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My assignment was to produce a television show documenting life in Fort Wayne during the 1960s.

A complicated decade, to be sure.

I struggled with the contradictions that were prevalent in the city during that period.

On one hand, life was simple and somewhat innocent, just a continuation of the 1950s.

But that view is contrasted by the national headlines of that period and what those events did to change this community for good.

After researching the decade and interviewing dozens of people, both experts and those who lived it, I think the sixties can best be summarized by one of the people I interviewed.

He said Looking back in Fort Wayne, the sixties were a time when things just seemed to happen around you while you were growing up and raising a family.

It was a frightening time.

It was also a wonderful time.

The early sixties in Fort Wayne really were rather sleepy.

Life was good.

Everything was booming at that time.

The Harvester plant was running at about 10,000 employees and everything looked for a lot of promise.

Back in those days, unemployment was a very low level.

The northeast part of Fort Wayne, which is now the Georgetown, Maplecrest, Glenwood Park, Snider High School area, actually was was spawned or born, if you will, In the 1960s.

The Nickel Plate railroad had been elevated in the mid fifties and of course the elevation of that railroad opened up the northeast part of Fort Wayne, which had been farm fields and basically undeveloped.

In our neighborhood in the sixties, we still live in the same place.

There are a lot of kids and they did the usual kid things and our Kool-Aid stands and putting on one daughter was pretty much of a promoter and a director sort of boss, or you might say.

And she put on plays and we had a big trunk for all costumes.

Well, dresses, things, you know, from God knows what in the twenties or thirties.

And so the kids still are playing right there in the yard.

And I mean, not just two or three, you know, some tend to be eight or ten or 12.

And there was a lot of playing out on the sidewalk and in that part of town or alleys.

And they would do things in the alley.

You know, they they could play all over, you know, they could hold a China in in the backyard.

You know, it got two or three feet deep.

You're getting close.

And we have in our neighborhood, we have front porches.

And people did sit out on their front porches.

Neighbors knew one another and were friendly, very friendly, you know, sharing cookies that they baked and talking over the back fence.

And it was a it was just a pleasant place to be for I think perhaps a lot of Fort Wayne was that way.

Was really quite a bit like our own childhoods 30 years earlier in the in the thirties when things were much more economically depressed.

In the sixties, times were pretty good in general.

But the neighborliness and the funny thing, I mean, TV was around and the kids knew about, you know, the Monkees and, and the Disney programs and what have you, but they still outside a lot and not in organized place so much.

I mean, there was Little League Baseball and Wildcat and things like that.

I think at that time it was for boys.

Mm.

But they had more time to just be children in the sixties.

And in those days there were a lot of activities for young people in our churches.

So, you know, we kind of stuck to that, that and we would go to the movies, we go to the park for picnics and, you know, those kind of things.

But we were very happy.

We used to go to a lot of hockey games.

That was big thing.

We would go to Wolf and Dessauer's downtown, and at Christmas time you'd see the magic windows that was that was always the rave.

And to ride the little train inside up on the same floor, I think where Santa Claus was.

It was funny because I sat on Santa's lap many years, and then later on in the early seventies, I was in a music group that Phil Steigerwald was the adult advisor for.

And at one rehearsal, finally the second rehearsal, someone stood up and said, Mr. Steigerwald, we think you're so familiar, but we can't figure out why.

Will you please tell us why we think we know you?

And he said, No peeking.

And we just all shriek and like, Oh, no, it couldn't be.

So what a guy he is too.

What a great guy Phil Steigerwald is.

I don't know exactly when our children's zoo started, but when our older children were young, there were just some cages out there with some kind of mangy animals.

And one of them, one or two deer they had.

Yeah, I remember.

The zoo has been there as long as I can remember, but it was just a fence with cages and they had hawks and fox and ducks and some pheasant and stuff like that.

And then on the other side of the street, they had a fenced in area where they had some buffalo and some deer and peacocks, but nothing like today.

Today is very well set up.

It's a really, really it's a world class zoo.

It's well thought out.

Well-planned.

Fort Wayne can be proud to have that.

I tell you, the Clyde Theater in Quimby Village was was big.

I can still remember going after James Bond became popular and they had Bond back to back.

And I think they had From Russia with love and and maybe Goldfinger might have been doctor it must have been Goldfinger is a is a double feature.

And driving from the north side of town, the traffic was backed up over the Bluffton Road Bridge.

You could not.

And it was one huge theater that later got divided into two or three theaters before it closed as the Quimby, but one huge theater and came in.

And the only seats you could get were either in the first or second row.

