Take yourself back, if you were alive at the time, to the 1960's. What do you remember of it? For me, living in a small, rural South Texas town, it was about a few of our boys going off to Vietnam, Saturday night dances at the VFW Hall, getting an older person to buy us a six pack of Lone Star or Pearl beer, driving endlessly around town looking for boys from other towns, going swimming in a cow "tank", Saturday morning bible study, basketball games, and giggling about who might have "put out" over the weekend. Oh, we watched Walter Cronkite's evening news and saw what was happening in Vietnam and the rest of the country. We were shocked by the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy as well as Martin Luther King. But ours was really an insular existence. At the same time I was living this bucolic life, there existed an alternate universe to ours. And that alternate universe was the cultural crucible brewing in the state of California. The reason I bring up my background is that in an interview, the author said he wanted to write about Charlie because, " he wanted to find out how WE grew such a monster." We? I had no part of it, thank you very much. Read more...
