What Baby Boomers Feel About The 1960s. Show 6.

The time is 1989. I was making a six part television series on the 1960s primarily focused on the people who lived through it and what they remembered. While there were a few "famous folk" in the series, I focused most of my time on what I call baby boomer ordinary citizens. This video presents the final show in the series, the sixth show, where people who live through that time describe what changed as a result of the 1960s and how they felt about it as 1990 approached. They remember growing up, clothing and hairstyles, marijuana and other drugs, being young and feeling free, hippies, political radicals, antiwar and other demonstrations including women's rights, gay rights, Indian Native American rights, physically disadvantaged rights, among others.
The style I adopted was to let people talk and what I found so often was that if I set up the interview correctly telling folks that this was very important to the future and that they were speaking to the future and that if they were nervous, it was good to be nervous, provoked those being interviewed to just say what they thought and felt without a lot of editing or interference by me and other members of my crew doing these recorded interviews.
Subscribers have asked me about how my team and I got people to be so honest and real. Part of the answer is that people were waiting to tell their children a bit more about themselves and to create their own legacy by recording their stories.
In PBS, the network I was making this television series for, asked me to make it from the point of view of the children of the baby boomers - in other words to tell stories that helped boomer parent’s children to understand a bit more about their parents and about that time.
What interested me and still interests me most of the social movements of the 1960s more than the political movements. I felt that society changed more socially than it did politically and I still feel that way.
So many of my subscribers and other viewers who have watched clips from the series, make the point that for them, the behaviors and attitudes and changes in the 60s went too far and did damage to the future, to the America that we are living in today. I don't disagree but I present this video as a portrait of what those who I filmed felt had changed for them during the decades since they were young.
Before my series aired on television, there was another series on the 1950s & 1960s titled Eyes On The Prize, which had presented the experience black Americans felt and lived through during those times. So I focused my series mostly (not exclusively) on the rising middle class, on the tens of millions of Americans who moved into suburbs, on the children of those people and what they experienced growing up in the 1950s and early 1960s.