The entire theater was packed, but spent a lot of time going to movies.

The movies were fairly cheap.

I remember one of my best friends that threw a fit when they raised the price up to a dollar.

A lot of sock hops after school and, you know, you dance and, you know, I was always on some kind of committee where you did that planning and did that decorating and did that clean up afterwards.

But there are a lot of sock hops.

We had a social club and at that time we had named ourselves the Mad Caps.

Yeah.

And we yeah, we had dances at the GE hall, we rented the GE hall and we had dances there.

We also had dances at our it was a Winter Street Union Hall.

We had dances there.

We also used to use the Chamber of Commerce and had dances there.

And there was a place called the Palm Terrace, which burned down and we had dances at the Palm Terrace.

If you park your car in the vicinity of Harrison and Main, you could hit probably a dozen nightclubs, nightspots, uh, within a four corner area.

I mean, you could, if you wanted to wear a sport coat and a turtle neck, you'd go to the Rathskeller and you'd have a drink or two and have a nice German meal, then walk down toward the river.

And where the old Cats Meow was, there was a pretty sleazy little place.

There was a fairly sleazy place next to it.

Across the street there were at least three more.

There was a there was a bar next to the Coney that had one of those chicken wire things for the band because of beer bottles that were occasionally flung in their direction.

You know, there are some places you go where there's entertainment in some places, the audience is the entertainment that that was one of the places the clientele was much more fun than any or anybody on any stage.

But that area is totally gone.

There's nothing left of any of it.

There are some empty storefronts now.

I mean, right next to Coney, between Coney and that cigar store is the bar that I'm talking about.

That's now just a it's just a wall.

And that the parking lot over there across from Merrill Lynch, along the side there on Harrison, there were three taverns there that were.

But but that's what you could do.

I mean, if and I must admit that I did occasionally, it was it was a good place to just meet people and just people watch and, you know, enjoy some decent, really good music.

Obviously, all the Halls Restau Across from Lincoln School there at Goshen and Coliseum was a restaurant called the Golden Dragon.

It was a marvelous place, very good food.

It's where the Azar's is there across from the Red Roof Inn.

And the Red Roof Inn is where Lincoln School used to be.

So that's a very busy corner now.

It was it was kind of busy then, and Coliseum Boulevard was still California Road in those days.

And the very first McDonald's in Fort Wayne was on California Road where about where the one across Glenbrook is now.

They built a new building and so on.

But I remember you get the the all-American meal.

It was, you know, a hamburger, fries and a chocolate shake, and it was like $0.79 or something like that under a dollar, I'm sure.

But you'd go to a Cardone's restaurant, I think, on Fairfield, or you'd go to a Zolis.

It's still there on Broadway.

Another great memory would be on Calhoun Street.

There was Big John's Pizza, and then Big John Milton went and took some culinary training and suddenly it became cafes.

And now I think TV was a big part of my life when I was young, you know, for a second, third grade, we did have some local shows that were pretty cool.

And my favorite show of all was on Channel 21.

It was the the the Bill Jackson show.

It was Captain Kangaroo.

And, you know, I can always remember Captain and and, you know, Mr. Moose and Bunny Rabbit and Mr. Green Jeans.

You know, they were always you know, they were just our buddies, you know, they were there for us, you know, and and we grew up in there was Engineer John.

I watched him and I can remember sending him two Canadian pennies.

He was doing something and he said my name on the air.

And I'll tell you, I just I was forever in his debt because he he said, you know, there's a little girl and she wrote he he read my letter on the air and he showed me the two the two Canadian pennies.

And I just knew that he was talking directly to me.

Father Knows Best and Lucy and Ozzie and Harriet and My Three Sons and those kinds of things were the kind of shows we watched him and our kids and Ed Sullivan.

I can also remember the very first color television that we got.

It was really cool.

And it seems to me that the picture was not very good, but it didn't really matter.

You know, people sometimes were very orange or very pink.

Yeah, I remember the first color episode of Bonanza Boy.

I mean, the family was ready Sunday night.

The popcorn's popped, everybody's staked out their claim to their favorite spot on the couch or or in easy chair, going to sit down and watch Bonanza in color probably would have been more climactic if we had a color set.

We didn't.

This relatively new form of entertainment, this television was largely considered just that entertainment.

That is, until that bleak November day in 1963, when the country was glued in front of the flickering screen in shock.

Our president had been killed.

I was at home in our bedroom with the TV on, and I heard that and I just said, This can't be true.

This cannot happen in the United States of America.

I just knew it couldn't.

