Do you remember 1969?

It seems that there are fewer and fewer of us who do.  Maybe some don’t remember because they were too stoned to retain anything, but mostly, I think it’s because so many people are too damned young to remember. They weren’t even born! Grown up people, I mean.  Why men and women who could be my kids are teaching, doctoring,  and lawyering.  And not a one of them remembers 1969.

I was remembering ’69 today because of an interview on NPR with Terri Gross and Roseanne Cash.  Cash has a recording of 500 Miles on her new cd.  Of course, I was reminded of the Peter, Paul and Mary version, of which I was very fond that year.  Mary Travers died last week — the passing of another icon of the sixties. Tributes were paid to her and they showed footage from concerts back then.  I remember you, Mary. I remember.

1969 was quite an important year, you know.  Politically, Nixon became president (oh dear!) with not much foreshadowing of the Watergate debacle that would bring him down. Of course, his running mate was that upstanding gentleman from Maryland, Spiro Agnew, who was forced to resign later because of a financial scandal.  Golda Meir became the first woman Prime Minister of a major country, Israel.  She looked a lot like my grandmother. In fact, they could have been twins.

Of greater note to my generation, which “dropped out, tuned in and turned on”  around then, Led Zeppelin released their first album. And the Beatles, alas, played their last concert together. Who knew their whirlwind “taking” of the world would last only about 5 years.  Those same doctors and lawyers, some of them, think Paul McCartney was famous for being in a band called “Wings.”

Of course, one of the big reasons for our unrest back then was the Viet Nam war, which spawned demonstrations and the public burning of draft cards and our flag…to say nothing of a few arguments between fathers and son.

Perhaps some of the most amazing things about 1969, though, are the things that were NOT happening.  Meals were slow cooked…microwaves hadn”t been invented. And we “waited” for phone calls (especially from the opposite gender), because phones existed only at home, in businesses and in phone booths — not in our purses or hanging from our belts.  Music was not very portable, unless you had a transistor radio in your pocket and books were definitely printed on paper, essentially the same way Gutenburg did it in the 15th century,  rather than read on Kindles or heard on cd’s.

As for me, I was about to embark on some of the major adventures of my coming of age.  If you can believe it, I was introduced to Janis Joplin at Christmas of that year by my fifty-one year old father, who thought he was being very cool buying me her album, Cheap Thrills.  This was pretty funny, because I was quite a “goody two shoes,” who wore a girls’ school uniform 5 days a week and didn’t drink. Yes, I sneaked smokes occasionally, but everyone did back then.  I was still a year or so away from buying a pack of cigarettes. No, Janis was quite the eye-opener! I was actually quite shocked.

During that fateful year, I was also introduced to a legendary Cincinnati “institution” — the Ludlow Garage.  Our version of the Fillmore West, it hosted a few famous acts like the Allman Brothers and Santana.  One late summer night, I went out with friends, never exactly saying where it was that I was  going.  In fact, I don’t think I even knew where we were going!  What I do remember is absolutely rocking out to Grand Funk Railroad…and praying that my parents never found out where I was. I don’t think they ever did, until I told them when we were reminiscing about the sixties years later.

If you were alive and cognizant of much of anything in July of 1969, you remember Neil Armstrong walking on the moon on 7/20. I remember it because I was on a TWA 707, flying from Rome to New York, when the pilot came on to announce that history had been made.  I also remember that my BFF (who is still my BFF 40 years later) was straightening her hair with Curl Free.  I wasn’t there, of course…but she told me all about it.  It’s kind of funny, really, what makes an impression. I have no idea what I, myself, was wearing or any details of that flight, except the pilot’s voice and the cheering plane full of Americans united by joy over our having beaten the Russians to the punch, just as JFK had promised about 8 years before. But I remember that she straightened her hair. Probably because I was envious.

And then there was the way I ended 1969 — on a  Caribbean cruise. There was the cool, good looking guy from Puerto Rico and the sort of scary dudes who worked as stevedores  on the ship and turned out to be purveyors of cannabis.  I think we’d just docked in Cartagena.  That’s Cartagena, Columbia, by the way.  You could have gotten high just breathing the ambient air…not that I’m saying I did.

Well, if you were alive in 1969, you probably identify with some of this, though the specifics may, of course, be different.  It is easy to be nostalgic about that time. I was really very innocent, with most of my life and challenges well ahead of me. And we were innocent even in the midst of our turning societal norms, mores and traditions — just as the youth of previous generations had done. In fact, just as youth of every generation does!

As usual, I’ll end with a poem.  Entitled, of course:

1969

Morrison, Hendrix and Joplin

mainlined rock and roll,

and white powder, as a

cyclone raged inside me,

a face in the crowd.

Airplanes and zeppelins

echoed inside my head.

Psychedelic Don Quixote

rocked my doorway,

magic rainbows tilting

at the silvery moon.

There but for the grace of God,

a stairway to heaven.

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