Hey DUers....... ones who were around in the 60s/70s

[HEyHEY]

Were you at any of these?

Selma Marches
Woodstock
Kent State
Monterrey Pop festival
Alta Mont
London in the 60s
Any civil rights marches/demostrations
Dallas when Kennedy was shot
The Beatles on ED sullivan

any thing I may have missed....

tell us about it

[Bertha Venation]

1. I hope Mrs. V. will relate her experience of the Ala. church bombing.

In short: she was twelve years old. At church that morning, she and a few of her friends were discussing the bombing and crying. A deacon walked by and said, "Don't know what y'all are so upset over, it was just four little n*gger girls."

Hopefully she'll tell the whole story.

I have nothing to relate. I wasn't anywhere. I was born in '63 and all I remember about the whole tumultuous 15 or so years is wanting a POW bracelet but my stepfather wouldn't let me have one.

This afternoon I heard "Four Dead In Ohio" on the radio and seethed. Jesus Christ, please, NEVER AGAIN.

[liberalmuse]

12. That song makes me weep...

especially The Dandy Warhols version with 'Blue Monday' playing slowly on the keyboards and Cory Taylor-Taylor droning, 'What if you knew her and found her dead on the ground, how could run when you know?'. I remember looking in a magazine when I was in grade school and seeing the picture of a girl over a young man's (?) body with her head lifted up in an agonizing cry. It was awful. To this day, I can't believe this happened on a college campus in America.

[underseasurveyor]

16. I had one of those bracelets

I got it in the 6th or 7th grade and when I was in the 8th grade ('72') I sent it to the family of the person who's name was on the bracelet. He came home alive :-)

Another thing I remember about those bracelets is they turned your wrist green. For us at the time it was sort of a badge of honor, who had the greenest wrist.

WOW, I had forgotten about those.

[iam]

2. The Beatles on Ed sullivan

I was real young, but I remember that since I lived in the Canal Zone in Panama, we were subject to censorship by the miltary. AFRTS, our media service, did not air the show. It was to be shown on tape since we didn't get anything live. Dang.

[Mikimouse]

3. Knew about all of them, but only actively participated in

the anti-war marches on Boston Common in the late 60s and early 70s.

[WannaJumpMyScooter]

4. Some of them, yes.... but you missed some good ones

Selma... no
Woodstock... yes
Kent State.... at the protest one month later
Monterrey... no
AltaMont.... won't say... might still be wanted
London then.... no
Civil rights/demonstrations.... yes several

Dallas.... no, but I think GWHB 41 was

the Beatles.... no TV yet


How about some 70's things?

72 Republican Convention and Demonstrations.... yes

Flying off the roof of the US Embassy 1975......yes

Rocky Horror Picture Show Movie premiere.... I think so, can't remember

Landing on the moon .... yep, had a TV then

[HEyHEY]

6. ...

72 Republican Convention and Demonstrations.... yes

I thought of that after I posted...flying of the roof?

[Bertha Venation]

7. I remember seeing the Saigon embassy departures '75 on TV.

Damn.

And, like it was yesterday, I remember Nixon's resignation.

Damn.

[HEyHEY]

8. Oh the roof!

Yeah now I get it...jesus you were there..wow

[WannaJumpMyScooter]

11. Yes. Second to last helicopter to leave.

Barely got off. People grabbing at the skids as we lifted. The plane was filled... overfilled.
Landed on the USS Hancock... what a zoo that was, people everywhere. Yesterday, but oh so long ago.

[LandOLincoln]

20. Uh, WannaJump...

are you talking about the big demo in D.C. after Kent State?

'Cause it was the following weekend, not a month later.

Kent State was Monday or Tuesday the 4th of May, 1970. The demo was the following weekend.

And yeah, I was there.

[WannaJumpMyScooter]

22. yeah. I thought it was a month... been a long time

and time went slower then, at least for me

[supernova]

5. Beatles on Sullivan - '65

I remember their appearance on the '65 Ed Sullivan Show. I was three.

I was dancing and watching Paul sing. I remember this because grandma called at exactly that same moment. She lived up the woods alone and was scared someone was lurking around her house.

Daddy went to get her so she could spend the night with us.

[Xandor]

9. I was at Kent State

edited to add a few more details

To this day, it is painful to remember and talk about. One of the girls who was killed was Allison Krause, and her boyfriend Barry lived in my dorm. I vaguely knew Barry, and thus had met Allison a few times. The events unfolded over the course of two-three days. It was, basically, a series of rallies, marches, etc. I attended most of these, and of course, the final rally that ended in the shootings. I can only say that it was unbelievable, outrageous, horrifying... words fail. As the shooting occured there was much confusion, and in the next hour or so we only knew that Allison and others had been shot and taken to the hospital in Ravenna. One of my friends had been near Allison when it happened, and he told me that she was in pretty bad shape. Then, the news trickled in... one was dead... more were dead... more were injured... Allison dead. Oh, god. Within a short while after the shootings a huge throng of (very angry) students and faculty assembled spontaneously in the large greenspace nearby. A student in one of the nearby dorms turned his stereo speakers so they played through the windows... I will never, ever forget the sound of Jefferson Airplane booming out over the crowd: "Look what's happenin' out in the street...Got a revolution, Got to revolution!"