JFK, when he was assassinated, I was at work and it was a rainy day.

And we were setting up a team to play an industrial league basketball and the YMCA Industrial League.

And we got the word of it and oh, it was really sad.

It was a good guy.

When Kennedy was shot, I was working traffic down at the corner of Wayne and Barr Street.

And those days downtown was active.

We had at Christmastime one time a total of 40 officers, and we generally had at least 20-15 to 20 officer working traffic downtown at every intersection.

And I went over to the then was the old Hobby House for a break, walked in and there were a number of businessmen sitting around having coffee and a few of my compadres.

And I said, Well, why is everyone looking so glum?

What happened?

And one of the businessmen said, Well, why didn't you hear the radio?

And I said, No, I've been working traffic.

What happened?

They said, The president has been shot.

We think he's killed.

And I couldn't believe it.

I was teaching at McCulloch school at the time, and our principal, whose name was Laura Phipps, came to the classroom, came to the door and knocked on the door and asked me to step out in the hall.

And I stepped out in the hall and she said the president had been shot.

They did not know the condition, his condition, but he had been shot and, you know, and she says, don't say anything to the children.

We don't want them to be upset.

So I went back into my classroom and could hardly work, could hardly wait until the end of the day.

I was a sophomore at Northside High Schools.

Right after lunch, I'm in a speech class with Stanley Lee, was my teacher in Dallas, and they turned on the intercom and just had the had the message.

And it, you know, just even thinking about it chokes you up.

And then they dismissed class and had kids go into the auditorium and hear the news.

And they they weren't sure right away whether Kennedy had died or not.

And then they had that the the Catholic priest had been there, and then he was dead and they dismissed the school.

And it was just it really was sort of the end of innocence for for my generation.

And, you know, it's never quite been the same since then.

On the bus ride home.

That was probably one of if not the only day that the bus was relatively quiet.

There were two or three kids who had transistor radios on and everybody was listening intently to to hear.

I believe we got out of school on the day of his funeral.

There was no school, which was, uh, which was very unusual.

And I remember spending that day watching the funeral on television.

All of a sudden, we were part of a much bigger world.

Our whole school was devastated.

It was like we'd lost a personal friend.

I was one of the millions of people who happened to have my television set on as they were transporting Lee Harvey Oswald from one jail to another.

And of course, we all watched him on live television being shot by Jack Ruby.

So those were tumultuous, unforgettable events, things that you had an instant sense of history in the making.

It was unlike anything that I had ever seen before in my life and unlike anything that I've seen since.

That defining event changed us and changed life as we knew it in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

On the surface, we looked the same, but we were different.

We grew up The early to mid sixties in Fort Wayne saw numerous changes.

The Fine Arts Festival grew into a huge event each summer, changing the way many residents viewed the local arts scene by making art accessible to all.

During those few days.

Each summer in Frankie Park, new audiences were cultivated.

I mean, there was everything music, the Philharmonic, the community concerts, the Shrine band, ballet, and then the ballet.

The art museum would have art exhibits.

The theaters were there, the Civic Theater, the children's theater.

There were puppet shows galore.

In February of 1962, a spectacular fire took the old Wolf and Dessauer building on Washington Boulevard between Calhoun and Clinton streets, along with three other buildings.

I was working in the Records Bureau that day, developing some film for Lieutenant Statler, and I heard The Sirens and I ran out of the building and they said, Evacuate the building on across the streets, burning up.

That's what you've got to understand was the new Wolf and Dessauer, the fire department showed up on our street at the old police department, the wrong place.

But they did the best they could.

And by the time they got down to that where the fire was, it was really going.

And I remember going out and watching some of it and working the traffic.

And then I was placed on top of the old Dime Bank building to watch for sparks, you know, that would come down maybe because of the fire, but it was quite a conflagration.

Hated to see it go up after the buildings were torn down the whole in downtown Fort Wayne remained for many years.

On Palm Sunday of 1965 saw a tremendous display of Mother Nature's power as tornadoes ripped through much of central and northern Indiana, killing 140.

We had Palm Sunday tornadoes that give a whole new meaning to weather alerts.

I'll tell you, you know, I work for Indiana and Michigan is linemen and went down on the burn area down there where they got hit hard on that area.

And the devastation just looked like World War two.

The Boy Scout troop that I was with went down to burn to help a couple farmers on cleanup.

You hear stories of tornadoes running strong to trees.

But until you actually see a tree, the one whole side of this is nothing but straw, just unbelievable.

