Had an exchange of letters with grandson Drew, a nearly-teen. He had a school assignment to contrast and compare his times with mine. Clickbait if ever I saw one. But it tripped me out. What, indeed, was it like, to be a kid in the 50s. So, thank you Drew, and check out the 1950s when … More Now & Then
My friend Michael Rossman argued that we must have rituals, and that if we’re gonna give up on those offered to us, we should make up our own. Referencing Lorca, the poet of Spain, Michael insisted that there must be a wedding, even within a war. And so there was. Yes there was. And in … More Find Joy
It seemed like a good idea at the time. Is that enough? Judy was pregnant. I was burned out or maybe just bored. Hillary’s Mariposa house was falling into ruin. Nixon had just been reelected. The hippy dropout idea was very current in 1973. Judy and I both had solid, desirable jobs In the city, … More How We Became Country Hippies
In 1976 or so, Jackson Browne wrote about traveling in a tour charter, saying: We’ve got country and western on the bus, R & B We got disco in eight tracks and cassettes in stereo We’ve got rural scenes & magazines We’ve got truckers on CB We’ve got Richard Pryor on the video So, ‘stereo’, … More What a Long Strange Trip
Roger Nelson was my best friend, in school, when I needed a friend the most. His folks were founders and stalwarts of the Winnetka Bible Church which my dad was hired to pastor in 1951. We lived in the parsonage next door to the church; Nelsons lived hardly a block away, and they were my … More Roger’s Gone
(My daughter, who was not quite four years old at the time, asked me recently to talk about the 1968 Chicago convention for her children who are living thru this new awful time now.) On the cab ride in from Midway airport we passed sandbagged machine gun nests on the University of Chicago campus. That … More Chicago, August, 1968
Tom DeVries 