The Summer of '69: A season that shook the world

By any measure, the summer of 1969 was extraordinary, in the world, across the nation, and on Long Island. It was a summer of remarkable achievement, as the U.S. space program won the race to the moon, with help from Long Island's Grumman engineers, who built the lunar module Eagle.

The Mets marched to a World Series victory that even their most avid fans couldn't have predicted. Theirs followed the championship runs of two other local teams - the Jets and the Knicks.

On a farm in Bethel, N.Y., nearly 500,000 people gathered for the Woodstock music festival that would come to symbolize the hopes for making "love, not war." For some, Woodstock also was an orgy of drugs and overindulgence.

It was a summer of tumult. While students throughout the country marched for civil rights, casualties in the increasingly unpopular war in Vietnam continued to mount. On Long Island, the average age of the war dead was 21. By the time summer began, 89 young people from Nassau and Suffolk had lost their lives that year.

Those lucky enough to make it home were often greeted with hostility by a public protesting the war and angered by reports of civilian deaths in Vietnam.

It was a time of shocking scandal and crime. On a tiny island called Chappaquiddick, the scion of the nation's most prominent political family, Sen. Edward Kennedy, drove off a narrow bridge in a mishap that left his passenger drowned and cost him a chance to follow his brother to the White House.

A week later, a psychotic cult leader named Charles Manson, and those who followed him, conducted a murder spree in the Hollywood hills, killing nine people, including the pregnant actress Sharon Tate.

Images of the violence, the protests, and the war streamed into America's living rooms, where the face of Walter Cronkite graced every TV. Viewers escaped the steady diet of bad news by tuning to lighthearted fare: "Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In," "Here's Lucy" and " Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color." "Sesame Street" made its debut that year.

On Jones Beach, a sea of teenagers listened to portable transistor radios as Cousin Brucie played Stevie Wonder's "My Cherie Amour" and the Rolling Stones' "Honky Tonk Woman."

Forty years later, those teenage baby boomers are looking back as they plan for retirements that for some are delayed years beyond their hopes. Tom Licari of Amityville, who attended Woodstock just weeks after finishing his junior year at Chaminade High School, went on to become a lawyer with two children. "We were supposed to save the world," he said, "but careers, parenthood, marriage and divorce all got in the way."

>> YOUR VOICES : 26 readers tell their stories from the summer of 1969