Spring, 1970 saw yet another crazy time in American history, at the end of an impossibly eventful decade that was full of so much change in every aspect of life, from music and culture, to politics and technology. I remember it well. First, there was the drama of Apollo 13.
It sure seemed as though Lovell, Swigert, and Haise had only a 1% chance of making it back safely; but, incredibly, they did.
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The following week there was the first Earth Day, which to me seemed to have a feeling of desperation about it, because air and water pollution really were bad back then.
Then there were the Kent State killings, 40 years ago today. Hoo boy, did that leave an impression. Two years after Walter Cronkite had declared Johnson’s Vietnam War to not be winnable, Kissinger and Nixon decided that escalating the conflict into Cambodia would be a great idea.
I don’t think I’m supposed to hotlink to BBC “Witness” podcasts, but I’m going to do it anyway for their piece on Kent State. Listen to how many gunshots there were. The Guard opened fire on unarmed students. There’s no other way to describe it.
[audio:http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/worldservice/witness/witness_20100504-1030a.mp3]What galls me is how, in the Sixties, conservatives told student radicals to love America or leave it. Now the conservatives are the ones who are protesting — with some of them armed — because they don’t like the ways things are. I don’t hear anybody telling them to love it or leave it.
Well, of COURSE you have to include THIS!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qs6aaaJBAv0&
What an amazing time. in “Apollo 13,” Ron Howard did a fantastic job of showcasing the incredible ingenuity of the engineers and scientists in Houston who helped the boys get back home. As for Earth Day, I remember standing outside the office at ABRHS and looking at some posters about it on those free-standing bulletin boards. Did we have an assembly of some sort? Pollution really WAS bad. “All in the Family” did a show about the ozone later a bit later on; I remember that, and then they banned spray cans, which have slowly wormed their way back in!