it help is needed — theirs.