Yesterday Came Suddenly

Earl Fowler

It took some doing, some rifling through plastic bins filled with old newspaper clippings, but there it was (at last!) on the Comment page of the July 15, 2000, edition of the Montreal Gazette.

The piece I’d been searching for was sandwiched between a column by former Gazette editor Norman Webster suggesting that freshly minted Canadian Alliance leader, Stockwell Day, would prove to be as charismatic as John F. Kennedy (well, they can’t all be gems), and a jeremiad by Calgary Herald columnist Catherine Ford lamenting the recent bankruptcy of Frederick’s of Hollywood.

(For the record, Ms Ford blamed the demise of the “North American institution” on “globalization, cheap lace and public lewdness.” The same Ms Ford, by the bye, who once commented favourably about my “tight buns” as I swished past her in the Herald newsroom. But that’s not what I’m here to talk about.)

In between the day’s ruminations by those two titans of Canadian journalism was an essay with my byline and the headline “Talking about our degeneration.” I’d been prompted to write it after twigging to the revelation that Ringo Starr, born on July 7, 1940, had turned 60 a week before and ... Hardly Anyone Had Noticed!!!!

After failing to persuade Gazette city columnist Mike Boone re. the manifest urgency of the topic, I took matters into my own Apple iBook powerbook G3 clamshell (the funkiest laptop design of all time) and began typing:

We all know about the news media’s insatiable appetite for milking significant anniversaries until the spent teats of the past are chafed and bleeding smudgy black ink.

The penchant is entirely understandable, given, for example, the recent public clamour for a thorough rehashing of the Meech Lake accord and standoff at Oka.

Can’t get enough, frankly.

Thus, I had been confidently anticipating a mass donning of sackcloth and indiscriminate daubing of ashes this month.

For verily, a sign — maybe The Sign — has been sent that the endgame is upon us, fellow Baby Boomers. And yet, incredibly, the cosmic sea change seems to have slipped across the universe without so much as a word slithering into a paper cup.

So steady the latté, turn off your modem, relax and float downstream.

Listen. Do you want to know a secret? Richard Starkey, once a member of the very apotheosis of 1960s youth culture, is back in the 60s. His 60s.

Aka Ringo Starr. The funny-looking Beatle. The one who had simply to smile and bob his head while keeping the beat.

It was bad enough when the Rat Pack became infirm and Bob Hope stopped being funny (sometime before the Vietnam War, I recall) and Betty Kennedy became senile enough to be named to the Senate.

But bummer, children, this is Ringo. This is us, fellow stardust clouds. We’re next in line for the early-bird, piggies-in-a-blanket specials at Smitty’s House of Pre-chewed Pancakes.

A Beatle is 60.

The piece drones on in this vein drippily and trippily (think the opening to “Tomorrow Never Knows” on Revolver), but enough of all that.

What I want you to do is to flash forward through 25 years of tomorrows and tomorrows and tomorrows. And suddenly Ringo, the elder of the remaining Fab Two (Paul McCartney celebrated his 83rd on June 18), is about to turn 85.

Which set me to thinking, (full disclosure) while spaced, about time again.

Ringo was born into a turbulent world at war. Five days before his birth, the British-owned SS Arondora Star, carrying civilian internees and POWs of German and Italian origin from Liverpool to St. John’s, Newfoundland, was torpedoed and sunk by a German U-boat northwest of Ireland, killing an estimated 865.

The Battle of Britain air offensive by the Luftwaffe against the British RAF Fighter Command began when he was just three days old. Ja, ja, ja.

Ringo would be one-and-a-half when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. He was 23 when the Beatles made that first fateful appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show on Feb. 9, 1964, less than three months after Kennedy’s assassination. He’d be 40 when an assassin would gun down John Lennon on Dec. 8, 1980, twenty years before I wrote the piece marvelling gormlessly at how quickly and relentlessly time marches on.

But what I find discombobulating — now that I think of it — is that if you flash back 85 years from 1940, you wind up in 1855. Eighteen frigging fifty-five.

Let me take you down ’cause I’m going to strawberry Copperfields.

Ringo isn’t technically a Baby Boomer. But if you are a 75-year-old born in 1950, say, mentally flash back 75 years in the other direction to 1875. If you were born in 1960, take the T-train back 65 years to 1895. We all live in a yellowing submarine, and our friends are all aboard. Many more of them live next door.

And the band begins to play:

The mid-19th century was a period of significant political change across the globe. In Europe, the Crimean War (1853-1856) was in full swing. The war, involving Russia against an alliance of the Ottoman Empire, the United Kingdom, France, and Sardinia, was a defining moment in the decline of Russia’s imperial ambitions and the restructuring of European power. Perhaps you’ve noticed that it tends to flare up every now and then.

