October, 1969

The revolution starts here.

I was now into my second month of college, and the transition was shaky at best. I was truly missing home and my pre-college life, but found the various changes I was undergoing to be at least somewhat thrilling. New people, new friends, new ideas. An upperclassman, Bob Stabile, but known to most (until this day) as Professor Hokum W. Jeebs, stopped by my room to ask if I was sell the gramophone speaker I had in my window (I would not). I had joined the staff of the college radio station - WRPS - and was now a DJ. I would continue spinning records, later with WNTS (Northern Twin Colleges) , throughout my years in Potsdam.

I loved playing music from new artists - James Taylor, Carole King, Steely Dan, The Allman Brothers, Cat Stevens - there was a lot of good music back then.

My studies were not living up to my expectations. History, a subject in which I'd always excelled, was proving to be difficult and boring to me. Did I really want to be a history teacher? By then I'm sure the answer was now "no." I struggled in my other courses. In philosophy, my professor was a young radical from New York City, who did his best to indoctrinate us freshmen with leftist fervor, and I think he succeeded to some degree, though the times themselves had a lot to do with it. A paper I wrote on the 60s anti-poverty programs was greeted by him with scorn and mockery. I purposefully then wrote another paper extolling the virtues of communist reforms in Cuba on which he lavished praise and encouragement. Left, right - they were all crazy, I thought.

I have a few scattered notes from this time, and an entry in October contains a single word - confusion.

Student life was highly segrgated and divided into several groups that did not usually mingle all that much. The jocks, the fraternity/sorority greeks, the nerds, the "Crannies" - music school students, and the freaks. I was going down the route of the last group and beginning to "let my freak flag fly."

Author Jack Kerouac died on October 21 one day after being rushed with severe abdominal pain from his St. Petersburg home by ambulance.

His death, at the age of 47, resulted from an internal hemorrhage, the result of a lifetime of heavy drinking. It was a few years after his death that a became a Kerouac addict, devouring all of his writings I could get my hands on.

The first message over Arpanet, the world's first operational packet-switching network and the predecessor to the Internet, is sent from a lab at UCLA to one at Stanford.

Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid, starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford, is released October 24. The film went on to receive four Oscars, including one for the best original song "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head." I saw the film soon after it came out; it contains one my my all-time favorite scenes, when, after over-dynamiting a safe during a train robbery, Reford deadpans to Newman: "Think you used enough dynamite there Butch?"

WalMart is incorporated on October 31. This scourge plagues us until this day.

The "Days of Rage" organized by The Weather Underground take place in Chicago. On October 15, hundreds of thousands of anti-war protesters take to the nation's streets.

Born on October 10 - NFL quarterback Brett Favre.

On October 5, The BBC broadcasts the first episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus.

The great Paul is Dead rumor reaches us in Potsdam. Some of my friends and I spend hours and hours analyzing the "clues" and listening to part of Beatles tracks backwards. Paul is barefoot on the Abbey Road cover, "I Buried Paul" at the end of Strawberry Fields Forever, etc. etc.

Paul McCartney later comments "It is all bloody stupid."

I still have to this day a copy of the special magazine rushed out to take advantage of folks like me, pictured below.



Around that time, a friend and I got hold of a bootleg tape of The Beatles Get Back/Let It Be sessions. This provided us with ample more fuel for the fire. We went so far as to telephone the Apple Records office in London - we were after all, journalists from Radio Potsdam station WRPS. We recorded the call and convinced ourselves that a voice heard shouting in the background was the one and only John Lennon.

One good result - while we were immersed in Paul and Beatles research, we learned of the famous Butcher Block cover for the album Yesterday and Today. We took out my copy, looked it over, and though we saw something underneath.

With the help of some steam, we loosened the cover, and voila - there was the original - then, and now a collector's item. I still have that as well.

On October 24, Irish expatriate author Samuel Beckett is awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize for Literature. A few years later I would play the character Lucky in a production of Beckett's Waiting for Godot - the pinnacle of my acting career.

The "Miracle" New York Mets shock the baseball world by winning the World Series over the heavily favored Baltimore Orioles.

