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[Ya-ta Boy]

I�ve been feeling nostalgic for 1968 for about the last month. This presidential campaign is the most exciting one since then and that�s part of it, but what really brought it all up was a co-worker�s 40th birthday. I got to teasing him about him spending the most exciting year in our recent national history pooping his diapers.

In my opinion, this current election is the end of the chapter that began in �68. Our long national nightmare is coming to an end�unless something goes wrong before November 4th.

This is a question for Rteacher, the Bobster and Conservative (??) and anyone else around who is of an age to remember�Where were you and what were you doing in �68?

[Ya-ta Boy]

I turned 18 just before I went off to college in Colorado in the fall of �67. I was political, but only so far as civil rights was concerned. I�d started kindergarten the year of Brown vs Board of Education and couldn�t figure out why race was still a problem for anyone. I was more than a little disgusted that the older generation hadn�t fixed it. LBJ had signed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act and that seemed to me to be all that needed to be said about it. I didn�t understand why Watts and Detroit and Newark and the rest had burned in the summers.

The War wasn�t really an issue. It was just there. There had been about 15,000 troops in Vietnam in �64 and now there were 500,000, but Dad was sure it couldn�t last long. Little Vietnam. Big US. There were automatic draft deferments for anyone going to college, and the War couldn�t possibly last 4 more years, so my brother and I weren�t concerned. The War wasn�t discussed in classes in high school and no one we knew had been killed yet. I was aware of Teach-ins at college campuses, but the reports never told what was discussed: just that they were anti-war.

Life magazine told me and everyone else I knew everything we knew about LSD and the Summer of Love. Sounded interesting.

School started up in late September and I went to my first demonstration the next weekend. The school was threatening to close the library on weekends because of lack of funds. That didn't seem right to me. Where was I going to get books? So we had a little sit-in. A couple of dozen students showed up and it was kind of entertaining and the school caved immediately.

Probably the best thing that happened at the sit-in was hearing about 'The Belly of the Whale', the only coffee house in town--and just off-campus, behind the library. Oh ho! A coffee house. You mean where hippies hang out? Well, they were the Colorado version of hippies, not the real live California kind, and not as good as the kind they had over in Boulder, but they were what passed for hippies at CSC, a teachers college. At the Belly you sat on the floor, drank coffee or hot spiced cider, looked at the psychedelic art on the wall, rapped with Jane and drew conclusions on the wall. Sgt. Pepper played every night, along with Jefferson Airplane's Surrealistic Pillow.

In October Norman Mailer and Allen Ginsberg tried to levitate the Pentagon. WTF? And suddenly everyone was talking about the War. I was pretty na�ve. How could anyone go against your own government?

My brother decided not to go back to Iowa State and volunteered for the draft. He finished boot camp near El Paso at the same time my winter break came, so we both got home for Christmas. His train up from Texas was 17 hours late because of a snow storm down in Kansas. Years later Mom told me that after he got home, exhausted, in the middle of the night and had gone to bed, that she came to our bedroom door and watched us sleep. She said she was so worried with him in the Army and me otf in college that she might never see her family together again. We were all relieved when he was assigned to Germany�the government was already starting to use the draft to reward and punish people for their political views. By volunteering, he was safe. Most of my high school friends were working, waiting to get their draft notice.

In January I went back to school for the winter quarter and moved in with a new roommate who had a TV. It was easier to keep up with the news, but I missed the beginning of the Tet Offensive (Jan. 30). When I did hear about it, I was as shocked as everyone else. LBJ had said there was light at the end of the tunnel and the Viet Cong were on the run. Well, they weren�t.

Because of my grades, I was asked to join the Freshman Honors Seminar. The first thing the prof had us read was Thoreau's 'Essay on Civil Disobedience'. I didn't realize it at the time, but the profs were getting political, too.

Jane was so '67, so I started hanging out with Alice. This wasn't Alice in Wonderland, or Alice B. Toklas (she was still in the future), she wasn't Alice's Restaurant, although that Alice was just around the corner, and she wasn't the Alice that didn't live here anymore, but for a while, she was my Alice. She was even generous enough to keep on with me after I didn't open the door for her because she was liberated. I learned the limits of that kind of liberation.

New Hampshire held its primary on March 12. Who was this McCarthy? He got 42% against LBJ, who only got 49%. You can actually force the government to change policy? This was news. Then Bobby announced his candidacy a few days later. I thought that was sleazy of him. McCarthy had had the political courage to challenge Johnson, so deserved the support. Yes, by this point I was against the War.

The evening of March 31 was the most shocking thing since hearing that JFK had been shot (I was taking a Geometry test when Billy P came to the door and told the teacher.) Johnson said, �I will not seek and I will not accept the nomination of my party for president.� My roommate and I were stunned.

A few days later Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed. I understood why those cities were burning. The pictures of Washington Monument and the Capitol with flames in the background...

By May I�d signed up to campaign for McCarthy. I spent 3 weekends in Nebraska and South Dakota going door-to-door distributing flyers and trying to persuade people to vote for McCarthy. Alice thought I was crazy not to stay home and study for finals, but I thought ending the War was more important.

In Rapid City we went to a gym to watch a Sioux community dance. We were the only whiteys there and didn�t think anything of it. A poster said Senator McGovern would be making a speech sometime during the evening. When that started we left. Out on the corner, a staffer caught up with us and asked us to wait�the Senator wanted to speak to us. We rolled our eyes and agreed. None of us knew anything about him except that he was backing Bobby. When he did come out he was a pleasant enough guy, but I told him I thought he and Bobby were moral midgets for not supporting McCarthy. He took it pretty well.

