Book Introduction [Excerpts]
Book Introduction [Excerpts]
This is a true story about coming of age in America in the ’60s, about the loss of innocence and earnestness and a belief that the better angels of our nature would help us shape a “newer world” in the words of Robert F. Kennedy.
The story takes place in Bloomington, Indiana, my [Greg’s] hometown, but it could have happened, and with slight variations surely did, anyplace in America where the baby boom generation was finding its way.
We were all buffeted by the same centrifugal forces of societal change. We were subject to the same avalanche of seismic events. We were listening to the same music.
It was, as Simon and Garfunkel sang without irony, “A time of innocence.” An innocence so pure—an afterglow of the elysian Eisenhower ’50s—as to be untranslatable to later generations growing up too fast in more brutish times.
The central events of this story unfold from the summer of 1967 to the summer of 1968, the fulcrum of the ’60s, when America swung from the Summer of Love to an early winter of sorrow and crushed hopes.
This is not the story of those in the spotlit vanguard who tripped out on acid in Haight-Ashbury, marched on the Pentagon, occupied university buildings, sat in the path of Dow Chemical recruiters, were bloodied in the streets of Chicago and the jungles of Vietnam—the iconic images that came to define “The Sixties” as we know it.
This is about the rest of us who never went to the barricades, who watched from the sidelines. We were no less transformed than our brothers and sisters in the arena, but we were disguised to our elders, and perhaps to ourselves, as agents of the status quo.
You can find us in yearbook photos of the Class of ’68, suspended in time. Smiling, untroubled faces of girls with flip hair styles and close-cropped boys in coats and ties and not a whisker of facial hair. You see no hint of the turmoil unfolding outside the frames of these still-life portraits.
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He broke up the military rows of desks in his classroom and arranged them in egalitarian semi-circles. Every day students arrived to a provocative new quote on the blackboard meant to unsettle and inspire. He gave extra credit for seeing movies like The Graduate and Dr. Zhivago. While overseeing The Optimist, the student newspaper, Chuck opened the pages to politics, debate over Vietnam, arts reviews, radical essays, short stories and haiku. He was an unabashed romantic who often began his florid, highly personal yearbook inscriptions with quoted lines of poetry and song lyrics.
“What a time it was...a time of innocence...a time of confidences,” he prefaced one note.
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Students were entranced by Chuck, thrilled by his illicit intellect and challenging of norms, flattered that he spoke to them, almost conspiratorially, as equals. “We were in on the ruse,” said one. “He had us at hello.” But there was unease, too.
To the daughter of an Indiana University professor, “He was like a changeling, not quite adolescent and not quite adult. It was almost like he was a new breed of person. He clearly was searching for meaning, even more than we were, which made him a strange person to know as an adolescent. It’s like he wasn’t jelled. I think that’s what made him so attractive to us. We could see the struggle and the search for meaning. We understood the pain.”
Seasons change with the scenery
Weaving time in a tapestry
Won’t you stop and remember me
At any convenient time?
“The world has changed so incredibly since 1966, as has my life,” Chuck wrote. “One of the many differences on my consciousness has been knowing you. Too many thoughts come to mind, some of which border on the trite level of prose. Next week I will rejoice at our escape and then regret leaving a small circle of friends. But as Grace Slick advises, ‘You’ll be inside of my mind’ on future days of splendour. Can you imagine us years from today? [signed] Chuck Walls.
9/21/17