Harold Brink

Watching The Lone Ranger Harold Brink

How to live a purposeful, self-discovered life growing up through the Eisenhower years in the middle of America was an ongoing question in this boy's life. His sorrows and joys, mistakes and successes in a place known as the Land of Lincoln are portrayed vividly in this book that bridges the days from the birth of the atomic bomb to the Summer of Love. Fear of nuclear war, emotional detachment, and withdrawal from religious belief intermix with a loving family, spiritual connection with nature in the outdoor life, and a budding counter-culture attachment in a thoughtful, humorous story that brings back those not-so-golden years of Dick and Jane, duck and cover, and Elvis Presley. Follow the author through college and the beginning of his career as an educator as he searches for his identity and independence in the thick of 1950s conformity and the revolts of the 1960s. The American panorama comes to life in the book as the boy searches for his relationship to the American myths and role models that people his world. What is it to be a man in America? What can he learn from his father's generation? What can he learn from Abraham Lincoln, Huck Finn, and the Lone Ranger? Which myths and stories should he pick to help chart a path to self-discovery through the thicket of an America in the throes of Cold War fear and the juggernaut of the Vietnam War? With an eye for irony and humor, the story is an enlightening journey from boyhood to manhood written from the viewpoint of a person who struggles to live outside conformity and the expectations of others.