Timeline

 My timeline is to me like the Lakota and Park Rangers history on a buffalo hide at Agate Fossil Beds; not a grand account of every event, but a view of the world from my perspective. My timeline isn’t a record of all that happened in the world, but what was happening in my world. This is mine: how I saw it from my vantage point.

So alongside wars, assassinations, and political turns, you’ll find births, marriages, rattlesnake bites, new jobs, and losses. This is my life; a few broad strokes for the backdrop. Here is what I did and the times in which I did it.

Two notes to my Timeline, I’ve included the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Joe McCarthy, of whom I had no awareness growing up. I include the bombing because like a temple bell it resonated long after it was struck.

McCarthyism is an obvious inclusion but I want to note I had no knowledge of McCarthyism at the time. I educated myself on it as an adult well after college. The adults and teachers in my life who lived through those days never talked about it. In fact the spirit of McCarthyism hung like a cloud over American political life long into the 60’s and even into the 70’s where ideas like the Free Speech Movement, Vietnam dissent and Nixon’s humiliation broke it’s power over American intellectual life.

My Timeline

1945 Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombed
1946 I was born
1948 Marshall Plan enacted
1950 Korean War begins
1950 Cathy was born
1952 Tehachapi Earthquake
1953 Eisenhower negotiates Korean truce
1953 McCarthy chairs an investigative committee
1957 The FLN insurrection in Algiers
1957 Sputnik launched
1960 Graduate from grammar school, start high school
1960 John F. Kennedy elected president
1963 Kennedy assassinated
1964 Civil Rights Bill passed
1965 Start college
1965 Rhodesian UDI declared
1966 Join the UFWOC march to Sacramento
1967 Larry Stephan, St. Roberts classmate, killed in the DMZ
1967 Join the Air Force
1968 Married Cathy, go to England
1968 Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy assassinated
1968 Year of upheavals worldwide: Allende rises, Tet Offensive, Dubček and Prague Spring crushed, Brezhnev Doctrine, Nixon elected, Tlatelolco Massacre, My Lai revelations, Paris demonstrations, Northern Ireland Troubles intensify
1969 Sean born

1969 Apollo 11 moonwalk

1971 Ted born

1971 Honorable Discharge, start UCLA

1974 Nixon resigns

1975 Benjamin born

1975 Fall of Saigon

1977 Laurie Pessah (niece) born

1978 Benjamin bitten by rattlesnake

1980 Ronald Reagan elected president

1983 Separate from Cathy

1983 Get sober

1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre

1989 Berlin Wall falls

1990 Nelson Mandela freed from prison

1991 Rodney King beating

1995 Move to Bay Area

1995 Oklahoma City bombing

1996 Marry Susan Walters, Caius born

1999 Vida and Misia born

2001 The World Trade Center attack and collapse
2001 Start work at Juvenile Hall
2003 My father dies
2004 James born
2005 Start working at State Parks
2005 My mother dies
2005 Ami born
2006 Molly born

2008 Obama is elected President
2009 Paloma born
2011 Retire from Parks
2012 Marry Suzette Anderson
2016 Joan dies

2016 Trump is elected
2020 COVID-19 lockdown

2021 Coco born
2021 Ellen dies

2024 Trump is reelected President

2025 Paloma starts high school