I am two months younger than Barack Obama.  I grew up in a Chicago suburb called Crystal Lake.

Whenever I asked my parents why they chose to live and raise their children in Crystal Lake, out of all the other possible bedroom communities, towns like Lake Forest and Dundee and Barrington and Woodstock, the answer was always the same: because of the schools.

It was the mid-1960s.  When you’re a child, you don’t know anything about current events.  I couldn’t have picked Lyndon Johnson out of a lineup.  I didn’t know there was a war in Vietnam until it was almost over, and I never heard a whisper about the assassinations of Martin Luther King or Robert Kennedy.

I voted for my first president in 1968.  I was seven and in second grade.  We had a class election, with a little voting booth and everything.  I didn’t know anything about either candidate, so I voted for the guy I had heard of: Richard Nixon, who I had heard my father talking about at some point.  To this day, I clearly remember sitting on the front lawn of the school, waiting for the bus to come, when they announced on the loudspeaker that Nixon had won the school-wide election.  I remember cheering, not because I had any idea who Nixon was, but because I had somehow “guessed right.”  When it was announced later that night that Nixon had also won the national election, it felt anti-climactic.

I say, my parents always told me that they picked Crystal Lake to live in because of the schools.  And if there is one thing that sticks out in my mind about my education, it was the emphasis on fairness and equality, tolerance and consideration, and, most of all, a vigorous denunciation of racism.  I was told, from a very early age, that black people are every bit as good as white people and that I shouldn’t let anyone tell me different.  I was told this over and over again by my teachers.  They made us read Huck Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman.  They took us to a real movie theater to see Sounder, and Roots was a school-wide event that touched every subject from Social Studies to gym.  By the time I graduated high school, I was like, “Okay, okay, I get it, black people are just as good as white people, fine, if I ever meet one I’ll be sure to keep that in mind.”

Because, of course, there were no black people in Crystal Lake.  I was as likely to see a black man in Crystal Lake than I was likely to see the Loch Ness Monster.

It’s obvious to me now what was going on, but back then everything was weird and mysterious.  Why, I wondered, did they keep hammering away at this perfectly obvious, perfectly acceptable truth?  What was their problem?

Their problem, of course, was that the US was, at the time, embroiled in a massive civil-rights battle, one that culminated in the assassination of Martin Luther King.  The people who ran the schools of Crystal Lake probably considered themselves righteous and embattled, stemming a tide of hatred and discord in our little white middle-class suburb.  They probably saw themselves as beacons of liberty and equality, combating limitless messages of racism and intolerance they were sure were scarring my still-developing mind.

Not without reason.  I remember once, at eight or so, playing on a playground at an exclusive country club, and a little boy near me picked a penny up off the ground.  The little boy’s mother slapped the coin out of his hand and said “Don’t pick that up off the ground, a nigger could have touched it!”  This was not in Birmingham or Jackson, this was in Crystal Lake – hell, this was in a country club in Crystal Lake – the mother’s outburst was not only contrary to everything I’d been taught up to that point, it was completely irrational – there could not have been a black person, of any class ranking, for sixty miles around.  There were the typical sort of racist jokes and stories passed around as social currency, and the lone Greek boy in my fourth-grade class was endlessly teased for the color of his skin.

And not even my revered school system was immune.  I remember one eighth-grade social-studies teacher – a social studies teacher! – openly sneering, in class, about Iron Eyes Cody, the “Indian” used in the famous environmental ads of the mid-70s.  This enlightened soul instructed his students that American Indians (as they were known then) were no environmentalists, not any kind of spiritualists, or members of any decent kind of society at all.  Rather, he informed us that Indians were lazy, uneducated slobs concerned solely with getting drunk.  “Fire water!  Fire water!” this teacher exclaimed, staggering around the room in an exaggerated parody of Indian inebriation.  An English teacher in high school, in between teaching us The Old Man and the Sea and Slaughterhouse-Five, took time out to warn us, in dire terms, that “the blacks” had already moved into several outlying Chicago suburbs, and that, in ten years time, “they’ll be here too, just you watch,” as if they were, literally, a plague sweeping outward from the urban epicenter.

For my second presidential election, in 1972, I was 11 years old and in fifth [no, wait, sixth -- thanks, felixbunae] grade.  Everyone – everyone – voted for Nixon.  There was only one boy in my class who voted for McGovern, a strange, quietly humorous boy with long blond hair and a habit of wearing turtlenecks.  This oddball’s name was Ivan – Ivan! – and his father was a psychiatrist and his mother was an artist, and he lived on a sheep farm out of town, a strange estate that had a Buddhist temple gate over the entrance to the pastureland.  Ivan, who was known as the “brainy” kid, smilingly took all kinds of abuse from his classmates and patiently explained why McGovern’s policies were better than Nixon’s (he was also an avowed communist, if his name wasn’t clue enough to his parents’ political leanings).  The fact that, at 11, he actually was familiar with the candidates’ respective policies branded him as a hopeless egghead among us Nixonians.  Secretly I admired Ivan, because he could patiently and elegantly explain to me buzzwords that people threw around like brickbats in 1972 – not just “communism” but also “abortion” and “feminism” and “Viet Cong” and “the domino theory,” but publicly I ridiculed him for being ridiculously out of step with popular opinion.

(Five seconds at Google has shown me that Ivan has become a renowned children’s neurologist in Nebraska.  I am not in the least surprised.)

Watergate was the defining moment of my adolescence.  I followed every twist and turn of the investigation, I raced home to watch the hearings on television, I listened to my father bitch and pontificate about who was a fool and who was a wise man.  Imagine!  Twelve years old, and obsessed with Watergate!  I knew all about Jeb Magruder and John Ehrlichman and H.R. Haldeman and the E. Howard Hunt and the Saturday Night Massacre.  Are there twelve-year-olds out there today who are following the story of the Wall Street bailout, the war in Iraq, the atrocities of Abu Ghraib?  Every week I’d rush to the library and look through all the weekly magazines, trying to get a handle on a political crisis that was tearing the nation apart.

I came away from Watergate a sadder but wiser young man – I had seen a president resign in disgrace, but I still felt in my heart that Nixon was an intelligent, complex man who had gotten caught up in something bigger and more powerful than himself.  (My father, the reader may wish to know, thought the Watergate scandal was nothing more than a sophisticated hit job and sent Nixon a telegram of condolence on the day he resigned – I’m sure it was greatly appreciated.)  I thought Gerald Ford, too, was an honest, decent man, a straight-shouldered public servant perhaps in a little over his head, and I wasn’t angry when he pardoned Nixon, I thought he was cauterizing the wound that was threatening to bleed the nation to death.

Ford, I felt, was doomed from the start.  It seemed to me that the Democrats could have run a turnip in 1976 and still won.  And while I thought Jimmy Carter was more qualified for the presidency than a turnip, I didn’t particularly like him.  I didn’t buy his aw-shucks peanut-farmer shtick and I thought his brother Billy was a national embarrassment.  But, as with Ford, it seemed to me that Carter was a decent man, an honest man, who was unable, for reasons pertaining to that same honesty and decency, to make a very effective president.

Maybe I was just young and naïve, but I believed what I had been taught, that the presidency was a great and powerful office and the men who held that office were deserving of our respect and admiration.  Nixon may have resigned in disgrace, but he still went to China, and he still got a freakin’ man on the moon.  Try to imagine George W. Bush putting a man on the moon!

Next: Ronald Reagan becomes president and tries to kill me.