Interview with Eldon Bindley Click for bio
Eldon Bindley
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Jacob Bindley: Ok, this is Jacob Bindley, it is September 22nd and I am interviewing Eldon Bindley about his life and experience in the 1960s. So just to start off, where were you born and raised?
Eldon Bindley : I was born in Glenwood Springs, Colorado and my race is Native American and White.
JB: Where were you raised? Sorry.
EB: Oh I'm sorry, my hearing is bad I apologize. I was raised in Eagle, Colorado.
JB: Ok, tell me a little bit about Eagle. What was the town like?
EB: Eagle was a farming community back when I was a child. My first ten years, well actually, first fifteen years, I lived there it was almost strictly an agricultural community. It was the county seat, Eagle county. We were a small ranching community, on the Western slope of Colorado. Our town population as I was growing up was between four and six hundred people and so it was very small, very small, community with, you know, very close knit community. As I was being raised in 1962, Vail, was established, Vail, Colorado the ski area. And then, so about 1965, late 60s, we started becoming a bedroom community for the ski area, the employees started moving into town as they couldn't afford to live up-valley due to a lack of housing, affordable housing, so we were a bedroom community at that point.
JB: Ok.
EB: And basically, being raised in a small town is wonderful. I can remember my childhood that we were turned loose during the day because every mother in town was watching us. In fact, in the summers mothers would kick us out of the house about nine o'clock in the morning and tell us not to come back until noon. And we'd go find our friends and play at the park and run around town and play at different places, people's houses. Our town had a fire siren that alerted the volunteer fire department and they had it set to go off at noon everyday. So as a child we were trained that when the fire siren went off, everybody ran for home to have lunch and then we'd go back out in the afternoons to play some more. So it was a very, very unsupervised childhood that we had to make our own games and, very creative, of course there wasn't, there wasn't a lot of other activities other than that. Television in our valley, didn't come into our valley, until the early 60s and it came in, the first TV we had, that I remember as a child was one channel. And eventually we did end up with the three major networks, but it was transmitted from Denver and through a translator and it was snowy and there was times you couldn't hardly see it. And of course it was a big deal for us, but it was something our lives didn't really revolve around at that point. We were more revolved around our social interaction with other children being raised like that.
JB: So just to pivot a little bit, talking about TV, what kind of TV shows did you watch at the time?
EB: Well, the TV shows that I can remember, TV during the day in my house wasn't allowed to be on. So the only time that the TV, mom would let the TV be on, would be Saturday mornings she'd let it be on for a couple hours, for Saturday morning cartoons. And there were, you know, a variety of different cartoons that, that all of us revolved around. I can't remember exactly which ones they were at this time but Saturday morning cartoons, and then the family at night would watch, after dinner, we'd watch TV and of course we always had our favorites and shows like Bonanza, a lot of sitcoms like I Dream of Jeannie and, off the top of my head, and Leave It to Beaver, and different shows like that, that were typical 60s shows, sitcoms, westerns were big, Gunsmoke was on and Bonanza, and so that was basically the shows. Lawrence Welk on Sunday nights was a must see for the family. Or Saturday night was Lawrence Welk and then Ed Sullivan on Sunday nights was really big. Sunday night, Ed Sullivan baby.
JB: Nice
EB: We never missed, if we were home we had it on, so there you go.
JB: Talking about your family a little bit, what was the structure of your family, how many siblings did you have and yeah?
EB: Ok, family was made up of Mom and Dad. At the time I was in grade school, up until I want to say about fourth or fifth grade, Mom was a stay-at-home mom and Dad was the local barber in town, he had his own business. I had an older brother, an older sister, I was the youngest in the family and they were, my sister was six years older and my brother was four years older so there was kind of a gap there where they were closer in age so I was kinda, they spent more time together than I did with them, I was kinda the tag along, and they tried to figure out how to get rid of me. So [laughs] so that was the structure and then, like I say, when I about in fourth or fifth grade my mother then went to work full-time and we became a two-income family.
JB: Ok, I guess kind of moving off talking about your mom working and everything, we talk a lot nowadays about the feminist movement, and how it came to be in the 60s. What were your memories of that movement, with your mom taking a job and everything, and how it affected gender roles for instance. Did that change a lot in your town at the time?