Although Fort Wayne was not hit, I&M had numerous lines knocked down, causing power outages to much of the city in the 1960s.

There were places in Fort Wayne where, if you were African-American and you were not welcome.

This was also the case in the decades that preceded the sixties.

However, during this decade of change, protests began to see slow progress in equal housing, employment and education.

I remember as a young lady when I was in high school, I would go down.

There was only one of those stores that would serve blacks and that was the Kresges.

And we had about three or four seats that we could sit in.

And I worked at Fishman's in the beauty salon, and I would walk down to that store because it was the only place that you could sit down, and then you couldn't even sit down in Murphy's.

You had to stand up at a counter and be served.

So I would go to Kresge's and sit down and I will never forget I always ordered a cheese sandwich, a grilled cheese sandwich, cherry pie and a cherry Coke.

And that was the only ten cent store.

It was a ten cent store that would accept blacks and let them sit in those three or four seats.

And in Murphy's they had this counter in the front where anybody could go stand up and stand up.

But in the back was a lovely bar area.

But you couldn't go there.

You didn't know until you sat down at the counter and then they all stand up.

You waiting for a waitress to come wait on you?

And you said that waited and waited and waited.

And so you say, Hey, come over here.

And she said, I can't.

I said, What's wrong?

I can't wait on colored folks.

Cant wait on black people, we didnt know it until you sit down.

Embarrassment.

That happened.

So we had protest against restaurants.

The English Tea Room was a very popular restaurant downtown, and we could not eat there.

No signs.

But if you went in for a service, they would say, I'm sorry, we cannot serve you.

We have no seats available.

We have reservations.

They would just make up excuses so that we could not eat there so many, many, many years later, a group of black guys did go together and they actually bought that English terrace tea room, and they kept it for a very short time.

But nevertheless, I was very proud of that.

But there was not one place that we could eat.

Even Coney Island, the hot dog places down on Main Street, we would go in and buy our hot dogs and take them out, but we could not even sit there and eat.

It was more or less taken for granted.

No signs, but it was a spoken code that we could not eat in any of these places.

Not any of them could we eat.

We were not welcome.

At public housing in Fort Wayne - when I came to Fort Wayne - was segregated.

I'm talking about totally subsid in a part of town called Westfield, where you had people who were who were living in public housing, who were African-Americans on one side of the street, and people who lived in public housing, who were white living on the other side of the street.

And that didn't change until after 1968.

As far as the police department when I first came here, I think they had about six, if that many, minorities on the police force.

Thats all.

And the story was they couldn't find any qualified.

So we created protests.

We had this march in the street by the hundreds.

So now they have in a number of minorities, all Mexicans, blacks and etc.

The had no female.

Fire department was no minority at all.

No.

So we had created protests When I first took office, they this was in early 1960, the Urban League and other black groups prevailed upon me to put the first black firemen on the force.

We had never had a black at that up until that time.

And I put the fellow in the Fire Prevention Bureau and that, of course, did not sit well with the firemen because they still did not want a black on the force and they knew that the door was open and more would follow.

And after the I did put this fellow on the force, many of the blacks were dissatisfied because they didn't think that was a true place for a fireman.

That was only tokenism.

And they wanted to see him on a fire truck.

And politically it was a part of my demise.

I'll put it that way, to be very honest about it.

But I knew that the day would come when you just could not continue to keep black people out of the fire department.

And some of these firemen worked like Trojans to put me in office.

Some of them I went to high school with them and it was just not very compatible with them staying in office as far theyre concerned.

In the early, early sixties and we would trick or treating and we decided to go over the Old Mill area.

My daughter and her friend, and they went over in the Old Mill area and people were so very nice to them.

They gave them all kinds of treats and everything, just real, real nice.

And then we went to a house on the corner of the Old Mill Road and Pettit and the kids knocked on the door and I was, you know, back in the shadows.

So when my daughter held out her little brown hand for her treat, the lady looked at it and she said, You don't live in this neighborhood.

She said, You go to your own neighborhood and get treats.

And that just ruined the whole the whole evening.

Everybody had been so nice.

But that one incident of rejection has stuck in my daughter's mind for eternity.

With all of these things was going on in Fort Wayne and we just felt like that something should be done.

So we we moved out to do something.

And that was some changes made.

At that time, many communities were searching for a particular personality to head up their Urban League affiliates, and you probably would not recall.

But in 1967 and 1968, there was quite a bit of civil turmoil.

And I remember that one of the staff members, Jacqueline Patterson and William Watson, who worked at the Lincoln, attended a conference in New York City and knew that I had some Hoosier roots, having lived in Indianapolis and interested me in coming to Fort Wayne at that time because I guess you might say that I was militant enough to to persuade or dissuade those people who were purportedly militants.

