Boom!

I recently read a thought-provoking book called Boom! Voices of the Sixties, Personal Reflections on the '60s and Today, by Tom Brokaw. With such a high-profile author, a former TV network newscaster, it's not surprising that it got a lot of attention. It's well-deserved.

My most active and engaged adult years were spent from that time until now. Obviously I have reason to have an interest in the period. It's one thing to have lived those times from the inside and another to reflect upon them in hindsight. And yet another to have those personal reflections reflected in the thoughts of someone who was up-close-and-personal with prominent figures of the time and present at many significant events. In addition, the book fills in ancillary facts of which we might not have been aware at the time.

Reading history has always been a pleasure to me. Reading revised history has, too. Reading history one has lived provides even more insights as one approaches eldership.

I was going to comment on this book anyway, but in conversation with my daughter and her boyfriend yesterday at our intimate Xmas dinner, they mentioned how interested they were to see the movie Milk. Although a native of San Francisco, Deirdre was a toddler at the time of the Jonestown catastrophe, followed nine days later by the assassinations of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk. She wants to know more. I'm keen to fill in the curious. Boom! is a good start.

I recommend this book, especially to those who were not alive at the time but, along with everyone else older or younger, reap the benefits of social progress made during that era.


* Some day I'll relate a fun anecdote about George Moscone and me. And maybe another tidbit about Dan White. SF is not so big that you don't come into contact with people of note when you live there.

Hippy Days Reunion

Peggy & Aline, April 2008
(We asked a waiter to snap this, told him just head
and shoulders. Twice he got shots like this, then
another waiter did a head-and-shoulders shot
that wasn't as nice. Now when I learn to crop
photos, this will probably be fine.)

Like most of us, I have a busy life. I have at lots of draft blog entries going back to last October. I'll spare you the list of activities and reasons and cut to the chase: I had dinner about two weeks ago with a friend from our Haight-Ashbury days.

Peggy and I lived at 516 Ashbury, one door from the corner of Ashbury and Page, with Haight at other end of our block. This was in the late '60s. I remember that when we lived in that house was when I learned of RFK's assassination, after I'd returned from seeing Battle of Algiers. We had lots of parties in that flat. The back room where the parties were was lit with Christmas lights. We also bought a little 12" B&W TV to watch the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour on Sunday nights. We thought it was the coolest thing going -- and it was revolutionary. My favorite regular was "Share a Little Tea with Goldie" with Leigh French as Goldie O'Keefe.

Peggy left for graduate school in Illinois in 1970, and that's the last time we saw each other, 38 years ago. We both have grown children and published books. We found each other on the Web, natch.

As we chatted it up at Chow in the Castro, it was as though there had been no intervening 38 years. After dinner, we drove around and reoriented ourselves, especially Peggy, who hadn't been in San Francisco in all that time. Peggy's a retired college professor and writer of mystery novels. I'm eager to read her latest, Sweet Man Is Gone.