FIRST PERSON

consciousness by releasing the album “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”

Other music of the 1960s also shaped my world. Aretha Franklin belted out R-E-S-PE-C-T. The Doors set the world on fire. The Who told me that this was my generation. The flower children showed what freedom looked like at the Monterey Pop Festival in California.

My town was also connected to the city by television, and the outside world began to intrude. The nightly news gave us names that we’d never heard: Haiphong, Hanoi and the Mekong Delta. Images of helicopters airlifting wounded soldiers from rice fields burned in our brains like napalm in the tropical forests.

War wasn’t a movie, like John Wayne in “The Green Berets”; young men, including a brother of my classmate’s, were dying. Our parents wanted us to believe that the president and the generals knew what they were doing; we were beginning to think they didn’t.

Meanwhile, the home front was exploding.

I desperately wanted to see the Tribe at Cleveland Stadium, but it was not to be. We invite readers of all ages to submit a personal essay of musings or reflections for First Person. The guidelines:

A range of styles and subjects (but no political/ opinion pieces) is encouraged, with a preference for content of a topical nature.

Your writing must be original and previously unpublished. It can be funny or serious, local or global, but it must be your own.

A submission should run no longer than 18 column inches (about 700 words).

No pay is provided. No publication guarantee In 1966, inner-city Cleveland had exploded with the Hough riots. Then, in the summer of ’67, race riots erupted throughout the country. My father told me there was no way we were going to a ballgame in the city.

I began to understand that folks living in the poverty of the central city could take only so much. When the government turned hoses and dogs on people protesting racial discrimination, when the Ku Klux Klan burned down churches in the South, and when people were pushed and shoved around because of prejudice, it was no wonder that peaceful protests could become violent.

By summer’s end, I began to understand Janis Ian’s lament on interracial dating in “Society’s Child.” I believed Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions when they told us, “People, get ready; there’s a train coming.” I realized, as the Temptations sang, that the world was a ball of confusion. Bob Dylan’s is granted.

All text is subject to editing.

The writer should be identified by name, age, occupation, hometown and phone number. Anyone selected for publication will be asked to supply a photograph or have a photo taken.

A submission used becomes the property of The Dispatch; it cannot be reproduced elsewhere without our permission. prophecy finally hit me: The times, they are a- changing.

By the end of 1967, I still delivered papers from my Schwinn bike, I still played sandlot baseball into the night, and I still enjoyed going to the Dairy Dolly for rootbeer floats.

But I had learned that summer that a world existed beyond the limits of my hometown and that I couldn’t insulate myself from it by ignoring what was happening in other cities or countries.

If our world was changing, I needed to do the same.