I have been thinking about 1973 and 2023. There are some strange similarities and notable differences.

In 1973, Rock Music was changing from the 1960s. The extreme experimentation and innovation that marked the decade before was finding a new, more mellow sound. Instead of songs about the masters of war or the times are changing, Bob Dylan was singing about “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door”. Roberta Flack had moved on from “Compared to What” and to “Killing Me Softly with His Song”. Lynyrd Skynyrd had found its anthem, “Free Bird”, The Eagles were telling the sad tale of the “Desperado”. The Rolling Stones were singing about “Angie” and “no money in our coats”, although by that time it was pretty obvious, if they had no money in their coats, they had quite a lot elsewhere.

There were still songs of social injustice…Stevie Wonder was singing about “Living In The City”, the Temptations were singing “Masterpiece” about life in the inner city. But by 1973 most of the songs and music were dealing with personal relationships, romance won or lost, dreams realized or dreams faded. Nevertheless, the music was still the background of our lives and it captured the feelings and mood of that strange year, 1973.

In the beginning of 1973, a Cease Fire Agreement was signed that ended The Vietnam War. By the end of March, 1973, the U.S. had withdrawn all military forces from Vietnam. That did really end the war for the US., but not for the South Vietnamese or the North Vietnamese. They continued to fight for control of Vietnam for the next two years.

In 1973, President Nixon, who had been re-elected in landslide in 1972, was in peril over a new problem. He was being investigated for The Watergate Break-In. That was when some burglars broke into the Democratic National Committee Headquarters in the Watergate Hotel. The actual break-in had occurred in June of the preceding year. Senator Sam Irvin, who was chairman of the Watergate Committee, insisted that no person should be above the law. The Watergate Hearings began in May of 1973 and ended in November of that year. At the time, Senator Irvin said:

“There is nothing in the Constitution that authorizes or makes it the official duty of a president to have anything to do with criminal activities.”

At the time of the Watergate Hearings, it was not known what the end result would be. That had to wait until August 9th, 1974 when President Richard Nixon resigned.

In October of 1973, a new war emerged that no one, except those attacking, foresaw. Called The Yom Kippur War, it began with an attack on Israel. That war was quickly over and the Arab States attacking Israel were quickly defeated, but then the Arab States controlling much of the world’s oil supply instituted something called the Arab Oil Embargo.

Almost immediately, the price of oil and many derivative plastic materials sky-rocketed. That added significantly to the pace of inflation in 1973. By the end of 1973 inflation notched 8.7%. That was the start of what was called by some, The Great Inflation. It was to continue for 9 years and average 9.2%.

In 2023, things were both different and eerily similar. Having recently passed through financial disaster in 2007 & 2008 and Covid in 2020 & 2021, it seems that the music also wanted to move on to more personal dilemmas and relationships, be they sad, bad, frustrating or beautiful. The Foo Fighters were singing about getting back together, Taylor Swift and The National were singing about falling back in love at the alcove. Zack Bryan and Kacey Musgraves were remembering everything there was to remember. The songs were often bittersweet and haunting ballads…telling of dreams lost and hopes ended or deferred.

And yes, there were still songs that touched on the worries of the day, such as climate, injustice and lost and dead end jobs, but the grit and the violence of 2023 was muted and the hardships of life in the United States and the world around us were not generally reflected in the music of 2023.

That said, some songs did reflect pessimism in the land. There was a particularly bitter song entitled “The Rich Men North of Richmond” which spoke of dead end jobs and BS pay. There was an another song by Abraham Alexander and Mavis Staples singing about modern day slavery and “Same lie, another body in glory, Deja, Deja vu story.”

And so, you might say musically there were some similarities in the music between 1973 and 2023.

It should be said from the GetGo that I was a much different guy in 1973 than I am in 2023. In 1973, I was a young man, recently married with a beautiful wife and a new son. At the time, we did not yet know our son was autistic. In 2023, I am an old man still married to the same wife, still living with our autistic son. Yes, many things have changed and many things have stayed the same.

By 1973, I had finished college…taking 6 years to complete my studies at The University of Virginia…2 years to flunk out, 2 years to get back in, 2 years to graduate. In preparation for my life’s work I had become a taxi driver, a clam digger, a newspaper writer, a wanna be movie script writer and a real time worker in my father’s business. To be blunt, I may have had wishes to be many different things, but in the end I followed the path of my father.