That conflict also underscored the rise of industrialized warfare, as new technologies like the telegraph and railroads were increasingly used for military logistics and communication. Could drones be far behind?

Elsewhere, European empires were deeply entrenched in colonization. Britain, France, and other powers were extending their control over vast territories in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific. The British Empire, in particular, was at its zenith, controlling lands that spanned the globe, from India to the Americas. This imperial expansion, however, was met with resistance, and the year 1855 saw the beginnings of what would become a tortuous history of anti-colonial movements.

In the United States, the mid-1800s were marked by tensions over slavery, which would culminate in the American Civil War just a few years later. In 1855 in particular, the country was embroiled in political and social upheaval, particularly in territories like Kansas, where pro-slavery and anti-slavery forces clashed in what became known as Bleeding Kansas. To the north, Canada wouldn’t be born as a dominion of four provinces for another 12 years.

The mid-19th century was also a time of great technological progress that set the stage for future industrialization. The steam engine, which had been refined in the late 18th century, was now a cornerstone of industry and transportation. In 1855, the world saw the continued development of the railway system, with countries like Britain and the United States seeing a rapid expansion of railroads, which connected distant regions and facilitated the movement of goods and people on an unprecedented scale. Much to the sorrow of Indigenous Peoples.

The advent of photography also marked a significant cultural shift. While the first permanent photograph had been taken in 1826, by 1855, photography had begun to gain more widespread use, particularly in Europe and America. This new medium allowed people to capture moments in time, offering a visual record of both personal and public history.

In the realm of science, 1855 was an exciting year for discoveries that would have long-lasting impacts. Theories on evolution were beginning to gain traction, and though Charles Darwin’s landmark On the Origin of Species wouldn’t be published until 1859, the groundwork for his revolutionary ideas was being laid during this period. Similarly, developments in medicine and chemistry were transforming everyday life, with innovations such as antiseptic techniques beginning to emerge.

The world of 1855 was also a time of social transformation, with significant shifts in culture, art, and daily life. In Europe, the Romantic movement, which celebrated individualism, emotion, and nature, was fading into the background as the Realist movement began to take hold. In literature, figures like Charles Dickens were documenting the lives of the urban poor, while painters like Gustave Courbet were focusing on the realities of everyday life, challenging traditional depictions of beauty and history.

Finally, the mid-19th century was a period of significant social inequality. The Industrial Revolution had brought with it tremendous wealth for some, but also extreme poverty for many others. The urban working class faced gruelling labour conditions, while women continued to fight for their rights, including the right to vote. The seeds of future social movements — such as women’s suffrage and labour rights — were being sown during this period.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had published the political pamphlet that became known as “The Communist Manifesto” amid the European Revolutions of 1848, and it remains one of the world’s most influential political documents to this day.

Anyone born in 1855 who made it to 1940 lived through the numerous transformations unleashed by industrialization, imperialism and social upheaval, the American Gilded Age between the Reconstruction Era and the so-called Progressive Era (1890s-1920), the First World War, the Russian Revolution, the rise of fascism during the Great Depression, the outbreak of the Second World War, the replacement of the horse-and-buggy era by automobiles, the invention of airplanes, the development of Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity and the mind-blowing implications of quantum physics, the revelation that there are trillions of galaxies in addition to our own in an expanding universe, and so on and so on and so on.

Dunno whether anyone 85 or older ever held the newborn Ritchie Starkey in 1940. But take a minute to ponder the stone-cold fact that a cheerful, peace-signing musician we all love has now been pounding out a heartbeat as long as any surviving alumni from the 1855 maternity care unit had been in the days when Hitler’s blitzkrieging Wehrmacht seemed en route to running the table in Europe.

Not bad for a kid from a lousy Liverpool neighbourhood whose education was curtailed by lengthy recoveries from a coma caused by peritonitis and a later bout with tuberculosis that led to almost two years in a sanatorium. Not for nothing did his classmates tease him as “Lazarus.”

And now back to 2025.

A quarter century after moaning about the early signs of our degeneration — as that earlier contemplation of pre-chewed pancakes at the Husky House Truckstop of the soul draws ever nearer and we are all left wondering où sont les tight buns d’antan — do I have any advice for the temporally challenged?

It’s a facile, hippie-dippie fantasy to imagine that in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make. Isn’t it pretty to think so?

But I do think this is an enlightened suggestion for those of us still able to get around as many, many nights go by: Sunday mornings, go for a ride. It’s later than you think.

One more time for Ringo!