Looking Back to 1968

by Paul Marion

In late November 1968, my friend Susan April walked three miles in the rain from her home in Dracut, Mass., to buy the new Beatles double album at a Lowell record shop and hitchhiked home when the paper bag from the store began to soak through. Officially titled The Beatles, the album quickly became known to everyone as The White Album because of the all-white sleeve with the discreet band name. “I was one crazy fan,” she says. In those days, many of us in semi-rural Dracut had been born in the city, which served as our downtown for clothing stores, dentists, banks, and more.

Another friend of mine, John Suiter, a photographer in Chicago now, recalls “the beautiful color prints of the boys” which his college roommate had taped to the wall. Around the same time, the Rolling Stones released their Beggars Banquet recording in an off-white sleeve, a second “white album.” John says it took a week to “fully consider both albums . . . listening deeply, testing our understanding of the music and lyrics, poring over the liner notes for hidden communiques.” He adds that The Beatles’ plain white cover was excellent for rolling joints because “the small bits of weed stood out nicely.” The music didn’t catch hold of him and his friends until after winter break and the first half of the year. There were thirty new songs to absorb—in so many styles, with so much content.

My lifelong pal Paul Brouillette recalls high school friends who could afford to buy the album “debating for months whether it was as good as the previous year’s Sgt. Pepper record or a hodgepodge of John’s and Paul’s and George’s songs. Even Ringo had a song, ‘Don’t Pass Me By.’” Some friends thought the end result was a mess. He says, “In 1969, Beatles’ songs, the group and solo, such as ‘The Ballad of John and Yoko’ and ‘Give Peace a Chance,’ were topical or political but not as clever as the lyrics to ‘Back in the U.S.S.R.’ or as poetic as ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ on The White Album.”

Speaking globally about the Fab Four, a growing-up classmate of mine, Willy LeMay of Nantucket island, says: “To have been lucky enough to come of age as those first Beatles songs hit the airwaves was akin to grabbing the lightning bolt right out of the sky.”

The Beatles (Wikimedia Commons image)

My response to the The White Album lagged. When the record landed, I was still listening to The Beatles from 1964 and 1967, A Hard Day’s Night and Magical Mystery Tour, plus a handful of number-one singles that I had on the small records, 45s. At later high school dances and beer-parties, The White Album soaked into my skin thanks to a hundred spins on the turntable and repeated eight-track tape plays. “Rocky Raccoon,” “Julia,” “Blackbird,” “Helter Skelter,” “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill,” even the goofy “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” got my friends going in basements and living rooms.

Before and after the drinking age dropped to eighteen years old, we had in our crowd two sets of parents who said they’d rather have their kids drinking downstairs in “a cellar full of noise” than drag-racing on the highway and tossing empties out the window if a cruiser fired up its blue lights. Anyone was welcomed to stay over. Nobody in our tight group crashed a car. We did know kids who had been killed in road accidents.

We rocked out to The Beatles, Stones, Grand Funk Railroad, Crosby-Stills-Nash-and-Young, The Who, and others. But The White Album and Abbey Road dominated. For about ten minutes I was in a makeshift band that tried hard to copy “Rocky Raccoon,” a mash-up of folk and honky-tonk showing the group’s incredible range. I banged on a Sears catalog blue metal-flake snare drum and a hi-hat for the cymbal sound while others played guitar and an electric piano. As an older guy I go back to The White Album for select cuts like “Long, Long, Long,” a gem featuring George’s voice and guitar with Ringo’s massive drumming.

Many of my friends didn’t connect The White Album to politics at the time, even with the song “Revolution” on the disc and the not-so-subtle commentary of “Piggies” and “Happiness Is a Warm Gun.” We took The Beatles for music first and almost exclusively. That’s what we needed. The sound and the energy. We took them secondly for hair and clothes.

