When I was a little boy my mother told me that I had a great grandmother named Unity McFadden, a magic name. Unity had a hard life and faced tragedy many, many times. I wrote this about her. Unity McFadden, I know your secret. Illiterate Donegal peasant girl, raised on seaweed and potatoes. You survived the great famine and the coffin ship, but couldn’t escape your fate. Living in a squalid 1850s coal town, digging Pennsylvania dirt. Did your heart…
A young child’s transition from the freedom of home life to the stifling regimentation of early school years can be a very traumatic experience – at least that was the way it was for me in the 1950s growing up in a lower middle class neighborhood in West Orange, New Jersey. Many fellow students in my kindergarten and Grade 1 classes settled in well. Others struggled initially but coped. I simply could not conform to school life. I arrived in…
Hitchhikers meet some of the most interesting people. Or at least they did when I was thumbing rides between 1968 and 1972, mostly in the US and Canada, but also in Europe and Africa. I even got picked up by some very nice moms whose own kids were hitchhiking. They felt an obligation to offer lifts to young people since other drivers were picking up their children. I told the moms that it was kind of them to stop for…
Purely by coincidence I happened to be very close to the two biggest North American rock festivals of 1969. Everyone knows about Woodstock, but the other one is often described as the greatest rock festival that nobody remembers. Except for the 110,000 of us who were there. That’s what happens when the organizers make no attempt to film three days of tremendous musical performances. It has no afterlife. When the most famous rock festival of them all followed 12 days…
The deputy sheriff of Vega, Texas, chewed heartily on a toothpick, his feet up on his desk as he perused a paperback copy of Perry Mason’s The Case of the Rolling Bones. I guess it was a slow day in the justice business. I sat in a chair across from him, fresh from a night in the local jail. Somehow a pleasant jaunt across the American southwest had turned into a Coen Brothers film. It all started innocently enough when…