1968! (A very crazily-chaotic and cluttered–and sad & happy/bad and good/happy & sad/good & bad–world … as it is in 2018. … I was a young 21, and wasn’t focusing and doing the critical thinking which I should have been doing!)
https://www.cnn.com/shows/1968
I started 1968 on New Years Day in the company of Murray Burns of Utopia, TX with a win by my Aggie team against Alabama & the Bear at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas. I love track and field and saw Randy Matson put the shot a number of times later that spring at Kyle Field, TAMU. (And of course Randy won the gold medal at the Olympics in Mexico that year*.) At G. Rollie White Coliseum I would thoroughly enjoy watching Shelby Metcalf’s basketball team, including the all-around athlete Randy Matson. [*1968, the year of the wonderfully gutsy protests of African-American/black athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos.]
And in class and at the USDA-ARS Cotton Insects Research lab I was truly appreciating the opportunities to learn about insects and biology in general, and ecology, and agriculture and “natural”/biological management of insects. Under the tutelage of Drs. Joe Schaffner, Horace Burke, R.L. Ridgway, & E.J. Dyksterhuis, a great wildlife science professor, and Knox Walker and others, I received a good foundation for what I now call “positively ethical applied community ecology”.
But I was also loving opportunities for getting to know a diversity of women (and other genders also) of various ethnicities, age-groups, and backgrounds. We had some great times at the Lakeview Club & rodeos with Stonewall & Wanda Jackson, and at James & Betty Coppedge’s parties … and elsewhere.
My roommates and I were all working our own ways through college without financial support of our parents. We WERE relatively poor. One of our main sources of food was rabbit (mostly cottontails and big marsh rabbits, but also jack rabbits which we would cook long and hard into a stew). We would go out at night with 22s and spotlight for the rabbits, clean them, and put them in old plastic bread-bags for freezing. … Rabbit was supplemented with a few duck roommate Scott Boyd would bring in, and a raccoon which roommate Jim Barrett trapped and barbequed. (It was an old raccoon of long stringy dark meat, … not particularly tasty and not an especially great idea of Jim’s to convert it to barbeque.)
In late 1968 I was double registered at A&M and working on completing my BS in Entomology, and beginning my MS. My Dad Alton had even committed to coming to College Station for the first time to see me graduate!
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But of course, even at relatively right-wing A&M, we weren’t totally sheltered from what was going on in the rest of the world–civil rights & anti-War protests, Texan LBJ’s troubles, the Democratic convention in Chicago, and the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and of Bobby Kennedy. In 1968 in my small speech class (in which Randy Matson was a classmate), I gave a presentation on the need for stronger and tighter gun control, and presented a review of John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Affluent_Society . And even at A&M I had friends from Latin America and other parts of the world who–through discussions with them–began to make me think about the mortal sins of our Empire, and the people of that Empire, in supporting dictatorships and de facto facism in the interest of international stability for neo-liberal capitalistic greedy-gain through exploitation of Nature and the poor.
Then in December of that wonderful and dreadful year, 1968, my roommates (out in a cabin on Lake Placid, College Station) and I received our draft notices. Jim Barrett joined the Medical Service Corp and became a commissioned officer, Scott Boyd** (the sharpest and best student & researcher of the 3 of us) fled to Canada. I joined Naval Air and became Ensign Martin for a brief period, soloed in a T-34 and T-28, and was beginning IFR training and night flying during that short time in the military. [**Scott–who by the way was a gun collector & also supervised youth at Allen Academy, Bryan, TX–was doing his Master’s research on the turkey chigger mite under Manning Price.]
I wish I would have had the savvy to more overtly protest War and social injustice & inhumaneness … and perhaps have headed to Canada with good friend & roommate Scott Boyd.
https://www.cnn.com/shows/1968