By the end of the month I was back home for the summer working nights for the Rock Island Railroad. I had to sit in a building alone all night and pull 4 levers whenever a train went by, then make a phone call to report it. Not too challenging. I listened to rock and roll from Oklahoma City or Little Rock, sometimes WLS from Chicago, all night and swatted flies for entertainment when I got too sleepy to read. I�m sure I was listening to �Whiter Shade of Pale� when the DJ interrupted to say that Bobby had been shot in LA.

I was still working nights when the riots started at the Democratic Convention, so I was home in the evenings and got to see Mayor Daly rant and rave when someone said Chicago was like Prague when the Soviet tanks rolled in.

I was so angry at Humphrey for stealing the nomination (and stayed angry at him for several years) that I became disillusioned with school and decided to transfer. That wasn't the only problem. Alice didn't love me anymore. I got my acceptance to Berkeley around election day. I didn�t care anymore�Nixon, with his Southern Strategy, his secret plan to end the war, his Silent Majority. Bah! I had no idea it would last 40 years.

The White Album came out late in November. My friend had a reel-to-reel tape recorder and we taped it off the radio, then played it over and over, trying to figure out what they were trying to tell us to do. Was it to be revolution? I will always believe they could have triggered an uprising, if not a real revolution, had they put out a different album that night.

I packed up and went home for Christmas, then the day after my folks and my sister drove me up to Des Moines to see Yellow Submarine the night before I left and then I caught the flight out to California.

I was living in an unheated room on Channing Street, across from Berkeley High School on New Year's Eve. �68 had been an amazing year and I was relieved when it was over.

[nicholas_chiasson]

I'm only 23 and with the exception on Sept. 11 I can't remember a single year...as a year. If you asked me "where were you in 2004?" I couldn't tell you.

[moosehead]

[caniff]

That was a good read, YTB.

[wannago]

[Ya-ta Boy]

[stillnotking]

[Rteacher]

Sorry, but I can't give a coherent account of where I was at mentally in 1968, other than that I started getting disoriented to the point of manic depression and deep-running paranoia ...

I was very disturbed by films showing napalm victims - poor village women and kids horribly disfigured by our scientific progress in chemistry - and I gradually became more and more radicalized.

After a few weeks, I practically stopped functioning as a student - except for monitoring a Marxist professor's classes.

When I got busted by university police the first time I ever bought any grass (a nickle's worth) I felt some intense hatred against the government and thought that it might be a part of a plot to eliminate all anti-"culture of death" forces.

Existentialist literature and perpetual "all-nighters" got me half-seriously contemplating suicide, while LSD, blonde hash, the Beatles, "underground" publications , and "progressive" music of all types influenced me to identify almost wholly with the "counter-culture".

Looking a little beyond that, in 1969 I dropped out for the third - and last -time, preaching to others that staying at UMass would be an expression of faith in the state of Massachusetts, and I no longer had any faith in the state of Massachusetts.

That same year I also saw myself as sort of a charter member of "Woodstock Nation"...

Related to radical politics of that earlier period, the Korea Herald recently reviewed a new book (Ravens in the Storm: A Personal History of the 1960's Antiwar Movement ) by Carl Oglesby, one-time head of the radical Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).

Here's a link to his Wikipedia bio:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Oglesby

By 1973, I personally started becoming disillusioned with various "new-left" icons of the "revolution" - including figures associated with the Youth International Party (YIP) - witnessing first-hand the discrepancy between media hype and and reality.

Here's the New York Times review of Oglesby's book:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/10/books/review/Dixler-t.html?ref=review

And a colorful Wikipedia article on the "Yippies":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youth_International_Party

[Ya-ta Boy]

Thanks for that.

It looks like you became both more radical and arrived there a lot sooner than I did.

I forgot that I stayed up all night the night (Nov. '6 The White Album came out. My friend had a reel-to-reel tape recorder and we taped it off the radio, then played it over and over, trying to figure out what they were trying to tell us to do. Was it to be revolution? I will always believe they could have triggered an uprising, if not a real revolution, had they put out a different album that night.

I was pretty passive about some things. I figured it would happen when the time was right, so I didn't meet up with Mr. Owsley's products till the spring of '69, at the end of my sophomore year, the year I went to a different school each quarter.

[Fishead soup]

I was a riot cop. Who used to love to beat up dirty long haired traitors who wanted to cause the west to lose the war against communismn. I also arrested numerous subversives and planned their labotamies by bribing doctors to give false diagnosis.

[chris_J2]

I was 12 years old, & in my final year of primary school grade 7 (there are no elementary / middle schools in Australia). I remember these events:

January 4 � The search for the body of Prime Minister Harold Holt, who disappeared whilst swimming off Portsea, Victoria, is called off. Shark? Russian Submarine?

August: RNA show has a Viet Nam War exhibit & pavillion, featuring bamboo booby traps by those nasty Viet Cong.

October 14: � The town of Meckering, Western Australia, is badly damaged by an earthquake.

November: Killarney, a small town, south west of Brisbane, is hit by a tornado. I visited the town in January 1969.

December: Hottest December day on record, with 105 f (42c) We were allowed to go home from school early!

On other years in the same decade, I also recall the assassinations of both Kennedys, & the b&w tv footage of American astronauts landing & walking on the moon. (Sorry, all wonjct's, I really don't think it was a Hollywood studio set). Also recall the "All the way with LBJ" slogan, & the visit to Oz in 1966. I also remember the Charles Manson / Tate Bianca murders in LA in 1969.

Nightmare? 76-80, 92-2000? Carter & Clinton were 2 of the best Presidents the US has ever had, & both were highly regarded internationally, even if their domestic reputation was (arguably), on the nose.

[Fishead soup]

[littlelisa]

[Fishead soup]