Tom Stafford: A little something from the Summer of '69

Jun. 11—Last week, I found myself in the front room of my Grandma Stafford's home in Marquette, Mich., on a sun-warmed early evening mid mid-August 1969.

My memory is imperfect.

But as I recall it, my brother and I were sitting in front of the television with our cousins, Bobby, Craig, Linda and Suzy. They lived with our Grandma because our Uncle Don had died of cancer. Our Aunt Ann would follow him before any of us or them graduated from high school.

But that was yet to come.

As was the habit on our visits, we'd spent the day with our cousins swimming in either Lake Superior or the Shiras Pool, where the concession stand had frozen candy bars, a true novelty to a boy from the Detroit suburbs.

I also remember the evening news of that day exposing me to another novelty of the times: Boys with hair down to their shoulders, shirtless and joyous at a music festival in Woodstock, N.Y.

The high school my brother had graduated from that spring — the one I would enter that fall — would change with the times. Burning marijuana soon would be smelled occasionally in the bathrooms.

My favorite high school record albums would be Army Airborne veteran Jimmy Hendrix's "Are You Experienced," the Beatles' post-Sergeant Peppers classic, "Abby Road," and everything by Chicago and Blood, Sweat and Tears.

The Fifth Dimension also would rise through the charts with "The Age of Aquarius," a song from the Broadway hit "Hair" in which pubic hair went public in one scene, sending social shockwaves that would combine with the tectonic political shockwaves set off by an increasingly unpopular war in Vietnam and the draft that supplied the lion's share of the 50,000-plus Americans who would die there.

From just before that time, I also remember being moved during a nighttime car ride by Sgt. Barry Sadler's "Ballad of the Green Beret," which ended with the fallen Marine urging his widow to "put silver wings" on his son's chest and "make him (too) one of America's best."

Nightly news reports for a time presented estimates of the enemy dead in addition to those of the American dead until the former seemed either preposterous or obscene. Ultimately, Walter Cronkite, anchorman of all anchor men declared what the nation learned some in the administration had already concluded: that the war was unwinnable.

Another sign of the times included the 1972 Stevenson High School yearbook carrying a picture of me, as a senior, lighted by the candle I was holding at a peace rally.

On another front, the wistful tribute ballad "Abraham, Martin and John" linked the assassinated Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King.

For the record, there was another political assassination I remember in the news last week when the striking photo of a stricken Robert Kennedy was published.

I had arrived at homeroom to see my math teacher, Miss Curtin, tearful over the overnight assassination after a speech celebrating his victory in the California Democratic presidential primary running on an anti-war platform.

The political assassinations seemed as normal to those of us who had known nothing else as the Monkees and lava lamps.

But, let me return to 1969, where I was invited not long by Springfield attorney Mark Kerns.

Spotting me in front of my house, he stopped his car to offer thanks for an obituary I had written 15 years ago or so about his father — and because something else was on his mind.

As promised, he soon emailed me an editorial his father wrote for the Sept. 22, 1969, edition of Springfield's then morning paper, "The Sun," titled "The Right to Dissent."

The piece "must have been important to him," his email said, "because the box he left behind after so many years on the bench contained very few memoirs."

In that morning's paper, newsroom legend and Sun Editor Maynard Kniskern introduced Joseph Kerns as "the Presiding Judge of the Second District Court of Appeals and Chief Justice of the Courts of Appeals of Ohio."

In the piece, Kearns writes that the right to dissent is "deeply and wholesomely imbedded in American traditions and institutions, but that its "inherent qualities ... provide it with a metamorphic potential and capacity ... for either good or evil."

He describes the America of 1969 as one in which 'the pendulum (of change) swings recklessly beyond the routine" — and in which "unparalleled materialism accentuates and helps to project every semblance of economic and social inequality in this country."

He also gives the vast majority of youthful protesters of the time their due.

"The youth of this day represent the most enthusiastic dissenters against what undoubtedly is and what they conceive to be injustice and inequality. With vision unobscured by the affluence which surrounds them and with consciences still untainted by corruptive power, their objectives are frequently good and worthwhile and their exercise of the lawful right to dissent is refreshing, thought-provoking and beneficial to society."

But he chastises "a comparatively small self-ordained and vocal segment" of protesters for creating "a distorted image of every form of dissent."

He follows that with what seems to me a perfect description of Internet Trolls: "They thrive on fear instead of understanding. They have substituted panic for persuasion. While pretending to detest wrong, they dissipate right."

"In the process," he continues, "dissent has changed to revolt, and revolt has given sanction to crime."

He then pleads that the precious baby called dissent not be thrown out with bathwater so polluted by those who have abused it.

Referring to dissent and a free society as "complementary terms" that "go hand-in-hand or not at all," he pleads with his readers to rescue "this indispensable and valued asset from the smoldering fires of ignorance, bigotry, violence and hate and to restore it to its rightful place in society."

He closes with this sentence: "Failing in this, dissent will have no salutary purpose, the lawful right to dissent will be empty and society will not long thereafter remain free."

I thought you'd want to know that.