Vice President Spiro Agnew says of war protesters "A spirit of national masochism prevails, encouraged by an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals."

I take issue with this vicious and untrue characterization. I was happy to be an impudent slob.

September, 1969

Around the Labor Day weekend in early September, I officially start college as a freshman at SUNY Potsdam, located up in the St. Lawrence River Valley in far northern New York. I have a very clear memory is my father talking to me in my room as I was going to bed the night before driving up to drop me off. He gave me a little pep talk and told me that he loved me. Now, I had been quite a thorn in his side ever since I was little, and I don't ever remember him telling me that before. So it meant something to me. Though in retrospect, it's possible and even likely that he was glad to see me go. I'm sue he secretly said "yes!" Above, my Mom and brother Brian in the Potsdam quad, around September 1, 1969.

I was now living in room 122 (I think) of Van Housen Hall, the first floor. Due to a housing shortage on campus, three students were crowded into rooms designed to accommodate two (like modern prisons, I guess), so a friend and I and someone I have no memory of moved in. My friend from high school decided to attend Potsdam because I was going there. It was also his idea to share a room, though I don't recall being wild about that. Across the hall were two guys from the Albany area, and next door were two Jewish guys from NYC - Billy Bernstein and Charlie Tuna. Billy was a huge Jefferson Airplane fan; Charlie Tuna was probably crazy and liked to light his farts to entertain us. Billy was dismayed to find some top 40 singles of bubble gum music in my collection. I don't suppose he called me a hick to my face, but a hick I was. Well, he kind of called me a hick, now that I think about it.



After a few weeks I was completely homesick and hopped a bus back to Rochester - it was around a five hour trip. A little bit later the father of a High School classmate would regularly give me rides home for weekends and holidays. I enjoyed his company tremendously, especially since he knew which bars to stop at along the way.

That Fall I had my first experience of heartbreak and lost love which lasted through my first semester. I took very long walks out into the countryside around Potsdam and generally felt miserable. It also rained quite a bit that Fall, and portions of the campus were under construction, so there was mud everywhere. Lots of mud.

My roommate later transferred to another school, wound up marrying a mutual friend, and eventually came out of the closet. I had no understanding of the possibility of being gay at that juncture of my life, but thinking back it explains quite a few things to me.

But Potsdam, before winter set in and I learned firsthand about North Country winters, was pleasant enough. There were bars galore (the drinking age in New York at the time was 18), girls, lots of live music, and even a small head shop called The Isle of You. There were three mens clothing stores, all beginning with the letter H - Harold's, Herman's .... and one other I don't remember. A music store, a movie theater, and a sub shop were also around. New things to do and try, interesting people to meet - a new life. I don't think that I drank a lot those first months of college, or tried smoking marijuana - that would come soon.

As far a classwork, I remember little of that time - History, Spanish, Philosophy, I think. I really didn't care much at all for it.

Boone's Farm Apple Wine was a discovery around that time - I remember sitting in the park and drinking a bottle with Annie McNamera. Anything to be around a girl.

Radio Hanoi announces the death of Ho Chi Minh, the long-time revolutionary and leader of North Vietnam. He was 79.

The Beatles release their final recorded album and probably their best - Abbey Road on September 26 (The album rumored to be called Get Back, recorded before Abbey Road, remained unreleased, but finally comes out the next year as Let It Be). I listened to this album again and again in my dorm room and it greatly helped me get over my private heartbreak. It's probably at the very top of my list of albums of all-time.

In a bloodless coup on September 1, Colonel Muammar Muhammad Gaddafi, the chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council in Libya, assumes control of the North African country. The Colonel has maintained an interesting relationship with the United States ever since, and as of this writing is still with us.

The first ATM machine begins operation in Rockville Center, New York.


At the close of their first MLB season, the San Diego Padres lose their 110th game on September 30. They went on to win their final two games and finish the season with a record of 52-110. These days I am now a Padres fan, and as I write this they are - in last place!

Born on September 25, actress Catharine Zeta-Jones.



