Tom Miller
Memories
The Robson Ranch Music Club has been providing entertainment to the community for over 20 years! Concerts, dances, karaoke, and other events designed for where we live.
It’s been a couple of months now, and I’m just starting to get all the great folk songs out of my head! Yes, another legacy of our spring concert, America’s Folk Legacy, is the fact that learning and practicing music leaves a residue, ok, let’s call it what it is, an earworm. I wake up in the morning with Scarborough Fair and go to sleep at night with Our House or Forever Young or Blowin’ in the Wind. Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoyed this concert and had a great time singing in it, but it’s over, and I need to move on. And it isn’t just the songs that have invaded my dreams, both awake and asleep. It also brought back a lot of memories of what it was like to live in that time. I had just started college, and the Vietnam War was still ramping up. Protests were everywhere, and to me they were more than just politics. I was a male of a certain age, and my life was at stake.
When I turned 18 during my freshman year, I dutifully registered with the draft. As a student, I wasn’t too worried; I had a deferment. All I had to do was keep my grades up and pay tuition. I would be safe. But this was 1968, and the war was not only not winding down, it was getting bigger. Fast. And my grants and loans were being reviewed, and my parents were not rich, and I was having trouble with chemistry, which would not have been that big a deal, but it was my major! Uncle Sam then came up with an answer. The lottery. All I had to do was draw a high number, and I was safe, even without school. On Dec. 1, 1969, along with every member of my fraternity, I watched the drawing. The first number was drawn. These future soldiers were born on Sept. 14. Terror struck! That’s only one week from my birthday! This was not fun, regardless of the party atmosphere in the tube room. My number was finally called, and I got a 204. Bottom half, not terrible. Bill Hogue, one of my brother Sig Ep’s got a 363. He remarked, “Women and children may not go before me, but I’d be surprised if there are none in my battalion.”
Now all I had to do was decide whether I would risk dropping my deferment by the end of the year in 1970, putting me into the pool, or hold on with the hope that the war would end before I graduated. If I filed the drop and the “number” was higher than 203, the draft board would, in my nightmares, immediately take me to my physical and then to boot camp without even allowing me the chance to say goodbye.
Where were you in 1969?