Elections and politics have always been a big part of my family\u2019s life, perhaps surprisingly mostly on the GOP side.<\/p>\n
I used to be told to behave myself and play outside while my grandmother and great-grandmother hosted teas in their homes on Keever Avenue to raise funds and awareness for emerging young Republicans like George Deukmejian and Craig Hosmer. When I was 7 I tagged along on canvassing excursions with my dad, knocking on doors and pestering people to vote for Joe Shell<\/a> who was running against Richard Nixon in the Republican gubernatorial primary, because many Republicans felt Nixon wasn\u2019t conservative enough.<\/p>\n My great-grandfather was in the Iowa State Legislature and his wife was a suffragette who was a victim of a whispering campaign about her being a lesbian, until the local paper ran a photo of her and her husband and their 11 children in a touring car.<\/p>\n My grandmother was an alternate delegate for Barry Goldwater at the 1964 Republican Convention in San Francisco\u2019s Cow Palace. I still have the badge, kept in a box with a program my grandmother brought me from a Ronald Reagan gubernatorial rally<\/a> at the Lakewood Center in 1966, signed, \u201cHi, Timmy! Ronald Reagan.\u201d<\/p>\n Obviously, I come from hardy conservative Republican stock and I would probably have fallen into the Fox-hole and be driving a loaded Dodge Ram pickup with an array of 34 pro-Trump\/anti-Biden stickers on the back by now if I hadn\u2019t fallen in with the wrong crowd and emerged as a McGovern Democrat and cast my first vote for president in 1976 for Jimmy Carter, based on the sage written advice of Hunter S. Thompson<\/a> in Rolling Stone.<\/p>\n By the mid-1990s, voting became a family outing. My wife, my 8-year-old son Ray and 2-year-old daughter Hannah, and Jimmy, our beloved Aussie always took the stroll down to the end of the block to vote in the Sperry family\u2019s garage, Hannah in a wagon and Jimmy bounding along with us. I wish I\u2019d commissioned Norman Rockwell to do a painting of us.<\/p>\n People didn\u2019t hate one another for their opposing opinions yet. One of my neighbors, a fairly new friend at the time, was enthusiastically against Bill Clinton in 1996 and said, \u201cI don\u2019t know why he\u2019s ahead in the polls. I don\u2019t know a single person who is voting for Clinton.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cUh, I am,\u201d I said. He was appalled and it led to one of many arguments, but he didn\u2019t unfriend me on the spot.<\/p>\n We never missed an election, always beating the same path to the Sperry house, where they set up a mock election booth outside so the kids could fill out a ballot. In my memory it was always a crisp, sunny mid-fall afternoon, with the liquidambars turning gold and orange and all the various other colors of 1960s home appliances.<\/p>\n Surely, I\u2019m a bit overly nostalgic for those early fall evenings when the kids were little and the smell of burning firewood and the increasingly southward arc of the sun made the lighting so distinctly autumnal that it annually smacks me with a strong feeling of deja vu, reminding me of all those late October and early November days all the way back to when I was living with my grandparents and getting costumed up for my early Halloweens.<\/p>\n