Blame it on New Jersey
Saturday night I drove Irv's car through the Lincoln tunnel into the wilds of New Jersey. An hour later I arrived at a garden apartment in East Orange. Garden apartments were unfamiliar to me. They are buildings, usually two or three stories tall, built in an U-shape around a central courtyard, usually grass. Each leg of the U has its own entrance. She lived on the second floor of the left leg of this particular garden apartment building.
The date was good. Good enough for me to return to New Jersey the next week. Her name was Bonnie. She came from Chicago and ended up in New Jersey to attend grad school in audiology. When I met her, she was practicing and part-time teaching audiology. She worked with an Ear Nose and Throat doctor whose practice included many kids with hearing problems. Her kind and patient personality put the kids at ease and she did a wonderful job fitting the kids with hearing aids.
Meanwhile back in my life
I graduated from boarding school in 1963. I went from there to Northeastern University in Boston. This was the time of Camelot. John Kennedy was in office and Vietnam was just a few military advisors in Indochina. That fall Kennedy was shot and the world started to change. I was working as the morning disk jockey on WNEU, Northeastern's campus radio station. I spent three days and nights reading stories from the United Press wire to our campus audience.
I think that Kennedy's death signaled the beginning of what we now think of as the 60's. Actually the sixties got into full swing starting about 1969 and going on through the late 70's. JFK's vice president, Lyndon Johnson took office as president and things started to change. Johnson, before becoming vice president, was a very liberal senator from Texas. He was the Democrat's Democrat. He was Capitol Hill's senior wheeler and dealer. As president, he did more harm and more good at the same time as any president before or since.
Between 1964 and 1970, Johnson turned Viet Nam into a full-scale war. Boys between 18 and 30 were vacuumed into the Viet Nam killing machine. By the time it was over, more than 50,000 American boys died fighting a war that we lost. During those years, feelings ran high. Many, especially the hippies and many other young people opposed the war. I was one of them. We couldn't see why we were fighting to defend a people who didn't appear to want defending. The country was polarized. The civil rights movement was gaining steam and the streets of Los Angeles and Newark burned with the rage of inner city blacks tired of getting less than the increasingly affluent white middle class. "Injustice" became one of the most overused words in the vocabulary of America's youth.
Journey was part of the human potential movement. This movement born of psychoanalysis, drugs, post-adolescent hormones, and the confusion caused by the world changing and seeming to turn upside-down. It may be hard to understand now, but in 1970 everything seemed different. Our parents grew up during the Great Depression and bore the scars of seeing their world turned cold and empty. They strove for success as a way to guarantee they and their children: us, would never suffer that pain again. We were born just after World War Two. Our world was filled with promise. Jobs were plentiful, education available. We could not only afford to go to college, we could afford to drop out.
Clearly our parents didn't understand us. How could they? We seemed to be tossing everything they slaved for into the garbage. Instead of completing our education and entering the world of corporate security, we quit, joined protest marches, slept on the floor of dirty, city buildings, and had wild sex.
At least that's what our parents thought. The reality for most of us wasn't quite that extreme or romantic. That was a problem too. People like me worked for a living. I had a good job and enough money. I hated the war and had the chance to debate it with people like Walter Cronkite. I wasn't powerless and oppressed. Neither were others I knew. That bothered us on a deep level - deeper than we could ever realize at the time. After all, in times of great change, those who aren't part of the movement wonder why they got left out.