EB: Well in our household it changed a lot. What happened was when my mom went to work, she was working in the Assessor's office. And one of the problems she ran into a lot was that there was unequal pay. She was getting paid less for doing the same job as the men that she was working with. Which was a frequent complaint, even if she was, had seniority and knew more about the job, they still paid her less and the men more. The assessor at the time was a male and he referred to it as 'well they have families to support and so they deserve more money than women'. I can remember that being a really big deal with Mom because she'd bring that up a lot with Dad and I'd listen to their conversations. And then later my mom actually became Assessor. And at that point her wages went equal, because it was an elected office, went equal to other officials in town. But at that point, in the 60s, there was a lot of women, I can remember, that actually started to work and not be stay-at-home mothers because stay-at-home mothers were very common when I was young, in the first few grades and then later it wasn't so common. And I think a lot of it had to do with second income, you know, also made it easier to get along and it was more of, they can afford a few more luxuries, both of them. So I can remember that transitioning happening and in our household that happened in the mid-60s.
JB: Ok, so talking about family and everything, the Vietnam War is happening during the 60s and I'm just curious how did the war affect your community? And how'd your family feel about it?
EB: The effect on it, that I remember the most is, that our community was a very conservative community, very patriotic. Most of the men in the community had served during World War Two, my dad was a veteran of World War Two. So the support for the war when it first started was very, I know my dad really supported the war because it was put across that we were stopping communism which was a big, really big deal in his mind because he'd been part of the army that had been drafted to stop the Germans and Nazism. So communism was high, and he interpreted the war as being necessary to keep communism from spreading. Later on in the war, the war in his eyes, and this is looking at it as how its coming across to me, cause I was still fairly young, I remember in his eyes, when they didn't really go all out and fight the war as a war and go in and just invade North Vietnam, his support for the war started to go away because he didn't see it as we were actually fighting a war, we were just sacrificing money and so the support started to decline. And I think that was true throughout our community and I know then, later on, the late 60s, when I was in high school, I had friends that were drafted, served in Vietnam. And I know the support was going down very quickly, a lot of people didn't want to go. And I myself would've went if I'd been drafted but the time I was of draft age, the war had ended which was I think in 72, 73, whatever, but I became eligible and at that time they'd stopped drafting so I was never called.
JB: Leading up to when you obviously weren't called, were you scared about the possibility of being drafted and sent over to Vietnam? Or did it not, how did that kind of come into your life, how did you think about it?
EB: I never gave it much thought. As I recall now I was never paranoid one way or the other about it. I guess, like I say, I had friends that were drafted and served and a couple of them went to Nam you know but we didn't have any real casualties come back to the community that I can remember. And I guess it never really dawned on me, I never, I don't recall ever worrying about being drafted.
JB: Ok, were there any kind of anti-war protests or anything in the surrounding area where you were in Eagle or anything? Any kind of draft card burning, things like that?
EB: There wasn't. Our community back then was, on all issues, we were up in the mountains, so to speak, we were years behind the main culture. So even like when the drugs started in the 60s, it didn't get into our valley until, like I wasn't really exposed to drug use in high school, it didn't actually make it into our high schools until I was out in the mid 70s. Even though in the mid 60s and late 60s it was going on across the nation. Same with the war protests, never really hit our area. You'd read about them, see it on TV, but it was nothing that was an occurrence in our community.
JB: Ok, so with the 60s we have a lot of Vietnam War protests and different movements going on, how did it feel for example with like the Civil Rights Movement that was going on at the time. How did it feel for you to watch that unfold throughout the 1960s?
EB: The Civil Rights Movement was something that I never fully understood. We were a white community, like I say it was small, and when I was growing up there were no Blacks in our community we did have a small amount of Hispanics. But they were, they weren't really, I don't recall a lot of prejudice against them, I remember a couple of my friends were Hispanic and I never gave it much thought about it. So our community was not exposed, I'm sure there was really a lot of racial bias. I do remember throughout that there were, people were commonly using derogatory terms for other races. And we never gave it much thought, we as kids even used them. And so when the whole Civil Rights Movement thing, it was something that we watched and followed closely on TV and stuff because of how it was coming down and of course the Martin Luther King speech was really discussed in school and but it really had no impact on me personally because I was never really exposed to any of the Jim Crow laws or anything like that, because there wasn't anything in our community. Like I say, the prejudice, I don't recall any real prejudice in the community cause there wasn't anyone to be prejudiced against.
JB: So kind of going back to the start of the interview, when you were talking about your dad talking about communism and everything, what was your community's reaction to the threat of nuclear warfare during the Cold War. Because I know a lot of schools did hiding under the desk and different drills and things, how did the Cold War affect your community in the 60s?
