Aug. 15, 1969: Billed as "3 Days of Peace & Music," the Woodstock Music and Art Fair begins on Max Yasgur's farm in Bethel, NY, about 43 miles from Woodstock. More than 400,000 will descend on the venue that was only anticipating half that number. Things get weird. The nation changed forever.

I was 18 when the Woodstock erupted on the American scene. I had graduated from Fairfield High School, a modest-sized suburban public school, in June of the same year. I was to spend the summer as an assistant, paid by a medical research grant, and supervised by one James H. Halsey, the Chief of Neurology at the University of Alabama (Birmingham). After the 10 weeks of work at UAB - saving everything I made for the lean times ahead - I was off to Tuscaloosa, Alabama for my freshman year of college. Who cares, right? If you will indulge me, I hope to make a point, even if it possibly obscure and, well, to anyone other than me, perhaps even trivial.

To say that 1969 was a pivotal year in American history is an understatement. To say it was a turning point in the life of the much younger man I was is no less so. My head was spinning with more decisions that I had made in "all" the preceding years combined. My high school sweetheart was moving away to Tennessee that summer, never to be seen or heard from by me again. I was leaving home, for all practical purposes, permanently, as I would never live in the home my parents still live in to this day for more than a week or two at a time thereafter. My immersion into "higher education" and the changes in my belief system would, eventually, cause a rift between my parents and I, particularly my father, that would last for two decades. The comfort zone that F.H.S. had been for 3 years was forcefully ripped from my world as suddenly and with such finality that it may have well fallen through a crack in the earth. Friends I had known since I moved into the western Birmingham hinterlands were dispersed, like dandelions, to the four winds and I would never see most of them ever again. The firmament - at least the ground beneath my adolescent feet - was violently moving and my sense of balance and permanence was, for the second time in my young life ^{( 1 )}, torn asunder.

America, totally unaware that one of its own was traumatized and sweating profusely, was also being shaken a to her core. There were the simply remarkable changes:

- the last issue of The Saturday Evening Post was published after a run of 147 years

- Joe Namath and the NY Jets of the AFL upset the NFL’s "unbeatable" Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III and pro football was forever changed

- Richard M Nixon succeeded Lyndon Johnson as the 37^th President of the United States

- The Beatles gave their last public "concert" (on the roof of Apple Records)

- Terrorism reared its ugly head in North America as separatists French radicals bombed the Canadian Stock Exchange in Montreal

Then, there were changes with long-range implications:

- Apollo 11 landed on the moon and Neil Armstrong stepped out for all the world to see and, more, to hear his immortal words: "One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind."

- Charles Manson and his band of psychopaths go on their killing spree in Los Angeles

- Ted Kennedy drives off a bridge near Chappaquiddick Island; companion Mary Jo Kopechne drowns - the Kennedy political dynasty died with her

- The My Lai Massacre occurs in Vietnam and the face of the war changes forever; the war to win "hearts and minds" - America’s and the Vietnamese - is forever lost

- The AIDS virus migrates for the first time from Haiti

And, incidently, a kid named "Albright" is forced to finally grow up.

Clearly, other landmark years have occurred, before and since, my pivotal 1969. One can, just in the last 100 years, single out 1941, 1989 and 2001 as years when there were seismic shifts in the nation and the global status quo. The adults of the age, including my folks, were jittery, sure, but most in 1969 knew America was strong and they didn’t get too worried about their lives or their well-being. In contrast, a fuzzy-faced kid from a lower middle-class family, facing the big bad world - especially the alien microcosm of academia - outside the suburbs was scared to death. Especially, when that kid was a gallon or two short of a full tank of self-confidence. I knew I was about to go toe-to-toe with people far smarter than me with far superior preparatory educations and many with a lineage of family success, sons of doctors and lawyers and merely the self-made rich. And here I was, an insecure, self-doubting and painfully shy son of a postman and the stepson of a secretary.

I plunged (with, I imagine, the same deep sense of foreboding a European peasant felt landing on Ellis Island, circa 1910) into the alien world that was college. Unlike many of my contemporaries, I had absolutely no idea how college "worked" - the ins and outs, the tricks, the shortcuts. I was a freshman in every sense of the word and it showed. Standing in the lines in the cavernous auditorium trying to sign up for the various courses I was instructed were "required", indelibly stamped on my forehead exactly where I stood in the New World’s pecking order. While the upperclassmen had snatched up all the plum classes (the easy "A’s", the afternoon sessions and all of the Tues-Thursday classes), as a freshman, I was left with the moldy crumbs: the 8:00AM classes, M-W-F and the grizzled teachers with tenure who were not at all averse to flunking freshman if for no other reason than their own amusement and to feed a perverted sense of power. While the intelligentsia knew to schedule all their classes back-to-back, ideally in the coveted 1:00-5:00 PM blocks on Tuesday and Thursday to make for long weekends, I was not privy to such inside information. Naive of who taught what and just happy to get any class on my required list, I was stuck, of course, with at least one class every day and, usually, those from 8:00-9:30AM and the next at 1:00PM. It would be a trial by fire, as it should be.

