THE CLASS OF’68

Twenty years ago today (or twenty-one, or nineteen) something happened. It’s easy to name the elements of the Sixties-Vietnam, hair, the Beatles, Bobby Kennedy, Wood stock, Chicago, Altamont, SDS, Mayor Daley, Kent State, Jerry Rubin- but it’s harder to say what the whole was all about. Of course every generation, seeing the mistakes of its fathers and mothers, thinks it was born to set things right. And a very large generation, for better or worse, often gets its way by sheer force of numbers. But there are few permanent victories: nowadays Jane Fonda does her exhorting from the exercise video while Timothy Leary celebrates the yuppie: “If you can’t choose lettuce with confidence, and if you can’t pick your BMW, how can you pick a government?” he asked recently. Power to the pesto.

Only the naive would say that the Sixties generation brought about the revolution its loudest visionaries foretold, but only the blind would say that the world was not changed, in ways large and small, by that generation. We asked sixteen Dallasites to reflect on that noisy, passionate time. -Chris Tucker

Susan McNeal

Coordinator, Market Research, Mary Kay Cosmetics Was a freshman at Kent State during the National Guard shootings



“On the Saturday before the shootings, there bad been a lot of unrest over Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia. The ROTC building was burned and the fire department couldn’t get to it because the students interfered. Martial law was declared-you couldn’t meet in groups of more than three or four. On Monday [May 4, 1970] there was a large gathering on The Commons and someone was speaking. The Guard threw tear gas into the crowd and the kids would pick up the cannisters and throw them back at the soldiers. I was about 200 yards away when the shots were fired. It was then that I decided that I never wanted to be in a country at war.”



Ken Molberg

Trial lawyer, Wilson, Williams & Molberg Played backup guitar for Steppenwolf



“I was at North Texas Slate University, which was a very activist school, especially antiwar. And Denton was strongly affected by the drug culture. Those who were just in the movement for drugs are either burned out now or dead, I went to L. A. in the summers to play guitar, and I bad two good friends there who went to prison for possessing a joint The result of that drug experience is that I am very antidrugs now. I have four children.”



Judy Solganick-Donohue

Teacher at Skyline High School

“Found herself” in a hut in rural Mexico



“At South Garland High School in the late Sixties, the mascot was the rebel and we bad the Confederate flag. Some of us refused to stand for that flag during pep rallies. I saw a lot of discrepancies early in life, especially in Mexico where I went to live after college. I became aware of the lack of health care, of the many homeless people. Kids then were appalled by injustice. Now we have Israeli atrocities, oil spills in Pittsburgh, and the kids don’t know anything about it. Their apatby is babit-forming just as our activism was habit forming.”



Dan Boyd

Attorney, Johnson & Swanson

President of Young Democrats, University of Texas, ’68’-72



“I bad the sense then that the world was changing every day. I wanted to do something with a public purpose. I never wanted to be poor, or be a social worker, or a VISTA lawyer, but I was anti materialistic. Now I find myself having to avoid drifting into overly materialistic values. I think people’s interest in social change is lying dormant right now. Arthur Schlesinger’s new book says that social activism comes in thirty-year cycles. If that holds true, then we’ll see another rise in social awareness in the Nineties.”

John Sparks

News producer, WFAA-TV

Was tear-gassed by police at a Washington Monument demonstration



“I grew up in a conservative family in Fort Worth, and I remember taking the bus downtown and bearing the bus driver tell the white passengers to sit together in the front because the blacks would get in and ’take over the bus.’ I transferred to UT after two years at Arlington State, and I knew then that I wanted to go into broadcast journalism. I remember at the time there was a doctor at the YMCA on the Drag who would examine young men to find if there was any way they could get out of the draft.”



Susan Teegardin

Artist, photographer, real estate investor Graduated from Vassar



“The Sixties made me very uncomfortable. They seemed so rigid. You were either straight or a hippie, a hawk or a dove, you either went to Woodstock or you didn’t. There was nothing in between. It was adolescent rebellion with a vengeance, and it bad the power of numbers behind it. So I was relieved to see the Sixties go- although now I see they’re back. Why, I don’t know.”



Gregory Graze

Senior vice president, Edelman Public Relations Editor, The Daily Cardinal, University of Wisconsin, Madison



“I saw the student protest movement at Wisconsin, which was like a Midwest Berkeley, go from nonviolent to violent. The campus leaders looked for rallying points like Dow Chemical recruiting on campus, CIA interviewing black studies. I was a stringer for Newsweek and events got so violent that Hold them I bad to have a helmet and gas mask if I was going to cover the unrest on campus. I was disturbed at the way things evolved I thought it was futile.”



