A FRANKENSTEIN Surprise, Part 2

Yesterday, I wrote about this 1968 issue of LIFE magazine, an issue I learned about from a long-ago former student, John Mlinek. It has a major piece about the 150th anniversary of the publication of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein--a novel and an author that have consumed many (happy) years of my life.

LIFE, by the way, was part of our household when I was growing up. It came every week. I loved to page through it--it was full of pictures and odd little stories. It was kind of the Internet, 1950s style. I remember, too, that my mom would clip things from it, then take the clippings to show her high school English students in Garrettsville, Ohio. I learned that from Mom--clipping things and showing them to my classes. And I'm still clipping-and-filing even though I, now retired, no longer have students to show them to. Can't tell you why I keep clippin'--I just must do it.

March 15, 1968. The lull before the storm. On April 4, Martin Luther King, Jr. would die on the balcony outside his room in the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. Shot to death. On June 5, Sen. Robert Francis Kennedy would die in Los Angeles after being shot the night of the California Democratic Primary (which he had just won).

That spring, 1968, still single (I had not yet met Joyce), I was finishing my second year of teaching at the Aurora Middle School (Aurora's new Harmon Middle School lay six years in the future). I heard the news about both murders on my radio in my little efficiency apartment on Chillicothe Road. This country was frightening in the spring of 1968. JFK, recall, had fallen to an assassin in November 1963. The Vietnam War was raging ... racial tensions were high ...

But let's look a moment at LIFE magazine that March. I discussed the Frankenstein feature yesterday, but paging through the issue, I was reminded of so much--of so much that has changed--or is no more. Or hasn't changed at all.

• There are ads for this new luxury item--color TV!
• There's an editorial: "Vietnam: Let's not have more of the same." It calls for "de-escalating our war with the North Vietnamese"  but says "we have not lost all chance of bringing it to an acceptable conclusion" (4).
• You could buy a GE clothes dryer for $169.95.
• There's an ad for a new Dionne Warwick album (Valley of the Dolls)--and for Kava instant coffee (I'd completely forgotten that brand)--and for Right Guard spray deodorant--and for an electric adding machine--and for Hostess Fruit Pies--and ...

But there are some troubling stories, too--reactions to the upcoming Mexico City Summer Olympics. Some black athletes, including Tommie Smith, were threatening to boycott. There is, says the piece, "bitterness among black athletes about the way things are in many colleges" (20). Smith, of course, did go to the Olympics--and raised a clenched fist when the National Anthem was played after he won the Gold for the 200-meter sprint. This was nearly a half-century ago (Smith was born in 1944, the same year as I).

And a full-page color ad for Campbell's Vegetable Beef soup ...

More tomorrow ... including that promised Bill Cosby story ...