And then then I was intelligent enough to be able to communicate the issues to those people who could do something about those issues.

So I was kind of an in-between person, and there were a lot of protest movements and marches in Fort Wayne in the 1960s, and a lot of them like the one for a school board member.

When did that take place?

I know we we marched in that family's marched.

My older children who are now in their early forties or 41 were little children.

And we took them with us as we marched the whole family marched.

And under the leadership of Reverend John Dixie and Reverend Jesse White really spearheaded.

But we met it at the John Dixie Church, Pilgrim Baptist Church.

We'd march all the way downtown and stop at the City Hall in order to protest the fact that we had and the fact that we did want a black representative on the school board.

It was kind of some scary times.

And because people were setting fires and damaging police cars and writing nasty letters and anonymous complaints and people were afraid that something was going to happen, well, nothing major really happened.

And that's because the Urban League was able to put together the kind of a team that could meet with people and address their issues and let those people know what had to be done in order to make Fort Wayne a more livable city.

Not to coin that phrase, but that's exactly what happened.

Some of the clergy, Reverend White, I knew him real well.

They did a lot to control the violence, to simmer down from what could have become.

It was just the community working together to control a few individuals or some groups and try to explain to them, you know, hey, if you want this, you have to do this, this and this, and it will come.

We were pretty naive back then.

I, I was at North Side High School and it was an all white high school basically till my senior year.

And then only one black student.

And and that was even considered, you know, how is the school going to handle this?

So you look back and you think, how did we not realize that, you know, something's happening here, that there is unofficial segregation, if not not official segregation?

One of my friends from grade school was African-American.

I remember I'd taken my grandfather as a member of the Fort Wayne Country Club, and I remember inviting him out to go swimming with me one time in the sixties.

And I didn't think anything of it had been my friend since grade school.

But sort of afterwards, you hear people talking about, you know, what's what's this kid doing bringing up, you know, somebody that's black to the swimming pool?

You you just you didn't realize what was going on in the world necessarily when you were young.

You were accepting and you had friends at different schools in different parts of town and you thought that that was the right way to do things, that it's kind of like going to hear King speak.

In 1963, my one of my good friends, Pete Meisters dad was the chief minister at First Presbyterian Church.

They were part of the group of ministers that brought in Dr. King.

So I got a chance to to sit on the platform at Scottish Rite and hear Dr. King speak and shake his hand.

Ralph Abernathy before him.

But at the same time, this was going on and I didn't realize that my father was prosecuting attorney.

They were concerned that there might be riots in town or some racial problems, Klan types or others protesting it.

And so while I'm inside listening to the speech, unbeknownst to me, my father's with a group outside checking to make sure that there's not any civil violence going on.

And it was something you I felt accepting and wanted to meet people, but society was was going through a tough time there.

Because of the involvement of the Urban League in creating open an atmosphere of open housing and equal employment opportunities and our involvement in trying to achieve racial balance in the schools.

On several occasions, we, the Urban League, were invited to step outside of the United Way family because people began to withdraw their pledges to the United Way because the Urban League was involved.

In the matter of fact, of course, a lot of these people have died now.

But but some prominent citizens asked the Urban League to voluntarily withdraw, and which we didn't do.

They shot in my window at the house.

Bullet went to the one that everything was the one that I was called.

So many of the thing, you know, radical.

And I would just threatened, you know.

They burned a cross on my lawn at the house.

You know, I had to have bodyguards around all the time.

I had to have people around the house to follow to, you know, just for safetys sake.

And the church, they broke into the church house a lot of time and got in it got in my seat.

Just stood up in the chair.

They said, let me know.

I can get you if I want to, you know, but I never give up on that.

We gained a lot of influence because we were involved in the boycott of the Fort Wayne Community Schools in order to get them desegregated and took a while.

In fact, it took much too long and spent too many dollars.

But it was done in the Urban League along with the Ministerial Alliance and the NAACP, we were all involved in the desegregation of the schools was so encouraging, you know, because, you know, just to see how the community was coming together, because we all protested and we was convinced that if you said nothing about anything, where would anything be done?

As the 1960s began, few of us had heard of Martin Luther King, and by the early to mid sixties, Martin Luther King was a household word because of all the things he was doing in the South and for that matter, all over the country.

And his impact was definitely felt in Fort Wayne probably in the early 1960s, and it gathered momentum through the mid sixties.

