Temperatures on Delmarva will retreat to the 60’s today and remain there for the next 5 days or more.
That’s bearable, of course, but not as warm as we would like.
It begs the questions: Would you go back to living in the 60’s if you could?
The 1960’s decade in America began with the election of the youngest president in our history at that time, John F. Kennedy. He gave hope to a younger generation of Americans that their concerns would be addressed.
Less than three years into the decade President Kennedy was gunned down in Dallas, just before the Fab Four, the Beatles, came to America and excited a generation of young people.
After Kennedy’s death, President Lyndon Johnson served during a turbulent period of protest during the Vietnam War. The pressure of the war lead him to decline running for re-election in 1968.
College students protesting the Vietnam War were gunned down by the National Guard at Kent State University, prompting the release of “Ohio” by Crosby, Stills and Nash.
That recording led to years of other musicians that protested the war after “Four Dead in Ohio”.
Yet, much of the music during the 1960’s was upbeat, happy, and classic.
Motown in Detroit brought us the Supremes, the Temptations, the Four Tops, Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder, and Otis Redding, among others.
So, would you go back to the 60’s or not?
In the late 60’s musical acts became more psychedelic. Groups like the Jefferson Airplane, Steppenwolf, and others opened up a whole new take on our lives.
Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison and the Doors became famous and succumbed to early deaths because of their lifestyles.
Then, late in the 1960’s, popular cultural figures were gunned downed during this decade of violence.
Martin Luther King was killed in Memphis on April 4, 1968. Presidential candidate Robert Kennedy was shot in Los Angeles on June 5, 1968.
It was, indeed, a turbulent time. The music was great, the politics were questionable, and the violence was outrageous.
Late in the decade nearly one half a million young people descended upon Woodstock in upstate New York to participate in a music festival that by all accounts was peaceful and defined a generation.
On July 20, 1969 American astronaut Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, captivating a nation, and demonstrating the abilities of American ingenuity.
In the sports world both the New York Jets and the New York Mets pulled off a couple of the greatest upsets in the NFL and MLB. People in Baltimore remember those moments well.
The most controversial movie of the decade, “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” featured the daughter of a prominent White family bringing her Black fiance home for dinner. You might be able to imagine how that was received nearly 60 years ago.
The other blockbuster of the late 1960’s featured the release of “Planet of the Apes” with Charleston Heston. On a trivial note, Heston’s love interest in the movie was played by Berlin, MD native Linda Harrison.
Some notable classic novels that were released in the 1960’s became instant classics. Among them were “To Kill a Mockingbird”, Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse Five”, “Catch-22”, and Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood”.
Would you go back?