END-OF-YEAR MANIFESTATIONS: "Little boxes, on the hillside..."

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 30, 2021

John Madden was very well-liked: NFL legend John Madden died this week at age 85. At the New York Times (and elsewhere), his death was front-page news.

Why was Madden so well liked? In that lengthy front-page obituary, the Times' Ben Shpigel explained it the way many others did:

SHPIGEL (12/29/21): As inclusive as he was beloved, Madden embodied a rare breed of sports personality. He could relate to the plumber in Pennsylvania or the custodian in Kentucky—or the cameramen on his broadcast crew—because he viewed himself, at bottom, as an ordinary guy who just happened to know a lot about football. Grounded by an incapacitating fear of flying, he met many of his fans while crisscrossing the country, first in Amtrak trains and then in his Madden Cruiser, a decked-out motor coach that was a rare luxurious concession...

For more than 20 years, that bus shepherded Madden to and from his assignments, a fulfillment of sorts of a favorite book, “Travels with Charley,” by John Steinbeck, who had driven around America in a camper with his poodle. 

By common agreement, Madden was well liked—was even "beloved"—"because he viewed himself...as an ordinary guy." Also, because he conducted himself that way in his interactions with regular people. 

Giant fame and giant wealth didn't seem to have gone to his head. His tendencies may have tracked back to the circumstances of his youth:

SHPIGEL: Madden was born in Austin, Minn., on April 10, 1936, the oldest of three children, and the only son, of Earl and Mary (Flaherty) Madden. His father was a mechanic.

When John was 6, his family moved to Daly City, Calif., a working-class suburb of San Francisco whose proximity to the city offered adventurous escapes for sports-crazed boys. With his close friend John Robinson, who would become the head coach at Southern California and of the Los Angeles Rams, Madden hitched trolley rides into town and then sneaked into Kezar Stadium and Seals Stadium to watch football and baseball games.

His family was of modest means, but Madden was resourceful. He scrounged for gear in rummage bins and fashioned his baseball bats by taping together pieces found at semipro games. Opportunities for minor-league baseball beckoned—the Red Sox and the Yankees expressed interest—but Madden, from his time caddying for the well-heeled at the San Francisco Golf Club, had come to equate success with a college education.

Madden grew up in working-class Daly City, in a family of modest means. Roughly a decade later, Malvina Reynolds wrote a song about the little houses of that city's urban sprawl, and about the "ticky tacky" people said to be living inside them.

The Reynolds song became well known. Its lyrics started like this:

Little boxes, on the hillside
Little boxes made of ticky tacky
Little boxes, little boxes,
Little boxes all the same

There's a pink one and a green one
And a blue one and a yellow one
And they're all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same

And the people in the houses
All went to the university
Where they were put in boxes
And they came out all the same

And there's doctors and lawyers
And business executives
And they're all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same

We don't know why Reynolds would have thought that the people inside those little houses were a bunch of doctors and lawyers. In our experience, Daly City was much more a fog-infested working-class suburb, just as the New York Times said.

In fairness to Reynolds, she may have written her song that way so it wouldn't seem that she was mocking the working class. But our tribe sometimes tends to enjoy characterizing and mocking Others in extremely large groups.

Madden grew up in Daly City in the 1940s and the early 1950s. As of the summer of 1960, one of our  aunts was living in one of the very houses, in the highly visible Westlake development, which Reynolds described and mocked in her song.

Those houses were indeed quite small. Except for the various pastel shades they'd been painted, they did all look just the same.

That said, we'll venture a guess:

The people living inside those houses weren't all made of ticky tacky. Also, they didn't all look just the same!

Our question today is simple. Can you see a possible problem with Reynolds' well-known song? 

At the time, we probably couldn't. Opinions may differ today.

At some point, Tom Lehrer apparently described Little Boxes as "the most sanctimonious song ever written." That doesn't mean that Lehrer was right, but all too often, within our tribe, the possible problem lurking here may persist, even today.

The late John Madden was very well liked. For background on the Reynolds song, you can just click here. 

Tomorrow: Top question of the past year!