1968 | 1968

May.12.2013 Here Come the Beardsleys! My niece has to do a report on a famous Californian. She chose Lucille Ball. That's my girl! Cue I Love Lucy theme! I emailed Meranda and told her I had a season of I Love Lucy on DVD, plus the movie Yours Mine and Ours. Not only does Ball do a great job as Helen North Beardsley...	Nov.05.2012 Voting for Hope I can still remember the election of 1968, even though I was eight years old at the time. I remember seeing crowds of young people on the TV news chanting "Old enough to fight, old enough to vote!" It shocked me to understand that they were talking about an injustice that even a child could...
Aug.23.2012 New Normal? Are You Kidding Me? Talk about the "New Normal", I turned sixteen out west in 1968 surrounded by colorful fashions, music that stirred the highest emotions, confused young men in camouflage and fights for the rights of minority groups like Indians, African Americans, Farm Workers, Drug Users, Pimps and Prostitutes. No...	Oct.26.2011 The Community Chorus I hate crowds. I've always hated crowds. That's why, in the late sixties and early seventies when I was involved in the antiwar movement, I had a serious problem: I could not look forward to going to demonstrations. I'll never forget the...
May.19.2010 those were the days For better or worse, 1968 was a time of great change in the United States and the world at large. For the worse, both Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated that year, the evening news reported regularly on the body count from the Vietnam War, and the Zodiac serial murderer began...	Dec.17.2009 UPON MY WINDOW Out of my bedroom window into the snow, I stared, brooding over my near departure from my home of 7 years. Tears trickling from my eyes, I blew one last time upon the frozen glass to create a frosty haze upon the window. "Bye", I scribbled with my eleven year old finger, then turned and...
Nov.27.2009 The Radical Rule of Thumb Recently, I experienced the movie, "The Baader Meinhof Complex." It's a difficult movie to experience - a German language film, subtitled casually (meaning the German isn't always translated precisely) in English, with Bourne-style. thumping music and sharp, quick cinematic cuts, clearly...	Feb.05.2009 Draft Bait (3) Goodbye Jesus The summer of 1968, I finally quit the seminary. I walked into the office of the Rector, Father McCormick, an ascetic Irishman from Boston, and told him I wanted out. I wasn’t sure about God, and celibacy was nuts. He didn’t argue with me because he never believed I would make much of a priest...
Jan.30.2009 Draft Bait (2) Greenwich Village I couldn’t bring myself to play Goebbels for Nixon, so I never told Sergeant Rock at the Post Office about my film training –– but I told Peace Corps. I air-mailed off an application the day after I passed the pre-induction physical. In the summer of 1966, still toying with the priesthood, I...	Jan.27.2009 Draft Bait (Part I) "Injected, Inspected, Selected" Before Bush and Iraq, there was Nixon and Vietnam. I ended up in Peace Corps, but sometimes wonder who I would be today had I ended up carrying an M-16, slogging through the Mekong delta. The road not taken, as Frost put it. In the Fall of ’68, as the government worked to restock our...