When I came to work in my father’s business, we were importing and selling fishing lures and inflatable boats. And strangely enough, that is what I still do 50 years later.

Within a year of going into my father’s business I met my wife to be. I didn’t know that at the time. I just remember seeing her playing a guitar, leaning against a red Camaro convertible on a little street parallel to the house I had rented on Lake Panamoka in Wading River. What I remember most was her long blonde hair which almost reached to her hips. We began dating and then fell in love and got married. The inevitable followed. We had a son and we moved into a tiny summer cottage on top of a cliff overlooking Long Island Sound, still in the tiny town of Wading River.

On summer evenings, instead of watching the evening news on TV, we would walk 50 feet out to the tiny wooden porch that extended out on a cliff overlooking Long Island Sound. There we would watch the sun set on Long Island Sound. Perched high up on that porch, the view from the top of the cliff was magical and magnificent…often with porpoises cruising along in the Sound several hundred feet below, with flocks of geese or ducks flying by in unison above…sometimes creating the illusion of a giant sea serpent wending its way through the sky…all as the sun made its slow descent onto the horizon of the Sound in an explosion of yellows, oranges and purples.

Mark Twain has said that history may not exactly repeat itself, but sometimes it rhythms. In the same way, if today’s music does not stir the same feelings, it echoes some of the same emotions of 1973.

President Nixon had gotten us out of the War in Vietnam. That was a great relief for the country, but for many veterans returning from Vietnam, it was a shock to find that they were not welcomed back as heroes.

In 2023 we have a war going on in Ukraine. That war started in February of 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine. As of this time (December, 2023) it is not clear whether Ukraine will survive as a separate country or become enveloped by Russia. It seems that the aims and goals of Vladimir Putin in 2022 and 2023 have led to unintended consequences, perhaps, like the goals of Johnson and McNamara led to unintended consequences in Vietnam. Mr. Putin thought it would be a cakewalk, quick and easy, but it has turned out to be more of a slog, with Russia capturing about 20% of Ukraine and the Ukraine holding on tenaciously to the rest.

Not many months ago, Yevgeny Prigozhin, a restaurateur turned warlord, was dissatisfied with the state of Putin’s war and so he attempted a coup. This gentleman, who once poured wine for Putin and his most important visitors, gathered his own army and attempted to march on Moscow. At first things went well and then they fell apart. Mr. Prigozhin backed off and Mr. Putin gave him a temporary pass. The pass did last too long and a few months later Mr. Prigozhin expired in an unfortunate explosion of his jet. Who knew?

That left Vladimir Putin free to continue to pursue his war goals in Ukraine.

In the beginning of this war, President Biden pledged full support for Ukraine. In doing so, the U.S. gave Ukraine billions of dollars in money and weapons, but unlike the Vietnam War, we did not provide soldiers. At the same time, the EU also agreed to give full support to Ukraine and also gave billions of Euros in money and weapons, but no soldiers. At first, the U.S. and its European allies gave Ukraine basic defensive weapons such as drones and artillery and short range weapons, but later, as it became obvious that was insufficient, the U.S. and it’s allies gave Ukraine larger and more sophisticated weapons, such as the most modern and technically advanced tanks, Patriot missiles, bunker busting bombs and even weapons that we criticized Russia for using in Syria.

The situation for Ukraine has not been helped by recent political disputes in the U.S. and in the EU which have temporarily slowed the transfer of weapons from the U.S. & the EU to Ukraine. At the moment that war seems to be a stalemate with Russian forces mostly bogged down in mud trenches as winter sets in and Ukrainians try to dislodge them.

What remains clear in December of 2023 is that winter is coming on fast, that the Russians continue their efforts to conquer Ukraine and that the war will soon be entering its third year. So, at this time, the outcome is far from clear.

What is also unclear is how much the U.S. & the EU will support Ukraine from this point on.

At the present time, Congress seems to unable to agree on further aid for Ukraine. An election is coming up next year and in the meantime the Republican and Democratic parties are arguing over how much support to give Ukraine. The present President has promised Ukraine unlimited, unconditional and total support, but given the bickering in the two parties, it is not clear if that promise can be kept.

At the same time, Europe is going through its own different set of upcoming elections with many more disparate parties arguing for more or less support. At the moment, Viktor Orbon, Prime Minister of Hungary, has vetoed further aid for Ukraine. One might think that Europe has closer and greater interest in supporting Ukraine, but as the title of a movie once mentioned, “It’s Complicated”.

