I sometime wonder that if I was born 10 or 15 years earlier, if I would be a 60s hippie. I came of age in 1980, the year of Ronald Reagan, and I've been pretty much a conservative since then. I shudder to think of how I might have turned out had I come of age in 1967 instead.
Anyhow, the evening of December 8, 1980 is etched in my memory. Definitely a "JFK" moment in my life. I remember exactly what I was doing. I had Monday Night Football (the Patriots were playing) on the TV and I was practicing situps (I was to report to Marine boot camp in just a few more weeks) and I overheard Howard Cosell mentioning "John Lennon" and "shot" and "dead on arrival" in the same sentence. My heart skipped a few beats and I immediately turned on my radio and you could hear nothing but Beatles music across the entire FM band. For the next week, most rock stations played nothing but Beatles and Lennon music around the clock. I'll admit, even though I now deplore the liberal ideology that Lennon stood for, I am still very sad for what happened. The man didn't deserve to die that way and I hope they never let that assassin out of custody.
Me too. Still have it in Album form, in fact. Good post, and as a similarly situated contemporary of yours, I share your "shudder" of how I would've turned out had I been born a mere 6 years earlier.