I don’t pay much attention to Facebook notifications memorializing a post that usually contains a photograph. When I think of Facebook, I think of Mark Zuckerberg sitting behind Trump on January 20, 2025, with his coterie of billionaires. Facebook seems like redundant nonsense to me with people who can’t stop posting like the narcissist-in-chief at the White House.

Amid all of the swirling insanity that seems like lethal doses to someone grounded in an era of change and hope, the late 1960s and early 1970s, this particular reminder, a few days ago, of a photo and discussion hit hard. The Facebook notification of that post seems like it happened on some distant planet, galaxy, or in a science fiction novel.

I first met Judy, who shared an apartment with my best friend Joe, over the phone. They were both students at New York University, as I would be the following fall. It was during the spring of 1970, and I had just returned from basic and advanced training in the military and had gone back to my junior high school teaching job in my hometown. That military experience had left scars on my psyche that I can recollect all of these decades later. My anti-war activism and protest were already a given. Joe had been the leader of our campus anti-war group during our undergraduate years in Providence, Rhode Island.

My call to Judy involved ongoing protests at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut (“Memories of May Day, A look back at Black Panther protests at Yale,” Yale News, February 18, 2022), which included issues related to a trial of members of the Black Panthers, the New Left’s involvement in that trial, and the anti-war movement in the New Haven community. Thousands gathered in New Haven in protests that contained almost every single element of 1960s and early 1970s issues. My particular concern was that Richard Nixon had ordered troops to be on alert in case the demonstrations in New Haven got out of hand. Huge military transport planes carried troops into nearby Quonset Point Naval Air Station as a staging area. It seemed almost as if the nation, or at least my small part of it, was at war as those transports roared overhead. My family’s home in central Rhode Island was on the glide path for the air station. I wanted Judy to know what was happening and alert Joe, who was in New Haven for those protests.

Noteworthy in the events in New Haven was the fact that the Yale News, cited above, discusses Hillary Clinton’s role as a law student providing advice to protesters at a law clinic at Yale. How times and people change in this case is not an overstatement!

The Facebook post memorialized a photograph Judy had sent me in 2010 of her visit to Philadelphia that had uncanny elements linking us once again, this time through extended families in ways that seemed very unlikely.

Judy, Joe, another friend from those days, and I would travel to Canada on the July 4th weekend in 1971. That road trip left traces from those times of great change that were indelible from my perspective. We were visiting a family friend in Ontario who had become an expat and was in the process of building a homestead northwest of Ottawa. If the earlier protests in New Haven had reflected the political movements of the times, then the road trip was a symbol of the zeitgeist of those days. It seemed as if the entire world was in motion and headed toward better times.

When Judy died in early 2022, the shock I felt was palpable. We only communicated sporadically and took positions later in life that seemed diametrically opposed to one another, but the imprint of our early friendship hit home in ways hard to express.

Two busloads of students from New York University arrived near West Potomac Park on the last day of April 1971. Judy, Joe, and I were there for the May Day protests to stop the war in Vietnam. The slogan of the protests was: “If the government won’t stop the war, then we’ll stop the government.” We unrolled our sleeping bags in the park and spent the night. We were awakened early by DC police who ordered protesters to leave the park. Joe and I ran toward the Lincoln Memorial where we took refuge among early morning tourists. We were safe, as the police wouldn’t dare enter the memorial among the tourists. Judy left the park separately and headed toward a feminist march against the war. The next several days were utter mayhem with police and teargas everywhere.

“Fifty years ago today, on May Day 1971, thousands of antiwar protesters descended on Washington, DC, to protest the Vietnam War. The ensuing three days of disruptive actions directly confronted the Nixon administration — and resulted in the largest civil disobedience–related detentions in US history,” (“May Day 1971 Was a Day Against War,” Jacobin, May 1, 2021).

Many of our encounters during the epoch of the Vietnam War anti-war movement reflected serendipitous connections that would have been impossible to predict.

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