My boyfriend and I were in our ’63 VW Bug, headed down the Vine Street Expressway on our way to Cape Cod. We were listening to NPR on the car radio, and we heard the news: Nixon resigned! Everyone started honking their car horns, it was so strange.
Nixon memories
Pretty similar in KC. Driving around in my ’73 VW bug (had a regular job), horn honking all over town. Slapped on my “Impeach Ford” bumper sticker that night.
I was too far underground to have a radio or a TV turned on. But I did read it in the morning paper.
I was an eleven year old paper boy for the WaPo and my parents wanted to save some copies of the paper because they would be collectors items.
I wasn’t impressed. Mostly I was pissed off that the hearings had pre-empted the Brady Bunch reruns most of the summer (often right at the last minute before it started, or sometimes after it had started).
I did not think the resignation was that big a deal and I didn’t understand who did what. I didn’t like Nixon because of the VN war. But the thing I thought was fucked up was the pardon. Everyone acted like that was such a gracious thing for Ford to do, and poor disgraced old Nixon.
To me that totally smacked of the slave mentality of most Americans. No such forgiveness was ever extended to the draft dodgers or other lowly (and mostly liberal) law breakers. But god forbid the rich and powerful be held accountable (and no, the resignation was not an accountable moment, just the nearest thing we will ever get in America).
Besides that, Watergate made the WaPo what it is. It used to be the 2nd paper in town, and the more liberal of the two (the Star was an afternoon paper and was much more popular until the Post put it out of business with Watergate), and the Post was until then very small and easy to carry (like 40 or 50 pages). They paid 3 cents per paper plus .75 cents per insert (usually one on Thursday and Saturday and 2 or 3 inserts on Sunday, and usually the inserts were bigger than the actual news part of the paper). After Watergate, it became enormous and backbreaking, and they broke the union of the distributor (the guys who delivered to the paperboys). The Sunday paper took hours to deliver, starting the night before and you only made about 4 or 5 bucks. You could only carry about 3 or 4 papers at a time, so it took 25 or 30 trips back home. And 8 years later, they were still paying paperboys the same rate as in 1974.
In the olden days, you used to PAY to buy a paper route. I forget how much we paid. By the 1980s, delivering newpapers was such a raw deal, you couldn’t give them away.