Where were You In 1968?

Do you know what this is? It is a blanket chest of my younger days. Carter’s favorite class at school so far is “the late great 1968.” She had come home everyday this week and talked to me about what I remember from 1968. Since I was seven years old the answers I have to give her are not fantastic, but she certainly is causing me to rack my brain about where I was when RFK was killed. The one thing I do have is a large collection of music some of which was from 1968 and today Carter got me to give her some of my old albums.
We pulled out all the Beatles albums I have, which included Meet the Beatles, The White Album, Revolution, Sargent Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Let it Be and a few others. Truth be told all these Beatles’ albums first belonged to my Dad and I lifted them from him when I was in high school. My Dad loved the Beatles and even though it used to embarrass me to no end, he could sing along to the radio really well. I have a very strong memory of him singing Penny Lane in his black Corvair while he pulled up to the book return at the New Canaan Public Library and had me get out and drop the book in. I can still hear him harmonizing to the song today.

The power of the music really made a memory.
We are going to the farm on on Sunday so I know that Carter is going to pepper my Dad with questions about what he remembers from 1968. We lived not that far from Woodstock, but since my parents were suburban parents who had just turned thirty it could have been a world away from them. This was an era where “never trust anyone over thirty” was a popular phrase.
We lived in a town with a weekly newspaper that only reported things like new sewer pipes being put in the village center, so if you missed the nightly news you might not know what was going on in the bigger world. In 1968 I was still young enough that when Walter Cronkite opened the news with the number of American who had been killed in Vietnam that day I thought he was actually reporting how many Americans had died in the whole country.
The best source I had for learning what was going on in the world was Time and Life Magazines. Our next door neighbor, Ellen West, was and editor at Time/Life and I always got to look at all her magazines. Her husband, General Charles West was retired from the army, but was still secretly working for the government in that secret agent way. Their only son, Jonathan was enough older than me that he was in the war in Vietnam so when he came home messed up I had an eyeful of what a horror the whole war was. That was as close as 1968 came to me besides the music.