How I loved those Saturday afternoon movie matinees for kids in the late 1950’s: 25¢ for the movie, newsreel, and cartoons-cartoons-galore. It was 10¢ each for popcorn and a soda, and only a NICKEL— can you believe it? — for a large box of Milk Duds. In case you’re wondering, that quarter admission ticket is still only $2.50 in today’s money. Such a deal that was!
For me, the movie itself, almost always a Western, was never the big draw. Often it starred John Wayne. With my pacifist, unsporty, motor-mouthy persona, I couldn’t identify with The Duke’s towering manliness on a warhorse. I do remember momentarily bonding with him when a movie magazine revealed that before Hollywood insisted on changing his given name, he grew up with the dreadful playground handicap of having been born “Marion Morrison.”
The one movie I do remember of his from my matinee days was She Wore A Yellow Ribbon. Wayne played a US Cavalry Captain who had to escort a woman through dangerous Cheyenne and Arapaho territory. She was engaged to a young Lieutenant, and she wore a hair ribbon which signified the yellow trim color that all US cavalry soldiers wore on their uniforms.
This movie had a unique influence on me, since in it Wayne had uttered the famous cry of “Send in the cavalry!” when the Indians were about to launch a sneak attack. It wasn’t long after that when our kitchen sink was leaking through the flooring beneath it, and my dad, knowing his limited handyman skills, turned to Mom and said “Send in the cavalry — call the emergency plumber!” And Dad hadn’t even seen the movie. Who knew it was such a famous phrase?
And so I remember thinking, “Send in the calvary!” in 1958, when I got the lead in our fourth grade Comedy Revue: “Make sure Mom, Dad, Grandma, and Grandpa will be in the front row on opening night, laughing their heads off.”
The famous phrase from the movie remained with me, though I forgot about the movie title…until fifteen years later when Tony Orlando & Dawn had a world-wide smash hit called “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree.” Sure enough, the songwriter had been inspired by the John Wayne film title. The song wasn’t about a soldier but a convict, released from prison, asking his sweetheart to let him know if she was still his by tying that ribbon around a tree. He would spy it (or not) when the prison bus was delivering him to freedom and, hopefully, into her arms.
The symbolic military connection to the yellow ribbon was lost — but not for long. Six years later, in 1979, militant Iranian students stormed the US embassy in Tehran, taking fifty-two American citizens hostage. It would be 444 days before they were freed.
The families of the captives were desperate for their release. The wife of one captive, inspired by the song, tied a yellow ribbon around an oak tree in her yard, symbolizing that our government should literally “send in the cavalry” and rescue our hostages. A newspaper photographer captured her tying that enormous ribbon, and immediately yellow ribbons were sprouting in thousands of yards all across America.
President Carter did try to send in the cavalry to rescue them, but mechanical failures and dust storms, culminating in a tragic aircraft collision which killed eight servicemen, forced him to abort the mission. Now here we are forty-five years later, battling Iran again.
Our less than triumphant war outcomes in Vietnam, the Persian Gulf, and Afghanistan have sobered us as Americans. The righteous victories in both World Wars, which so many John Wayne westerns embodied with their brave moral clarity, seem to have disappeared with those nickel Milk Duds.
But the American spirit of caring for our fellow citizens in emergencies, be they a future foreign threat or a weather disaster, unite and uplift us in the same way that was demonstrated by those forests of yellow ribbons. We may be deeply divided today, but our individual acts of kindness and support to each other every day still thrive as they always have from Atlantic to Pacific.
I conclude by offering you a musical memory of the 1970s. Not only will the song itself transport many of you to the good old days, but the charming amateurishness of this early music video might make you long for this prehistoric TikTok-less era.
I take no responsibility if you cannot put this wonderfully catchy tune out of your head for the rest of this week! Dr. Engel is not a physician and therefore cannot be expected to treat ear worms.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2eGARhVbwtI
Email Elliot at huffam@me.com or click here