Nixon

When I was a senior in high school, it was rare we had dinner together as a family.  I was often working on shows, either acting or doing tech, at the OPHS Little Theater.  My parents were in their period of going out to dinner with friends or clients several nights a week.  David was off on his supposed "year off" from college, wandering around with Pam Markus all over the place.  Carol was the only person in the family with a set schedule.

But on those few occasions when we did have dinner together as a family, we had, that year, an uninvited and unwelcome guest at dinner almost every night:  Richard Nixon.  Dad would sit with the paper, or Newsweek, and expound on the latest of Nixon's sins.  He was, of course, preaching to the choir, but he would get angrier and angrier, almost to the point where I almost wanted to defend Nixon just to have something to say.  As more and more nastiness of Watergate and Nixon's other sins became public, dad's anger only increased.  There was so much information out there about how crooked he had become that it led to just longer and louder tirades against Nixon.  

Of course, dad was right in his vitriol.  But it wasn't doing any of us any good.  Dinner became unpleasant.  None of us disagreed about Nixon, but I at least didn't need to hear the latest sins at the dinner table.  I'd rather eat my salad in peace.  

Nixon resigned only about a month before I left for college, which pretty much put an end to the tirades.  

Subsequently, and interestingly, one of the ways Marjorie and I bonded as we got to know one another the next year was complaining together about Jerry Ford.  But without reading the newspaper at the dinner table.