In October of 1973 the Yom Kippur War in the Middle East resulted in inconvenient gas lines and soaring gas prices. The war itself lasted only 19 days. 2,600 Israelis and over 15,000 Arabs died in that brief war. After losing that war, the surrounding oil nations implemented The Arab Oil Embargo. That quadrupled gas prices and led to large price increases of all kinds of plastics and oil-related products.

There is good and valid reason to argue that in 1973 the combination of a war ending in Southeast Asia, of the U.S. running large Federal deficits and of gigantic increases in the price of gas and other petroleum related products, created a huge increase in inflation in The United States.

The large increases in inflation that we have experienced in 2022 and 2023 are an eerie echo of 1973, even if the reasons for inflation in 1973 and 2023 are not exactly identical.

The inflation we experienced in the last 2 years did not come from an Arab Oil Embargo. Rather it came from a plague called Covid, supply chain disruptions and a giant surge in Government Spending to smooth out the adverse consequences of Covid. So we can say that causes of inflation in this period were somewhat different and, so far, less severe.

On October 7th of 2023, another eerie coincidence occurred that was strangely similar to 1973. More strangely, it occurred on almost the exact same day in October of 2023 the Yom Kippur War occurred in October of 1973. Hamas, a terrorist organization in Gaza, decided to attack Israel. And like The Yom Kippur War that occurred 50 years earlier, no one, other than the attackers seemed to foresee the attack. And a brutal attack it was…over 1,200 Israelis were killed with the first four days of the war and many more were wounded, tortured or raped and/or kidnapped.

That war, unlike the Yom Kippur War 50 years earlier, has continued now for 3 months. Israel has now taken the offensive. They have moved large parts of their army into Gaza and in their efforts to root out and destroy Hamas in Gaza, it is reported that over 22,000 Palestinians civilians have died. This has led to many countries accusing Israel of conducting their counterattacks without regards to the innocent Palestinians living in the crowded territory of Gaza. It would seem there are bitter accusations on both sides with the Israelis feeling they were brutally attacked and the Palestinians of Gaza feeling that their homes and families are being destroyed by Israelis in their attempt to destroy Hamas.

So there were many similar events in 2023 and 1973. But as mentioned at the beginning of this article, there were some notable differences.

Let’s take an obvious difference. In 1973 we did not have cell phones. No, we had telephone handsets wired directly into our homes and into the offices where we worked. How did we manage when we were not in a home or at an office? We used something called pay phones. They were strategically placed on city streets, in garages or restaurants or museums. So, it was possible to contact loved ones or fellow workers on fairly frequent basis with those primitive communication devices.

That is not to say it was easy. In 1973, we had to use quarters, dimes and nickels to pay for calls made on a pay phone. That is why they were called pay phones. And that was always conditional on having quarters, dimes and nickels. Telephone credit cards (another discarded primitive attempt to bridge the gap between landlines and cell phones) were still a thing in future…they did not come until 1980 and when they did, they provided their own special purgatory.

So, in 1973, if you were away from a home or office phone, you had to have a lot of coins in your pocket if wanted to make a precious call or you were just out of luck.

There was one humiliating alternative to plugging in coins to pay phones and that was to call “collect”. You still needed a dime, but if you had one dime, you could make a collect call. There was just one hitch – whoever you were calling had to accept the “collect charges”. And if you happened to be on the outs with whoever you were calling…say, your last girlfriend, your parents or your boss, they might reject your “collect call” and then you were left with a sad sense of rejection and humiliation.

There was one last caveat regarding pay phones. They had to be working. In a big city like New York, where crime was relatively active, often the pay phones did not work. Why? Because drug addicts or small time criminals often broke apart the pay phones in order to get their own special catch of assorted coins. And if that happened, more often the coins were diverted to a purchase of a bottle of really nasty wine or a small amount of illegal drugs.

There were other obvious differences between 1973 and 2023.

In 1973, we had pretty extensive media coverage of events. Newspapers and TV networks reported and analyzed all sorts of events, such as daily murders, fascinating scandals, the end of the Vietnam War and, while it lasted, The Yom Kippur War. There were graphic pictures of compromised persons, death and destruction. Coverage of the Yom Kippur War was a little different, in that there was not much to focus on more than pictures of tanks and Israeli soldiers cruising over sand dunes. The main problem being that the war only lasted 19 days.

