Malcolm Anderson was born on October 15, 1940, at home like his siblings. As he got older, his older brother Cameron began to bully him and Jack more and more. The two of them each had a baby crib next to each other that they lived in for their first three years, so Jack and Malcolm always grew up in each other’s presence. They would grow very close and Malcolm would share his brother’s introverted characteristics (Like his brother, he was a bit more outgoing in his later years).
Malcolm and Jack shared a lot of the same problems in the years that they lived in the crib, as Malcolm would tell me. They suffered through the horrible-tasting baby foods that Felix’s wife would give them every day. They suffered through the fact that their parents couldn’t give much attention to them because finances were still pretty bad for the family at the time. They suffered through the worst part — Cameron would constantly find ways to bully them. Malcolm doesn’t remember every incident, but a few have stuck out to him.
Transcript of the Zoom Call
Me: Wait, but how did he bully you and Grandpa Jack?
Grandpa Malcolm: Well, I can’t recall everything, it was so long ago… there was one time I was in my crib, I had my toy animals to play with, Jack was playing with his, it seemed alright… Cameron suddenly turned up with some kind of spray bottle in his hand, filled up with some liquid. He just sprayed it into our cribs and the smell was horrible. Even now I can’t describe it or where he got the bottle from but the smell lasted for two weeks. It was irritating to get through that time, and I got no sleep.
Me: Okay, let me write that down real quick… What else? What else?!
Grandpa Malcolm: Oh, calm down, Mary. One more moment. Let me try to remember…. Well, I was about three at the time, I left the crib a few weeks after this incident, but I was still at Cameron’s mercy… he went into the bedroom in the middle of the night. It was right after Christmas when this happened and he was angry that I had gotten a present from Mom and Dad that was slightly more expensive than his. He was jealous, and he got his revenge by leaving one of his cigarettes in my crib, while it was lit. I think he planned to cook me to death once my crib caught flames. If the stench hadn’t reached my parents sleeping in another room my crib would have caught flames. He was disciplined for weeks.
You know this Cameron guy’s gonna grow up to be a crazy man when he tries to kill his little brother at something like eight years old. A lot of kids at this time were smoking as early as eight, so I’m not too surprised to hear that. Malcolm says he got his first proper bed at the age of seven.
During his time in elementary school, he started to gain an obsession with drawing. He drew a lot of pictures back then, mostly of landscapes, and he even wanted to become an artist in those days. In third grade, he started a business with one of his other friends who was also largely obsessed with art and the two of them worked together to make a business where they sold their art across town. They made about fifteen dollars from their business, which is about $191 today. They each split up the money and used it to buy a huge stash of candy. Malcolm kept some of his art as he got older and he showed me a few pieces. There was a lot he made back then and I certainly couldn’t keep track of all of it, but my favorite piece was of a pack of monkeys in a tree, munching on bananas. It’s really good, about Ava’s level, and I think he could have made a lot of money if he had decided to continue down this field but around his 5th grade time he gave up on art and moved on to other things. Art is still a hobby for him and he did it from time to time. The reason why Ava does so much art is because he inspired her when she was younger. I’d always known he inspired Ava but I didn’t know about his childhood talent until I started digging deeper into this during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Eventually, Malcolm went into his middle school years, and he was fairly introverted, but he did make a few more friends than Jack from what Barbara told me (She was a social butterfly, and she kept tabs on Malcolm’s life). His grades were pretty good, a little better than Jack’s overall, and his middle school GPA was 3.74. (Barbara’s was 4, of course, it was and Jack’s was 3.6). His high school years were the beginning of two decades of very tough years. His freshman year began in 1954.
At the high school around this time, there was a really big smoking epidemic. Everyone was smoking— it was sort of like a trend there, such as how certain video games became popular among our community. Malcolm was just about the only person to not join in the trend, and although he wasn’t bullied, he didn’t have much respect for it. He spent most of his time reading and occasionally exercising, choosing to focus more on his studies than his social life. He was the only one out of the four siblings to never smoke— Jack smoked in his later years and died of cancer, Cameron smoked, and Barbara, being a ‘popular’ kid found her way to the cigarettes, although she eventually stopped later on and pursued a more healthy lifestyle.
Malcolm decided in his early high school years he wanted to pursue the civil engineering field, working for many months on taking classes for that and also reading up on it whenever he had time. He started college in 1958. He did a decent job with college and after a lot of stress, he was able to graduate college in the middle of his class. For a few years after this, his life seemed to look up. Financial problems became less and less of a worry as he rose, and maybe he’d have a successful life. He even had the money for travel after some time and took a few road trips to Mexico at that time. But his struggles were far from over because the course of history was about to have a massive impact on the course of his life.
To understand the next part of Malcolm Anderson’s turbulent life, you’ll need to go into history a bit. This era in history (the 50s and 60s) is part of a very tense time in international politics. The two most powerful countries of the time were America and the USSR (The USSR is a union between Russia, Ukraine, the Baltic States, and a lot of Central Asian countries). Both of them had their ideologies, both of which were very different from each other. They wanted to spread those ideologies around the world which inevitably created paranoia and caused a lot of fighting. Malcolm Anderson had already watched through the news as some of this conflict brewed. He read the newspaper at the age of 8 as the Berlin Airlift was taking place. At 10, the Korean War began. The Space Race started during his high school years and as Malcolm was studying to become a civil engineer, a bunch of American experts were studying the science needed to launch a spacecraft into orbit. As he was just finishing up college, the USSR put some nukes in this island called Cuba right off the coast of the USA, threatening to nuke America. Malcolm could’ve died from those nukes, and only a few last-minute bits of reason managed to save America and the whole world. But even after that tense climax, there was still a large amount of anger that could affect thousands of lives. Nuclear war was not completely avoided, and there were still showdowns still to come. And Malcolm was about to be put right into one of those showdowns… can you guess what it is?