"The 1960s - For Me"

 

The photo is of my wife and me on April 11, 1964.

 

In his forward to his 1977 collection of essays, The Essays of E.B. White, Mr. white wrote: “The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest...Only a person who is congenitally self-centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays.”

 

Truer words I have rarely read, and the attached is exhibit ‘A.’

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

More Essays from Essex

“The 1960s – For Me”

October 22, 2025

 

“The sixties produced an archaic mind-set that is

great for imagining a world not yet in existence.”

                                                                                                                Walter Isaacson (1952-)

                                                                                                                Steve Jobs, 2011

 

The third decade of one’s life is, perhaps, the most transformative. One’s first decade is composed of blissful childhood. During one’s second decade, one moves from childhood to adulthood through the challenging teenage years. By one’s third decade, parenting has (mostly) been done; it is the time when one rises (or falls) as an individual, an adult. 

 

For those born in the late 1930s and early 1940s, the 1960s were our time, just as the 2020s are for our grandchildren. It was a chaotic time, one that followed the perceived gentler and more conformist 1950s. 

 

The ‘60s began on a note of hope, with the election of John F. Kennedy as President, the first born in the 20^th Century. Then things fell apart: His assassination in November 1963 was followed by the assassinations of Martin Luther King in April 1968 and two months later of Robert F. Kennedy. As well, civil rights advocates Malcolm X, Medgar Evans and James Chaney, among several others, were killed. It was the decade in which Vietnam divided the country and gave birth to the anti-war movement. That movement led to the 1968 tumultuous Democratic Convention in Chicago and two years later to the Kent State shooting. It was the decade when the Beatles first appeared, when Abbie Hoffman formed the Youth International Party (YIP). It saw the rise of the sexual revolution, with Germaine Greer, Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinham. And the decade ended on mixed notes – with Woodstock, a four-day rock concert attended by an estimated half a million drugged-up, narcissistic young people. And then, in July 1969, we watched with patriotic pride Neil Armstrong walk on the Moon. 

 

For me, that decade was metamorphic. Born in January 1941, I was twenty in 1961 – an unfocused student who had dropped out of college. I spent the summer of 1961 working in a Canadian nickel mine and then as a lab technician for a metallurgical company outside of Boston.

 

The next ten years changed me. On New Years Eve of 1961 I met Caroline, and my life improved. We were married two years later, and two of our three children were born, one in 1966 and the second in 1968. However, Caroline lost her one remaining grandparent in 1965 and her father in 1969. I lost my three remaining grandparents in 1961, 1963 and 1969, and my father died in 1968. I finished college, completed my military obligation, began a real job. I changed careers in 1967, beginning forty-eight years as a stock broker. 

 

There is no grand design to life. Preparation, diligence and hard work are positive traits, but life is largely serendipitous. In 1960, I could not have predicted how things would change for me, any more than I could foresee how the country would change. There was death, but there was also life. With Caroline as my wife and new-born children, while I mourn the deaths, I look back on the 1960s with fondness.