52 years ago.....

August 8 1974

52 years ago right about now, sitting in an apartment furnished by S&H Green Stamps in Knollwood Acres (Storrs) with my first serious sweetie and a friend and his wife (him now dead, her a long lost Trumper), ready with a couple bottles of André swill that we didn’t yet know was swill, waiting to pop the first cork ar the moment when RMN actually announced that he was going to resign. He did and we popped and toasted and laughed and felt very adult and then, children again, wondered what would happen to us next.

Up at Tanglewood, they interrupted a new-music concert so the audience could could watch the History on a 21 inch television set up zbove the stage. Reading UNDER THE VOLCANO again and again the whole summer. Neil Young’s ON THE BEACH spinning on the Garrard all week, in preparation for the event we knew was coming. Cigarettes everywhere, fingers stained from nicotine. Nobody left on campus to pick you up hitchhiking, so you waited and waited and often ended up walking. A newscaster in Florida had recently blown her brains out on the evening news. The longest summer to date. Stopped time. August 8, 1974.