Fighter Pilot's Daughter

Fighter Pilot's Daughter: Growing Up in the Sixties and the Cold War details author and Professor Mary Lawlors unconventional upbringing in Cold War America. Memories of her early lifeas the daughter of a Marine Corps and then Army fatherreveal the personal costs of tensions that once gripped the entire world, and illustrate the ways in which bold foreign policy decisions shaped an entire generation of Americans, defining not just the ways they were raised, but who they would ultimately become. As a kid on the move she was constantly in search of something to hold on to, a longing that led her toward rebellion, to college in Paris, and to the kind of self-discovery only possible in the late 1960s.
A personal narrative braided with scholarly, retrospective reflections as to what that narrative means,My Cold Warzooms in on a little girl with a childhood full of instability, frustration and unanswered questions such that her struggles in growth, her struggles, her yearnings and eventual successes exemplify those of her entire generation.
From California to Georgia to Germany, Lawlors family was stationed in parts of the world that few are able to experience at so young an age, but being a child of military parents has never been easy. She neatly outlines the unique challenges an upbringing without roots presents someone struggling to come to terms with a world at war, and a home in constant turnover and turmoil. This book is for anyone seeking a finer awareness of the tolls that war takes not just on a nation, but on that nations sons and daughters, in whose hearts and minds deeper battles continue to rage long after the soldiers have come home.

Mary Lawlor is professor of English and the Director of American Studies at Muhlenberg College. She is the author ofRecalling the Wild: Naturalism and the Closing of the American West, andPublic Native America: Tribal Self Representation in Casinos, Museums and Powwows.

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Pilots House

Chapter One: Learning to Fly

Chapter Two: Frannies Days of Yore

Chapter Three: The Coming of the Cold War

Chapter Four: Waiting Out Korea

Chapter Five: Camping Out in Miami and Topsail

Chapter Six: School Pains and Home Wars

Chapter Seven: Trouble With the Army

Chapter Eight: Strange Days in the Deep South

Chapter Nine: Coming of Age in California

Chapter Ten: Cold War Catholicism, JFK, and Cuba

Chapter Eleven: The Discipline of

Synchronized Swimming

Chapter Twelve: Saint Brigit/Bardot

Chapter Thirteen: Back to the Swamps

Chapter Fourteen: Transition out of America

Chapter Fifteen: Germany in the Sixties

Chapter Sixteen: At Play in the Fields of Empire

Chapter Seventeen: Following European Politics

Chapter Eighteen: Making a Home in Paris

Chapter Nineteen: New Constellations

Chapter Twenty: An Immoveable Feast

Chapter Twenty-One: Our Friends the Draft Resisters

Chapter Twenty-Two: Show Down With Frannie

Chapter Twenty-Three: May 68

Chapter Twenty-Four: Show Down With Jack

Chapter Twenty-Five: Lost Days

Chapter Twenty-Six: Heidelberg Redux

Chapter Twenty-Seven: A Beaker of the Warm South

Chapter Twenty-Eight: The End of the Cold War

Notes