Since I’ve worked for almost 60 years in the mixed worlds of journalism, Hollywood, academia, non-profit and private sectors, legacy and digital media, I often get questions about what happened during my long strange career.
It is rare that a week goes by that somebody doesn’t want to discuss something about the way it was in the 60s or 70s. I always try to comply with their requests, because I was a reporter for a long time and I know it’s frustrating when people resist such calls about what they remember.
Usually I’m willing to discuss pretty much anything except the identities of certain confidential sources or relationships that I pledged not to disclose. So that leaves a pretty wide latitude for conversation.
Probably the most sought-after information is about my years at Rolling Stone and specifically the Patty Hearst stories.
Fifty years ago, Howard Kohn and I had three cover stories on the newspaper heiress’s kidnapping and apparent conversion to the cause of her kidnappers, the domestic terror organization calling itself the SLA. Publisher Jann Wenner labelled it the “scoop of the decade.”
Even mundane details of our own lives at that time seem to be of some interest and one Hollywood producer recently asked me, “Do you ever think about how amazing it is that you did all of that? That you lived through it?”
I answered, “Sometimes it feels like it was in fact someone else, not me.”
After we hung up, I stayed with that thought about it feeling like somebody’s else’s life, not mine. I suspect a lot of people feel that way about the distant past and the things that happened back then — things that may sound strangely exotic now.
Given that we grow and change throughout our lives it is kinda true, too, that many of us were pretty much someone else when we were younger. And speaking only for myself, I have no regrets about that.
But the other thing about the perspective of distance on those long-ago events — they shrink into a small piece of a much larger mosaic of people and places and what matters over, under and through time.
As he often does, Dylan get this just right, albeit in another context:
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is rapidly fadin'
And the first one now
Will later be last
***
Note: Howard Kohn and I will be celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Patty Hearst stories in Rolling Stone this summer with a reunion in San Francisco.
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TODAY’S ARCHIVAL VIDEO:
The Beach Boys- Shindig! (All Performances) When to be cool was oh so innocent, in black and white.
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