Summer of ’69

As I’ve mentioned before, I was born in 1969.

◆ 1969 was the year that Led Zeppelin released their debut album…

Led Zeppelin I

This album is forty years old now. The members of Led Zeppelin who are still alive, have become old…but this album is still excellent.
If you don’t own a copy, you should buy one.

◆ Also, on 1969 July 20, the first astronaut landed on the moon (I wrote a post about it…click here).

I wasn’t born until November 1969, but I’m sure that this was a momentous event for those that witnessed it.

◆ August 9th was the 64th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, Japan…

but it was also the 40th anniversary of the 1969 August 9 grisly murders of Sharon Tate and others by the notorious “Charles Manson Family” in California.

Charles Manson in custody.

The late sixties changed America in many ways and took away it’s “innocence”.
The Vietnam War, hippies, drugs, Woodstock…and the Charles Manson trial.

I heard that many Americans only began locking their house at night after the murders by the Manson Family. Even the judge in the trial began carrying a gun under his robe after Manson tried to stab him with a pencil in court. (The court officers intercepted him before he reached the judge and they escorted him out of the court room…as they did, Manson yelled to the judge: “In the name of Christian justice, someone should chop off your head!”)

Once Charles Manson showed up in court with an “X” carved into his forehead, and the next day his “Family” had matching “X”‘s in their foreheads. (Years later, Manson carved more into the “X” and turned it into a swastika).

Also, tomorrow, a member of the “Manson Family” who went to prison in 1975 for an assassination attempt on then-US President Richard Nixon will be released from prison.
Her name is Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, and she is the only member of the Manson Family who is still loyal to Charles Manson. And she’s getting out of prison tomorrow (2009 August 16) after serving 34 years of a life-sentence.

◆ Today is the 64th anniversary of VJ Day…

but today’s also the 40th anniversary of the first day of “Woodstock“, the three-day rock / folk music festival in New York that went from 1969 August 15th to 17th.

3-day ticket for Woodstock Festival, 1969 August 15-17

A three-day outdoor concert in the mud and rain with little food and water…I don’t think it sounds enjoyable. Maybe I’m just not the right generation to understand the appeal of Woodstock.

Forty years ago this summer America went through alot of changes.

The Original Moon Walk

Today is the 40th anniversary of the first and only* manned landing on the moon. *(I’ve been corrected).

On Sunday, 1969 July 20, the world watched on live television as the Apollo 11 landed on the moon and Neil Armstrong exited the craft and walked on the surface of the moon and planted the American flag and said his famous line:

That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.

U.S. astronaut Neil Armstrong (RIP August 5, 1930 – August 25, 2012)

I was born in 1969, a few months after this occurred…so I have no experience seeing it.
How about you? Did you see man land on the moon in July 1969?

***

I didn’t see the Apollo 11 land on the moon…but I grew up in Florida and I remember the first reusable Space Shuttle. It was the “Space Shuttle Columbia” and it flew it’s first mission in 1981.

Since I grew up in Florida, which is where NASA launches the Space Shuttles from, my high school used to have all of the students and teachers go outside whenever a Space Shuttle was scheduled to be launched because we could watch it in the sky from the schoolyard.

Since we were teenagers, most of us were bored of watching every single Space Shuttle launch. So on Tuesday, 1986 January 28, I remember being outside to watch another launch…this time of the Space Shuttle Challenger (which had the first female astronaut and Japanese-American astronaut on board).

It was just another launch to us teenagers…until it exploded in midair!

We all ran inside and turned on the television news.
All seven of the crew perished in that tragedy.

RIP.

(Also, the entire crew of the Space Shuttle Columbia (the original Space Shuttle) died when the craft disintegrated on re-entry in 2003).