Pubdate: Sun, 25 Jul 1999 Source: San Jose Mercury News (CA) Copyright: 1999 Mercury Center Contact: http://www.sjmercury.com/ Author: Peter H. King, Sacramento Bee Note: Dear Readers: I sometimes receive notes about duplicate items. We do try to keep them to a minimum. (Newshawks: you can help by insuring that when you send an item to the subject line is the headline just as it appears in the source - this allows our roboeditor to help in the duplicate checking process.) However there is a group of readers, mostly those who write LTEs, who want to know about every instance of an item appearing in different sources. Thus we post this item, which has already been posted once from the Bee. - Richard Lake, Sr. Editor WHY THE '60S NEVER SEEM TO FADE AWAY SACRAMENTO -- This week, sadly and for obvious reasons, the Kennedy funeral procession returned to American television screens -- in particular, the still powerful image of little John F. Kennedy Jr. saluting his father's casket as it rolled by. I was a Fresno third-grader the first time I saw this signature moment of the '60s, live, on a black-and-white television. Then, as now, I wondered if the 3-year-old boy knew what it was all about, this idea of death, of his father never coming home. This month in Berkeley, an echo of the Free Speech Movement has been getting heavy media play. A lockout at KPFA, the alternative radio station with roots deep in the lively turmoil of the '60s, brought out waves of street demonstrators -- ``the true graybeards of the '60s and '70s,'' as the San Francisco Chronicle described them. ``We want mediation, not facilitation,'' Larry Bensky, a displaced on-air personality dubbed ``the God of KPFA,'' thundered to the protesters, ``and that doesn't mean sitting around a table, holding hands and singing `Kumbaya.' '' My childhood memories of Berkeley's contributions to the '60s are not as vivid as those of the Kennedy assassination. In fact, sometimes in Fresno it seemed as though the '60s were something happening somewhere else, on the other side of the Altamont Pass. I do recall, however, my older brother getting caught once by my folks with a copy of the Berkeley Barb. The results were not pleasant. Out Of This World Also this week, the Apollo moon landing has been everywhere, with public television specials and the newspaper recollections of various participants, from Neil Armstrong on down. Again, I remember that July night 30 years ago. What I remember most is standing in the back yard and gazing up through the valley sky, as if the ``fire on the moon,'' as Mailer called it, could be seen with a teenager's naked eye. Add to this list of 1960s echoes the capture last month of Symbionese Liberation Army fugitive Kathleen Ann Soliah (yes, the SLA was of the '70s, but much of what is attributed to the '60s actually happened in the next decade; it's part of the phenomenon). And the ongoing political knee-jerkery over medicinal marijuana. . . . And the recent controversies in Orange County over South Vietnamese refugees. . 2E . And the start of a presidential campaign in which the question of what candidates did, or did not do, in the Vietnam War will once more be on the table. . . . The '60s are not dead. They are with us still, casting unshakable shadows across life and public discourse in this country, defining in many ways the national debate. And with California being ``America, only more so'' -- Stegner's phrase -- and also the sound set for many moments known collectively as the '60s, the undying decade seems especially alive in this state now. Many Last Breaths A few years ago, upon the death of Jerry Garcia, I tried to compile a list of all the times the '60s were said to have died: At Altamont Pass, with the Hells Angels raising lethal hell at a Rolling Stones concert; with the Manson murders in the Los Feliz hills; with Jim Morrison in the bathtub in Paris; on the embassy rooftop in Saigon, as the last American helicopter left; with the fiery assault on the SLA hideout in South Los Angeles, and on and on. Why this comic effort to keep declaring the '60s dead? Not much ink or air time is wasted marking when, say, the '80s died. Why does this time known as the '60s keep coming back? The '60s mattered: in many ways, on many levels. They were, as a friend who lived in the thick of all things '60s likes to say, ``the last great time.'' Big stuff happened, some of it ugly, some of it wonderful. Basic ideas -- everything from the presumption of a national goodness to the confines of earthly gravity -- were challenged. To revisit the Berkeley radio protester, it wasn't just ``holding hands and singing `Kumbaya.' '' - --- MAP posted-by: Richard Lake