The BobboSphere: Don't believe everything you think.

­It's been 40 years since 1968­ and already people are wondering how to remember it. Well, this is how I remember it and some of the years beyond.....

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 I heard the loud thumping of­ footsteps coming up the ­basement stairs of my parents' home in Silver Spring, Md. Something was very wrong. My girlfriend Marie appeared at the kitchen entrance, distraught and out of breath. Martin Luther King has just been shot dead in Memphis. It's all over the news. Come downstairs. Now.

A terrible primal rage boiled up from somewhere deep in my
consciousness. Not Martin Luther King. Not King. For God's sake, not
him.

­ ­Estelle Carol and me in front of the­ Lincoln Ave Commune-1974 ­

In the early 1970's I was a member of a political commune based in Takoma Park, Maryland. Our small wood frame house was located in some leafy woods between Piney Branch Road and Maple Avenue. Sligo Creek Park was about a quarter mile away with its rocky swift flowing creek.

Although named after "Honest Abe", the Lincoln Avenue Commune began with a lie — a monstrous fraud perpetrated on the landlady Mrs. Chu. You see, we didn't think that we could find anyone who would rent to a gang of ruffians like Betty, Becky, Joey, Chet, Sarah, Greg and me (Bobbo) .

I recently read Cathy Wilkerson's new memoir, Flying to Close to the Sun about her days in SDS and Weatherman. She was in Chicago recently giving a reading from her book. I attended and here is my report.

Riding the Red Line up to Women and Children First Bookstore had my stomach tied in knots. Cathy Wilkerson was going to give a reading from her new book Flying Close to the Sun.

Thinking about Cathy brought back painful memories of the breakup of SDS, the murder of Fred Hampton­, the bloody civil war that tore apart the Black Panther Party, the townhouse explosion that killed three SDS leaders, the splitup of the Mother Bloor Collective.... all of which  happened around the last time I had laid eyes on Cathy Wilkerson.

1968 was not a good year. War, assassination, political violence and creeping fascism fell over the land like a gloomy shadow. It was however, a very good year to read J.R.R. Tolkein's Lord of the Rings for the first time.

 I had first come across the epic trilogy in 1965 as a high school senior when I saw it listed as a favorite of 60's college students. Later some of my pals formed a band called Middle Earth and passed out business cards with the word "Hobbit" displayed prominently.

The bassplayer in the band had a hippie-style VW bus named "The Traveling Slum". On the windshield visor was a button that read "Frodo Lives".

But despite my travels with the Middle Earth band members in the Traveling Slum, I still had not read the book that had given birth to their name--- until the summer of 1968.

Tracy Turnblad and the gang are back in this latest version of the John Waters classic about desegregation in Baltimore, Maryland during the early 1960's. Hairspray was originally a 1980's film starring Ricki Lake as Tracy Turnblad and then turned into a hit Broadway musical. The 2007 film is based more on the musical than the John Waters original film. Waters does make a brief cameo in the new movie as a flasher pervert. Anyone who has seen his Pink Flamingos will appreciate the irony.

The story of Hairspray was based on the real life civil rights protests at Baltimore's Gwynn Oak Amusement Park and at the Buddy Dean Show, a dance program modeled after Dick Clark's more famous American Bandstand.

I  was born in DC and was a baby and toddler at 13th and Clifton NW.  We eventually moved out of inner city DC into the working class Glenmont  area of suburban Maryland. I stayed there from 1951-1961. In  the summer of 2005, I walked through my old neighborhood to see how it was doing.

My partner Estelle Carol and I emerged from the cool semi-darkness of the Glenmont, Maryland Metro station into the blazing August sun. Glenmont  sure looked different from the newly bulldozed subdivision that had been cut out of the rolling hills of the Piedmont in the early 1950's. Back then, Georgia Avenue was a two lane country road narrow enough that I could bomb commuter cars with pine cones from a tree limb that stretched over the southbound lane from the adjacent Denley farm.

As a kid and well into my college years, going to YMCA Camp Letts near the Chesapeake Bay was one of my central life experiences. One of those experiences was confronting Dixie style segregation.

YMCA Camp Letts sits at the end of a peninsula jutting out into the Rhode River near Edgewater, Maryland. On a clear day, you can see all the way to where the South River meets the Chesapeake Bay. The camp was established in 1906 and has been in its present location since 1922. Many of the counselors came from local Maryland colleges, especially the University of Maryland at College Park.

Generations of DC area kids have sailed its waters, hiked its trails, played Capture the Flag, sat around campfires, short-sheeted one another and told dirty jokes after lights out. It has also served as an adult conference center and outdoor education center for school kids.

I first attended Camp Letts in 1957 at the age of 9. Then it was racially segregated, not uncommon in the Maryland of that time. The Chesapeake Bay beaches near Camp Letts where my parents took me for weekend outings were White Only as were many public acomodations and restaurants. But the Civil Rights Movement was on the march and the walls of Jim Crow were falling.