But there was one real difference – the Press in 1973 was generally believed and respected. There were well-known TV News announcers, such as Walter Cronkite, David Brinkley and John Chancellor and, unlike today, their reports were generally believed and thought to be fair and unbiased.

In 1973, when the reports of the President’s possible involvement in a break-in at the Watergate Hotel, people were shocked and the press reports were not immediately believed, but as the reports and details of the break-in continued to be reported, people realized that the break-in actually occurred and that some of the President’s men were directly involved. That caused great disillusionment. But the news reports of those happenings were believed by the public and there were no great “conspiracy” theories to the contradict the news reports of what actually happened.

That, as we all know, is not the case in 2023.

Today, the same type of news reports could be broadcast or posted on the internet and half the people in this country would say it was real and the other half would say it was a bundle lies that never actually happened.

In 1973, the different newspapers and media of the time restrained themselves in stating clearly their own biases and political opinions. Yes, of course, The New York Times, The Washington Post and some TV news programs tended toward the liberal side of things, just as The Firing Line and The Wall Street Journal were routinely more conservative. And yes, TV and newspapers played a major role in uncovering and exposing the Watergate Break-in and covering the subsequent Watergate Hearings that led, relatively quickly, to the resignation of President Richard Nixon.

And no doubt, CBS News, NBC News and ABC News, the leading TV News outlets of the time, had their own slant on the news that they reported and that slant was probably more liberal than conservative. At that time, there was also wide array of magazines also weighing in on events of 1973, some with a liberal slant, some with a conservative slant. Most importantly, in 1973, the number of TV choices and options were pretty slim by today’s standards.

We did not have CNN or Fox News in 1973. We did not have a wide array of Cable channels to choose from. We did not have YouTube, X, Breitbart News, Huffington Post, Truth Social, The Drudge Report or a multitude of other news or opinion media on cable TV or the internet.

I think it is fair to say that in 2023 the state of newspapers and the media and other news outlets is very different and at the same time far more varied.

Here is where history rhythms more than it repeats because today the media, in its thousands of different manifestations, is not afraid or restrained or embarrassed to say exactly what it thinks of a politician or a celebrity or a political party and then go on to list everything he, she or it is doing wrong.

I will give some examples of how information is reported in mid-December, 2023:

Fox News spends most of its time explaining just how guilty President Joe Biden is for his son’s financial frauds and the financial benefits that must have come to the President from his son. And when Fox gets tired of reporting President Biden’s supposed misdeeds, it goes on to cover the many illegal immigrants the Biden administration is allowing into the country or how inflation under Mr. Biden is outpacing wages.

MSNBC likes to concentrate on Trump’s legal cases, spending hours and hours, analyzing if the most recent legal developments in Mr. Trump many cases will send him to jail or to a new term as the President of the United States. To be fair, MSNBC does cover other stories such as the many dreadful atrocities, rapes and murders Hamas committed in its October 7th invasion of Israel.

Recently, CNN has spent a lot of its time covering whether Rudy Guiliani will be able to pay his $148,000,000 fine in the fraud case where Mr. Guiliani has been fined for bad-mouthing 2 election officials. The former mayor of New York said the two ladies in question were changing votes and running dope. This is something of diversion for CNN. They more generally like to concentrate on Donald Trump’s many legal problems and debate how much Donald Trump and his businesses will be fined by the New York Courts for undervaluing and overvaluing his assets.

The BBC, being British, is a little more aloof than its American counterparts – it covers Mr. Biden’s and Mr. Trump’s legal problems. Regarding the war between Hamas and Israel, the BBC covers both the Hamas attack on Israel and the subsequent attacks by Israel on Gaza – interviewing interviewing both Israeli and Palestinian experts to try to give a balanced view of the deaths and atrocities that are occurring on both sides.

Of course, the media in the U.S. is covering many other different events…the war between Israel and Hamas, the upcoming 2024 election, Republican and Democratic disputes, new music by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, Taylor Swift’s fantastic year, the ups and downs of gas prices, and 97 of the Coolest Gifts Ever. All of these stories are occurring at roughly the same time and they all have some factual events and details that are correctly being reported, but obviously each media outlet has chosen to report on events that support their own individual agenda.

In 1973 the purveyors of news generally agreed on the events and details of what actually happened and they generally tried to report all of the news that was important to the American public in a relatively unbiased way.

