1960s Teen Runaways Complain About America & Their Lives. A Beautiful Folk Song At The End

I filmed this at a runaway kids coffeehouse in New York City in December 1967. At the time, runaways was a household word and was in the news just about every day. I recall the statistic that there were 250,000 runaway teenage kids under 18 in our major cities at that time. They were coming from all over the country. They came to New York in winter with nowhere to go and no protection from the rough folks who lived on the streets. I wonder what happened to them?
I was in New York city filmmaker at this time. Just about everything was a suitable subject for a documentary and virtually no one had been filmed using a 16mm camera and a professional audio recorder. I walked into this place and asked for permission (which was always given) and started to film. The resulting 10 minute movie ran on prime time NET - National Educational Television, the forerunner to PBS.
For those interested in the singer, his name was Chris Wilson (also known as "Gandalf the Grey", "The Wizard" or "The Wiz") He had worked with the Salvation Army in the 60s and they would send him around to sing to kids to discourage them from running away. Shortly around the time of this video he signed with Columbia Records and in 1970 released an album called "Gandalf the Grey Am I". The CD version of that album includes the song from this video, "The Future Belongs to the Children". From what I gather, he passed away several years ago due to cancer. Here he is later in life singing another beautiful song • SITS.avi This comes from his KZbin channel and you can find other performances of his on there as well. He also did a show on his channel talking about various subjects, one of which was dealing with cancer. He seemed to be a really nice guy with a big heart who lived an overall happy life.
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Thank you
David Hoffman filmmaker