And of course tragically ended with his assassination in 1968.

I think the King assassination, though, hit everyone.

I mean, I don't recall that that was a non polarizing civil rights event that that I mean, I think everybody universally I mean, here's a guy the big mystery was why would you choose to assassinate a nonviolent black leader when there were many more militant I mean, you know, the Black Panther Party had people that were calling for open rebellion and King was Trying to pull things together.

Well, the simple answer is he was making it work.

It was happening.

And that was, you know, I had my daughter at that time.

She'd been born in 1956.

So she was about seven years old when Dr. King was killed.

So what we did was we were glued to the television and she watched everything.

I said, I want you to see what they have done to us.

And I made sure that everything that happened, we were glued to the television and I explained to her we ate in front of the television set, We slept for the television set, and we watched everything that happened that they had on television in those times.

And a lot of times we said before these things and tears just automatically flowed and dropped.

She looked at her mom and dad and she cried also.

So she remembers very vividly in her mind all of these things that happened.

She remembers Bull Connor and the police dogs and the water hoses.

Oh, yes.

All of these things are deeply embedded in her mind.

We had some marches here that I recall in the mid 1960s.

And then, of course, when the tragic event happened in, I believe, April 1968, the city, as were all cities, was braced for some type of reaction, perhaps violence.

As far as the police department was concerned, we had demonstrations.

We used to say in Fort Wayne that if New York sneezed today, in two months, we got cold in Fort Wayne But, uh, yeah, we had some demonstrations, uh, and some marches and burnings on Pontiac Street and Maumee Avenue.

And I was out looking at your towers out here.

I remember the night they cut the wires of a tower down on Gay Street, a huge radio tower, and it went down.

But when the news flash that he was assassinated, then that just that just tore the hearts out of people.

We just felt like our Moses was dead.

You know, it was just dumb now.

So that's why they got in the streets and start burning.

Yes.

Just lost their and started burning down houses.

There were elements in the community that successfully I'm ashamed to tell you, were able to keep certain events from being publicized, if you will, to the degree that they probably should have.

Yeah, there was trouble the night King was killed, but it was downplayed.

It was downplayed by the media because we were we were asked by city administration and specifically law enforcement not to exacerbate problems, not to, you know, listen, I mean, don't call it a riot.

Call It a disturbance.

It would be best if you didn't report.

So, I mean, window breaking is probably something that we should avoid reporting because we don't want to cause more trouble.

And and it was it was it was fairly subtle, but but we got the message pretty clearly that we were we were being looked upon - we in media - as as a way to sort of keep the lid on, if you will.

And I'll be darned if we didn't do it.

And I'm not sure that we were we were right to I'm not sure we were wrong, too, but I'm not sure that we were right to either.

I mean, you know, I think our responsibility is to reflect what's happening.

And you can make a judgment and determination on whether it's significant or insignificant.

To some degree.

I think we probably do have a responsibility not to make something greater than it is and thereby cause more trouble by doing so.

That was certainly the message that was that was sent to us.

And most of us, I must admit, went along with that.

You really felt things spiraling out of control.

Democratic Convention in Chicago later on.

It was a crazy world.

I look back on 1968.

It's a classic example how the heck we survived that year.

I don't I don't know.

I mean, if you really think about about the things that occurred that one year you've got the Tet Offensive, which was which was the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong complete attack on the entire nation of South Vietnam, I mean, nobody was safe.

The embassy was being attacked, Saigon was being attacked.

I mean, all of the places that the GIs there thought they were safe and were suddenly under fire.

It brought the war home to the American public.

It caused huge numbers of demonstration not the least of which was the Chicago convention riots of and of, you know, being a news guy, getting up in the morning and walking into work and finding out what that night's inactivity brought was stunning.

I mean, it was just there was one major event after the assassination.

So really, you know, my goodness, just those two alone, the Kennedy assassination and the Dr. King assassination, those were I mean, it was it was really an amazing and amazing year to have survived.

That is just, you know, amazing that this country stayed together as well as it did Although hairstyles, clothing and music had changed radically, kids still enjoyed many of the same pastimes as did those in the fifties.

You know, Dales Drive-In - Dales Drive-In was always a great place.

You could I look back now and, you know, it's like we never had a lot of money, but we you could always go there and get a Cherry Coke.

And, you know, if you were really extravagant, you could get a hamburger or a cheeseburger and French fries.

And, you know, we usually got French fries and a Cherry Coke.

That was that was kind of the going fare.

The big thing of it was - north Azars - if you could get number one spot.