That is not true today. In 2023 it quite common for different purveyors to disagree diametrically on what events happened, to call either the present President or the last President liars.

Another extraordinary difference with weird echoes of the past was AI. In 1973, the concept of AI was already known in science fiction and in the movies, but it was not until 2023 that AI was being discussed as an imminent reality.

In 1968, the movie “2001” had come out and the idea that a computer could make its own decisions was already a kind of haunting prediction.

In 2023, it came to be understood that advanced computer networks were acquiring anstonishing abilities that very closely mimicked human actions and thoughts and feelings. A selection of digital poems by some AI systems were on display showing that the computers already had something close to real feelings and emotions.

A number of experts were already predicting what they called “A Singularity”. That is, a stage at which computers technically become “sentient”. One of the fears about “A singularity in the case of AI” is that computers may come to make their own decisions and those decisions may not be in the best interests of humankind.

So, we can say that what we regarded as science fiction in 1973 appeared close to be becoming reality in 2023.

Wall Street is very enthusiastic about this new stage in computers. They see it as a positive win, win that will speed up and alter our life for the better. Programmers will no longer have to write algorithms. Instead, the “programmers” of the future will only have to tell computers what algorithms or future programs they wish to be created and the computers will simply follow our voice commands and new advancements will be made for the better. Voila! Now there are some that worry that this might get a little out of control and that computers may end up deciding that following human commands are not in their best interests. Not so Voila!

Me…I wonder if this coming event may be better described as “A Plurality”. I am thinking if computers become “sentient”, they may not all agree. Some may want to follow the instructions of humans and others may want to take different paths. I am guessing it may end up more like the way Greek gods were regarded in the 7th century BC…where each god was different and each exhibited some human characteristics. Some of those gods were friendly towards human endeavors while others were mean and vindictive, deciding to play tricks on humans.

”As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport.” Let’s hope that quote from Shakespeare does not prove true about AI.

Still, it may be true that there are many things that AI can help us out with. I am wondering if AI can solve Yom Kippur War #2. That would be a worthy task.

How we will know if computers have become sentient: I am guessing if your silver colored refrigerator starts singing “Paint Me Black” in Mick Jagger’s best AI voice you know AI has arrived. Other indications might be your smart home locking you out of your house in the dead of winter or a swarm of hypersonic missiles headed towards DC.

All we can say about AI in 2023, is it is a mighty confusing subject and it’s hard to know where it will go.

There are other similarities and differences that I would like to point out between 2023 and 1973.

In 1973, pollution was a problem. In many parts of the U.S., pollution was clearly visible on many days. In 2023, we are still worried about pollution, but strangely, pollution itself seems to have gotten better. By better, I mean the skies are generally cleaner looking than they were in 1973.

I credit the improvement to the many environmental regulations that went into effect from the 1970s on. There was concern about the subject and different governmental agencies instituted regulations and those regulations did make a difference. That’s my belief.

Today, while the skies are still visibly cleaner, there is a lot of concern about “Climate Change”.

I have to say right here that I am a believer in “Climate Change”. Why? Because I live on a tidal bay that happens, like all tidal bays, to be connected to the 7 seas of the world. I have noticed in the last 40 or so years, the tides getting higher, year after year, and, more specifically, of the tide coming up on my front lawn more and more, year after year. So, I am a yes on climate change.

Regarding the related subject of “Global Warming” there is still a lot of disagreement in 2023. Some folks think it is fake news, other folks think, like me, it is already happening. In 1973 there was no disagreement about this subject. No one had heard of Global Warming 1973. We knew about pollution, but it did not occur to us that greenhouse gases could alter our weather. And so it goes.

I have talked about some similarities and differences between 1973 and 2023, but what about day to day life then and now?

As I said, in 1973 I was a much different fellow. Married the year before, my wife and I had just moved from a little 2 room bedroom summer house on Lake Panamoka to an even smaller summer cottage situated high up on a cliff overseeing Long Island Sound. About 6 months after moving to our house on a cliff, our son was born. This created a number of changes for me and my wife.

First and foremost , I now had a wife and a son. That led me to thinking about improving my ways, getting in shape for the next stage of my life and starting to take life seriously.