Music was the water to our fish in those years. The Doors played at the Commodore Ballroom in 1967, a performance hall near the Lowell train station. Their song “Light My Fire” was the number one in the country. The Commodore presented Cream, Jimi Hendrix, and the Kinks. Fans saw Vanilla Fudge, Moby Grape, Ultimate Spinach, and the 1910 Fruit Gum Company—note the food trend in names. The popular house band was Little John & the Sherwoods, like Paul Revere and the Raiders. Canobie Lake amusement park over the New Hampshire line showcased Sonny & Cher, Brenda Lee, and the Supremes. The record stores, Garnick’s and Record Lane, stocked new music. Two AM radio stations kept listeners informed and entertained.

Anchored by drummer Dave Arsenault, the Sherwoods practiced a few houses away from mine. I’d sit on the cement front steps and listen to the boys slinging fists across amped-up steel strings and banging away at the snare, tom-toms, and cymbals. The five-man band surfed on the British Invasion wave of bands. Band member Ed O’Neil told the Lowell Sun: “We’d rehearse forty to sixty hours a week. We’d go in sometimes at eleven in the morning and rehearse until eleven, twelve at night. Plus, we’d play there three times a week.”

Little John & the Sherwoods publicity photo

The Sherwoods cut a single, “Long Hair” on one side and “Rag Bag” on the other. A thousand kids packed the Commodore at the height of the Sixties. The Sherwoods had chances to tour with the Beach Boys and Young Rascals when they were hot, but their manager held them to the house-band contract that kept them in Lowell to open for the Yardbirds, Neil Diamond, and other chart-toppers. When Arsenault got drafted into the Army in 1966, his bandmates gave him a public haircut on stage. That was the start of the group’s unraveling.

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What else was going on? All the big and little parts of daily life in the Merrimack River Valley.

In the spring of 1968, 2500 people at Shedd Park in the Belvidere neighborhood cheered for their teams in a baseball game. It was the largest baseball crowd in the history of Lowell High, which lost to its cross-town rival, Keith Academy, a Catholic high school for guys only. “They had a better team,” said Brian J. Martin of Lowell High, who had pitched a perfect game two weeks earlier.

The Keith game was still close when Brian ripped a long line drive that was snagged out of the air in a leaping grab that snuffed out a likely three-run homer. A school of about 400 students, Keith won the Catholic Conference baseball championship and played in the Eastern Mass. Championship game, losing to Reading, 2-1.

Baseball was booming in the area, in part because of the Red Sox’s “Impossible Dream” season in 1967 when the Sox won the American League pennant for the first time in decades and then lost the World Series in seven games to the St. Louis Cardinals.

Future Lowell Mayor and high school Headmaster Brian J. Martin, pitching for Lowell High School, 1968 (courtesy of the “Room 50” blog, 6/24/18)

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For context.

Dracut’s population in 1968 was about 18,000 and more than 90 percent White; Lowell had 94,000 people: 92 percent White, 5 percent Hispanic, 1 percent Black, and .7 percent Asian. Twenty thousand people had left the city between 1920 and 1960, many of them World War II veterans moving their young families to their first homes in the ring of suburbs, Billerica, Chelmsford, Dracut, Tewksbury, Tyngsborough.

By 2020, Lowell’s population, having grown to 115,554 people, was 40.59 percent White (non-Hispanic), 21.68 percent Hispanic, 8.28 percent Black, and 22.11 percent Asian. The 2024 population was 120,418, according to U.S. Census records.

After World War II, unemployment in the city had risen and stayed high. The local authorities began tearing down old houses, tenements, and business structures, hoping to attract new “electronics” companies with open space for expansion. According to one report by neighborhood leaders: “The Lowell region was one of eight major urban centers in the U.S. classified as places with chronic unemployment, and as late as 1965 the jobless rate was fifty percent higher than the national average. From economic deprivation grew crime, neglect of the young and the elderly, poor physical and mental health, dependence of public welfare programs, and the steady withering of community involvement and spirit.”

In 1968, a friend of mine walked to Keith Academy from his home across the river from downtown Lowell.