-Xandor

[HEyHEY]

10. Volunteers - good song

Thanks for sharing. That's a crazy story.

[jonnyblitz]

13. I got a chill reading your post.

I can't imagine what that would have been like to experience. :(

[liberalmuse]

14. Thanks for sharing.

That is so heartbreaking. My god, I can't imagine. I was 6 when that happened, and didn't understand the full import of it. I think about it now and can't quite believe it happened.

[bobthedrummer]

15. I marched for open housing in Milwaukee with Father Groppi

even though my family lived on the extreme South Side, 1 block away was Greenfield.

[beawr]

17. When I was eight years old

My Father took me down to Resurrection City in the Summer of 1968. It was a Plywood Pup-Tent city set up on the DC Mall between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. The neighbors thought he was nuts, but hell, we were from Gary, Indiana so we tended not to be frightened of black folk.

Resurrection city was quite big. It was also incredibly muddy. People used the reflecting pool to bathe. Latrines were set up, but they certainly were not the modern porta-potty.

A few months earlier, my Dad had taken me to the roof of his office building right on the MD/DC line, about 3 or 4 miles from the Post King Assassination riots. We could see the fires and the smoke. We could also see the Maryland National Guard completely blocking all traffic between Maryland and the District. My Dad was a Medical Military Officer at the time, so we were able to get around.


My five year old son is obsessed with the Beatles, so we picked up the DVD set with the entire Sullivan Shows with the Beatles. Now he goes around acting like Frank Gorshen imitating Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas. Odd.....

[ironflange]

18. OK, let's see

Vaguely remember Beatles on Ed, I have an older sister.
JFK shot: I was on Romper Room that day, it went to air live. We were pre-empted that day, but the show still went on to keep us kids busy. I can still remember how uptight Miss Ann was that day.

I saw the moon landings. Apollo 13 had us all scared, then euphoric when they got back.

I remember news items about Kent State, also the 1968 Democratic Convention.

I wasn't at any of the concerts, etc, I was too young. Wrong end of the continent, too. I remember the Watergate Hearings on PBS, and saw Nixon resign live.

I remember the fall of Viet Nam, the helicopters at the embassy, sailors pushing the choppers off the flight deck into the sea to make room for more.

I was in Moscow in September of 1972 to watch Team Canada beat the bad ol' Russkies. The trip of a lifetime.

[never cry wolf]

19. Disco demolition at Comiskey park?....n/t

[VOX]

21. Big police riots at Cal State Northridge and UC Santa Barbara...

I was at Northridge -- January '69. (The school was then called San Fernando Valley State College -- you could almost hear the mission bells ring.)

A group of several hundred students had gathered to take over the administration building non-violently. Little did we know that several busloads of LAPD's finest in full riot gear had filled the building from the back entrances.

As we began to enter the building, there was a shattering of glass as one of the plate-glass windows was broken. Only a few yards ahead, I saw dozens of white helmets rushing out of the building, into the crowd. The helmets were swinging black batons, and they carried clear acrylic shields. A mass of humanity turned instantly to flee, but there were too many of us crowded in together to break and run. I saw a teenage girl just a few feet in front of me crumple to the pavement, weeping -- a cop dragged her off, back into the building. The cops formed a line, shields deployed -- and the students squared off, shouting, "The whole world's watching!" and "Hell no, we won't go!" Some students were jumping on the roofs of the cars parked in streets that cut through campus.

The cops charged again, and again they swung their clubs at anything in their path. I saw a tall, husky, long-haired guy go down to the cement. This time, the crowd had "dressed ranks," and was able to run, and I sprinted away, made fleet of foot by the surging adrenaline. It was beyond surreal. *This* was my country? WTF?

Around the same time, some more large-scale police riots occurred up at UC Santa Barbara, at Isla Vista. That was a fairly regular thing up there.

In those years, the youth grasped that *they* has a certain kind of power, and they used it, and it scared the hell out of the reactionaries and the status-quo.

I was glad I was there -- alive, united, involved. There was some world-shaking event happening every day in those years. Many of those events were deeply tragic. But goddamnit, we tried to change things for the better.

Which is why today's RW-control of things is all the more galling. And so, goodbye, 1969, and hello again, 2004.

[GoddessOfGuinness]

23. I was 10 years old when the National Guard

rolled into DC via the highway near my house during the "68 riots. My neighborhood was beginning to change as freaked-out white people moved away, horrified that a black family had moved in. Many of the neighbors were waving at the Guard and cheering the forces that had come to restore law and order by indiscriminately bashing protestors over the head or gassing them to force them to disperse. My husband was among the demonstrators; but I hadn't met him yet.

I remember a news broadcast in which an elderly African American woman tearfully talked about how looters set fire to her home in the U Street corridor, destroying things that had belonged to her parents when they owned the house. Atrocities were committed by protestors as well as police.

I remember a few years later, riding home from a violin lesson with my Dad through College Park, and seeing students carrying signs that said "Kent 7--Turn On Your Lights", not understanding what was going on. And my father cursing "goddam hippies" under his breath.