050610: Random Musings

Well, the Old Broad hasn't been randomly musing for quite a while. At least, not in the blogosphere. Been concentrating on getting some reading done for my other blog, so the OB hasn't been parading around much, the last month or so.

But I wanted to note a couple of recent anniversaries. One sad, one happy.

First the happy. On May 6th, 1960, England's Princess Margaret married Anthony Armstrong-Jones in Westminster Abbey, in the first ever televised royal wedding service.

I remember I was in junior high at the time and fascinated with England, royalty, and weddings in general (already dreaming of my own, just like any red-blooded American teen of the time). I watched the service on TV, glued to the set. Well, there were no video recorders in those days: you watched the show, you caught the re-run, and that was it. And the whole thing was in black and white: the TV broadcast (at least we didn't have color TV then) and all the newspaper and magazine coverage. So that's the way I remember it. But here's what it looked like in the real world:

A final weird note: Several years later, when I finally had my own wedding, we used the same music Princess Margaret had on her big day. I have absolutely no memory of what that was, but I know it sounded wonderful both times.

And the sad one? This week (May 4th) was the 40th anniversary of the shootings at Kent State University in Ohio that left four students dead and nine others wounded. I recall that time of the world very clearly, but I'm not quite so clear on what I was doing that particular day. I've always remembered being at the laundromat doing laundry when I heard the news. But that was a Monday, and it really seems like I would most probably have been at work or in class at the time. I do remember that the Kent State Massacre, as it came to be called, brought about a marked change in the way we looked at the world back then. Things got much more serious after that. The summer of love was ancient history and it really did seem like the older generation was trying to kill off their errant offspring, just to teach us a good lesson. Not true, of course, but that's how we read it at that moment. Must have been all that tear gas clouding our brains.