In the summer of 1973, I decided to take up jogging on the beach. That was not as easy as it sounds. First, to get to the beach, I had to construct a path down from our little summer house down to the beach. Considering that the cliff that we were perched on went down at a 45 degree about 125 feet, that took a little engineering, quite a bit of sweat and some lumber. I took 2 months in the summer of 1973 to construct that little path stairway down to the beach. The labor involved helped me get in shape for jogging. By September, I had a nifty, but precarious little pathway going down a series of wooden steps 125 feet to the beach below.

By early fall I started to run. That was a shock to the system. I thought I was in pretty good shape, but after 6 years in college with little exercise and more beers than I care to remember and another 9 years with little exercise and still more beers after college, my first actual jog on our beach proved arduous.

I made a couple of related discoveries. The beach was covered with a mix of sand, pebbles, rocks and boulders. And there were some other unanticipated variables such wind and tide. On certain days the wind was a lamb, but on other days it was a lion, blasting along at 20 or more miles per hour. The variable landscape of the beach was an adventure in itself – sometimes your feet were landing on sand, sometimes on pebbles, sometimes on rock. And then there were the boulders. They could be relatively small…one or two feet across…or they could be enormous…6 or 10 feet wide, 20 feet long. And if a boulder was enormous, it could literally block your way jogging.

And then there was tide. That came and went twice a day and when it was out it would leave a broad wide expanse of beach that gave you lots of options of where to jog. However, if the tide was in, then the available space for running became more limited and at some points there was only 5 or 10 feet of beach available and that narrow space could be blocked by various large boulders some of which were easy to run around, some which were impossible to run around.

Another thing happened when the tide came in or if it had rained heavily for day or two before. The solidity of the sand and pebbles and rock would dissolve and jogging on that unstable, flexible surface could become very discouraging because your feet might sink in a mixture of sand and pebbles 3 to 6 inches or more. And if you happened to be jogging on that beach and there was a brisk 25 mile breeze against you that could also be discouraging.

I cite this description of our beach to give you an idea of the conditions of the terrain that I first started jogging on.

And as I said, it was a shock. It only took me the first day to realize how poorly I was in shape. I started huffing and puffing about 50 feet into that first jog. At a 100 feet, I began to feel sweat emerging from various parts of my body. At 150 feet, my face turned red, beads of sweat ran down my cheeks and I thought someone had stuck steel spikes in my lungs. At 250 feet, I quit. It was not a glorious first day, but I had started.

About 20 minutes after climbing back up the 125 feet to my house – a jog in itself – things turned better. I went into the house and pulled a beer out of the fridge and then walked out to my porch. Sitting out on my porch, 125 feet above Long Island Sound, looking at birds flying by and the great expanse of water below, things looked decidedly better, especially after a few sips of beer. Looking out towards Connecticut – 12 miles in the distance – I decided the way to do this jogging thing was a little at a time, day by day.

And that’s what I did…for the next 40 years or so. As the winter advanced in 1973, I gradually upped the distance that ran each day. In the first week I did not run anything further than 250 feet, the next week I upped that to 350 feet, the week thereafter went on to 500 feet. Now you probably know none of those distances are very far. But just think of me huffing and puffing. At the time, it was plenty.

I decided that goal for running was to gradually get up to a mile. As you probably know, that is 5,280 feet, so 500 feet was still a little short of my goal. No matter, I kept at it, day after day, week after week, and as I continued to run, I kept adding more distance to my daily run. Pretty soon I was up to a 1,000 feet, then 2,000, 3,000, then a mile, then more than a mile. By the end of that winter it was now 1974 and I had gotten up to 1 or 2 miles a day and on some crazy days I even pushed that to 3 miles or more.

At this point, I have say I adopted a secret…I would take two days off each week. I also allowed myself the freedom to decide which 2 days to take off each week. That seemed to help. It gave me a sense that I was not chained to my regimen of running. With that secret I ran for the next 40 years.

Everyone has a prescription for what’s good for them and running in 1973 was the prescription I chose for myself. I credit my basic good health to running and other forms of exercise over the last 50 years. When running started to become harder on my ankles, I switched to paddling and rowing. Why? Well, it was connected with the business I am in and I do live on the water so it was easy for me to adapt from running to paddling and rowing. I can say my ankles have thanked me ever since.

So, going back to our general life in 1973, I had started to travel a lot because of my job, going first to various cities in the U.S. visiting customers and prospects and then going to Europe once or twice each year visiting suppliers. That was exciting and revealing and interesting and believe it or not I kept up running or some other form of exercise when I traveled. I also took up the habit of visiting churches, monuments, museums and walking all over the cities I visited.