It is the heyday of Underground comix, featuring popular characters like Fritz The Cat, The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, and Mr. Natural, most of which I am exposed to for the first time as copies are passed around our dorm.

On September 26, The Brady Bunch premiers on ABC. The show runs for five years.

Sugar, Sugar, probably the best-known song of the bubble gum genre and performed by the basically non-existent group The Archies, begins a four-week run at Number One of the pop charts. I was not a fan (thankfully) but will admit here a guilty fondness for The 1910 Fruitgum Company, another bubble gum band.



The Band release their self-titled second album on September 22. The album contains some of the group's best-known songs, including The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down, Up on Cripple Creek, and Rag Mama Rag. Also released that month is Janis Joplin's first solo album I Got Them Ol' Kosmic Blues Again Mama.

January, 1969

The Winter of 1968-69 saw the City of Rochester receive 79.8" of snow. So much of my memory of growing up about 25 miles east of Rochester, in the Town of Ontario, consists of visions of snow. I don't recall that Winter being any worse of better in terms of snow and cold, but it was actually below the annual average of 92.8", so I guess we got off lucky that year.

In 1969, the Town of Ontario was still a mostly rural village, with a one-block long main street as its' center. Shopping centers had not yet reached us, but were entrenched in the towns closer to the city and the town center was beginning its slow decline. Agriculture, in the form of fruit (apples, peaches, pears, and cherries), was the economic engine. In the late 1800s, the town had some note as an iron ore mining center, but industry was long gone from Ontario, though a few vestiges of that period remained in the form of ore beds, which were now used mainly for swimming.

The people of the town were almost exclusively white, republican-leaning, with a mix of Catholic and Protestant. I went to school with kids named Fioco, Ficarro, Moak, Lennon, Bell, Doyle, Anderson, Hall, Robusto, Smith, Gardner, Reynolds, Hilegeer, Kelly, Cantin, Dippel. There were just a few intrepid Blacks and no Jewish. The migrant farm system, though slowly coming to an end, still existed, and Black and Hispanic migrants from the South still made the trip up North to Ontario in the Summer to pick fruit and live in squalid and substandard housing that was the private disgrace of our region, though no one wished to talk about it. They were referred to back then as migrant "camps."

My parents were fairly strong Catholics and we attended mass every Sunday, like it or not. We lived at 211 North Slocum Road on a 65 acre farm my parents bought in 1945 for $5,000. We weren't farmers, but my father rented out some of the fields to other local farmers - tomatoes, corn, and hay were usually found in the fields behind our house. Our phone number was LA4-8210. I believe that by then we were no longer on a party line, but for much of my youth we were. I used to enjoy listening in on the phone conversations of my neighbors. The picture at the top of this post is of the creek on our backyard, taken on a typical winter's day - except for the sunshine, which was not typical.

Of our family of six, four of us still lived at home. My older sister Liz was in Washington, DC working for The Washington Post. My older brother Tom was living at a dorm in Rochester. A German exchange student, Bruno Schneider, from "a small town halfway between Hamburg and Hanover", also lived with us that Winter and Spring. The previous November, we were all together again for nearly the last time, except for a few future occasions. From the left, below: Bruno, my Mom Charlotte, Brian, my Dad Thomas, Liz, Tom Jr., and me with my eyes closed.

During the month of January, I was probably starving, due to having to lose 5-6 lbs prior to every wrestling match that season. I was a senior and thus one of the leaders on the team, and I had a pretty good year but was in a weight class that was lower than my natural weight. It's a stupid sport, I thought so then and I still think so...I have no idea why I did it.

But I had my first real girlfriend that year and love was keeping me warm and happy. Though I did not completely realize it, this time was the beginning of my last few months of my childhood and young adulthood; my life would change beyond any recognition in 1969.

Marvin Gaye's I Heard It Through the Grapevine was No. 1 on the pop charts for most of January. The White Album by The Beatles was in the middle of an extended stop at No. 1 on the album charts. I was listening to it constantly.

