It was fifty years ago and I was sixteen years old. I was coming of age. It was a year full of hope and also a year of dichotomies. It was an amazing time to be sixteen and an amazingly weird time to be sixteen. I have written about before in November 2008: Was it the Weirdest of Times?
It was a time where some of my generation, me included, truly believed we could change the world. I attribute that to the post World War II prosperity in the United States. University education was available and encouraged for all. It was more affordable compared to these days. The labor market supply and demand was such that we were essentially guaranteed jobs, good jobs, upon graduation. We were the generation raised on TV. Everything and anything could be solved and rectified in an hour. We thought we were different. We believed we were different. We believed we could and would change the world. We had the Summer of Love. We had Hell No, we won’t Go. We had the Age of Aquarius. We had Woodstock, the moon landing, the Vietnam War, the Generation Gap, and women, blacks, Indians, and Latinos advocating for equal rights in our land of the free. It was a time of some significant changes in morals and mores for a sixteen year old to deal with on top of all the normal coming of age things sixteen years have to deal with.
1969 was special because of the moon landing and Woodstock. It was special given my age. It was special in how my ideas, thoughts, and vision changed and changed marked by these two important and unrelated events.
When John F. Kennedy laid down the challenge to put a man on the moon before the end of the decade, I became fascinated with the possibilities. I wanted to be part of it. I wanted to become an astronaut. I watched every launch of the Mercury and Gemini programs. I had written Kennedy as a nine-year-old asking for information on the Space Program. I got a manila envelope from NASA full of booklets and pamphlets on the plan to get to the moon, biographies of the astronauts, and more. I read it all, several times. In watching the launches, I would take notes about any delays, the actual time of the launch, and how the mission went. I never scored a baseball game but that was what I was doing with the space program.
Somehow, I started losing interest midway through the Gemini program when the missions were longer then a TV show. I was dismayed by the Apollo 1 capsule fire that took the lives of astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chafee. Maybe I was just getting older and my interests were changing. I believe that the social turmoil of the era also competed for my attention. By the time of the Apollo 11 Mission, I was missing the childhood exuberance I had for the space program and wondering how and why I lost it.
Oddly, a few weeks later, Woodstock became all the rage. It came out of nowhere and captured as much or more news, from my perspective at that time, than the moon landing. And, I knew nothing about it just a week earlier. It went from being a big rock concert to becoming something much bigger. It seemed liked everyone around my age (actually a few years older), were trying to get there to be a part history, to be a part of what we thought or were being led to believe, was a turning point in the history of mankind. I am laughing, now, as I type this fifty years later, but did it seem real back then. I wrote about it in August 2004 and I am pretty much in agreement with what I wrote then. Woodstock was not the beginning of a millennial change, it was the beginning of the end that era’s peace and love movement.
The moon landing and Woodstock… oh, the times they were a changing and changing still.
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