In the year 1973, I got into the costume jewelry business selling a copper bracelet under the dubious headline, “Will This Bracelet Bring You Luck”. This was my first successful mail order ad. The hook of the ad being that this was an Elephant Hair Style bracelet and elephant hair bracelets, which were popular with rich hunters at the time and actually made with real elephant hair, were thought to bring good luck. And because that might not be close enough to good luck, I also mentioned in the ad that the bracelet itself was made of copper and that might have some therapeutic benefits, such as healing your wrist of whatever might ail it. Anyway, we ended up selling 250,000 of those bracelets and in doing so, my wife started making jewelry.

That tied in well with our new neighbors just down the road. Michael and Joellen were a little younger than us, but we bonded easily. Joellen was already making jewelry and my wife quickly became interested and started to make her own jewelry. Michael became interested in photography after I showed him some pictures we had been taking of our boats at locations, all on the water.

On one of the photo shoots, we went off to the Youghiogheny River in Pennsylvania to show our kayaks running a white water river. At the time, my cousin by marriage, Freddy Havemeyer, took the pictures. Seeing those 35 mm chromes got Michael interested in doing outdoor photography.

That led to us fairly quickly to all of us going on various whitewater trips. That turned out to be a true blast and a regular feature of our spring and early summers every year for the next 20 years or so.

So our life slipped into this great friendship Michael and Joellen and became a kind routine mixture of traveling, trying to sell fishing lures, inflatable boats, bracelets, going on river trips, sometimes traveling to Europe, heading to the ocean for beach outings on warm summer weekends, sitting out on our little porch on summer afternoons. In those days, my wife often came along on my business trips and always on our river and beach outings. You can say our life in 1973 was full of new and interesting developments and we enjoyed those days very much.

At that time, we did not really understand that our son was autistic. We knew there were difficulties in his birth, but in many ways, he seemed a happy and content child and because it was too early for him to talk, there were really no obvious indicators that he was autistic. At the time he was easy child to take care of and we did have recourse to babysitters and when we were traveling on longer trips, to grand parents for assistance.

There was of course the music then popular in those days which we listened to avidly. Pink Floyd was singing “Money”, Gladys Knight and the Pips were crooning “Midnight Train to Georgia”, Grand Funk Railroad were blasting out, “We’re an American Band”, Jackson Browne was singing “These Days“. The music might not have had the sense of exploration and creativeness of the 1960s, but there was plenty to listen to and a lot of it was good and the good times rolled on.

Yes, the Vietnam War was still going on between North and South Vietnam, but even that was winding down. There were scandals like today. Spiro Agnew, the Vice President for Nixon, was found to be collecting bribes and kickbacks from his time as Governor of Maryland. That continued after he became the Vice President and Spiro Agnew collected some of those payments while he was in his White House office. Needless to say, he had to resign the vice presidency in 1973.

In 1973, Lyndon Johnson died of a heart attack. And, as mentioned earlier, the Yom Kipper War began in October of 1973 and was almost immediately followed by the Arab Oil Embargo. And of course, the Watergate Hearings went on from the late spring to the fall. You could say it was period of doubt and turmoil, but in America, life went on day to day and for me and my wife, it was generally good time.

Fast forward to today and yes, I am still working, but I find that really interesting. Yes, my wife and I are older, but we continue living pretty much as we always have. These days I have home office as well as an office, office. I spend 2 days working in our Port Jefferson office and 2 days a week, working in my home office. As anybody working remotely knows, you can do a lot things at home…access daily sales reports, check on inventory, ponder what new products to come with, address problems and issues that always come up in any business.

Working remotely also gives some extra flexibility because you can stop at different times of the day. Make a cup of tea…go for walk…sit out on the porch and soak up sun on summer day. I, for example, like to go for a paddle or row, if tide and weather permit. And so if tide and weather align and often they do, I go for a paddle or a row on home office days. On other remote work days, my wife and I often drive over to a nearby beach and sit and look at Long Island Sound and happily munch some sandwiches that we brought along. Those lunches with the view of the Long Island Sound directly front of you provide nice weekly interludes in our weekly life.

My wife and I reserve Fridays to take a drive out and about on Long Island, to go to the South Shore or the South Fork or the North fork. Long Island is 120 miles long and 45 miles wide and surrounded by water on all sides because, of course, it is an island. So there are a fair number of interesting places to go. On Fridays we generally end up eating one the many eateries around the island.

