Coming of age during the era of the Walk for Development - 1971


I was thirteen years old when I did the Walk for Development (which I recall as the Walk for Mankind) in Minneapolis in 1971. And to me, it represents the winds of change that were starting to happen to young people at the beginning of the 1970s. Of course, I had no idea what I was doing, and what it meant, and I'm sure that the twenty-four dollars that I collected that day didn't change the world. By the way, no, I'm not in the photo, it's just something that my mom saved about the event in the Minneapolis Tribune - that's her handwriting. Yes, I walked 30 miles. I was a kid, and was used to walking, I could have walked even farther.

Being born in 1958 technically makes me a "Baby Boomer" (which extends all of the way to people born in 1964) but when I talk to actual Baby Boomers (born soon after World War II) nowadays, I find that my experience coming of age is different. The '60s were over, and the world that Austin Powers lived in was already gone. It was the end of the innocence.

Listening to true Baby Boomers makes me wistful for the world they grew up in. Theirs was the incredible time of the 1950s, and 1960s. Their parents had cars with big tail fins on it, and they listened to rock and roll when it was new. By way of contrast, the "Pinto Mustang" came out in 1973, and music was starting to play something called "disco". There was still rock and roll, but it had lost its playful tone, and had become just "rock".

I was a toddler when John Kennedy was assassinated, and I knew nothing of his era of Camelot. The first president that I became aware of was Richard Nixon. The colorful hippies of the 1960s were becoming a serious problem in cities, and a carefree lifestyle of Easy Riding while selling drugs had developed a strong backlash, which ultimately became the War on Drugs.

We were nostalgic for the 1960s in the early 1970s, and one of the most popular albums when I was in junior high school was the Beach Boys' "Endless Summer". We were already looking back to happier days.
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