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Between 1961 and 1975, the rate of violent crime in the United States tripled.
The property crime rate almost tripled.
And the homicide rate doubled.
Visit the online cover archive of Time magazine and search it for “crime.” You’ll find only five cover stories devoted to crime topics between 1923 and 1960. Between 1961 and 1975, there were 18, including trend stories like “Crime: Why and What To Do,” “The Urban Guerrillas” and “Cops v. Crime: Ready For A Hot Summer.” (As a Time-Life employee and longtime subscriber, my grandfather would have read all these issues.)
Doubtless, some people (the very young, the very aged and the very rich) passed unaffected through this period of turbulence.
Still, the upsurge in all types of major crime suggests that many Americans — voters, taxpayers, walkers of the straight and narrow — were affected in ways they had not previously experienced.
For every high-profile political assassination or race riot seared on the national memory, there were thousands of people who had their homes burgled or their pockets picked.
All of which brings us to a spring morning in 1971, and an unpleasant discovery on a Boston street:
The number of motor vehicle thefts in the state of Massachusetts rose from 14,215 to 91,563 in our 15-year period of choice.
In 1971, 56,709 vehicles were reported stolen.
And one of them, on the morning of April 16, was a green 1965 Ford registere
d to my grandfather.
My Aunt Elaine was going to grad school at Boston University at the time, and using the car to get to social work internships outside the city. She left her apartment one day to head out to an internship, and was surprised to find her car missing from its parking space.
Thankfully, the Blumenau family’s contribution to Seventies crime statistics turned out to be more opera bouffe than tragedy.
The Boston police, who initially told my aunt that many stolen cars were never found, called her back the next day to tell her they’d found it in a nearby neighborhood. The car was missing its windshield, but otherwise undamaged. While no one was ever charged, the assumption on all sides was that the Ford had been stolen for its windshield — probably by a “chop shop”-style repair operation — and then ditched.
The car was repaired … perhaps, my grandfather drily suggested, with the same windshield that had been taken from it in the first place.
My aunt went back to driving to her internships.
And a year or so later, she received — and accepted — a marriage proposal from my Uncle Steve in the same ’65 Ford. The car is long gone, but they’re still together.
(A few more family notes, before we leave this calendar entry behind. My grandfather’s attention to detail, even under stress, says something about him: Note how he specifically describes the car as “65 Ford Stolen” — as though he had multiple cars in Boston to differentiate between. The notation “Phoned Boston” is also redolent of a time when long-distance calls were rarer and more expensive than they are now.)
One summer, almost 25 years later, I parked a brand-new Plymouth in a dimly lit off-street parking lot on the Boston-Brookline border, every night for three months. Each morning I walked down Commonwealth Avenue hoping to find my car in one piece. And every morning, it was.
Whether that bespeaks a shift in social mores; more effective policing; or simply a lack of interest in the windshields of ’95 Plymouth Neons, I guess I’ll never know.
I find I’m sorry to get to the end of your blogs. I wasn’t sure why the beginning emphasis on crime but true to form, it got to the point.
Thanks for another interesting Monday morning.
I once read a simple explanation of why crime rates go up and down. Births.
Politicians are eager to take the credit for stopping crime but someone did an unbiased investigation and found that crime went up as the number of teenagers rose and went down in a similar pattern.
A lot of people have acquired a job by their twenties and finally have money in their pocket. Fewer are acting out in order to get dates. Their hormones are no longer causing temporary insanity. Less of them are pulling stupid pranks.
The baby boom began in 1945 and those kids would be sixteen in 1961. It peaked in at 26.5 births per 1000 people in 1949 and dropped rapidly then it slowly rose to a much lower peak of 25.25 in 1959. From there, births slowly tailed off until until 1964, considered the end of the Baby Boom. Babies born in 1959 would be sixteen in 1975.
Next time the administration says they got tough on crime, ask to see the demographics.
By the way, the calendars are fascinating but I’m wondering why anyone thought to save them for 50 years.
I grew up in Connecticut in the early Sixties and occasionally visited Stamford. It was a medium sized city about to grow up. There were still working farms within two miles of the center of town in 1965. Within five years all of downtown had been knocked down and rebuilt. By 1975 it was becoming a home for the world headquarters of Fortune 500 companies fleeing New York City. Your grandfather was probably very displeased as quiet neighborhoods gave way to carbon-copy developments.
Don: Thanks for reading and commenting.
I find your theory on teenagers interesting — though I’m not sure it explains the strong increase in real hardcore crimes, like homicide.
I can see teenagers hot-wiring cars or stealing stuff from shops, but not necessarily killing people.
Why my grandfather saved the calendars, I don’t know. Maybe he did see them as diaries of some kind. He wasn’t the sort to save anything and everything, so they must have had some value to him.
My folks have saved them since his passing because they evoke his personality.
Where in Connecticut did you live?
I used to live in Trumbull, about 25 miles North of Stamford along I-95 and the Merritt Parkway. No malls existed at the time, and Stamford was where the fancy stores like Bloomingdales were. So Mom would pile us in the car and she’d go to the big stores to do holiday shopping or to buy a nice dress for a dinner party.
In the mid-Seventies and early Eighties I worked for Pitney Bowes as a delivery man. Pitney Bowes owned the South Side, I think they may have been the biggest manufacturer in town and the only Fortune 500 company at the time. I went down by there about three years ago and they had torn down all of the manufacturing plants. It looked like Detroit, blocks and blocks of empty lots piled with bricks and rubble. Their world headquarters is in a shiny building down the street but they must have outsourced everything.
Trumbull is next to Bridgeport, another huge manufacturing town at one time. Also completely wiped out. People think of Connecticut as a suburb of New York, filled with men in fitted suits living in big houses. These days much of that is true. But parts of it were, and are, a lot like Allentown and the rest of Lehigh Valley.
Further North and West, the state has always been more blue collar. Now they have Mohegan Sun to keep everyone employed. It’s the second largest casino in the US. I’ve never been, but I don’t think it’s made things a whole lot better for people out that way.
As concerns the connection between more teenagers and homicides – drugs.
If the TV is to be believed (and I wouldn’t guarantee that) America’s kids are shooting it out every day in the projects. Add in the double-crossing dealers and the robberies gone bad. I don’t think that many take up a habit at the age of 25. By the time these teens are in their twenties, the majority are dead, in jail or kicked the habit. Thus the more teenagers the more drug-related crimes.
There’s also the factor that World War II fulfilled a lot of the bloodlust in the previous generation. Not many were anxious to kill again and unlike a gang, they were able to just walk away from all of the violence afterward. I’m guessing that the soldiers in WWI and WWII weren’t choir boys but got all of their anti-social tendencies worked out by raping and stealing whenever they had the opportunity in other people’s backyards.
Don: Very interesting. My maternal grandmother worked for Pitney Bowes for a while. I don’t remember what she did — probably secretarial, the kind of thing to which women were limited at big companies back then.
I’m thinking that crime became the topic of choicebecause it corresponded to the time of my car being stolen. That car sure influenced a lot of events. Who would’ve known my nephew would be writing about it 40 years later. And now the “kids” want to know about the proposal in the car (it had to do with cultural history–we were creatures of the “spontaneous” ’60’s & 70’s time period). Anyway the article was interesting , and carries the same accuracy that your grandfather’s calendar record keeping did! I’m looking forward to reading about other events that I had forgotten.
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