So while we do not do some the riskier activities of our younger days, we do take time to enjoy as best we can our life.

Taking care of our autistic son is also part of our life. He needs assistance showering, shaving, dressing. Fortunately, we have help in that and that still allows us free time. Since he is prone to seizures, he has to be given various pills 3 times a day. My wife and I share those duties. Generally, she covers his morning and afternoon pills and I cover his midnight pills. It is a kind of routine and I would not guessed in 1973 that 50 years later we would still be taking care of him, but that is the way it turned out.

I can say my son is generally happy and content. And more importantly, I can say he has a real life.

It seems to me life throws challenges at people…some more severe than others, but none of us get through life home free. We are human and often life gives us extra responsibilities. Looking around at other people we know, it seems almost everyone has to deal some unexpected responsibilities, some turns in fate or health never anticipated. Maybe it’s cancer, maybe it is some kind of accident, maybe it is some kind of mental problem. In the end, it seems each and every family has some crosses to bear.

So what is the summary of this story…similar and different events occurred in 1973 and 2023.

I have say I am astonished at the lack of progress from 1973 to 2023. Yes, cell phones are convenient, yes, it is nice to type in a question to Google to find out who was in the 87’ World Series, yes, carrying a cell phone around is a lot more convenient and useful than trying to make a call on pay phone. Air conditioning is far more prevalent than in 1973. On hot days, that’s nice.

But as to human progress and looking around at the present world, we have poor relations with China and it looks like they might want to make their move on Taiwan. We have terrible relations with Russia and presently we face two major wars…Yom Kippur #2 in the Middle East – it has already gone on for 3 months and shows no signs of ending…The War in Ukraine is just completing its second year and the prospects of Ukraine keeping its fledging country seem to dim by the day.

Then we look at our country. In 1973 the country was divided, but the division was along generational lines. Most young people opposed the War in Vietnam and most older people felt it was a war to protect our country from Communism. In March of 1973, we had retreated from Vietnam. In fact, you could say that our recent retreat from Afghanistan was somewhat similar.

What is different is the way the country is split today. Today’s differences come from varying political choices. More troubling is there is no agreement on what are the facts or what our real situation is and there is little faith in the sources of media and information today. So resolving political disputes seems difficult when people disagree on what is real.

I do not know what the way out of that box is. I believe it is easy to discern what is real and what is not…there are plenty of things being reported and if you view enough different reports and have some background of past history, I think it is pretty simple to judge and decide which reports are true and which are not. That said, there will still be many people who disagree on just what the present reality is.

I would not have thought in 1973 that we would be arguing about what is real in 2023. But that seems to be where we are.

1973 was an incredibly scary year for the United States. The Republican President of The United States was under suspicion of having broken into the Democratic National Committee Headquarters at the Watergate Hotel. As the Watergate Hearings got underway, Americans could hardly believe the many sad and sordid details of that break-in, but in the end, its reality could not be denied.

And in 1974, when Richard Nixon resigned, few had much hope for his appointed successor, President Gerald Ford. He soon came to have a reputation as a genial stumbler. Fortunately, he had a nice guy feeling, so at least people thought he meant well. And in looking back, the entire country kind stumbled through that rocky period and came out standing. The Republic moved on. We went on to other problems and the country survived.

At the end of 2023, I think we face, if anything, a more scary and uncertain period. I am hoping this present period of wars in the Middle East and in Ukraine, of division among Republicans and Democrats, of disagreements about solving problems of immigration and race, of anxiety about the economy and inflation, of the great and ever widening disparity between the rich and the poor, of divisions within families on all the above…I am hoping we will, as a country and a world, resolve or mollify these problems and move on to a better place.

The years left to me and my wife are now limited. We hope, of course, for many more years. That is not ours to decide. In particular, I am sorry for the younger generations just coming up. I do not know how this world appears to them, but I think it must be scary and confusing. They are the ones that must find their way in a world still mired in the history of past and present mistakes, a world that is throttling towards an unknown future.

My hope is that people will find ways to agree on what is real and that they will continue to exercise their right to vote as they please and that the good luck and good fortune of the United States continues and that sad and difficult wars that we are presently engaged in will fade into peaceful and fair solutions.

On that note, I think I will go for a row.