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 opponents, environmentalists, feminists, and many more varieties of protest to follow. The stories are my personal accounts of my generation’s experience, spanning 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 in the late Sixties. Over ten years it became my extraordinary experience of living in America, largely in Berkeley, in the Sixties and after.

Several chapters range farther back to the striving immigrant worlds of my parents and grandparents, 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, and the contemporary world I comfortably inhabit today as a retired boomer.

This book primarily chronicles my paths through the Sixties. Political radicalism and the counterculture inspired my first big life change, a Sixties transformation away from suburban Skokie to the new political and cultural possibilities of radical Berkeley, California. It included lifelong membership in a commune where I learned the value of collective living and collective decision making, a story that continues to the present.

The tumultuous Sixties ended, but those years of rebellion haunted me as I made my next transformation, the great leaps from radical teacher and hippie to corporate lawyer and eventually a boss. The tensions between my conservative aspirations from the Fifties and my radical ideals from the Sixties shaped the decades that followed. Consider two terrific friendships, one with Joe Rapoport, the Twenties labor organizer who became the subject of my first book; and then came my wife’s Uncle Benedict, the billionaire real estate investor who became an unlikely mentor for my career successes as an attorney and court administrator and an unlikelier friend.

I inaugurated my retirement, at age 67 in 2012 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. There I realized I had become a partner in another great civil rights struggle, the gay movement for equality.

My retirement also featured, at last, the resolution of my thirty-years quest to get the gold my brothers and I inherited from my father. Why did it require thirty years? Well, that gold was dissolved in zinc, not easy to reach.

“How did I get here?” That ironic question from the Talking Heads’ song “Once in a Lifetime,” drives these stories as I tried to understand my life and my world. I encountered that question again and again.