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By July 4, 1969, the murders on Lake Herman Road remained unsolved and had transposed into mystery. Summer fun was now high on the horizon. Independence Day is the perfect holiday for Summer— a time of outdoor fun, picnics, barbecuing, shooting off firecrackers, enjoying the same symphony music, same parks, same boat regattas.
The summer of 1969 was also a volatile time. The antiestablishment movement was now sweeping the nation. The Summer of Love, a benchmark for the Baby Boomers, was already 2 years old. The Haight wasn’t bustling with the mainstream anymore. A weird psychedelic drug culture was replacing it. It was becoming the center of dropouts and illicit trade. The same Baby Boomers were now preparing for a new benchmark. In just over a month a huge festival was to be held to which the nation’s youth would flock, as they did to the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco in 1967. Billed as an “Aquarian Exposition: 3 days of music and peace,” it was to be the “Sermon on the Mount” for the hippie era. It would go down in history as Woodstock.
(The videos at left will help contextualize for the reader the era. Two of them are Scott Mackenzie singing San Francisco. These were chosen for the archival footage in them. The third video is actual film of the Haight-Ashbury area in San Francisco in 1967. You can see hippies and counterculture mixed with what your average teen and youth looked like,
1967.)
Also, soon America was preparing to set a man on the moon. On July 16, Apollo 11 was scheduled to take off. Life went on, but it was at the fulcrum of the Janus. Between the extremes, American society was treading into tomorrow, awaiting the age of the Jetsons. Today it celebrated a colonial past with powdered wigs, tricorn hats, redcoats and bluecoats, muskets, and lots of fireworks amidst psychedelia, counterculture and the wilting symbols of flower children.
For the details, please see Gian J. Quasar’s HorrorScope, online or at a book store near you.
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