EB: You know, I recall that now, in our community there was actually a person was appointed, kind of the emergency response director I guess, whatever. Buildings had different decals that kind of indicated, the county courthouse had areas that were designated that could be, they considered that maybe was, the basement of the courthouse could be a fallout shelter and they had it stocked with provisions. I remember that. I remember that in school there were drills. Not so much, I don't recall the drills I've heard other people talk about get under your desk type of thing but they were talked more about where to go in the community if there was an emergency. And they had different places that they had. I remember that there were different things like, I can remember Popular Mechanics, my dad always had a subscription to Popular Mechanics for his clientele in the barber shop and he'd bring them home and I'd read them and even in that magazine, there was "how to build a fallout shelter". I still remember that, how you could build your own and what to stock it with in case of nuclear war. So it was something that the community was aware of but was not paranoid about, I think because of where we lived and it wasn't like we lived next to anything major, we thought, the closest thing we had that maybe they'd go after was NORAD. Which was across the mountain range, a hundred-something miles away.
JB: Ok, so what do you remember about the Cuban Missile Crisis? About that kind of time back then?
EB: I was really young during the Cuban Missile Crisis. I was, what, that happened early 60s so I'd have been eight to ten years old during that time. What I recall mostly about it was, you know, the coverage on TV about it and that kind of thing. I can remember that there was a heightened awareness about what was happening. I can remember a lot of conversations with the adults about the faceoff that was going on in Cuba but it never really, you know I really don't recall a lot about it other than that. It was on the news every night, when we watched the news on TV, you know that was a big thing about the missiles and the spy planes going over and that but I recall that, one of the things I recall is that, the facedown at that point, that when Russia pulled back it seemed to be a big relief for the adults.
JB: Ok, so you mentioned you're quite young at this time, and I was just wondering do you remember when JFK was shot in 63?
EB: I do, I do. We were in school, and so I'd have been eleven years old so fourth or fifth grade. And I remember that that actually happened, where I heard about it, we were actually at recess. I still recall I was outside when the kids started talking about it and then of course when we went back into our classroom then the teachers made the announcement that that'd happened. And then of course watching everything unfold on the news, because of course every night that was really covered. And of course I can recall everything, I can recall them showing on the news when Jack Ruby assassinated Oswald and all that going on. And LBJ being sworn in, of course that was shown, and that still sticks in my mind. I watched the funeral of JFK on TV, remember very vividly, what stuck in my mind was they had a horse with saddle with the boots and stirrups backwards. And just that whole procession, how it proceeded. So I really recall all that, of course they did show him getting shot on TV so it was quite a deal there. Lot of it stuck in my mind.
JB : Yeah wow, I'm sure. So with the 60s we have all these different changes, obviously with JFK getting shot, all these major events. Did the 60s feel Earth-shattering at the time, living through them? Did it feel out of the ordinary?
EB: Because it was my childhood it felt normal. I didn't know any different because the 60s, start of the 60s I was eight. In the 70s I was eighteen, so that point in time I had no reference for. The only reference I had was that was the period of time of my life. So looking back after I got older, I can judge it that way. But at the time I was living it, this was just, when you're going through periods of that time its just a normal thing when you're a child because you don't know any different.
JB: That makes sense. So pivoting to, we talked a little bit about culture for instance. What kind of music did you listen to at the time, what was kind of popular music for you at the time?
EB: Well in our school there was two genres of music. We had country western that was very popular and then of course we had the rock, which was The Beatles and The Who. So I hung out with both cowboys and hippies. So I actually listened to both genres of music, country western and rock, depending on what group I was with. A lot of my friends were ranch kids and were into the country western and then some of them were part of the hippie movement, which they were trying to simulate what they saw on TV and try to catch up with that part of it too.
JB: Ok, ok, so kind of going off that culture thread still, what was dating like back then? What were kind of the norms of dating, I know they've changed a lot over the years and decades and everythign. What do you remember about that time and what the norms were around dating and everything?
EB: Well I know when I started dating we did have a movie theater in the town so one of the big things was, go to the movies. Or we would go down to the local hangout, kind of like a Dairy Queen, wasn't a Dairy Queen but it was a small cafe type of thing. We had dances and stuff at school that were probably more frequent than a lot of places. They don't do the local community dances like we used to have. We used to have, it seemed like, there was a community dance when I was growing up usually like once a month. That was just one of the forms of entertainment the community had so we did that. Of course it was a lot different back then because there wasn't any cell phones so it was the case of either face to face or on the phone if you were gonna ask for a date. So [laughs] I think it was a lot more, when you got turned down it was a lot harder because of the face to face. Over a text I think it would be a lot easier to accept [laughs], I don't know I don't date, you get to answer that question [laughs].
JB: Right haha, exactly.
EB: But you know that's the big things we did, dating, if that's what you're trying to get at.
...