I mean, you could you talk about nursing an order of fries and a and a Coke for hours on end because you didn't want to give up that prime spot.

Boy, you sit there, you're in Prime spot, and you can just sit there nonchalantly and watch people cruise through.

Sure.

Save your gas.

When I was in high school, you know, you need to hear kids that would go over to Ohio and buy the three two beer that popular didn't do that.

It was affectionately called Charlie's.

The real name was Crystal Tap.

It was just across the line in Hicksville, Ohio.

And of course, there was a just around the corner over in Defiance.

There was our place over in a St Mary's, Ohio was the other place.

And he would sneak across the border because drinking age is only 18.

In Ohio.

And even if you didn't drink, just the slight fact that there's so many kids and live bands and pretty good time, probably the single thing that made my parents and that generation angry was length of hair on guys.

I mean it was.

Why that became such an infuriating point?

Why police officers couldn't stand it?

Why - you know, people 40 and up and I'm in my fifties now.

Why why they it just it was it was, you know, talk about polarization.

My word, it was it was just the defining crowning.

Your hair is long, go get a haircut.

The political opinions less significant.

Even the drug use less significant.

Get your haircut, you get your haircut, things be much, much.

I remember my dad going through that with me - my mom and dad - get your haircut.

But I mean, I had hair down to here.

I had pictures that no one will ever see.

I own stock now, you know what I mean.

I'm in mutual funds.

When did that happen?

How did that happen to us?

You know, it was it was a lot of fun.

It was it was great music and it was kind of fun to have long hair, you know, and bellbottoms.

Hmm.

And it seems to me that there was no you know, the way, you know, our pants were hip huggers.

And, you know, some of us didn't have - that wasn't a good style.

That just wasn't a good look.

I can remember oranges and chartreuse green being just a real, you know, that was a real color scheme.

And you know what?

There are many people that look very good in chartreuse.

And really, dayglow orange.

That's not a good color.

Bellbottoms were just starting to come in.

Some kids were wearing them.

A lot of us weren't.

I remember a neighbor girl not only had bell bottoms, she had taken and opened the seam up to the knee and put extra material in shoes.

They were extra wide jumbo elephant bells they called them, which was, which was kind of funny in a in the winter, a light snow.

She'd walk to the bus stops and sweep the sidewalk.

She went kind of funny.

The dress code in school was very different from what it is now.

I mean, girls couldn't wear slacks at all to school.

We had to wear dresses.

And I can remember when I was in high school, best friend of mine and I both got suspended from school at the end of our senior year because wore culottes to school.

So there was a whole group of us did that.

So you know, we were all rebels anyway.

Styles other than that basic, the long straight hair.

I mean, straight hair was big.

I mean, we went to great extents to get straight hair.

I mean, we I never did it, but I know I wore the largest size rollers I could in my hair, but girls were orange juice cans in their hair to try and get their hair as straight as possible.

And that's where ironing your hair came from.

Kids with naturally curly hair.

You get your mother's ironing board out and a friend would iron your hair with her iron, which if you can imagine that for some people's hair.

But that was, you know, as straight as you could get.

It was the objective, the absolute defining moment of the 1960s with regard to both music and style can be summarized in two words - The Beatles.

“I Want To Hold Your Hand” seemed like, you know, such an incredibly wonderful song and, you know, it's kind of lame.

Now.

They're going to be playing some of this stuff in 100 years and you know, it's going to be the I mean, Paul McCartney is the Cole Porter of his time, you know, And I really do think that of of that that was another thing I think that many of us knew at the time this was really special stuff.

Creedence Clearwater Revival, you know, some wonderful, wonderful rock and roll music.

I mean, The Lovin Spoonful and groups that are are, you know, legendary today and should be rightly so.

The music of the sixties was about rebellion.

And of course, much of that rebellion was aimed towards the raging war in Vietnam, a horrific war few Americans understood.

I could never figure out why we were over there.

I mean, we're fighting this war.

There's this little country.

Sure, we got an alliance with them, you know, and we agree to protect each other, but never could figure out why it really why we was over there.

I mean, we're we're sending our kids over there and we're wasting all this money on bombs and airplanes and lives.

The government telling you one thing and a few months later, finding out it was the exact opposite.

And you start to question things.

Why are they lying to us?

Who are they trying to protect?

What are they trying to do?

What are we doing over there in the first place?

And well, you'd asked about if I knew any friends that had served.

Yeah.

And as you talk to them and hear some of their stories versus what you're hearing from Dan Rather and it's the exact opposite, then you start getting a mindset, Hey, we've got no business over there in the first place.

