It was after eight, a crisp evening, and Rick was still missing.
Damn him . A total jerk.
I kicked at the ground, scuffing my shoes on the pavement. If he weren’t so cute...
“Hey, Eleanor, would you turn up your radio?” From my left, a male voice, not too deep, with a funny accent I’ve never heard before. I turned; a strange dude sat next to me, tapping his right foot, left foot on the wall, knee tucked under his chin.
As Stoney, Jeff, and I prowled the strip, we ran into Wild Man Fischer, clenching a tape recorder, one of those portable Juliettes, blasting a song from his new album An Evening with Wild Man Fischer.
He shoved it under my nose and shouted, “Hear my song?”
A pest, but harmless--probably a rich pest. He fit his name; he was manic, always wound up tight, fast like a fly or hummingbird. He even looked manic: eyes practically popping out of his head, his hair, black and frizzy, stuck out at all angles. He wore a loud yellow shirt with blobs of red, orange, and green, and flip flops, though, sometimes, only one, even when it was cold. Plus, he was constantly running around the strip with that tape recorder.
I’ve heard that he’d spent some time in a mental hospital.
“I’ll play it again,” he said, pushing the rewind button.
“That’s okay.” We inched away.
I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, but he had a way of getting under your skin. And then he’d be off to the next group of freaks. They were all out tonight, unusual for a week night: Julius Caesar, drag queens, streetwalkers–a circus. We verbally sparred with Caesar, an old dude, his Roman soldier costume stolen from 20th Century Fox. He harassed tourists, the middle-aged straights who arrived on the strip decked out in Hawaiian shirts, Bermuda shorts, straw hats, and sunglasses, big clunky cameras around their necks, loud voices: “Hey, Herman, look at the dirty hippies.” Everyone was a dirty hippie because the straights couldn’t distinguish between groups that populate the strip.
Caesar yelled out his standard slogans: “LBJ is a necrophiliac; he digs dead dudes” and “All the way with LBJ; Lady Bird Johnson is a nymphomaniac.”
What a freak; his slogans angered many of the gawkers, who turned red.
Some even yelled back, “America: Love it or Leave it.”
Caesar paid no attention to the counter-yellers--like he was in a trance.
When Eleanor and I arrived at Rudy’s, Pam was already there with her new old man, a tall, about 6'5", Indian dude, like from India, with wide shoulders and huge brown muscles.
“This is Draino,” Pam, barely five-foot, said, tucked under his arm.
Regional pacts...can prevent a local conflict from escalating into world war. The regional pact thus becomes a buffer separating the distant great powers from immediate threat–and the danger of a Social conflict escalating into world war is thereby reduced. A regional pact would provide a buffer between the United States and the Soviet Union in future flare-ups.
Photo from alternet.org _____________________________________________________________________
A year ago today (1967), “The October 17th Movement” was created by radical New York women dissatisfied with the increasing conservatism of the National Organization for Women (NOW). Their manifesto includes,
Radical feminism recognizes the oppression of women as a fundamental political oppression wherein women are categorized as an inferior class based upon their sex. It is the aim of radical feminism to organize politically to destroy this sex class system.
As radical feminists we recognize that we are engaged in a power struggle with men, and that the agent of our suppression is man insofar as he identifies with and carries out the supremacy privileges of the male role. For while we realize that the liberation of women will ultimately mean the liberation of men from their destructive role as oppressor, we have no illusion that men will welcome this liberation without a struggle....
The oppression of women is manifested in particular institutions, constituted and maintained to keep women in their place. Among these are the institutions of marriage, motherhood, love and sexual intercourse (the family unit is incorporated by the above).
Source for Manifesto ______________________________________________________________________ *
The last recording session for The Beatles White Album wraps up, after John Lennon records the 32nd and final song, “Julia,” He tapes it alone, twice singing to his acoustic guitar accompaniment, this song the only one released by The Beatles on which John performs alone.
* Dr. Arnulfo Arias Madrid, elected president for the third time and twice ousted by the Panamanian military, is again ousted (for the third time) as president by the National Guard after only 10 days in office.
A military junta government is established, and the commander of the National Guard, Brig. Gen. Omar Torrijos, emerges as the principal power in Panamanian political life.
Torrijos' regime is harsh and corrupt, and will have to confront the mistrust of the people and guerrillas backing the populist Arnulfo Arias. However, he is a charismatic leader whose populist domestic programs and nationalist foreign policy appeals to the rural and urban constituencies largely ignored by the oligarchy.
Apollo 7 was a confidence-builder. After the January 1967 Apollo launch pad fire, the Apollo command module had been extensively redesigned. Schirra, who would be the only astronaut to fly Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions, commanded this Earth-orbital shakedown of the command and service modules. Since it was not carrying a lunar module, Apollo 7 could be launched with the Saturn IB booster rather than the much larger and more powerful Saturn V. Schirra wanted to give Apollo 7 the callsign "Phoenix" (the mythical bird rising from its own ashes) in memory of the loss of the Apollo 1 crew, but NASA management was against the idea.
