What a year that was, huh? The United States celebrated two hundred years as a “free” country. Red white and blue were everywhere.

Ford was in office, but was going to lose to Jimmy Carter in the fall.

By 1976, the greats were gone or going. The Beatles had split forever and were on successful solo careers that made their loss a bit less painful, but nevertheless an open wound that remains to this day a great loss in the music world, but somehow this song was re-released that summer. On a fishing boat down in Tangier Sound, kids in speedboats played it and it echoed across the swells of the mighty Chesapeake.

Vietnam was over. 1975 had seen the final battles as Saigon fell to the NVA.

Books detailing Nixon’s hubris and stunningly stupid crimes were being published. We thought that the worst was over, that we could all heal, that our divided country could heal.

It really was a hopeful time.

What happened?

***

I was just a teenager in a school that was way out of my pay grade. I had no hope of passing a single subject and Biology I, Algebra I and Spanish I were all incomprehensible, a fact made worse by overpaid professors who were, in reality, burnouts who couldn’t reach me. The only subject I made decent marks in was English, and my previous education had nothing to do with it. I had read everything I could get my hands on, learning grammar and spelling as I went. Books were my escape from the nightmare of everyday life. I smuggled in copies of Playboy and Hustler, and sometimes Penthouse, not just because of the models, but because I learned a lot from articles on politics, celebrities, fashion, style, and how to behave in a way that others would be more receptive of.

Of course it never changed my rage, or my being an asshole. Untangling that would take decades, a fight I’m still waging. Yet reading held perhaps a big input to later becoming a liberal, socially and politically.

From 1972 on, I had been working for my father at his warehouse in Glen Burnie, right next to the mall. Back then there was an Amoco station up the street, a giant sliding board with panels missing to dissuade trespassers from using it because those damn things were dangerous, despite the Banana Splits making it look like stupid-fun, and beside that was a GO propane filling station and a store where they sold gas grills.

The warehouse was filthy. No matter how much I swept the floors with an oil-based sweeping compound and a push broom, the next day black dust would coat everything.

I had to clean the trucker’s bathroom, which was as humiliating as it was disgusting.

By December of ’75, a new guy and I were tasked over my winter break to roll sealer on the floors in an effort to keep the dust out of the “pores” of the cement floor.

It would prove futile.

I did discover in the cold of that winter the joy of Taster’s Choice coffee and Coffee Mate, which I couldn’t get enough of. It’s a miracle I ever slept at all.

Working and going to school in January, with my sadistic older sister driving the three of us to school, I was truly miserable. I hated her by then. She laughed at my every misspoken word, stumble, fall, bad grade, and she constantly complained about the way I smelled after work. To this day I can’t even stand the memory of her.

If I had any refuge at all, it was at my desk, where I wrote erotic stories, drew pornographic caricatures of people I knew and hated, or when I took to my bed to read whole novels in two nights.

Then there was music. That universal medication that heals, or reminds you that you have a lot of healing left to do. Songs and instrumentals that made me cry and parodies that made me laugh. Upbeat music, love ballads and last but not least, the most god awful stuff you ever heard.

***

Spring, 1976: I remember bright days with lots of sunshine, but it was cold at the old prep school by the Severn River.

What sustained me is hard to say. It was the second semester of my first year in a private school I never belonged in. Triggers, which I knew nothing about, were everywhere, and PTSD wasn’t even a widely known condition at the time. As I’ve often noted, I knew that I was different, that something was wrong with me, but not what was wrong with me. Which means I couldn’t do anything about it. Speaking to a former classmate in 2014, I tried to explain. I think he already knew. “You were always into something,” he laughed. “Later, we found out other things were going on.” He spoke no more about it, and I never pursued the subject. He had read about it in the papers. I felt vindicated by his sober conclusion.

Sometimes a trigger was the news. In reality, nothing was really healing. We were all happy to be out of Vietnam, but I casually knew veterans who were obviously troubled. Watching how one guy who Agent Orange was about to kill treat his devoted girlfriend and then wife so horribly really hurt me.

It hurt me that I was too young and had missed the war. That the guy was dying and was angry and scared. That I had played “Army” with friends when we never knew what real war was like. I was sensitive to the pain and sickness of others and I was bitter later on that I could not have taken their place. I was quite a coward, but had I been of age, I would have gone.

I was being raised a racist, a sadist and, in short, a Republican (by today’s standards).

But that was never who I really was. I understand brain washing and mind conditioning. I know how it works because I went through it. Today’s MAGA washees still stun me. The phenomenon of brain washing is studied, documented, and somewhat understood by scholars and physicians, but there’s no cure. This was the era of Krishna and the “Reverend” Moon, and the news had a buzzword: deprogramming. But I didn’t believe in it. I still don’t.

