DENNIS MYERS Against the Grain Advertisement

The Reno Gazette Journal yesterday carried a story about the cemetery at the Nevada Mental Health Institute. This graveyard dates back to -- well, no one is sure, given the uncertain record keeping.

A decade or so ago, I did a story on it for a Nevada television station at a time when the Institute was planning to move all or part of the cemetery to make way for new construction. I reported that it was believed that most of the people buried there had died without known family members. I later learned that there was at least one other reason, too.

Not long after that story was broadcast, I heard from a woman in Lovelock who said that a member of her family--I believe it was her father--was buried at the Institute. At the time of his death, the stigma of mental illness was still such that the family was unwilling to claim the body. So the years passed and now the woman wanted to claim the body and have it buried with the rest of the family members. I gave her names at the Institute and later called to make sure she had made contact, but I never learned the final resolution of the matter. The important thing was that she felt free to make the request and identify herself with her father's problems.

There are times when we think that attitudes never change, that we are in a Sisyphus-like battle against prejudice. But sometimes we can actually see within the span of our own lifetimes that feelings do change.

In the 1970s I was talking one day with Nevada historian Wilbur Shepperson, who in the early 1960s had written a book (published in 1966) about Nevada City, a cooperative socialist colony east of Fallon in Churchill County that was founded in 1916. Shepperson told me that when he was writing the book he had managed to find some of the participants in the colony experiment but they did not want to be interviewed about it. But in the '70s he had some encounters with them that indicated they were less reluctant. He believed that the events of the 1960s had made them feel more comfortable with their pasts because the public had become more accepting of unconventional politics and conduct.

On Sept. 23, 1967, the cover of Time magazine had a black and white photo of a couple in wedding dress stepping out the door of a church. The headline was "MR. & MRS. GUY SMITH/An Interracial Wedding." Mrs. Smith was the daughter of U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk and the wedding was so newsworthy that it was the talk of the nation. Not long before the wedding could have gotten Guy Smith lynched. Today there is an African American member of the U.S. Supreme Court who has a white wife and there has been a white secretary of defense with a black wife.

In 1963, the Broadway musical "Bye Bye Birdie" was made into a movie with Dick Van Dyke and Janet Leigh in two of the key roles. When it was remade for television in 1995, Jason Alexander and Vanessa L. Williams filled those two roles.

There was a time when even discussion of racially mixed couples could get people killed. Today, except in the narrowest of fringe circles, no one gives such couples a thought.

It is very easy to be drawn in by the notion that nothing ever changes, that we don't progress. Five years ago who would have thought that we would see a black and a woman as the frontrunners in the Democratic race for president? Progress is slow, but it's visible if we look for it.

Granted, we have a ways to go. For evidence, we only have to look at the other race for president. There are those trying to make John McCain's age an issue. He's 71. So is the Japanese prime minister. India's prime minister is five years older than McCain. If he's elected, he'll have to deal with older national leaders in Burma, Cuba, Egypt, Kenya, Kuwait, Nepal, Saudi Arabia, Senegal and Zimbabwe. Dwight Eisenhower served as president until he was 71 without anyone questioning his competence. (Ronald Reagan served until he was just under 78, but there were those who did question his mental competence because of incidents of vagueness, memory lapses and so on.)

Nothing about McCain suggests he would be unable to perform as president. He does have physical problems, but they are not a function of his age -- they've been with him since his thirties and are a product of the torture and abuse he received as a prisoner of war (little wonder he opposed George Bush's pro-torture policies). There is little indication that his mental powers are in any way impaired.

In this year when progress has been made against sexism and racism, it would be nice if there were some advance against ageism as well.