Park Road Plaza

“Keep in mind there was a lot of change that we had no control over. It was a tumultuous time. The Vietnam War, the Weather Underground, the Civil Rights clashes, Kent State, and all the campus unrest. And don’t forget rock and roll. Elvis the Pelvis might have been a scandal in the “Fifties, but the British Invasion of the Beatles just made all bets off. Nobody had ever seen a phenomenon like the Fab Four. Buddy Holly had died in a plane crash and Elvis went into the Army. Rock and roll got more violent and decadent with the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, and Janis Joplin. That’s what Don McClean’s song American Pie is all about. Kids were being told by the Acid Culture to “Tune in, turn on, and drop out.” John Lennon started looking like somebody’s grandmother and doing ‘bed-ins’ with Yoko Ono while the other Beatles found yogis for enlightenment.” But, in spite of all of that weirdness, Alex, most of us would tell you that we grew up in relative prosperity and peace because of the suburb phenomenon. We were largely suburban and country. The violence was going on in the urban areas. It didn’t really touch us until they started cross-busing kids to school for enforced desegregation. The post WWII economic boom helped to keep people optimistic. Jobs were plentiful. Lyndon Johnson started his War on Poverty. Above all, we went to the moon. By God, we put a man on the friggin’ moon! Still amazes me.” “So you guys thought you could do anything,” I said. “Pretty much,” Bryan replied. “Life was good if you had an eight track player and a Chevy Van with shag carpet and a bed.” “It was all pretty positive, then, in your estimation?” “Not so fast, Alex. I mentioned some of the upheaval already.” “Yeah, but you said that things were still overall positive in spite of that.” “By appearances, Alex. By appearances. Some of that stuff was fatally corrosive to the American soul. Kennedy was killed in Dallas. Camelot died at the hands of a lone Communist shooter in a book depository. People still can’t wrap their minds around that fact. It is just unbelievable. The Vietnam War resulted in a loss for a nation that had never known what losing a war was. We went into the war to preserve democracy and came out of it questioning it. After National Guardsmen shot students at Kent State, flower children started putting daisies in the barrels of soldier’s guns. Many were just as prepared to burn the Constitution as they were to burn their draft cards. It was a burning time. Women began to assert themselves, as feminists burned their bras and demanded equal rights. Buddhists burned themselves alive in the streets of Vietnam to protest the war. The Ku Klux Klan burned crosses to try to keep segregation alive. Dr. Martin Luther King got his head blown off outside of his motel room and cities burned.” I sat very still and listened. “The last hope for the young idealists died when Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. The hopelessness might have been symbolized by Warhol’s soup can art or Twiggy’s starvation figure being deemed attractive. The Woodstock concert wound up just being a bunch of kids who crashed the gates without paying in order to roll around in the mud and filth, naked and high. High ideals wound up in destruction and hopelessness. Pretty soon Janis and Jimi were dead from drug overdoses.” “So was it a light or dark time?” I asked. “Light for awhile as long as denial was still possible,” Bryan said. “But the die was cast. The Revolution was successful. It just took awhile to play out. Time was on the hippies’ side.” “But we eventually had to go to work,” he said, legs crossed and fidgeting with something on his burgundy ostrich boots. They were nice, probably 500 bucks. And they were the boots he worked in. Obviously, when he went to work, he became successful. “We climbed the corporate ladder’” he continued. “We bought houses in the ‘burbs and covered the floors with shag carpet. My wife and I defined the term, ‘workaholic’, I believe, and sadly, we ended up in divorce court. There was no longer such a stigma on divorce because we were the ‘me generation’. The divorce rate doubled in this country as we came of age.” “We also almost doubled consumer spending, Alex. The ‘me generation’ was also known as the ‘consumption generation’ and that trend continues today.” “Yeah,” I said dubiously, shaking my head. “But we all know how hard things have been the last few years. The pie just isn’t as big, anymore.” “Well, yeah, we’ve had our problems,” Bryan said. “But successful entrepreneurial types are always going to make it, whatever the economy. We’ve had not only the kids, but our parents to help out while the economic downturn was going on. There are always obstacles and difficulties.” “Every knight has got to kill dragons,” he continued. “And it’s never easy. If you want to be a knight, it’s what you’ve got to do. Otherwise, go scratch in the mud with the peasants.”