I could have taken a bus, but walking the route, surrounded by empty mill buildings with broken windows, somehow reinforced the new independence I felt since leaving grammar school. Everything was bigger, and older, than Dracut, the town I knew. History had been made here—had been—but the Lowell I walked through every day from 1968 to 1970 was spent and gray, punctuated only by the burnt-orange brick mill walls.

Community leaders involved in the federal Model Cities urban renewal project talked about rehabilitating Lowell’s history, mills, and canals as a way to revive the spirit and economy of the city. At the grassroots, activists planned a way forward. They believed in education as a stimulant and pictured a “City of Learning” in a museum-without-walls.

Ten years of effort led to tremendous change by 1978, when the city was named a national park, commemorating the American Industrial Revolution of the mid-1800s. The new computer industry created jobs in the region. Wang Laboratories, Digital Equipment Corp., Data General, and other high-tech companies dominated headlines as the boom radiated outward from the Route 128 belt, America’s Technology Highway, to Route 495, Lowell’s modern-day Merrimack River.

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In the nation and world every month of 1968 brought explosive news. January’s brutal Tet Offensive attack against U.S. and South Vietnamese forces by North Vietnam’s army and Viet Cong guerrillas in the south exposed President Lyndon B. Johnson’s deception about the enemy’s strength. (Tet refers to the Lunar New Year holiday in Vietnam.) Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in April, and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy during the Democratic Party’s presidential primary contest in June. Social and political unrest spread. Student turmoil in France in May and Mexico City in the summer, and then the Soviet Union’s invasion of Czechoslovakia in August, kept the global pot boiling over.

South Vietnamese army rangers defending Saigon in the winter of 1968 (Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

By 1968, the Vietnam War was in the veins of places like Dracut and Lowell.

In September 1965, Army soldier Donald L. Arcand, nineteen years old, was killed in South Vietnam near the end of his tour of duty—the first young man from Lowell to die in that war. He was a door gunner in a UH-IB helicopter that was shot down by fighters on the ground. Private First Class Arcand was posthumously awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. He had played basketball at St Joseph’s High School, most of whose students had French roots.

Jane Hoye of Lowell, who was engaged to Donald when he died, wrote years later that she felt an “indescribable sadness” at the news of his death. “There were no men in Lowell in those days. They were all drafted,” she added, according to the Lowell Sun.”

Michael J. Monahan from Dracut Center was a Marine Corps radio operator in South Vietnam in September 1966 when he was shot and killed in combat. He was almost nineteen years old and had been in uniform for six months. Local historian Rebecca Duda describes him as “a brilliant student who wanted to help others, an aspiring doctor.” A graduate of Keith Academy, he left Boston College in his sophomore year to serve in the military. Town officials paid tribute to his sacrifice in a monument at a newly dedicated Monahan Park on Pleasant Street.

A young guy whom I knew by sight from my Dracut neighborhood was killed in Vietnam in 1969.  Six years older than me, he was a sergeant in the Air Force when he died in Gia Dinh Province, a “ground casualty,” per military records. A quiet guy who lived up the hill from my house, his name now tops a steel post set in a grassy crossroads at Hildreth Street and New Boston Road where I caught the high school bus. Now it’s a hero square: Turner Square. When I finally visited the bright black Wall in hot and steamy white-stone Washington, D.C., and felt the incisions in its mirror-face, I searched for Sergeant Turner’s name: His dates are 31 Jan 48, 17 Aug 69. Daniel R. Turner. He’s on Panel 19 West, Line 57. Just like the neighborhood sign.

City officials in 1969 dedicated Arcand Drive in honor of Donald—it’s a prominent street in front of the John F. Kennedy Civic Center and Lowell City Hall. The same year antiwar activists in Massachusetts began organizing peace marches in the old factory cities where the military was getting so many of its members. They wanted to save lives. In Lowell, some young people and older residents listened to the organizers describe a plan for an antiwar march in 1970. When the day of the march came, a few hundred protesting students, community members, and hard-core, out-of-town antiwar activists with provocative flags and banners encountered violent resistance from hard-nosed Lowell guys who detested what they believed were anti-American symbols and chants.

