These are tales of the baby boom generation, the slice who created the upheavals of the 1960s: radicals and hippies, civil rights marchers and war protesters. The stories are my personal accounts of my generation’s experience, spanning my suburban origins in the Fifties, rebellion in the Sixties, and counterculture explorations in the Seventies. Next came a tenacious journey of return to the mainstream, hard won success in the Establishment, and twenty-first century aging.

The book begins with my stumbling entry into the Civil Rights Movement in 1968, when I delivered my first lecture as a white professor before an audience of 250 quizzical Black freshmen at a southern Black university. Over two years it became my extraordinary experience of living across racial lines in America during the Civil Rights Movement.

Several chapters range farther back to the striving immigrant world of my parents and grandparents, my family roots in West Side Chicago in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, and how we reached the suburbs. I also explore the near future, my daughter’s millennial world of uncertain prospects and diminished expectations, the contemporary world I comfortably inhabit today as a retired boomer.

This book chronicles the impacts of the Sixties on my own path and my generation. Political radicalism and the counterculture inspired my first life change: away from suburban Skokie to radical Berkeley to explore new political and cultural possibilities, including lifelong membership in a commune where I learned the value of collective living and collective decision making.

The tumultuous Sixties ended, but those years of rebellion haunted me as I made the great leap from hippie and radical teacher to corporate lawyer and eventually boss. The tensions between my conservative aspirations from the Fifties and my radical ideals from the Sixties shaped the decades that followed, as I forged a relationship with my wife’s billionaire uncle, who became the unlikely friend and mentor. 

I inaugurated my retirement wearing a glittering red sequined dress as a straight participant in Red Dress Day on the California AIDS ride, a very gay cycling event of the 2010s, and realized I had become a partner in another great civil rights struggle, the gay movement for equality. My retirement also featured the resolution of my personal thirty-year struggle to dispose of the gold my brothers and I inherited from our father.

“How did I get here?” That ironic question from the Talking Heads’ song “Once in a Lifetime” drives these stories as I tried to make sense of the vicissitudes of my life by addressing that question again and again.