Get us out.

Yeah, I was.

Peace, peace, love, dove.

Everybody's.

I was into the hippie movement to an extent.

Yeah.

On those grounds because I, I personally felt we had no business being there in the first place.

And it was all I kept hearing through the grapevine of more and more of my former classmates.

They were coming home in a box.

I felt more and more that we had no business being over there.

It was interesting because what you would watch on television regarding the Vietnam War not necessarily jibe with what we were being told by our national leaders and what we were reading in some of the national press releases.

And so from that standpoint, television did a tremendous service to the American people because it gave you literally an eyewitness account of what was going on.

And you could sit in your living room or at your dinner table or at your TV tray and the Vietnam war was almost a daily bill affair or on on network television.

Well, a couple of fellows that I went to high school with went to went into the service right out of high school, and a couple of them went to Vietnam.

I remember I remember Rick Farlow and talking to him and some of the horror stories.

Oh, just unbelievable.

One of the kids, you know, in my class at North Side left school early and went over there and was killed.

I know other kids from my class that that that died in Vietnam, but it kind of crept up on you gradually.

You didn't realize how much of a morass it was going to be, how much it was going to catch people.

But you started seeing it on the news, but it started slowly.

People, I don't think, really became aware of of how much was going on and what was actually at stake until the until the later sixties.

I was lucky.

My best friend that I pedaled around with was lucky.

Neither one of us got called up.

They had just instituted the draft, the lottery.

On the draft.

I was lucky.

I got number 331 out of 365.

That's not bad.

And I was pretty well down the list.

Yeah, my brother was over that, uh, station at Danang.

He was luckier than most.

Uh, he worked on the electronics, on the airplanes, the radar and instrumentation and stuff.

He made the repairs in the shack.

He was, uh, electronics repair over there, but, uh, sure glad to see him come home.

I was glad that, uh, I didn't have to go.

That I didn't have to.

My number never got called, but it as all I've talked to more and more fellas that I work with have worked with that did serve in some of the story, some of the other stories that they tell other than the horror stories.

I sometimes ask myself how much I missed, you know, I mean, as as you discuss Vietnam, the scary part about that is I'm not sure when it's going to be over, you know, I mean, is it over yet?

Those guys that came, some of them very dear friends of mine, ought to have their names on the wall because they're not home yet.

You know, their minds are still over there.

And and it's the way those people were treated unforgivable.

That's one small step for man...one giant leap for mankind.

Of all the world changing events of the 1960s, none was better timed than man's first step onto the moon.

We actually landed a man on the moon, and then it finally sunk in in miracle.

Wow.

We got a man on the moon.

Yeah, it was.

It was kind of thrilling.

Yeah, that was really.

I didn't know what was going to happen.

I know if he was going to sink in up to his waist or or what, but the lunar lander, you know, it landed and it was solid.

So.

And I can remember my mother just being more interested, you know, more concerned about, you know, what, if something happened and they would be and they wouldn't be able to come back.

And he never dawned on me.

It never dawned on me that they would just never be able to come back.

But everybody was just so caught up.

It was just we were so proud of ourselves.

That was one of Kennedy's dreams.

As long as we're talking about Kennedy, that was something that landing man on the moon was something that he talked about, and he didn't see it.

After all of the bad, negative.

You know what I mean?

We deserved that one.

That was that was one we needed.

Despite all of the turmoil of that time, the sixties are still remembered fondly by those who lived it firsthand.

It was an interesting time during the 60s.

It was a decade where almost anything seemed possible, both for the good and the bad.

Life was was pretty good back then.

I say the sixties were the best years ever for my daughter because those are the years that formations and foundations were laid in her life on which she could build her future.

And a small community like this.

And so many things did happen so far as civil rights are concerned, and she was able to be a part of that.

We were a part of that.

She had her history firsthand.

Looking back in Fort Wayne, The sixties were a time when things just seemed to happen around you while you were growing up and raising a family.

It was a frightening time.

It was also a wonderful time in Fort Wayne Memories: The ‘60s is made possible in part by grants from Fort Wayne Radiology, the Fort Wayne Radiology, MRIs Center is one of the few MRI centers in the country to receive a three year certificate of MRI accreditation issued by the American College of Radiology, Fort Wayne Radiology All eyes are there for you.

And Home Loan Bank, the only 106 year old Fort Wayne Bank.

The mission statement of Home Loan Bank reflects a chartered for meeting financial needs, encouraging investments and promoting home ownership, creating local economic multiplicity.

Member FDIC, Home Loan Bank.