17 August—Donald Trump just dissed America’s long-time ally South Korea in order to suck up to the Axis of Evil’s North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, Trump’s young lover and fellow unstable tyrant. And Trump’s newly confirmed unethical attorney general has virtually admitted that he’s still really Trump’s unethical personal lawyer, but now on the public payroll. (He’s also still the contested acting Librarian of Congress.) And, as if that’s not enough, it turns out that Ayatollah Trump is also an expert naval architect and is redesigning the nation’s warships. What a guy!

But let’s put everything Trump aside as we celebrate the 54^th anniversary of The Big Move with a numerical update of the Monitor’s celebration of the 52^nd anniversary:

Exactly 54 years ago today (forget the arithmetic, that’s 1972), my (first) wife and I moved ourselves and Simon and Schuster, our wire fox terrier and Scottish terrier, to Litchfield. The previous day I had driven a 26-foot box truck from an Enterprise rental lot in wherever it was to our apartment in Forest Hills. Since the Enterprise people didn’t ask for a CDL (commercial driver’s license), I assumed I didn’t need one. I’ll never know if I was legal. And now I don’t really care.

Because despite never before having driven a real truck and experiencing palpitations and figuratively crapping my pants as I concentrated on traffic in front of me, assuming (i.e., hoping) that traffic behind me wouldn’t do anything to impede my progress, I made it to the apartment house and parked right in front of the entrance without incident or scratch.

(I’ve never driven a box truck since, though I have driven a Bronco pulling a horse trailer. Much less intimidating. Once you learn how to back up.)

The morning of the move, my wife’s father, Augie (really Abe, but he preferred Augie, which was better for his line of business) and her uncle Petey who had a CDL and worked for a moving company, but hadn’t been able to pick up the rental truck, helped us load the box and our Buick Estate Wagon. The remarkable 19-foot-long station wagon with a magnificent 455-cubic-inch (7.5 liter) V-8 engine had a tailgate that retracted under the floor and a rear window that retracted into the roof and could hold 4×8 sheets of plywood flat on the floor (between the wheel wells) and a couch on top of them. A few years later, it did. They don’t make ’em like that no more.

So we convoyed up to Litchfield partly over the Merritt-Wilbur Cross Parkway, on which, I learned from Uncle Petey when we got to Litchfield, big trucks were not allowed. But we hadn’t been stopped by the few New York or Connecticut cops who passed us, so what the hell. Lucky for Augie and Petey.

We unloaded the truck using the lift gate (of course; and it was fun), finishing late at night. So Petey and Augie got in the truck to drive it back to New York. But it wouldn’t start. Because it hadn’t occurred to us—even to Petey the professional mover (at the time)—that the electric lift gate drained the truck’s battery and the engine should have been running, at least intermittently, in order to avert catastrophe. And of course no jumper cables. And of course the town’s few garages were closed for the night.

Luckily, I had had the foresight to have a phone line connected before the big move, so I called the state police barracks. In a few minutes a trooper with jumper cables (and a can of gasoline, just in case) arrived and shortly thereafter Petey and Augie were on their way.

Then the fun started . . .