Summer 1969

Forty years ago this summer, along with my Dad, brother, Grandpa, and one of Dad's fireman buddies who did rehabs as a moonlighting business, I worked hard to help to rehab the upstairs apartment in my grandparent's two-family Jersey City house. Dad and Mom were rehabbing the rooms for our family foursome to move into them.

Late each afternoon I left the rehab project and drove to 14th & Gould streets in Newark, where I started working at five o'clock, stripping UPS "cars" (does UPS still call their smallest vans "cars"?) and shifting their route-collected contents onto a long moving belt to which all the cars had backed up. Or I worked the far end of the belt, reading parcel labels and tossing the items to workmates who loaded the several trailers backed up there, trailers that left at shift's end to transport the sorted packages to regional UPS sites for local distribution & delivery.

The UPS shifts lasted for as long as there was freight to be stripped and routed. Most evenings this took about three hours, but if it took less time we were guaranteed three hours pay. At $3.03 per hour that was, in those days, just about the highest paying part-time job in the world - and I kept working it until early 1970 when the demands of university studies compelled me to leave UPS. The other great thing about the job was that if shifts took more than four hours we earned time-and-a-half pay - so you know that if shifts were edging toward the three and half hour mark every one of us greedy young capitalist apprentices, even our lone Marxist-Liberation Theology seminarian, slowed his work to try to dilate the shift past four hours!

That job was why I missed going to Woodstock. I'd bought tickets (you know, for the life of me, I cannot recall where I bought them!) for all three days of the Woodstock Music & Art Fair . But a couple of days before the festival's start my UPS boss asked me if I'd like to work overtime on the coming weekend, doing some non-freight work in the UPS center that UPS had put off. I needed the overtime money more than I needed to gallivant up to Woodstock, so I sold the tickets to a co-worker who'd declined the Saturday overtime offer.

When that co-worker finally made it back to work it was already Tuesday or Wednesday of the following week - UPS docked him for the work he missed and wrote him up for unauthorized absence. The guy was furious with me: he told us that he and his buddy hadn't gotten within fifteen miles of the stage; they had had to sleep in their car; go to the bathroom in a roadside thicket; and they had to beg food and drinking water because local grocers and restaurants - which were at least a mile from my coworker's car - had exhausted their stocks to the first waves of festival-bound customers who'd come from the unforeseeable, miles-long traffic jam. He and his mate got rained on, caked in mud, stank to high heaven; and when my coworker returned to work he wanted to choke me. All I could say to him was, "Wow, man. Who knew?"

Somehow, although I noted their engineering achievement, I never caught the romance of the Mercury-Gemini-Apollo space programs. Never wanted to be an astronaut; never had a yen to be shoehorned into a claustrophobic frail capsule to have myself shot into a colossal, super-cold vacuum. I suppose that I just felt that the space program was rather unremarkable, that it was just one of those things that exists, that's simply present in life; much as youngsters nowadays regard digital computer and cell phone technology as something that's just been an unremarkable, integral part of their life. I imagine that the children of Zog, inventor of the axle (which was the invention that made those round things - you know: wheels - useful), thought the axle unremarkable: "So what, Dad? So we're lucky to have the revolutionary, history-making axle already. So lighten up on the The Way It Before the Axle Was When I Was A Kid stories and help us load the frikking cart!"

When Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon I was visiting my cousin George in his parents' house in Rutherford. George and I had gone through parochial school together - every grade, every nun, every schoolday morning mass, every rosary, every tears-provoking ruler whap! on our welted backsides. By summer 1969, four years after he and I had first picked up a guitar, George and I were still guitar novices. The moon mission failed to capture our imaginations. While the rest of the world was riveted to telecasts of Neil Armstrong's footfall, George was spinning a vinyl LP, turning me on to Ten Years After's blistering rendition of Woody Herman's "Woodchopper's Ball." Now that sent us to the moon, where we took no pictures, left no footprints.