When was Sputnik?

Lore, myth, and historical fact

Popular culture reflects a sense of societal identity. Images, storylines, and characters combine to create books, streaming media, movies, fashion, food, hairstyles, and the very language we use. We compare ourselves and look to find our inner selves in popular culture representations. Popular culture portrayals inspired by history, no matter how loosely, also reflect our wishful version of that history but more importantly, how we see and interact with the world today.

A more intimate version of re-visioning history takes place within families. Families mold history to support their own mythologies. Their mythologies become their histories. In turn, individuals shape their identity in alignment and in contrast to their families. These family myths are stories told around the dinner table, over a card game, while driving to an event. It’s an oral tradition served family style. In our family, the master storyteller is the matriarch. Her word is gospel.

Family Lore

One such myth upon which our family identity rests is one part of the matriarch’s multi-strand origin story, a.k.a. how she became an enlightened citizen of the world concerned with social justice. And there is no denying she has been involved in social justice causes throughout her public life.

Today’s tale, children, starts in the late 1950s, when, as an O.G. Trad Wife a.k.a. upper-middle-class white woman not employed outside the home, she describes a lovely day pushing a pram along Chicago’s lake shore next to her stepmother. I’m in the pram, my uncle who is only 2 years older, is in the adjacent pram pushed by the stepmother. Just two women taking their babies out for some afternoon air.

The tale continues: While on this walk, my mother looked up in the sky and saw Sputnik. (Wikipedia is your friend here if you want Sputnik basics.)

In that moment, her sense of global awareness, politics, her place in the world, and her role as a parent to future generations was reshaped in a thunderstruck AHA moment she has never forgotten and has retold many times to audiences of family and friends. Our family mythology creates a young matriarch who is aware of her place in a global context with uncommon vision both literally and metaphorically.

First problem: I wasn’t in the pram. I wasn’t born yet. (There’s a second problem but I’ll get back to that.) If I wasn’t born yet, was she even where she says she was? Was she merely accompanying her stepmother but without a baby of her own? Or is it pure imagining? Was there an AHA moment?

Sputnik was launched in October 1957. I was born in April 1958. She would have been about 3 months pregnant with me, her first child.

Second problem: Reports vary on whether one could see Sputnik with the naked eye. Yes. No. Well, maybe the ‘core stage’. But only at dawn or dusk near the moon. Only with binoculars. During the afternoon? In daylight? in Chicago? Much less likely.

When asked how she could have seen Sputnik with the naked eye while pushing me in a pram in Chicago, that it seemed fantastical, she affirmed that she did indeed see it and that events happened in the order she described. An impossible timeline.

As a child, I believed my mother’s stories. Most children do. As an adult, I pursued a master’s followed by a Ph.D in history. One of my classes was “America in the Fifties”. When the instructor started describing the impact Sputnik’s launch made on the American identity in 1957, I challenged him on the dates. Sputnik couldn’t have been in 1957 as I wasn’t born yet. And my mother’s story was inviolable within our family mythology. It was our family’s truth.

Sputnik changed her personal outlook and so the nation’s outlook changing as an extension of our family lore seemed a foregone conclusion. That’s looking at history from the inside out. Plus, I’d seen the movies - history from the outside in. (The Right Stuff, October Sky, et al) But my mind could not reconcile the dates recorded in history with the matriarch’s personal narrative. Was my mother wrong? Was I even allowed to think a parent might be wrong?

After that class and more of my own research, I chatted with the matriarch, ‘Remember that story you tell about Sputnik and how seeing it in the sky while pushing me in my pram changed you? It happened differently. Here’s the New York Times front page with the date on it.’ Her reply, ‘That’s not right.’

On Oct 4, 1957, the Space Age began as the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite, into orbit.

I offered up alternative versions of the AHA moment. Perhaps she was accompanying her stepmother who was pushing my uncle but without me? No. Perhaps it was Sputnik 3 launched in May of 1958 when I would have been a month old? No. (That would imply she was behind the times having been unaffected by Sputnik 1 and 2.) The original myth was the truth. The historical record was wrong. Or as Joan Didion has said, ‘We tell ourselves stories in order to live.’

One might be forgiven for wondering if she was a conspiracy theorist, a flat-worlder, or - gasp - a Trump voter. But no. She’s as liberal as they get with a lifetime engaged with Civil Rights, equality, and a master’s earned later in life. But nothing can sway the commitment to the personal mythology and, as the matriarch, therefore the family mythology. Fortunately, the family now knows to check the historical record before accepting the family lore whole cloth. Now, go watch Hidden Figures.