Underground News in New York City

Chuck Collins, host of Chicago's Underground News in the '70s asked me with a smile, “How would you like to come with Howie and me to New York City to interview John Lennon?”

I had nothing better to do, so I said yes. Doing a show in New York with Chuck, Howie Samuelsohn and the regular Underground News entourage sounded like fun. After all, it was 1974.

In order to interview John and Yoko, you had to run the gauntlet of their close friends, Troubadour David Peel and writer A.J. Weberman amongst them. Peel is known for playing his guitar in Washington Square Park and improvising topical songs like Have a Marijuana and John and Yoko in New York City, and Weberman‘s fame was made from his Rolling Stone articles about Bob Dylan’s garbage.

The first thing we did when we arrived in NYC is settled in on the fifth floor of the Chelsea Hotel. My next-door neighbor, as I recall, was a very sweet brunette; a dreamy young hooker wearing a blue diaphanous baby doll pajama set day and night. Other neighbors I saw in the elevator numbered the Andy Warhol star, Viva, and Clifford Irving, author of the Howard Hughes hoax biography, and his wife Edith Sommer.

Those who cannot remember the past...

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
George Santayana, Life of Reason, Reason in Common Sense, Scribner's, 1905, page 284

"If you remember the '60s, you weren't there."
Robin Williams

"...And part of the argument that I'm making in this campaign is that, it is important to be right on day one."
Candidate Barack Obama, January 31, 2008

How do you link these quotes in both the 20th and the 21st Century? Well, I marched against the war in Vietnam forty years ago, I served two years in alternative service at Evanston Hospital in the early '70s, and I was against George W. Bush's war in Iraq during this decade.

I'm in favor of most of President Barack Obama's policies. I'm just not sure that you can send thirty to forty thousand more troops to Afghanistan and still call it being right on day one. How many more illegitimate regimes is America going to support and still be true to our ideals.

"The answer my friend is blowing in the wind, the answer is blowing in the wind."
Bob Dylan

Something Old and Something New

My high school graduation class, Evanston Township High School Class of '64, was featured in a double page spread in Life Magazine. In case you don't know, Life Magazine was the iconic weekly photo magazine of the 20th Century. As usual, half of my face was hidden behind the graduate in front of me.

I remember walking a mile through the snow to ETHS because I didn't want to ride the crowded school buses in Chicago winters. Kind of like Abe Lincoln of the 20th Century. I still remember the fight song. ETHS we will fight for you, for the right to do everything for you. Today that means contributing to the alumni fund.

Every day that I go to work in the 21st Century is a calculated risk. I supervise a crew of Transportation Security Officers who inspect checked baggage for concealed IEDs at LAX. Take my advice, never speak the word "bomb" at an airport. I remember my first passenger in October 2003. She came up to my inspection table and said, "My bag is about to explode." I thought, "Is this some kind of test?" Then I realized that her bag was stuffed to the gills, its seams about to rip from the strain. I told her that burst was a better choice of language at the airport. Odds are one day one of us, at some airport across the country, will find one and it will be a good day for the American transportation industry but it will not be a good day for the TSO, and the Supervisor who find it. You can't outrun a blast from a high explosive.