Children in the 60's

[carlyhippy]

What do you remember about the 60's? Did you understand all that was going on during that time?

My most clear memories was violent footage on the evening news from Vietnam, the footage on TV from Kent State, and the music. I sang to the Beach Boysand the Monkees, then switched to the Doors and Janis Joplin. I wanted to be Ann Marie from That Girl when I grew up, and wanted a nanny like Mr. French at the time. I watched Captain Kangaroo every morning.

As for understanding what was going on in the world, I really didn't understand too much, too young to understand the concepts of war, drugs, racism, rioting.

[femmocrat]

1. I'm not sure how much I actually remember, and how much is from seeing the films so many times.

One thing I do remember is everyone in our school going to the auditorium to watch the space launches on three big TVs!

I loved American Bandstand and the singers from Philly like Fabian and Frankie Avalon.

[WolverineDG]

2. the only thing I remember is the Moon Landing in 1969 nt

[seabeyond]

3. 60's was childhood. adult world was not a part of our life. i didnt even know about vietnam.

70's i started becoming socially aware. watergate was the big one in our house. my mom was obsessive watching it. she was soooo pissed at nixon. mad a lot.

[seabeyond]

4. but that has me thinking. i remember challenger exploding. 911. i have never asked

my parents what they were doing and what they felt with kennedy's (2) assissination and mlk. my mom is gone. but i think i will talk to my father about it. see his perspective

[mitchum]

5. Although I was 3 when he died, I remember Kennedy as "the dead president"...

and have no memory of him being alive.
I remember Johnson very well..."Mah fellow Americans"
I thought the Vietnam war was something that had been going on for a long long time.
I would sometimes confuse Tennessee Williams and Tennessee Ernie Ford.
I remember Beatlemania; department stores would have Beatle sections.
I remember all of the 60s AM hits coming from transistor radios at the pool.
I saw my first hippie in a Burger King parking lot when I was 7.

[Gidney N Cloyd]

6. I grasped very little of it. That was a lot to take in for a little kid.

[liberaltrucker]

7. I can't properly reply, Carly

Teh Lounge is for, well lounging. My memories of the
60's include my brother going to Nam, me getting tear
gassed protesting said war and getting the shit kicked
out of me by a "patriotic" redneck.

The music was GREAT, though.

[Bennyboy]

8. Man do I remember...

The Beatles. Man oh man, things just went KABLOOEY when the Beatles came around. All of a sudden parents weren't part of our deal AT ALL any more.

The war, my parents watching the TV and hating people who were against the war. Walking down the street and seeing candles in half the neighborhoods windows. Losing friends and brothers. The TV Images. Walter Cronkite, who used to be the guy our family got the news from, suddenly banned from the TV because he became anti war publicly.

The Kennedys. 50 mile hikes. The murders of JFK and Bobby. My neighbors and my Mom all screaming out of the house the day JFK was shot, all crying. the whole funeral thing with John John and the horse drawn hearse.

Then Bobby go shot and I remember being at school and crying all that day, listening to the events of the day on a little teeny radio I had with all of my friends.

The music. The Haight and the hippies. I would go to Haight with my parents and they would roll up their windows and curse them. "Lock the doors we don't want them coming in the car" Like they really wanted to get in the car with Mr and Mrs uptight middle class. I'd go down there with my cousin Skip and I found that there was a world, an exciting world, outside of my parents reality. Skip took me to my first Grateful Dead show. My mom, to this day, says "You were always different after that".. Yeah right Ma. LSD.

[Bennyboy]

22. SEX!!!! (and the BEATLES)

The first time I ever heard them, I was being babysat by a girl about 8 yrs my elder, Rachel Self. I was about 8 at the time. She had just received her drivers license and we were driving along the road, myself, rachel and a couple of my friends. we were listening to the radio and all of a sudden Rachel SHH'd us all and turned the radio as loud as it would go.

She started singing along and by the time the song was over she had to pull the car to the side of the road. She was apoplectic.

My parents never listened to music, so I was a sheltered kid. I had no idea that music could have that effect on people. ESPECIALLY GIRLS!

Later that week, Rachel again babysat us on a Sunday evening. I really liked that because I could watch one the forbidden shows in our house, The Ed Sullivan show. My parents hated The Ed Sullivan show, rock and roll and just about everything so we never ever got to watch it.

A bunch of Rachel's friends came over to watch the show with her. Teenage girls all over the place. They all sat eagerly for the Beatles. I can't tell you when they came on in the show but when they finally did come on it was pandemonium. the girls all screamed fainted and swooned. I had never seen anyone act this way. These girls were flipping out. No longer were they demure girls, but they were freaking animals! All they talked about the rest of the night was The Beatles and who they were going to marry. Who was going to do what to whom and the pros and cons for each member of the band.

All I knew was, this music really got these girls going, going like nothing else. It changed them. It made their little teenage panties wet and I think it was the first time I was aware of sex.

I also knew that I wanted to be a Beatle. or something like one. Just like every teenage or pre-teen in America.

So we bought Beatle boots. we pegged our pants. We all begged our parents to buy us guitars.(Mine would only allow me to play a pedal steel, it was not a Rock and Roll instrument). We bought Beatle wigs.

Suddenly everything that we had been taught and told by our parents was wrong. Totally wrong. Here were these mop topped kids, having fun, pranking on everything in society and we loved it. Our parents hated it. Some passionately. Mine would not let me see the films (I had to sneak out my window, put on my pegged pants, wig and boots stashed in the bushes and meet up with my friends the night they opened). My parents did not let me have any of their music or wear any of the clothes. My dad was always "They are laughing all the way to the bank" and all that.

Of course that just made me rebel even more. No longer could my parents tell me what to do, what to wear, what to listen to. i was going to do it no matter what and there was nothing they could do about it.

It became a constant battle. I wanted to play music. I wanted to see music. They caught me sneaking out to go see the Beatles at Candlestick park and grounded me forever. It made no difference that I did not have tickets, I was going anyway.

[LaurenG]

27. lol -Like they really wanted to get in the car...

Yeah - it must have been scary for our parents, drug crazed hippies with love beads and all.

[mulsh]

9. I was about to watch Captain Satalite on KTVU, switching channels

the first time I heard about the "civil war in Viet Nam" I must have been around 6 years old. I remember watching the news report and thinking "this is going to be bad" then I switched on Mayor Art since I missed CS.
I remember being in the Haight during the "Summer of Love", watching all the people and thinking "there's something wrong with some of the guys"

I also remember the front page headline of the Berkeley Barb inviting people over to make a People's Park. So I went, after school. Somewhere there are photos of me, my brother and a couple of other kids in catholic school uniforms digging holes for trees.

Oh and our family would watch the local and network evening news all through the 60's. Looks like I was sort of prescient about that Viet Nam thing, at least my dad thought so.

[Kat45]

10. I remember the Kennedy assassination, and I was only 7.

I can remember my girlfriend, who lived upstairs from me, coming into the house and saying that President Kennedy was shot. Also watched the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, loved listening to the Beatles, then the Monkees. Loved the whole British Invasion, Carnaby Street stuff, and thought hippies were cool. When I was about 10, I started walking around with a transistor radio up to my ear all the time. And yes, I got heavily into the Doors when I was in seventh grade. (The albums I asked for for Christmas around 7th grade were the Doors, Cream, and Hendrix, but I also had to know all the top 40 songs all the time.) I became politicized sometime during junior high, with Vietnam being such a huge thing at the time, though I don't remember seeing the footage on the news. (My memory of my youth is not that great.) In 7th grade, they had a survey in school asking our opinions about the Vietnam War, should we escalate, de-escalate, etc and I had to ask somebody in my class what those words meant. I didn't really have an opinion as yet. I do remember that in 9th grade when we had to write a parody of the "friends, Romans, countrymen" speech from "Julius Caesar," I wrote it about the trial of the Chicago 7. Aiding my parody, the judge's name was Julius (Hoffman). I guess I had formed my opinions by then. lol I couldn't wait to get to college so I could protest, but by the time I got there, the war had just ended and there were no more protests (though there was still quite a sixties sensibility).

Edited to add: My mother would not let me go to Harvard Square (Cambridge) until I turned 13. Not sure if it was trouble because of the hippies hanging out, or students who might be protesting, or both. As soon as I turned 13, I got an older girlfriend (mentioned earlier) to take me there. Other times I'd go with my older cousin. Harvard Square was so cool back then, not the preppie/corporate place it is now.

[DBoon]

11. riots and demonstrations all the time

I thought taking to the streets was normal - you had college types demonstrating against the war, the counterculture taking over the streets, riots in the inner city and lots of labor strife (the late 60's were a peak in walkouts and other labor disputes). Everyone had something to demonstrate against.

"Our" music and culture were so radically different from our parents that we knew the future had to also be different. Pop music of even a decade before was so old fashioned as to be unlistenable. Conversely, people in my parents' generation (and especially *my* parents) hated the music we listened to. The Doors, Jimi Hendrix, the Iron Butterfly, were loud noise that inspired drug use in their minds.

People believed in affluence too - life had gotten better since the end of WW II and would continue to get better. The income stagnation we faced would have been unbelievable. The future would be like science fiction - i mean who in 1939 thought men would visit the moon 30 years later? Obviously we would colonize mars by the end of the 20th century.

I was born in 1956, so I would have been 14 at the end of the decade.

I remember Kent State and how the republicans and conservatives thought those damn hippies deserved it.

[zanana1]

21. I hear you.

The only bad part about growing up in the 60's is that it means I'm old now!

[carlyhippy]

12. speaking of the 60's, there is a made for tv movie on vh1 classic right now about the 60's

So much happened in this decade, wow... and we all witnessed it, the good and the bad.

[elleng]

13. A lot; big part of my young adulthood,

like Chicago/Dem convention/'68, helped get people out of Cook County Jail.

Mayor Daley, Sr!

and some music! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGbMEkQerYs

[MiddleFingerMom]

14. Raised smalltown Michigan and blissfully unaware of sociopolitical realities...

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...music and girls were my two main focuses (not necessarily in that order).
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I STAYED unaware until 1973 -- I was in Germany in the Army when the 1973
Arab-Israeli war hit. The Russians threatened to go in and the Americans
threatened to counter by going in and in about 3 minutes FLAT... there was
talk of nuclear weapons being "necessary".
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We were out on maneuvers when the world-wide military alert happened. Raced
back home to Nurnberg, only to be sent back out about 10-15 miles to the deep
woods. Mind you, at this point, none of US knew that nukes were a real possibility...
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...UNTIL...
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...we were told to all face in a certain direction.
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:wtf:
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We figured out very quickly that we were facing AWAY from the nearest big
city (Nurnberg) and that the only reason for doing so would be to keep us
from being blinded by a nuclear explosion.
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Before or since... I don't think I've EVER been so scared in my life.
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THAT was the moment that I decided that I needed to become more acquainted
with what was going on in my world.
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[begin_within]

15. Yes, vivid memories but not a good understanding of everything.

We lived in suburban Orange County and had a comfortable middle-class life, but the tumult of the decade was seen on the news every day. I don't remember the JFK assassination but I remember the RFK one clearly. My first knowlege of the Beatles was from 2 girls that would come over to the park behind our house and they had a lot of makeup on, and they were "into the Beatles." This was very early in 1964. The Beatles became very prominent, in fact my sister had Beatles pictures all over her bedroom and she went to see them at the Hollywood Bowl. I listened to all their albums as they came out starting with Sgt. Pepper, even though I was only 7. I was also taking piano lessons at the same time, mostly classical stuff. I think the first movie I saw in a theater was Mary Poppins but I'm not sure. We went to Disneyland several times a year since we lived only 10 miles from it. Race riots were on the TV for a little while when they happened in Watts, but then that seemed to die down. Race issues touched our family because my oldest sister married a black man and they were married 7 years. I had no problem in fact I like him a lot, but I think my grandparents never really dealt with it. I can remember when cherry bombs were still legal, though only the "big boys" actually had them. Vietnam was on the TV news every single day, in fact it was a routine thing. The first story was whatever happened there that day. I watched all the usual TV shows that were on then: Gilligan's Island, Batman, the Munsters, the Addams Family, the Monkees, Lucy, Dick Van Dyke, I Dream of Jeannie, Farmer Brown, Captain Kangaroo, Bewitched, Andy Griffith, Candid Camera, Beverly Hillbillies, Bonanza, Get Smart, Green Acres, Petticoat Junction, Twilight Zone, Outer Limits and of course Star Trek. TV was probably our main source of entertainment although later on we started going to movies more. We played miniature golf a lot, Holo Wai was a mini golf course in our town, with a Hawaiian theme. Almost every little town had a small mini golf course. Many also had trampolines and the larger ones had go-karts. I remember when Black and white TV changed to Color TV, and at first only rich families had color. The first thing I saw in color was The Wizard of Oz, and we were amazed when the movie changed into color. Of course when the wicked witch came on the screen I ran out of the room. But it wasn't that long until everyone had color TVs. I remember watching the moon landing, we all gathered around the TV and sat there watching every bit of it.

[tigereye]

16. we did see the Vietnam War on before dinner - i'm not sure that it was

explained to us by my parents... we saw a lot of things on tv, the political implications of which we could not possibly have really understood.


I used to march around with political yard signs for moderate Republicans, as I recall - before I knew any better. :D

[cwydro]

17. I grew up in NC

and was very aware of racial issues.

I was peripherally aware of Vietnam and remember talking with my mom about it.

I think my biggest worry (if I had thought about it) in those days was the cold war...we actually had a bomb shelter under our house.

[av8rdave]

18. Born in '58

I have vivid memories of growing up in the 60s. The graphic Viet Nam coverage sticks in my mind, along with wondering if I would wind up fighting there (Saigon fell the year before my 18th birthday, and US troops were out of there a year or two before that). I remember seeing coverage of the peace marches and protests, and remember the space program coverage, which totally captured my imagination.

The interesting part of all that was my parents. They had some rather interesting beliefs, that they tried to pass on to me:

1. The Beatles were the leading edge of the Communist invasion

2. McCarthy was right, and him winding up looking like an ass was one of the Communists great victories

3. The war in Viet Nam was a fight for our freedoms (sound familiar?)

4. The students at Kent State were shot because they deserved it

5. SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) were communist infiltrators

In retrospect, my parents did me a great service. Even attending college at a military academy, I learned just how wrong they were about all of the above, which taught me a great deal about being inquisitive and skeptical about anything political, religious or social.

To my parents' credit, they learned a great deal in the ensuing years, and modified their world views accordingly. Ultimately, they too unintentionally taught me a lot about asking questions and finding things out for myself.

[Bennyboy]

19. That is my story too....

How my parents felt and how that they were so wrong.

I remember the SF State thing with SI Hiyakowa and Reagan and how appalled i was at the use of force and how my parents were "They should just kill them all"...

This caused a huge rift in my family because one of my cousins was attending SF State at the time.

[hamsterjill]

41. Another '58er here, too!

My parents always warned me about the "long hairs". But rest assured, I didn't listen!

[av8rdave]

42. '58 models are the best!

My parents gave me the same warnings about the longhairs. I also pretty much blew them off. Amazing how fast stereotypes fall apart when you actually interact with those being maligned!

:hi:

[catzies]

20. Born in '62, Kennedy baby, earliest memory was when Beatles came to Miami

Yes, I really do remember. I found audio clips from WQAM on Youtube and heard them again and do remember it all from the first time.

Seriously, my first memories of the world at large are all connected to the Fab Four and are all bound together in my consciousness. My mom gave me the pics that came in the albums and she put them up on my wall in our bedroom and they're in the background of my baby pictures. "Help!" may have been the first movie I saw and we saw it at the drive-in.

Dr. Seuss taught me how to read and by age 6 I was reading the Newsweek editions on RFK's assassination.

Mom & Dad split up just around the time the Beatles got into drugs and my mom got into drugs too in a big way.

We went to Woodstock in '69 because my mom - a full-fledged hippie by then - knew Michael Lang in Coconut Grove. So we had to go, literally filling a Volkswagen bus with hippies along the way and drove from Miami to New York. I was 7 and my brother was 5 and Mom took us to Woodstock, of which my memories are lots, of walking, lots of mud, being bored to tears and then getting hurt and David Crosby trying to help me.

[trof]

23. Born in '41. I was in USAF pilot training in '63 and '64.

I grew up in Bombingham (Birmingham), AL.
In the 60s I remember the "race riots", fire hoses and police dogs, burning crosses, bombed black churches, bombed homes of black civil rights advocates, freedom riders and the 'massacre' at the Trailways bus station when all the Birmingham police force was "at home on Mothers' day", Eugene "Bull" Connor, police chief in Birmingham.
Google him for an 'interesting' read.

I remember the Selma to Montgomery march by MLK and his brave supporters and the bloodbath at the Edmund Pettus bridge.
I remember that J. Edgar Hoover branded King as a COMMUNIST and an OUTSIDE AGITATOR and UNAMERICAN and had an extensive dossier on him.

I remember the murder of Viola Liuzzo and the 3 civil rights activists buried in the earthen dam in Mississippi.

The 60s pretty much sucked, except for the pilot training part.

[Auggie]

24. MAD Magazine

I was born in 1957. My older brother subscribed to MAD Magazine but I read it too. MAD became incredibly insightful and progressive back in the mid 60's. Sounds strange to say it, but I think it helped frame the political and social change of the decade in a way I could understand and helped me be more aware of what was going on. I never thought of it quite like that before. We grew up together, more or less.

Thank you Bill Gaines.

[mitchum]

31. I agree with you completely about the influence of Mad

I had the same experience

[BurtWorm]

25. I remember seeing the caissons in the rotunda during the Kennedy funeral.

My main source of knowledge about JFK came from Vaughn Meader's First Family album.

I remember hearing Do You Want to Know a Secret?--first Beatles song I ever actually associated with the Beatles--on the radio. I was three or four. (Born in 1959.)

My brother is 8 years older, so I was aware of bands like Moby Grape, The Electric Flag, The Electric Prunes, Captain Beefheart, Mothers of Invention, etc., through him. Also aware of the SDS, protest of the war in Vietnam, hippie fashions, underground movies, etc., etc.

I was very aware of and nervous about the war in Vietnam and racial tension because of the CBS evening news with Walter Cronkite. Also remember the assassinations and funerals of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy. My best friend's mother was active in the Democratic Party in our town, and my parents were not especially political at that time. I did my part to try to encourage them to vote Democratic and I think they did. My mother in particular became very political and left after 1968.

[LaurenG]

26. 1964

We were going on a camping trip. My parents had bought a camper and my siblings and I rode in the camper during the trip. I was sitting next to the radio and the news came on talking about the war and how they thought it would last 10 more years. I started crying thinking that I'd be 18 or 19 by the time the war was over. It was 11 years.

The 60's were scary times though because I also remember all the preparation we had to go through to ready ourselves for nuclear annihilation when I was in grade school.

[lutefisk]

28. I like the politicians of the 60's more than the current ones.

It turns out even the Republicans weren't all that bad, compared with the ones we have now. And Democrats? There were some really good ones!

I like the music, the Whole Earth Catalog instead of the internet, the clearer skies, cleaner air, cleaner water, seafood that was safe to eat, air travel on nice new jets, absence of high fructose corn syrup, people taking it to the streets, marching against a war in a small town because people cared enough to take part, the fact that Bush and Cheney were just draft dodging drunks instead of world wreckers... lots of stuff. Kind of wish I were there, actually.

[valerief]

29. Wow, you're me!!!! nt

[county worker]

30. Well I remember a lot.

I started high school in 1960. I remember the loudspeaker at school telling us that Kennedy was killed. I remember lots of civil rights marches. I was even in one. I graduated in 1964 and played drums in a rock band. I got drafted in 1966 and went to Vietnam. I got back and was part of the anti-war movement. In 1968 I went to San Francisco. We had our own personal FBI agent parked out back of my brother's apartment. I remember Kent State, MLK and Bobby's assassination. Even remember Wallace getting shot. It was a very remarkable time.

[carlyhippy]

32. WOW! Awesome responses

amazing how much happened in those 10 years, so much change

[kwassa]

33. Going to Woodstock, watching Lee Harvey Oswald get murdered on live television ...

the Kennedy assassination was a national trauma unequaled since that time, the whole country shut down for 4 days.

the early rock and roll days when tickets were cheap and venues were not sold out.

Records cost $3.47 for the longest time. Woodstock ticket was $18 for three days of concert. A photo of me there was in Life magazine.

My introduction to both sex and drugs as a teenager.

I saw Janis Joplin in concert 3 times, yet missed Cream and Hendrix. Saw Led Zep in their first year of touring the US, and didn't like them.

[texanwitch]

34. The 60's were my prime childhood years like so many here.

I went from kindergarden to the first year of high school.

Great years to grow up in, wished I would have realized how great at the time.

I think tv made it so real to us, we were the first tv generation.

I remember watching the Vietnam War on tv, and of course the killing of President Kennedy.

The music was great for the most part, some of it really sucked.

America changed a lot in those 10 years, for the better.

Yeah, I am glad I lived in that period of time.

[trackfan]

35. As the youngest of five children, born in 1959, I was aware of the adult world.

My oldest brother was in the Navy in the Gulf of Tonkin. My other siblings were teenagers, and I have always had a "teenage" attitude, since my primary childhood influences were a bunch of teenagers. It seemed like Vietnam would last forever. I prayed every day for the war to end, basically for selfish reasons - so it would be over before I could get drafted.

[struggle4progress]

36. I remember sometimes seeing Truman or Eisenhower on the telly

I saw a few civil rights protests against segregated lunch counters in the early 60s

We did air raid drills during the Cuban missile crisis: run down to the school basement and curl up on the floor

The loss of JFK pretty much brought everybody to a standstill brief: people quit work early to go watch the news

TV broadcast of the Ranger 7 stuff was exciting; last photos were incomplete: http://www.solarviews.com/cap/moon/ra7p200.htm

The kids all knew about the Vietnam war

Mad magazine was surprisingly political: I remember a photomontage for "America the Beautiful" where "for spacious skies" was illustrated with chimneys spewing crap and "amber waves of grain" was an auto junkyard; they'd often do mocking political lyrics to well-known songs

Visited my California cousins in the later 60s: they were in high school and had a Haight-Ashbury poster on the wall

I remember hearing when Martin and Robert were assassinated

Walt Kelly was still alive then, and his Pogo was hilarious: IIRC the 68 election had Spiro Agnew as a hyena and Hubert Humphrey as a tiny knight in oversized armor on a horse

My friends and I listened to Tom Lehrer: "When you go to American city, you will find it very pretty, only two things of which you must beware: don't drink the water and don't breathe the air!"

The Smothers Brothers were on for a while in the late 60s: Pat Paulsen ran for President on the show: ""A lot of people say we have to save face in Vietnam. Personally, I think we should save something a little more sensitive than face." Network censors finally killed the hour

Lunar landing in 69 was exciting, too

[A Cooper]

37. Diver Dan

Diver Dan was one of my favorite shows when I was a kid.

[BurtWorm]

43. I remember that. My twin and I used to put underpants on our heads and call ourselves Diaper Dan.

And we weren't even being ironic!

[csziggy]

38. The 60s were a transitional time for me personally

Going from a child to a teenager. I watched Captain Kangaroo, Bonanza, The Monkees, The Man from UNCLE, Star Trek. That Girl was not my favorite - Ann Marie was too much of a ditz, the city was nasty, her boyfriend was useless, and her father was a PITA.

I vaguely remember the 1960 elections and how exciting it was to have a young President instead of a guy who looked like a grandpa. I was jealous of the Kennedy kids and their privileged life, especially Carolyn with her pony. But I felt so sad for them when their father was killed. That is when I was just old enough to begin to pay attention to politics.

I never understood the craze for the early Beatles or why people would buy tickets then scream all the way through the music. In my small hometown, we did not get much of the cutting edge music. The Rolling Stones were too controversial for any of the stations we got, so was Elvis until the mid-sixties. So much of the music of the era was left for me to discover after I left there in 1970.

The March on Selma shocked me as much that the bridge where the violence was started by the cops was where we turned to visit my great aunts and uncles - they lived a few blocks down River Street from there. I had already had my world shaken when my preacher uncle told a hateful raciest "joke" that made me lose all respect for him as a person and as a religious person. I could not understand the hate behind the segregationists.

When the leaders of the fight for freedom and equality were killed, it made me doubt the basis of our country. Then when Bobby Kennedy was shot, I was afraid - it seemed as though all the people who were trying to lead our country to achieve freedom for everyone were being systematically killed off.

When I was in seventh grade, prayer in the schools was abolished. Until then, and until she was threatened with dismissal, a neighbor opened each of her English classes with a fire and brimstone prayer. I was always glad I was not in any of her classes. About the same time our school system became fully integrated. They had been working toward it, but then they finally closed the all-black school and all kids from seventh grade up went to the same junior and senior highs.

Our little town became the first town in Florida to have a black mayor. He had been on the city commission for a while and as one commissioner put it, "It was his turn to be mayor." I felt that the white politicians were worried about racial incidents and if things got bad, they could blame the black guy for any problems.

Kent State happened when my parents had two daughters in college and one ready to go soon. One of my sisters was a big anti-war activist (still is) so they worried she could be caught in another Kent State. I got a year's of warnings about avoiding demonstrations before I left home. While I was not much of an activist, I was the kind of kid that seemed to get into trouble a lot.

Drugs - they were around but for me they were a 70s phenomenon.

[rurallib]

39. I was 10 in 1960. I actually remember quite a bit

Grew up in a college town. That may have been a factor. Also a catholic at the time JFK ran for Pres.
I think it was '65 or so that I became aware of Vietnam due to some students handing out pamphlets downtown.
The music, the protests and the confrontations.
The one day I will never forget was the day I was talking with my father. He wasn't pro-war. He was a small business man who just wanted to make a living. One day in 1970 we were talking and he blurts out "You know you kids are right" I asked "About what" and he says "the war, racism, politics, you name it."
One strange day was Nov. 23, 1963. We played basketball all the time. That Saturday there was no place to play indoors, so we went to an outdoor court. We were the only things moving it seemed. When the ball bounced on the cement it echoed forever. Almost like a twilight zone show.

[hamsterjill]

40. Summers at the community swimming pool!

We used to swim everyday. It was the local hang out, and you had to have a "cool" new bikini for the summer. If you had TWO bikinis, you were considered a rich person!

When we were eleven, twelve, etc., we'd "pair" up for the summer with a boyfriend and hang out at the pool, eating slurpy's and popcorn.