The other right of passage for a freshman was finding a place to live. Having no real close acquaintances (I told you I was shy and, consequently, a bit of a loner, as I am to this day) joining me at the University from F.H.S. and, thus, having no prearranged apartment sharing agreements, I was relegated to the other downside of the freshman year: dormitory living. I was assigned to a bland, East German-like high-rise complex called Petty Hall, nestled in a treeless field about 2 miles from where the actual classes were to be held. Having no car, at least, exercise would not be a problem. Of course, as low man on the academic totem pole, I was assigned a room on the 6^th floor (there were 7 floors and no elevators) and had no idea who I would have as a roommate other than the name on the card I was handed at registration: "H. Blaylock". Little did I know the young man behind than name would end up saving my college career, at least in year one.

Hank Blaylock was from Huntville, Alabama or, at least, a small hamlet near what was the second-largest city in the state. He was a tall, lanky, Lincoln-esque figure with a quiet, strangely-confident demeanor befitting the valedictorian he had been at his little high school. Where I was a bundle of nerves, riddled with the fear a very insecure fish should have in a very large pond, Hank exuded a quiet confidence that, first, disarmed me (weren’t freshman all supposed to be scared witless?) and, after a time, reassured me. He, just by his wry smile at my anxiety, eventually convinced me that even loners like he and I could swim with the sharks and, possibly, not be their lunch.

Let it suffice to say, I eventually got through that freshman year, cloistered away in noisy, very unexclusive Petty Hall, where the losers, the misfits and the poor resided in 1969. With Hank’s unflappable demeanor (and more than a little assistance from him with my math courses), I began to actually believe that I belonged in this gathering of future intellectuals. Sure, I remained a nerd (slide rule clipped to belt, pocket protector, horn-rimmed glasses), a solitary, unimpressive figure shuffling across the tundra to my classes and holed up in the library when not in a lecture. But, in my heart, a miraculous metamorphosis was taking place: I began to believe. I began to believe in myself and my abilities. And belief breeds confidence and that, gentle reader, can parent great things.

As America reeled from the chaos of the "Flower Power" movement, growing war protests, and the deepening chill of the Cold War, the life of a fledgling college student began to put down his first, fragile roots into the "real world". As I expected, that world was a tough, hard place where competition was the byword and failure was dealt with coldly and without remorse. I saw many of the students (some I has known from good old F.H.S.) who were more upper- than middle-class, living "off-campus" in their upscale apartments or, for the very well off, fraternity houses, stumble and fall, never to rise, academically speaking in any case. At the end of the first semester, a few vanished from campus; by the end of the first year, there were even more who never returned for a second year. I quickly learned that poverty, which is to say living without distractions, sometimes pays unexpected dividends.

Those who believe that Providence never intercedes in the lives of fools, let me assure you, sometimes, it does. An 18 year old with woefully inadequate math skills, signs up for required pre-med courses that, to his horror, include calculus and physics. In his well-deserved insecurity, he is convinced he has no chance to ever pass them. He stays in a dormitory because he doesn’t have the money to live in better quarters and, as a result, is assigned a stranger from a different city. The roommate, the pre-med learns, is an engineering student who can’t write a complete sentence but eats calculus, trigonometry and algebra for breakfast. The two form a friendship of convenience - the pre-med helps the engineer with his English courses, the mathematician helps the pre-med (barely) get through his math prerequisites. It was human symbiosis at its finest: two nerds surviving in the land of the privileged and gifted, like flounder swimming, unobtrusively, in a tank of gilded dolphins.

Personally, it is quietly poignant when I think about Hank and my first year as an adult. Regrettably, I never saw or heard of Hank after 1969, the year that America and a kid from nowhere changed forever. I know he is a success because I remember his determination and his confidence. Those are two personality traits that are hard to defeat. I like to think that old Hank became an engineer, went back to Huntsville, married his high school sweetheart and has had a happy and successful life. I am sure he is totally unaware of the life-changing lesson he taught me way back in 1969. Namely, you should never underestimate what you can learn from others even when, at first blush, you might appear to have absolutely nothing in common.

I may have long-sinced forgotten how to solve quadratic equations but I will never forget the real gift from my freshman roommate.

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1. The first time the earth moved beneath my feet to the degree that my life would never be the same again was when my parents split up when I was 9. I will not rehash old traumas but, for the few that might be interested, the sordid details of that tumultuous time can be reviewed here.