Monday, July 20, 2009

Seems like yesterday......what a great summer!

The Summer of '69: A season that shook the world

From the moon to the Mets, and Vietnam to Woodstock, what a time it was

By any measure, the summer of 1969 was extraordinary, in the world, across the nation, and on Long Island. It was a summer of remarkable achievement, as the U.S. space program won the race to the moon, with help from Long Island's Grumman engineers, who built the lunar module Eagle.

The Mets marched to a World Series victory that even their most avid fans couldn't have predicted. Theirs followed the championship runs of two other local teams - the Jets and the Knicks.

On a farm in Bethel, N.Y., nearly 500,000 people gathered for the Woodstock music festival that would come to symbolize the hopes for making "love, not war." For some, Woodstock also was an orgy of drugs and overindulgence.

It was a summer of tumult. While students throughout the country marched for civil rights, casualties in the increasingly unpopular war in Vietnam continued to mount. On Long Island, the average age of the war dead was 21. By the time summer began, 89 young people from Nassau and Suffolk had lost their lives that year. MORE HERE