• I was in Boston, Cambridge, specifically, having accompanied a high school friend in June of 1969 there, because his girlfriend was attending Harvard summer school.  My life plans were very short-sighted that summer.  I had attended Florida State University, majoring in English Literature, minoring in Advertising, for four years, but had not graduated on time, due to a bout with mononucleosis my junior year, which caused me to drop out for a semester, and put me behind.  It was a rough time. If you didn’t graduate in four years, or have a graduate school deferment if you had, you were immediately classified 1A in the draft.  This, of course, was only months before institution of the draft lottery, which assigned males a number, by which you were either drafted, or set free.  My lot was cast. Like clockwork, on or about June 10th, I received my 1A classification, along with a note telling me I had to report for an induction physical on such and such a date.  My friend, our high school valedictorian, had graduated Summa Cum Whatever, from Washington and Lee, but by an extraordinarily strong ethic, and to the dismay of his girlfriend, had refused to apply for an easy graduate school deferment, because, he articulated, so many did not have that option, and were dying in the rice paddies of Viet Nam.  I must admit, I had no such motivation, rather no motivation at all.  He said he was going to enlist as a medic, rather than be drafted as a grunt, and since the army seemed to actually honor such commitments, I followed.  We broke into his old man’s liquor cabinet, had a few shots of good Scotch, and went down to enlist.  We took a delayed entry, meaning we didn’t have to report until September, and that was that.

We were shortly put on a bus for Jacksonville for our induction physical.  It was discovered that I had a slight heart murmur, but the physician said it wasn’t significant, and I passed.  I now have had open-heart surgery to repair the offending valves, and have a pace-maker, as a result of that murmur, but who’s counting.  Outside the facility, while waiting for the bus to take us back to Tallahassee, we ran into another high school classmate, who had, quite unexpectedly, been denied service, because of the discovery of some skin cancer behind his ear.  Whatever.

Our reporting date was September 17, and my friend announced he was going to Boston to spend the summer with his girlfriend.  I signed on.  We hitch-hiked through Georgia, North and South Carolina, and Virginia, then took a bus from there.  After an interesting night in the New York Port Authority Bus Terminal, we caught a bus through to Boston.

The girlfriend was sub-letting an apartment in the Peabody Towers apartments in Cambridge, a short walk from the Charles river and Harvard Square. The actually renters were picking grapes in the northwest.  It was 1969.  I was basically an uninvited co-conspirator, and slept on the couch, but it was fine.  We did some odd jobs around Cambridge, and did some busking in Harvard Square. Somebody dropped a small wad of opium in the guitar case along with some change one night.  Across the square was the Orson Wells Cinema, that showed avant-garde films, and next door to that was a store-front where you could go in and play in a giant sand box.  A guy came by one night offering rides to Canada in an old school bus for $20.  We didn’t go, and instead found employment in a factory in South Boston that coated fabric with rubber for women’s shoe linings.  Seriously.  We took the MBTA to southy, then walked several blocks, past the Gillette factory, to our nondescript factory building.  I operated a machine that was about fifteen feet long.  It ran a large bolt of cloth on rollers from front to back, over dryers, and my job was to slop liquid rubber on at a blade, the rubber then smoothed out and dried as it ran to the other end, where it was rolled again, collected, and cut into designated lengths for shipment to shoe manufacturers.  Hot, nasty work.  We got the job because we told the shop manager, a brusque, hard-ass Italian with a shirt always unbuttoned to the navel, we were Harvard students. I guess he had a soft spot for Harvard guys.  My most distinct memory is of the guy who worked in the floor below, the basement, turning powdered rubber into liquid, which was then sent up to us in buckets.  He was an Albanian, at least 60 then, always covered in a white rubbery powder when he emerged at intervals to see how it was going above.  I can only imagine what diseases he contracted.

The point is, it was the time of the moon landing, July 20, 1969.  We went to a Moon Landing Party, at an apartment somewhere in Cambridge, an apartment, it turned out, where the Boston Strangler had struck not long before.  Draw your own analogies and conclusions.  The place was filled, and there were at least three TVs going, and a small group in the kitchen, assembling moon lander modules in cardboard, and another stalwart assembly on the roof, looking skyward, as if they could see the whole thing unfold. Maybe they could.  I saw only blank sky.  It was a remarkable night, and we all knew it.  I was transfixed by the TV account of the proceedings.  They kept showing a crawler that said, Live from the surface of the moon.  That was hard to fully comprehend.  I think that’s why the group was outside on the roof looking up.  Somehow looking at it made it all real. It was 1969.  Please read Norman Mailer’s account of that first moon walk.  It’s all based on transcripts, but rendered as perhaps only a fine novelist could say it.  An extraordinary event in an extraordinary summer, and if you were alive and paying attention, part of who you are. There were several more interesting and significant events to come that summer, 50 years ago, which we will address in posts to follow, but that’s where I was when those crazy test pilots landed.  Today, 50 years ago. Where were you?