Young Steve O’Connor was there with his older brother.

I didn’t know anything about politics or the war, but I remember the chant: Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh. The Viet Cong are gonna win!

I asked my brother Rory, “Aren’t they the enemy? There were lots of Free Bobby Seale signs, too, backing the Black Panther firebrand.”

A guy, a badass, who was the brother of a girl I knew, kicked a protesting sign-holder in the balls so hard I could almost feel it, nearly lifting the guy off the ground. He dropped the sign and fell like a ton of bricks. You know that famous photo of a Frenchman crying as the Nazi soldiers marched into Paris? It was like that. A man who was probably a World War II veteran with an American flag cried on the sidewalk.

One of the march organizers, Michael Ansara, would later write: “We needed to listen as much as we talked. More than anything else we needed to be respectful of the people we wanted to reach and organize—and we were going about it the wrong way.” Ansara’s friends later met with the Lowell guys who had attacked them on the streets to try to find a common purpose—to save lives.

The previous year, there had been another peace march in Lowell with a better outcome. The community staged an action in solidarity with the national Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam. In Boston, 100,000 people assembled to protest, one of many demonstrations across the country. My friend Paul was a sophomore in high school in October 1969 when he and several friends joined a throng of people:

We walked up Merrimack Street to City Hall under a blue sky with the sun shining through yellow maple leaves. The day was crisp and clear as only October can be at times. Streets were closed. More people joined the crowd when we passed St. Anne’s Church and Lowell High School. The mood was somber. We were protesting the war, exercising new muscles, and finding a new voice. For many of us, it was our first political act.

I felt some concern about participating, as my sister’s boyfriend was stationed in Vietnam, and, of course, my father saw any march like that as unpatriotic. But, again, it was like an initial coming-out and acknowledging that I could deal with possible repercussions.

Lowell antiwar march, 1969 (photo courtesy of Downtown Lowell page on Facebook)

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A final thought on 1968. The weekend after Easter, my brother Richard took me to the new Showcase Cinema complex in Lawrence close to Route 495, whose central theater had the largest screen in the area. I was eager to see the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, which, for good reasons, has reached the status of a cathedral among film religionists.

I didn’t get everything at first view, and I still don’t understand fully the haunting metal monolith and why the all-knowing spacecraft computer frazzed out. I should revisit Arthur C. Clarke’s novel to explore the story more deeply. When I learned that the computer was named HAL because the three letters precede IBM, I appreciated that inside joke. The visual presentation was nothing I’d seen before. The scope of the narrative, the space world gadgets and vehicles, the mythic vibrations.

Most of all, though, I came away mesmerized by what is called “the Star Gate sequence.” For almost ten minutes, I was pinned in my padded seat while a multi-colored projection washed my eyes, my whole body. I felt as if I was thrusting forward and being pushed back simultaneously. The effect was both kaleidoscopic and a psychedelic tunnel ride, the visual data rushing past on the sides as I, the viewer, arrowed ahead, slipping into the chromatic void through a vertical seam and then flattening to horizontal slicing.

Through ages of techno-grid travel the context shifts to a morphology that feels familiar even as it stays strange. From a machine world, from an optics carnival, we are transported to places vaguely land-and-sea-like. I walked into the sunlight feeling like a hole had been drilled in my head, painlessly, and filled with dream juice that I could not have identified when we got to the show 142 minutes before.

In a year not half-over that already felt messily human and would get uglier and more spectacular, this film, a work of art, had yanked me out of my limited daily experience. Space fascinated me from the start, whether in science fiction or science nonfiction. At the end of the year, the Apollo 8 astronauts orbited the moon and safely touched down in the Atlantic Ocean. Like the Star Gate Sequence, they gave us a new visual, a photograph by Air Force officer William Anders that is called Earthrise, made on Christmas Eve. About half of our planet, blue seas wrapped in white clouds, is seen above a slice of the Moon’s gray surface amid black space.

Anders said, “We came all this way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.”

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Paul Marion, Copyright (c) 2025