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The longtime NBC newsman Bob Dotson often reminds us that, when you get to know someone’s stories as told through his or her own articulated memories, you get to know the similarities between you and that storyteller. In a larger sense, as you see conditions that person faced and hurdles the person cleared in the iconic 1960s, you may well find parts of a road map to help you in your own challenges, inspirations, and successes in the current era. For his part, Dotson articulated hundreds of such memories in his Ameri- can Story feature over his four-decade career at NBC. Others have noted that life amounts to a very small percentage of what happens to you and a very large percentage of how you respond to it. Daily Life in the Counterculture 1960s depicts conditions that Americans faced in that decade, but it also depicts how many people responded to those conditions. A lot of those stories are told through the eyes of the individuals—mostly young people at the time—who lived them. You will find many of those anecdotes (both published and unpublished) in italics, while shorter memories are often told in standard quote format. This is the second book in the Daily Life series that I’ve written for Greenwood Press, but it’s the first that examines an experience that I was a part of myself. I came of age in the 1960s, a time that histo- rians rightly call this counterculture era in America, and it actually extended on to 1975, which the Vietnam War ended for America. PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS