June, 1969

Sometime that month - I graduate from Wayne Central High School. It was likely around the middle of the month. I have only the vaguest memories of the event. But we boys took pride in the sexual connotation of graduating in '69' even though such activities were limited to our erotic fantasy lives. I don't know of one friend at that time who'd actually had sex. At that time, at that place, sex remained something elusive and futuristic, much to our group disappointment. The caption on my yearbook casual photograph read: "Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil - but think about it." Some crack yearbook staff member knew me pretty well.

In my teens I became a huge fan of W.C. Fields - I thought that he was the funniest person who'd ever lived, even though he's been dead for 20 years. I collected records, posters, photos, books, stationery - anything I could get my hands on. Friends even called me W.C. I would do W.C. Fields routines I'd memorized from records at parties ("I cut a path through a wall of human flesh, dragging my canoe behind me!") . I was a nut.

The photo of me and W.C. above, taken in 1968, shows me wearing a flowered Nehru-style shirt I'd bought the year before on a visit to my sister in Washington, DC. I still have one of the original Personality Posters of Fields, now framed and loaded with numerous tack marks on all four corners, hanging on the wall to my right as I write this. Posters were big back then - there was a very cool poster/head shop in Rochester which I loved to visit I think that it was on East Avenue. My room had the Fields posters, the Richard Avedon black and white poster of The Beatles, Bob Dylan with the multi-colored electric hair, Simon and Garfunkel. Many LPs had posters inside in those days and that was an added bonus - more things to pin on the wall.

My parents would get a copy of the Sunday edition of the New York Times without fail every week - my father would pick up a copy on the way home from church. Church was mandatory in our house, the it was a time when you were still expected to dress up for church. That month or thereabouts, an advertisement in the Arts and Leisure section caught my eye:

Sounded good to me. I was 18 and free, so why the hell not? I began to formulate a plan....

Hee Haw debuts that month in CBS. Hosted by Buck Owens and Roy Clark, it featured a mix of country music and corny rural comedy. It was the complete opposite of hip, but fit right in with President Nixon's "silent majority" crusade. The country was completely polarized - gone was the idealism and optimism of the Kennedy years.

In 1969, Reader's Digest sent some 18 million flag decals to its subscribers, and they quickly became a big hit. Plastered on windows and car window vents, they were popular among the pro-Nixon, pro-war crowd - The Silent Majority. The system worked quite well if you were hitchhiking, which I did often in my college years. The best rides came from vans bearing peace stickers; if you were picked up by a car with a flag decal, you could expect - at the very least - a lecture regarding your hair and attire, the war, whatever.

One June 8, after years of steady increases, President Nixon announces the first withdrawal of troops from Vietnam - 25,000 out of a force near 550,000.

The Love Theme from 'Romeo and Juliet' reaches number one on the charts. This movie absolutely knocked me out - I thought it was brilliant. Mindy and I would actually watch it at the drive-in rather than make out, though truth be told I would have loved to have had the nerve at that time to have wonderful naked sex like the two lovers in the film. I still remember the echoes of the last line of the Prince in the town courtyard - "all are punished." Powerful stuff for a young catholic boy. It would take me some more years to shed my catholic upbringing, but the walls were beginning to slowly crumble. Too slowly.

The Weathermen formed as a radical offshoot of the 1960s student activist group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). A manifesto, which circulated around a June 1969 SDS convention, took its title from Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues." "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows," it read, and thus became known as the Weatherman statement.

On June 22, legendary singer and actress Judy Garland dies at age 48 of an overdose.

Born on June 15 - future rapper Ice Cube.

During a Bed-In for Peace on June 1 in Montreal, John Lennon, along with Yoko Ono, Tommy Smothers, Timothy Leary, and others, records Give Peace a Chance, which is released soon after as the first solo recording by one of The Beatles.

Warren Burger is sworn in as Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, ending the activist era known as the (Earl) Warren Court.

On June 28, the Stonewall Riots in New York City mark the beginning of the gay rights movement.

In Houston, Texas, Army veteran Orville Moody wins the U.S. Open by one stroke. Moody was the last golfer to win the event by first having to qualify through local and regional events. It was his only PGA tour career victory.

There was another great local band in the area which, sadly, I don't think I ever saw perform live, but it's also quite possible that I did and simply can't remember due to the ever-increasing number of misfiring neurons in my aging brain. Wilmer Alexander and The Dukes were almost legendary in Upstate New York in the late 1960s. Originating out of Geneva, NY, the Dukes had a couple of singles which reached the charts nationally, or at least "bubbled under the hot one hundred." Those of us living in Upstate remember them fondly - they were big on the bar and college scene at the time. Legend has it that they were the inspiration for the bar band in the film Animal House. The band released their one album in 1969. The times were a changin' and the times were rocking.