General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: 1968 (Your Help, Please!) [View all]tularetom
(23,664 posts)Working on the BART Ashby and Downtown Berkeley (Shattuck Avenue) stations. It was like ground zero for all the counterculture stuff that was going on and I had to act like a hard hat construction worker, biting my tongue listening to my boss trash the hippies while secretly agreeing with what they were saying. I couldn't say much because I had a wife and two small children who sort of depended on my paycheck.
It was a good time. I was making decent money for the first time in my life, living in a place where there was lots to do, and exposed (at least indirectly) to people with whom I agreed politically. Turned out 1968 was the last year you could feel that way in Berkeley. The next year brought the Peoples Park incident, repression, racial tensions and violent confrontations. By 1972, work on BART had slowed down, my wife and I had decided that the East Bay was no place to bring up young kids, and we moved back to the Central Valley.
I'll be 73 years old in a month and I'll always remember 1968.