Boom!
Pop Culture Chronicles
Anniversaries
Been There, Celebrated It, And Now It’s Boring
By Mike Olszewski
A new year is upon us and we say goodbye to “the teens” and head into the last year of the second decade. (Keep in mind that there was no year “zero” so 2020 is the final year of decade number two for this century.) We hope your holiday season was memorable, and if there’s one thing boomers like to do is remember.
For the past 10 years, we’ve been commemorating everything that happened in the 1960s. Granted, there was a lot to commemorate from tragedies (the deaths of JFK, MLK, RFK, Malcolm X and so many others), historical events (Apollo 11, The Beatles on “The Ed Sullivan Show”) and entertainment events (the explosion of pop culture on TV, the so-called Summer of Love, the change from AM to FM radio, groundbreaking books like “The Feminine Mystique” and “Catch 22.” The list goes on and on.
Did You Know?
Sometimes it was a comparison of extremes. The 50th anniversary of Woodstock was celebrated in Bethel, New York. A friend of mine, writer/pop historian Martin Grams Jr., attended the anniversary show and said the promoters did a great job saluting that special moment in time. Oh, and the couple on the cover of the Woodstock soundtrack album was even on hand. They met at the festival and have been married since.
Then we have another anniversary just a few months after marking the ill-fated Altamont Raceway show by the Rolling Stones. A free show, lots of people hurt and the exact opposite of Woodstock. But that wasn’t the end of the 60s. We have another anniversary in just a few months. No one can pin down the date when the 60’s era started, because it was an event or series of events rather than January 1, 1960. However many historians agree that the 1960s era came to an end at Kent State University on May 4, 1970. KSU is doing a series of well-planned events throughout the year to mark that anniversary.
One more comment about Woodstock: I had an order form for tickets and I thought it would be great to have it autographed by someone who was there on stage. When I was in radio I did a lot of interviews and Abbie Hoffman came to town plugging one of his books. He was there and before he signed it he said, “You know there was a story that Pete Townshend smacked me in the head with his guitar during The Who’s set. That never happened.”
Later that week, The Who’s CD box set “Maximum R & B” came out and sure enough one of the cuts is Pete clubbing Abbie off the stage. A few years later I met up with Townshend and asked him to sign the Woodstock ticket order form. His eyes bugged out and he yelled, “Abbie Hoffman!” I told him Hoffman denied that happened, Townshend said, “He would!” and autographed the form.
Boomer Trivia: Last issue I asked the name of the landmark Prospect Avenue bookstore that had three floors and was famous for having books stacked everywhere, but the proprietors knew exactly where to find everything. It was Kay’s Books.
This past autumn we visited Ron Adams’ Monster Bash convention and had the good fortune of meeting up with Mark Goddard who played Don West and Marta Kristen who played Judy Robinson on the TV series “Lost in Space.” They told us stories about just how cheap the production values were to the point they couldn’t hide their laughter. You see them cracking up in some of the episodes. The robot was an expensive prop. On the series it was a Class M3 Model B9, and they simply called it the “robot,” but in one episode it was revealed it had another name. It’s a tough one. I’ll have the answer next issue.
