Looking Back on 1968

After working a little more than my full shift at my workplace, I came home and naturally sat down to relax and watch one of my favorite TV channels: C-Span.  It was showing a recap of the tumultuous year of 1968 when assassinations, war, the election, and all the protests were going on.  I was there in the middle of it all...no, I wasn't in any of the news stories, I was just an eleven year old kid, going on twelve, and trying to get through my relatively insignificant little life...

The first half of 1968 had me in the sixth grade, a "senior" at my Nova Elementary School in Davie.  The second half I was a lowly seventh grader across the field at Nova High.  Now here's the kicker: when we were supposedly younger and less mature, we didn't lord our seniority over the lower grades...but in Nova High, the upperclassman were extremely hierarchical about their position and imagined superiority.  Doubtless this "reverse-maturity" had a great deal to do with adolescence and the need in some primitive, mammalian-brain-dominated classmates to establish some kind of pecking order.  Nevertheless, it was disconcerting for me in August of that year to meet up with kids just a class ahead of me whom I knew back in Nova Elementary and who suddenly didn't recognize me...or pretended not do...

If there was one theme that dominated my life back in 1968 and gave the year a personal stamp, it was my peculiar hobby of AM radio DX-ng, that is, listening to distant stations on the radio.  This would occur during the nighttime when picking up stations hundreds and even thousands of miles away was possible...I would regularly listen from my south Floridian home in Hollywood to stations like WBT/Charlotte, NC, WABC/New York, WBZ/Boston, WSM/Nashville, TN, and TransWorld Radio from Bonaire, Netherlands Antilles.  I would tune in on frequencies that were essentially a jumbled mess of sounds and strain my ears to pick out anything coherent among the noise...it was definitely a training period for me in both learning to listen and cultivating patience. During the second half of 1968 I discovered that the second-year American Basketball Association had a franchise in Miami called the Floridians...I closely followed their games on Miami's low power AM station WOCN/1450...that was perhaps my most memorable sports season, especially when you couple it with the Miami Dolphin's 1968 season under coach George Wilson: they went 5-8-1 that year but had most of the players they would be using to later go to three Super Bowls, win two, and go undefeated in 1972...

1968 was the year of the long song, which AM radio had previously steadfastly avoided.  Hey Jude, MacArthur Park, Time Will Come Today, Those Were the Days, and Sky Pilot, to name some of the more prominent, got a lot of airtime...I know, because I'd be trying to get a station's ID and had to wait until the damned song was finally over!  It was also the year that The Prisoner, one of my all-time favorite television series, began its 17-episode run on CBS.  So no, I wasn't at all caught up with the turmoil and war and politics the way it is being presented on retrospective documentaries...no, I was caught up with my own life...