Henrietta Hay's Column

1993 was a fine year for me personally, but as a measure of social progress it was a pretty lousy one - what with fires and floods and bombings and war and hunger and kids shooting kids.

I was struggling to find something good to say about it one evening before Christmas, when something very good landed on my doorstep. When the doorbell rang I opened it to find a group of my very good friends singing carols -- to me. I have upon occasion been a caroler, but this was my first experience as a carolee. It was a wonderful gift and certainly made the year look brighter.

Groups of carolers usually brave the cold to sing for the elderly and the homebound. I figured with luck I'd never rate. Well, wait a minute now. Let's think this through. Nah-- old age is always ten years older than I am. I'm sure there was another reason.

To return to 1993--or would you rather not? On balance it was probably like Dickens' comment, "It was the best of times and the worst of times." All years are like this, a blend of good and bad. Russell Baker in his autobiography has a theory. He says that most years start out well, and as you look back, when someone you love didn't die, it was a good year.

Take 1929. I was a junior in High School and the world looked as rosy as it ever can for a kid in that precarious state of growth. There were tennis matches and parties and, yes, studying. In March Herbert Hoover had been inaugurated and the future looked bright for America. On October 24 the stock market started a plunge that ended with U. S. securities losing $26 billion, the first phase of Depression and world economic crisis. I suspect that at the time I was only vaguely aware of what had happened, but I learned very quickly when I headed for college and realized the sacrifice my family was making to get me there.

Or take 1941. That year started very well. My older son was a year old and, and was, of course, the most wonderful baby that ever lived. Denver was about half way between the cow town I knew as a kid and the city it is now, and everything looked rosy -- until December 7 when the world changed again. I was in the kitchen getting dinner that Sunday afternoon when the news came over the radio that Pearl Harbor had been bombed and World War II had started.

1945 is a year we should all remember, but most people did not realize at the time how important it was. Those of us on the home front were busy counting ration stamps on sugar and gasoline and putting make-up on our legs because we couldn't buy hose. We heard about the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but at the time most of us did not really understand what had happened.

Then there was 1963, which is getting up there into the Baby Boomers memory. I was doing a show on a local radio station when the station manager bumped me unceremoniously to announce that word had just come in that President Kennedy had been shot. We all hovered around the teletype the rest of the day. The schools closed and my High School son and one of his friends came in looking for some sort of comfort. There wasn't any.

We tend to remember big picture items in terms of the year in which they happened. Personal memories are fragments. 1993 had some great ones for me, like listening to my granddaughter's debut with the Houston Grand Opera, "doing" Aspen with my Phoenix grandson and meeting Molly Ivins. On a more impersonal note, I have been delighted to watch three high profile women in Washington, Hillary, Janet and Ruth putting big cracks in the glass ceiling and the C. U. women's basketball team putting cracks in C. U.'s athletic program.

I have no idea what people thirty years from now will say about 1993, but in spite of all the awful tragedies going on around us, we treasure the good things that have happened. Happy New Year.