January was also basketball season - home basketball games were wildly popular. This was a small town. But for us the appeal of basketball games was highly magnified by the fact that the Friday night games were often followed by dances featuring one of the myriad of local bands that sounded pretty much like The Rascals. I can with a high degree of certainly predict that In The Midnight Hour was played at least once that month, around 11pm, in our darkened and strobe-lit gym.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average was hovering between 900 and around 950. It did not close above the 1,000 mark until 1972. The national median price of homes that sold that year was just below $25,000. The cost of a gallon of gasoline was just above thirty cents. The U.S. minimum wage was $1.15 per hour; in February that year it rose to a whopping $1.30. A Ford or Chevrolet sedan was available for around $2,500. A Cadillac or Lincoln, priced at more than $6,000, would stretch the average consumer more than their ability to pay.

The film Easy Rider was released on January 1. With it's portrayal of the elusive search for freedom, drugs, sex, and violence, it signaled an end to the optimism of the 1960s and the beginning of a darker period that perhaps lingers with us til this day. It also jump-started the career of Jack Nicholson, who was thus free to attend Laker games and behave rather badly.




Members of Northern Ireland's Royal Ulster Constabulary damage property and assault occupants in the Bogside neighborhood in Derry. In response, residents erect barricades and establish Free Derry. The Troubles will continue in Northern Ireland for another 30 years.

Meher Baba died on January 31. The final issue of The Saturday Evening Post, which traced its roots back to Benjamin Franklin, was published. It later returned in a different format, but was never the same.

On January 12 in Super Bowl III, the underdog New York Jets, led by quarterback "Broadway" Joe Namath, defeated the heavily favored Baltimore Colts 16-7 in the Orange Bowl in Miami.

My personal favorite: on January 20, Richard Milhous Nixon is inaugurated as the nation's 37th President. Said Nixon"

"We see the hope of tomorrow in the youth of today. I know America's youth. I believe in them. We can be proud that they are better educated, more committed, more passionately driven by conscience than any generation in our history." Of course, quite a few of those noble youth would die in the next few years showing their commitment, in Vietnam, and at Kent and Jackson States. In 5 1/2 years both Nixon and VP Agnew would be forever gone from Washington, both in disgrace.

On January 12, the British band Led Zeppelin releases its first album, self titled but later known as Led Zeppelin I.

The legendary rooftop performance by The Beatles takes place on the roof of Apple Records on January 30. It is the last time the band plays in public; John Lennon would leave the group later in the year but the actual break-up would not be announced for more than a year.

Born on January 5: Marilyn Manson
Died on Janury 29: Allen Dulles

My father was 57 - the same age as I am now (now that's scary!). My mother was only 53.

984 Americans were killed in Vietnam in January. For the first time that month, all four parties - the U.S., North and South Vietnam, and the NLF (Viet Kong) - sat down for peace negotiations in Paris.

Some 30,000 copies of the John Lennon-Yoko Ono album Two Virgins are seized by police at the Newark Airport. The then scandalous cover featured a full frontal nude picture of Lennon and Ono, while the back let the whole wide world see their somewhat unattractive bums.

I was the proud owner of a 1963 Ford Galaxie, a 3-speed shift on the column. I paid a grand total of $300 for the car the year before. I earned the money working as a sampler for the USDA the previous summer - taking samples from crates of cherries brought in by local farmers for the inspectors so they could grade them for sale. Years later, I wrote a song about that time.

Americans were watching Rowan and Martin's Laugh-in, the #1 show on the air at the time. Celebrity shows were very popular - among the 20 highest-rated included variety shows from Jim Nabors, Dean Martin, Glenn Campbell, Carol Burnett, and Johnny Cash.

Though I don't remember the exact time-frame, I certainly had submitted my college applications by January. I applied to Albany State, New Paltz State College, Potsdam State, and I think - Fredonia.

The joint French/English supersonic Concorde jetliner undergoes its first test flight in Bristol, England. In the early 1990s, I had the absolutely thrilling opportunity to fly the Concorde three times. I still have some of those lovely souvenirs Air France and British Air gave to passengers.

Perhaps best of all - the horrible year 1968 - later called The Year of the Triphammer- ended.

Some photos in this blog courtesy of The Wayne Central Alumni page - maintained superbly by my bother Brian!