“I missed the ’14-’18 war, but not the sorrow afterward.” — The Clash
Mike Wallace was born so long ago, we see placements in his chart that seem like they happened a long time ago even when we see them in people one-third his age (Chiron in Aries, which last happened in the 1970s). He made it to his Pluto opposition, a term you never hear in astrology — Pluto, with its 250-year orbit, made it halfway around the Sun in his lifetime.
How did that happen? Wallace lived to be 93 years old, but Pluto has been fairly close to the Sun for all those years, and when it’s closer to the Sun, it moves through the signs significantly faster (in a way similar to Chiron). Still, it was a long time ago that he arrived on the planet.
What we love about Mike Wallace is that he’s the product of a different time in history, a different world, where electric light and telephones were a novelty, where people were still getting around on horse and buggy, and where a reporter was supposed to go digging for the truth.
He was born in the last months of World War I, what some called the ’14-’18 war, when the age of industrialized combat fully took over. He was born before most of what happened in the 20th century, so this natural born storyteller had something to talk about — and someplace to do so. Had a journalist of his stature been born 100 years earlier, we might not have known about it. Mike Wallace was a product of television, and in some ways TV was a product of him.
He had Pisces rising, with a flair for image and drama. In that Pisces ascendant (rising sign) is a planet astrologers are barely beginning to understand — Eris. Talk about a harbinger of the chaos he would witness, and describe, through the 20th century in the peak of his career: one war after another, numerous assassinations, nonstop political scandal and his supposedly prosperous nation in constant turmoil.
When you remember Mike Wallace for that incisive journalism for which he was so famous, remember three things — the first two of which are from his chart. The third, maybe we can find in his chart (view chart larger).