My Timing: decades of Forrest Gump moments MEMOIR
I once thought of writing an autobiography where I was a kind of Forrest Gump character, who through my weird behavior, ended up in the middle of many significant events. Through a kind of serendipity, I’d just happen to be there when they happened.
So I ended up getting to know Timothy Leary and singing on stage in HAIR! and my weird compulsions even got me a job as a Public Information Specialist at NASA in Houston. writing press releases and escorting reporters into Mission Control during space missions
The Gump experience I write about today is: I was one of the
first non scientists to learn that planet Earth is heating up alarmingly fast,
and I also was among the first to witness scientists becoming afraid to say anything more about
it.
The Gump moment that I keep thinking of now is around 1980,
when the Air Force showed up and NASA changed from a workspace that was laid-back and civilian, where
guards at the entrance on Nasa Road One just waved pretty much anyone through the
gates, into a tight
security, heavily sealed off piece of land with lots of Air Force uniforms everywhere you looked, and
guards at the gate scrutinizing everyone’s badges closely.
Now years later…
Why think about this now decades later?
Because of global warming.
In 1979 I interviewed a scientist about his work on a totally different subject; and as I was packing up to leave he stopped me, “Wait, what you really should write about is how fast the planet is heating.”
He then described the alarming rate at which the polar ice caps were melting, how over past years you could see an ominous change happening, then he started talking really fast about the implications of a heating planet and it was all way over my head, one year out of college.
Then awhile later I was in my little office trying to come up with story ideas for Space News Roundup of which I was editor, and I remembered what that geologist had told me about the planet heating. It was Houston, I could have just come from a walk across the mall on a summer afternoon feeling the heat-
I called him and asked him if he could elaborate a little bit more about the planet heating-
“I don't know what you're talking about,” he answered abruptly. Then I’d see him with colleagues in the employee cafeteria and he’d barely acknowledge me.
When the Air Force showed up, I knew I wasn’t going to last
much longer. I’d been surprised that a person with my background had gotten
hired by NASA to begin with. To get hired, I passed a basic security clearance even though I’d
been on paid staff of the Peace and Freedom party in California when I was twenty years old, and I really did spend time in 1969 on a commune in Laguna Canyon where Tim
Leary did drop in now and then, so I probably
had an FBI file.
Still they hired me to have the run of Johnson Space Center and
make appointments to interview pretty much anyone who worked there. What a
great job to get straight out of college in 1978.
*****
I was one of the first non scientists to learn that planet Earth is heating up alarmingly fast, and I also was among the first to witness scientists becoming afraid to say anything more about it.
***************
Now abruptly a 20 page top secret security form was dumped
on my desk. “Everyone’s got to have red badges from now on,” they said, and I knew
my days there were numbered. I mean not
to mention the blue movies I made, I mean it, I don’t mention those…
NASA changed then, at same time as scientists were starting to talk about global warming then stopped. Only now in 2024 did I think of that connection. It may be coincidence...
Why Forrest Gump?
Point is, that compulsion led me to strive and finagle myself
into the inner circles of many places. I
got to perform in HAIR! because I was hanging around backstage and some cast
members just took me in. I got to go to
Peace and Freedom Party meetings when I was still a teenager because as soon as
I heard about war crimes going on in Vietnam, I became compulsed to become an
activist, antiwar work took over my last year of high school.
I know compulsed is not a word. Unless you've had PTSD for
decades, then compulsed is a word.
*****
So I had my own office with windows and steel gray furniture in Building Two of Johnson Space Center within months after graduating with my journalism degree in 1978.
Hmm. One thing bringing up this memory is watching The Trial
of Christine Keeler on Max recently, then buying her autobiography which I am stalled
in reading.
Men in uniform, especially officers, guys who work in intelligence,
they sniff out a woman like me, just like Stephen Ward and John Profumo sniffed
out Christine Keeler. They sense when a woman has something inside her that makes
her fall for men in power, even ugly totally unattractive guys. I was one of those women, likely many of women
like us had histories of sexual assault as children that made us so confused. I
don't think Keeler lived long enough to make that connection.
I know now that most of that weird behavior of being a sexual aggressor at the same time as I was a straight arrow public affairs person for NASA was the result of being molested by a Catholic priest when I was age five-six. But in the seventies and eighties I was deep into my Faster Than the Speed of Life period, which doctors in the nineties told me was “PTSD since age five” and I didn't believe it first time I heard it. But it explained everything. All the scandalous, out of control behavior that had ruined every job I got, it was because of compulsion placed in me at the fingertips of a pervert priest in 1953.
But I digress.
*****
At NASA in 1980, once the newly arrived uniformed Air Force
officers sniffed me out, they started hanging out in my private office with windows
in Building Two, gangs of them. And I did have sex with more than one of them, that's
what I did. They even set me up one time with a general. Honest, the guy at the
top floor of a tower on the Air Force Space Command site that you’d see as an
exit south of L.A. off the Four Oh Five.
Nothing happened in that "job interview" in fact it freaked me
out and I think I ran out of the general’s office and out of the building into my rental car, never to contact them again.
Hmm. Earlier in Houston, the first time I met with the AF general, next day I showed up for work dressed really slutty, more than I ever had before or since, a tight pencil skirt and a white sweater that was… not loose. People in the office noticed the change in my dress as I walked past. My usual look was Dress for Success, Just now thought of that. But then meeting in LA with the general up in that tower was weird, I mean, weird.
*****
The Forrest Gump moment here is- I ended up being among the first journalists
to hear that the planet was heating, and I was among the first journalists to then
observe scientists as they apparently became afraid to warn people about it. All
that happened around 1980 at a time when NASA changed from being civilian to military
dominated, even though the USA was not in any way close to war anywhere.
It's only today in 2024 at age 76, sitting at my desk writing with a national forest out my window across the street, that I made that connection. The AF more or less took over NASA soon after scientists started reporting that the planet is heating; and soon after that, this massive coverup and lying campaign started that went on for fifty years. Until it's impossible to deny that CO2 and other human emissions have caused a global-wide heating we are going through now in 2024, with growing disastrous results.
When it was obvious in 1984 I’d never have a future at NASA without the now required top secret clearance, I went home to L.A. and got a job at Rogers & Cowan Public Relations in Beverly Hills, who hired me on the spot off the street, because of my years at NASA, and I got to work with movie stars and big name producers. Just now I looked at the bldg at Bedford and Wilshire on Google Maps street view, and all the green lush Bev Hills foliage has turned so brown and dry. So are the trees in 2024 across the street in the national forest in Tahoe, all turning brittle and dry.
When it was obvious in 2015 that Earth had passed a tipping point, too late to stop the heating crisis time to find a way to survive, I made my way to a town in the Sierra Nevada mountains 6000 feet up near a mile deep lake.
I've been following the story of global warming ever since the 1970s. I moved to Tahoe mainly because it's going to stay cooler here and we have cleaner air than most and lots of water. But the residents are seriously misinformed thinking that the disasters heading for the USA on so many levels will avoid us.
I'm avoiding them.
I was a teenage anti Vietnam war activist
*
Memoir by Kay Ebeling, featuring Nancy Pelosi and the Black Panthers
In 1968 at age twenty, I was probably the youngest paid staffer in the Peace and Freedom Party...
TRIGGERED MEMORY: With the general, he led me into an elevator, said we were going up, but we rode a long time so the elevator must have been going down... there is no tower in the admin bldg at AF Space Command in El Segundo. I think-
ALSO RELATED
By Kay Ebeling (Book I haven't finished writing)
https://cityofangelslady.blogspot.com/2024/09/prologue.html?zx=db7f269323ec6420
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