The Apollo hardware and all mission operations worked without any significant problems, and the Service Propulsion System (SPS), the all-important engine that would place Apollo in and out of lunar orbit, made eight nearly perfect firings.
Even though Apollo's larger cabin was more comfortable than Gemini's, eleven days in orbit took its toll on the astronauts. The food was bad, and Schirra developed a cold. As a result, he became irritable with requests from Mission Control and all three began "talking back" to the Capcom. An early example was this exchange after Mission Control requested that a TV camera be turned on in the capsule:
SCHIRRA: You've added two burns to this flight schedule, and you've added a urine water dump; and we have a new vehicle up here, and I can tell you this point TV will be delayed without any further discussion until after the rendezvous.
CAPCOM: Roger. Copy.
SCHIRRA: Roger.
CAPCOM: Apollo 7 This is CAP COM number 1.
SCHIRRA: Roger.
CAPCOM: All we've agreed to do on this is flip it.
SCHIRRA: ... with two commanders, Apollo 7.
CAPCOM: All we have agreed to on this particular pass is to flip the switch on. No other activity is associated with TV; I think we are still obligated to do that.
SCHIRRA: We do not have the equipment out; we have not had an opportunity to follow setting; we have not eaten at this point. At this point, I have a cold. I refuse to foul up our time lines this way. ("Apollo 7 Air-to-Ground Voice Transcript," pp.117-118) Warning: HUGE download.
Exchanges such as this would lead to the crew members being passed over for future missions. ("Encyclopedia Astronautica") But the mission successfully proved the space-worthiness of the basic Apollo vehicle.
Goals for the mission included the first live television broadcast from an American spacecraft (Gordon Cooper had broadcast slow scan television pictures from Faith 7 in 1963) and testing the lunar module docking maneuver.
First orbit: perigee 231 km, apogee 297 km, period 89.78 min, inclination 31.63 deg., weight: CSM 14,781 kg.
The splashdown point was 27 deg 32 min N, 64 deg 04 min W, 200 nautical miles (370 km) SSW of Bermuda and 13 km (8 mi) north of the recovery ship USS Essex.
For nearly 30 years the Apollo 7 module was on loan (renewable every two years) to the National Museum of Science and Technology of Canada, in Ottawa, along with the space suit worn by Wally Schirra. In November 2003 the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. requested them back for display at their new annex at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center. Currently, the Apollo 7 CM is on loan to the Frontiers of Flight Museum located next to Love Field in Dallas, Texas.
Apollo 7 was the only manned Apollo launch to take place from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station's Launch Complex 34, as all subsequent Apollo (including Apollo-Soyuz) and Skylab missions were launched from Launch Complex 39 at the nearby Kennedy Space Center.
As of 2008, Cunningham is the only surviving member of the crew. Eisele died in 1987 and Schirra in 2007.
Mission insignia
The insignia for the flight showed a command and service module with its SPS engine firing, the trail from that fire encircling a globe and extending past the edges of the patch symbolizing the Earth-orbital nature of the mission. The Roman numeral VII appears in the South Pacific Ocean and the crew's names appear on a wide black arc at the bottom.
Capsule location
The Apollo 7 Command Module is on display at the Frontiers of Flight Museum, Dallas, Texas
Depiction in fiction
Portions of the Apollo 7 mission are dramatized in the miniseries From the Earth to the Moon episode entitled "We Have Cleared the Tower."
The Rev. Philip Berrigan pouring blood on draft records at Selective Service headquarters to protest the "pitiful waste of American and Vietnamese blood" in Southeast Asia. (AP/Wide World Photos.) __________________________________________________________________
All nine members of The Catonsville Nine, a group of Catholic activists against the Vietnam War, were found guilty today of storming a Baltimore (Maryland) suburb Selective Service Office and burning over 10,000 files.
During the trial, which started on October 5,
Philip Berrigan testified that his moral opposition to the Vietnam War led him to participate in the Catonsville incident:
"We have been accused of arrogance, but what of the fantastic arrogance of our leaders? What of their crimes against the people, the poor and the powerless? Still, no court will try them, no jail will receive them. They live in righteousness. They will die in honor. For them we have one message, for those in whose manicured hands the power of the land lies. We say to them: lead us. Lead us in justice and there will be no need to break the law."
After less than two hours of deliberation, the jury returned a verdict of guilty against the nine defendants. Philip Berrigan and another defendant were sentenced to 3½ years in prison, Daniel Berrigan and two other defendants were sentenced to three years in prison, and the remaining four defendants received two-year sentences.
On May 17, 1968, nine people walked into a Selective Service Office, took hundreds of draft files from a cabinet, took them outside, doused them with homemade napalm and burned them in the name of peace.
* Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet is released today by Paramount Pictures. A drama/romance, this film stars Leonard Whiting, Olivia Hussey, John McEnery, Milo O'Shea, Robert Stephens, and Michael York. More
On October 6, 1967 dozens of mourners gathered in the panhandle of Golden Gate Park in San Francisco to mark the death of Hippie, an imaginary character killed off by overexposure and rampant commercialism. A broadside distributed at the event stated, "H/Ashbury was portioned to us by Media-Police and the tourists came to the Zoo to see the captive animals and we growled fiercely behind the bars we accepted and now we are no longer hippies and never were." More
and
Rev. Troy Perry held the first worship service today of the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches (UFMCC), a congregation made up of homosexuals. Twelve worshipers gathered in his home in Huntington Park, California, at 1:30 p.m. A confrontation last summer between the L.A.P.D. and some men at The Patch, a homosexual dance bar in Wilmington, across the river from Long Beach and south of Los Angeles, prompted Rev. Perry to start his ministry.
* Today’s issue of Science advertises a new type of computer:
“The new Hewlett-Packard 9100A personal computer is ready, willing, and able...to relieve you of waiting to get on the big computer.” The $4,900 device, designed to sit on a desk top, weighs 40 pounds and is equipped with magnetic cards. This machine does scientific calculations.
The Hewlett-Packard 9100A is an early computer/calculator, first appearing in 1968. HP called it a desktop calculator because, as Bill Hewlett said, "If we had called it a computer, it would have been rejected by our customers' computer gurus because it didn't look like an IBM. We therefore decided to call it a calculator, and all such nonsense disappeared." An engineering triumph at the time, the logic circuit was produced without any integrated circuits, the assembly of the CPU having been entirely executed in discrete components. With CRT readout, magnetic card storage, and printer, the price was around $5000.
The 9100A was the first scientific calculator by the modern definition (i.e. trig, log/ln, and exponential functions), and was the beginning of Hewlett-Packard's long history of using reverse Polish notation entry on their calculators.
While the media spotlight shone on Europe and the US, hundreds of protesters were massacred on the streets of Mexico. Why is it still the forgotten story of '68?
The great spectacle of 1968, and capitalism's closest shave, came in Paris. The victory, in the end, belonged to Prague. The severity of 1968 in Rome and Berlin begat years of armed insurrection, while in Chicago, flower power grew up and got serious about war in Vietnam. But the bloodbath of 1968, the detonation of a revolutionary battle that rages still, came in a place that many accounts of that year reduce, inexplicably, to a footnote: Mexico.
* Night of the Living Dead (1968), directed by George Romero, is an independent black-and-white horror film. Early titles were: Monster Flick (draft script) and Night of Anubis and Night of the Flesh Eaters (production). Ben (Duane Jones) and Barbra (Judith O'Dea) are the protagonists of a story about the mysterious reanimation of the recently dead, and their efforts, along with five other people, to survive the night while trapped in a rural Pennsylvania farmhouse.
George Romero produced the film on a $114,000 budget, and after a decade of cinematic re-releases, it grossed some $12 million domestically and $30 million internationally. On its release in 1968, Night of the Living Dead was strongly criticized for its explicit content. In 1999, the Library of Congress registered it to the National Film Registry as a film deemed "historically, culturally or aesthetically important."
Night of the Living Dead had a great impact upon the culture of the Vietnam-era United States, because it is laden with critiques of late-1960s U.S. society; an historian described it as "subversive on many levels". Although it is not the first zombie film, Night of the Living Dead is progenitor of the contemporary "zombie apocalypse" sub-genre of horror film, and it influenced the modern pop-culture zombie archetype. Night of the Living Dead (1968), is the first of five Dead films directed by George Romero, and twice has been remade, as Night of the Living Dead (1990 film), directed by Tom Savini, and as Night of the Living Dead 3D (2006).
Selected pieces from the most recent version of the memoir.
2. Illustrations and Relevant Embedded Videos
I have very few photographs from that time in my life, so the illustrations are symbolic and artistic representations, which should not be interpreted literally. In 2005, when I wrote the first draft, embedding video clips was in its infancy, and so was my ability to embed them. But this is 2008, and I'm catching up with the YouTube revolution!
3. Out Takes
Text that appeared in various drafts but (for various reasons) was cut. The most important out take appears here--proof positive that I have been living on borrowed time for 39+ years.
In the first draft, I had added "news clips" to the text. During revision, I deleted most of them, but, now, have decided that they belong on this site.
5. New Text
I added this category--just in case something important is not covered in 1, 2, 3, or 4.
...The world as it appears to me is my creation, and for it I must assume responsibility. Given, as the bricks out of which I can build a universe, is a chaotic kaleidoscope of colors, shapes, sounds, moods, hopes, fears, joys, pains, ideas, movements...Out of this anarchy, I organize a world for myself. I subdue the disordered shapelessness into a world by choosing one out of an infinity of possible structures.