JB: So I guess as we kind of move towards end of this interview, I just want to ask you about a couple different big events of the decade and what you remember. So first do you remember watching the moon landing during the 60s? And how that felt?
EB: Yes, yes I do. I remember we did watch the moon landing. And I don't recall us watching it live, I don't think they had, in '69, I don't think they had live TV in school. Because cable hadn't hit our valley so it was over the air. So I don't recall watching it live, I do remember watching it on the news and stuff. To me it was a really big deal that we had put somebody on the moon and of course my expectations from there was that we'd be continuing to go back to the moon and eventually put a base there and all of a sudden we just quit going in the 70s so. But yeah it was a big deal, I recall that, and how I felt was a really, really big deal. And we discussed it in school.
JB : Ok, what do you remember about 1968 with RFK getting shot and also MLK getting shot that year too? Do you remember those events pretty well?
EB: I do, I remember. Once again I remember both of those events really well. RFK getting shot going through that, as I recall what sticks in my mind is the kitchen area or backroom area of the hotel and of course Martin Luther King being gunned down from a distance. I remember, I did just remember how much that affected the nation, how that was something everybody, the whole thing, and when you had two that close together, the conversations around that, what's going on in our society today, what's wrong with us. Why are we so violent? And those discussions.
JB: Ok, did you watch the 1968, the DNC, the protests in Chicago?
EB: I did. I watched both conventions but the Chicago one, where they showed, on TV, they actually showed the cops out there with the dogs and the batons. Yeah that was a big deal, and Mayor Daley and you know that whole thing. Once again that all revolved around that conversation I remember having in school, why are we having all this violence, riots, assassinations, Vietnam War, Vietnam War protesters that got shot on that college campus. That was all part of that discussion.
JB: Did that impact the way you felt about the time? Were you scared nationally about the way the country was going, or how did you feel about the direction of the country at the time?
EB: I think that looking back on it then, I don't think that that was anything that really entered my mind, just due to my age and where I was at. Because I'd have been like sixteen, seventeen years old in '68. And I guess I never, I don't recall being concerned about where the country was going, or the democracy, or anything like that. Just due to, yes I participated and everything, but the big focus in my life was I was a teenager that was, my big focus was sports, playing basketball and football. That was more, the most important thing in my life, and the national political scene was not something that was really.
JB: Understandable, one final question, because we haven't talked about, well we talked a lot about your community of course, what kind of role did religion play in your life at that point? Or in your community for instance?
EB: Ok, my household, the Protestant religion was very important. My mother was the Secretary Treasurer of the church and she held that from as far back as I can rememeber until well after she retired in the, well I think she held it clear into the 90s. So the local church was very prominent, that was big focus of where we spent time, as a family, with the community. The churches in the community, there were two major churches, which was ours, the Methodist Church, and the Catholics. And probably the majority of the community went to one or the other, so our community was very faith-based and there was not competition between the two, in fact, there was a lot of events that the churches held together, so it wasn't a conflict. Our religion wasn't a real strict religion it was just, kind of a, I guess back then more of a moderate-type religion. But it did play a big part in my life growing up and our family participated in the church and supported the church and like I said, my mom was a real big part of it.
JB: Ok, well with that, that comes to the end of our interview so thank you for your time today and I appreciate you sitting down with me.
EB: You're welcome.
Summary: Eldon Bindley is my father and I interviewed him on September 22nd. He was raised in a small ranching community in Colorado and was born in 1952. His formative school years occured during the 1960s. Major themes of the interview include politics, the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement, religion, culture, and media.
- Title:
- Interview with Eldon Bindley
- Date Created:
- 2024-09-22
- Description:
- I interviewed my father, Eldon Bindley, about his life and experiences in the 1960s. We covered topics such as the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement, music and culture, and political events.
- Subjects:
- Media Gender Vietnam Culture Cold War Politics Perception
- Location:
- East Wenatchee, WA
- Latitude:
- 47.41635801
- Longitude:
- -120.2899227
- Type:
- text
- Format:
- record
- Preferred Citation:
- "Interview with Eldon Bindley ", The Long 1960s - 2024 Fall, Center for Digital Inquiry and Learning (CDIL)
- Reference Link:
- /thelong1960s/items/bindley.html
- Rights:
- In copyright, educational use permitted. Educational use includes non-commercial reproduction of text and images in materials for teaching and research purposes. For other contexts beyond fair use, including digital reproduction, please contact the University of Idaho Library Special Collections and Archives Department at libspec@uidaho.edu. The University of Idaho Library is not liable for any violations of the law by users.
- Standardized Rights:
- http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC-EDU/1.0/