Neal Pointer

Advertising executive, Jones, Pointer, Winn Inc. Served in the 221st Signal Company stationed outside Saigon in the village of Long Bihn, May 1971-April 1972



“When I was drafted I was nineteen years old. I realty wasn’t aware at the time of what constituted war. I didn’t even take the time to look on a map and see exactly where I was going. I worked as a video photographer taking footage of the action that was sent back daily to the president and to Congress for them to review. Ait those guys who claimed they didn’t know what was going on, I was sending tapes to those guys every day. My experience in Vietnam gave me the confidence to rely on myself. When that feeling falters I can rely on the fact that things will never get that bad again. Vietnam was a demonstration of how much people care and bow much they can destroy.”

Tom Stephenson

Bar owner and restaurateur

Raised in Irish Catholic family; taught that anyone who pulled the GOP lever would go “straight to hell”



“I hope this generation of kids has better leadership than we did. Abbie Hoffman? jane Fonda? Those weren’t leaders. All the real heroes died off-JFK, RFK, Malcolm X- We’ve gotten so Jar from the ideas of the Constitution; you can tell that from the gaggle of geese running for president. Our generation has been haunted by not being able to see the big picture. This country will not be any better off until people start to inspect their souls. Countries run on integrity and charisma, and I don’t see much of that now.”



Kathryn Cain

Attorney/politician

Ran as a Democrat for county judge in 1986; was a Republican at Berkeley



“When I was in law school, I bad a professor in a tax law course who wrote on the board that we are here to learn how to make M-O-N-E-Y. I remember being so shocked; it was the first time anyone bad brought that up. I worked as a law clerk in a poverty law practice fresh out of law school, and I saw a lot of things then that I badn’t seen before. The people I saw there were the ones called welfare cheaters, but they weren’t I changed then from the GOP to the Democratic Party.”

Jesse Oliver

Judge, 95th judicial district state court

One of the first blacks to enroll in Arlington State College, now UTA



’After I graduated from Madison High, I put in an application to Arlington State. I was told that my application bad been transferred to Prairie View. A black attorney, Fred Finch, took the case and threatened a lawsuit, but he never had to file it. I went to ASC but I was prohibited from living on campus or participating in athletics. I speak to black students a lot now. They don’t have many role models; they think you have to be a musician or an athlete to succeed. The civil rights movement made a lot of gains in the Fifties and Sixties, but I see a resurgence of racism today. I agree with what Rosalynn Carter once said: President Reagan bas made a lot of people comfortable with their prejudices.”



John Storey

Interior general contractor

Journeyed to Aspen after college to be a ski bum



“Back in the Sixties, I guess you could say that I was a pseudo-middle-class liberal. I marched in all the protest marches and was associated with everything that could be labeled ’liberal’ during that generation. To tell you the truth, what turned me into a conservative was bating to pay taxes for the first time.”

Quln Mathews

News anchor, WFAA-TV

In November ’69, joined thousands in march on Washington



“I went to college [University of Texas at Austin] because it was the next step after high school. I never thought about what I would do for a career and I don’t think now about what I will do for the rest of my life. We were dreamers, and money was not an incentive. I wanted to do something meaningful with my life. We thought we could make a difference.’’



Bill Swofford

Sales counselor for Stancraft Homes

As “Oliver, ” had million-selling hits with “Good Morning Starshine” and “Jean. ” Quit performing in 1984



“If I’d been born ten years earlier, I might have gone into the family business or something. But in that decade there was such a breaking of constraints, so much questioning of society, You internalize that and it opens up other possibilities… Like a lot of musicians in the Sixties, I didn’t see it as a career so much as an outlet for expression, which in retrospect may have been kind of dumb. I was on Ed Sullivan three times and played with people like Stevie Wonder and Santana, but I never calculated anything. I always thought the next hit was right around the corner, even after ten years. I can still listen to ’Starshine’ today; it doesn’t thrill me or bother me. But I feel good when someone who was in Vietnam, or who was courting at the time, tells me they remember that song. As for current music, I’m very far removed. I wouldn’t know Twisted Sister if I beard them.”

Charlotte Taft

Director, Routh Street Women’s Clinic

Brown University, 1968-72; protested Sadie Hawkins Day



When I first began reading about women’s issues in college, a light went on in my head. I felt as if someone were telling me something that I bad wanted to know but was not aware enough to ask. I don’t think our culture recognizes women as human beings and I wanted to work on that. I am working for a society in which people stop being victims. That s bow I see women: raped, battered, abandoned.”

Keith Dishman

Optometrist

Supported Goldwater; had a roommate in SDS whom he thought “was a Communist”



“I went straight into the army at Ft. Campbell where they received new troops, then trained them and shipped them out. We checked their eyes. I remember thinking that some of these kids wouldn’t come back. But the training officers saw the war as good for their careers. They bad a joke that Vietnam may not be a good war, but it’s the only one we’ve got. ”