The spot is no less beautiful for it being mostly bullshit. Cody is Italian American, just for starters, the son of Sicilian immigrants. He was born Espera Oscar De Corti and raised in Louisiana before moving to Los Angeles to pursue an acting career. He will appear in a hundred Westerns and get a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for roles that will not always require the same gravitas displayed in the litter spot. As an Indian on the warpath in a 1950s Borden commercial, he ceased tomahawking a white man to death only after being offered an Elsie brand Popsicle. “When that Injun tasted the fresh fruit flavor,” went the voice-over, “his war paint melted into a great big happy grin.”
In his buckskin and braids, Cody would look right at home at Fort Dells—a reproduction American Indian in a reproduction American Indian campsite—right down to the mock mocs on his feet.
And yet if the commercial Cody makes is fiction, it is the best kind of literary fiction: a lie that tells the truth. Cody is by all accounts genuine in his love of Native American culture. He married a Native American woman, adopted and raised two Native American children, and will pass as Native American for the rest of his life. As such, he doesn’t want to look weak by crying on camera in the Keep America Beautiful spot. So the director does two takes: one with the tear and one without. In the take that will become famous, Cody’s single tear is a drop of glycerine.
But that not-quite teardrop shed by that not-quite Indian tells a truth about America. For a time in the 1970s, Keep America Beautiful will report getting two thousand letters a month from volunteers wanting to clean up their own communities. Casual littering quickly attracts public scorn. I will shame my own father when he absentmindedly lets a Kleenex fall from his pocket in the park near our house, and that is almost entirely down to Iron Eyes Cody.
As a child of the 1970s, and thus the fresh-faced hope for world change, I will soon be urged by a succession of cartoon characters to take personal responsibility for the state of the planet. Told by Woodsy Owl to “Give a hoot! Don’t pollute,” we’ll give a hoot, my friends and I, refusing to pump toxic waste from our factories into our rivers while at recess. It will be frightening to hear Smokey Bear say “Only you can prevent forest fires” when I don’t live near a forest or have access to the matches in the cabinet above the stove. But I will dutifully obey. Told to “Think metric,” we’ll think metric (at least in a half-assed way, for a brief time, during school hours) until we come home and live proudly among ounces and feet.
None of that yet concerns us while traveling westbound on I-94 in Wisconsin on the morning of July 21, 1969. Behind me, as we fly toward the Minnesota state line, Jim and Tom are fighting over who gets to lie across the hump that conceals the drive train, with its pleasing, spine-numbing vibrations. They are in costumes, pretending to be adults, Jim dressed entirely in flannel, in a replica Cubs jersey, while Tom wears the pin-striped overalls of a train engineer. Whenever Jim spots a Volkswagen Beetle he shouts “Slug Bug” and punches Tom in the biceps.
Jim is about to become a ’70s alpha boy: dibs caller of car seats, hogger of second helpings, chooser of channels, permanent Monopoly banker, all-time quarterback of backyard football, giver of charley horses on long car rides, and slugger of Slug Bugs with no punch-backs.
The very substance speeding us on our way—leaded gasoline—is already being phased out by law. In just a couple of years “loony gas,” as it has been known since the 1930s for its deleterious effect on the brain, will be replaced by something called “unleaded.” (“Regular or unleaded?” the grease monkey always asks on summer car trips across the country, while wiping the back of his neck with a filthy rag. And Dad will affect the accent of wherever we are and say, “Fill ’er up with unleaded.”)
But for now—in the dog days of summer, in the dog days of a dying decade—we are still inhaling leaded gas, and those fumes aren’t the only heady aromas about to evaporate forever. It is the last moment to let litter fly from the car window with society’s sanction, while a two-year-old gently snoozes in his mother’s lap, unfettered by a seat belt, in the shotgun seat of a Chevy Impala. Soon we will be making our own giant leap into the unknown, the dawn of a new decade, on a mission—Impala 11—to a new world.
But first we take a valedictory pass through the old world. Hitchhiking is illegal on the interstate highway system, but the hitchhikers are stationed at every other on-ramp, thumbing a ride or bumming a ride or—as a song by the British group Vanity Fare will put it at the end of 1969—“Hitchin’ a Ride.” The song will become a top-five hit in the United States, where thousands of young people this summer hitchhike to and from Woodstock: “I came upon a child of God. He was walkin’ along the road…”
Dad doesn’t know it, but those hitchhikers are already an endangered species by the time he is blowing past them at eighty miles an hour in a butterscotch blur, and even the cigarette butts those hitchhikers are scattering to the wind will soon be reduced in number.
Dad smoked two packs a day until he was thirty. In high school, he lived in an eighteen-by-thirty-six-foot trailer in Fort Wayne, Indiana, with a single mother who chain-smoked, so he was already steeped in the stuff, like a hickory-cured ham, by the time he went off to play football at Purdue, where he figured he might as well see what firsthand smoke was like and took up Marlboros.
Mom smoked all the while she was pregnant with her first child, and when that child was born, Dad liked to photograph him in his high chair, a cigarette dangling from one-year-old Jim’s lower lip.
Dad, Mom, and baby Jim had all quit smoking by the time Tom was born in 1965—Dad abstemiously declined to hand out cigars, as he had done with Jim—and the scant evidence of their ever having smoked is a black-and-white picture from a party in 1954: Dad has three cigarettes fanning out from his mouth and nine empty beer bottles on the table in front of him. He is decanting the contents of a tenth beer bottle into his right ear. In his left arm is my mother-to-be, aged nineteen, looking at the camera with a half smile as unreadable as the Mona Lisa’s.
The clock is already running out on Big Tobacco. On January 1, 1971, cigarette ads will be banned on TV and radio, and print ads and cigarette packages will carry a warning: THE SURGEON GENERAL HAS DETERMINED THAT CIGARETTE SMOKING IS DANGEROUS TO YOUR HEALTH.
This determination was made in no small part by two doctors, E. Cuyler Hammond and Oscar Auerbach, who conducted an extraordinary study. Dr. Auerbach taught eighty-six beagles to smoke up to two packs of cigarettes a day. The smoking was done through a tube inserted in their throats—the beagles had been given tracheotomies—and not, to my disappointment, while leaning up against a building in the rain. But still, the beagles took to smoking with gusto. After two weeks, some of the beagles wagged their tails in anticipation of their next heater. Twelve of those beagles developed lung cancer.