But in the Spring of 1976, nobody could see what was coming. We thought that even if we were fooling ourselves about healing, that the coming summer celebration would mend some of the rifts that Nixon, Johnson and the war had opened.

*The Universal Language*

Regardless of when the singles were released, these songs were on the radio and the charts.

Lord have mercy: The Four Seasons ?

The all time, forever “1976” anthem: Queen, Freddie Mercury the one and only …

And Elvin Bishop’s single from a 1975 album released in ’76…

It’s still a popular song and was part of the “Awesome Mix” in the MCU classic Guardians of the Galaxy.”

Peter Frampton had a hit that played all through the summer;

I don’t know what we were thinking here, but heck, we liked it: Welcome Back.

Remember the episode when Epstein painted a mural of Mrs. Kotter nude on the school wall? I can’t find the clip of the nutty guy shouting “repent! The world is coming to an end,” but it’s the funniest few seconds in the entire series.

For some, 1976 has become a dead zone. We remember some things with a hint of accuracy, while we really don’t remember others.

Memories are capricious things, sometimes staying close to accurate, sometimes right on target, but other times way off the mark. This I accept as true even when writing here. I stick to the best job I can do and leave out what I’m unsure of, except when I admit something I’m including isn’t clear.

What about 1976, then, do you remember most accurately?

The pop singles powered the summer of that year with great songs, but damn, there were some really weird things out there. For example, Wikipedia lists the singles but notes that a SNAFU occured in the compiled hits. It caused songs released anywhere from November and December of 1975 to be included because by January, they were still charting and selling 45s.

Some of the late ’75 songs I’m glad to see included.

See, 1976 was weird. The Captain and Tennille released by one of the most indecent, horrible, wretched songs of all time, “Muskrat Love.” It’s an abomination that sort of rode on their unimaginable popularity; the song is actually about two muskrats and features Captain playing muskrats making love sound effects with his cursed keyboard.

Kiss released “Rock and Roll All Night,” just another of their stupid songs with the same lyric repeated about a thousand times.

And Henry Gross released “Shannon,” a song about his dog, which was missing. For whatever reason, he hoped she had drifted out to sea, a horrible thought to me. Of course, it charted.

And I liked this one, because it mentions the Chesapeake Bay.

In August, a cover of Springsteen’s 1973 song “Blinded by the Light” changed history by being the first ever song in America that nobody could understand the lyrics of. Listeners swore that “revved up like a Deuce another runner in the night” was really “it looks like a douching in the middle of the night.”

Perhaps for that reason, it hit the charts with staying power, remaining on the radio playlists into the winter of 1976-1977.

Rod Stewart was daring. And, I believe, the only man who could release “The Killing of Georgie, Part One and Two” and get away with it. But it fueled an old urban legend that he was gay, which he certainly wasn’t. I don’t know how it did in sales, but it’s not a true story,  but a tragic one that tells of a young man coming out as gay and being thrown out by his parents. Georgie goes to the Big Apple and becomes a must-have guest at parties before he’s murdered. The second part is a lamentation of the narrator heartbreakingly begging Georgie not to go away. The song works, and it may be because it was ahead of its time. Only Rod Stewart could have pulled that off; it got play time even on AM radio.

Summer songs worthy of mention included Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show with their plaintive, heartbroken narrative of a young man who lost his love because youthful love never lasts, and usually isn’t real in the first place.

WAR’s hit with the now required summer listening, appropriately titled “Summer”:

I refuse to talk about Barry Manilow, Neil Diamond, or Barbara Streisand. Sue me.

Apple Computer, Price Club and Conrail were formed.

Hank Aaron hit his final home run, number 755.

The Winter and Summer Olympics were held at Innsbruck and Montreal, respectively. One athlete, Nadia Comaneci, earned several perfect “10” scores in gymnastics, a landmark event. Her floor exercise was accompanied by the beautiful “Nadia’s Theme,” became a hit single in the US that fall. Now known as the theme from “The Young and Restless” soap, it still evokes a vision of the intense 14-year-old Romanian making everything she did look easy. She later married American gymnast Bart Conner and they live in the US. Even in her sixties by now, she’s beautiful and the little shit is younger than me. Life ain’t fair. They own several businesses together.

The Southern Rock band Eagles released their awesome LP, “Hotel California,” which is still one of the best selling albums of all time. Rolling Stone has it on their 500 best albums of all time, and if it has dropped on that list a bit, it’s still there. It was also the band’s first album with Joe Walsh, today a legend in his own right. Three singles from it were released, but with a December debut, the album’s singles charted in 1977.

For the category best album of the year, only Rumours by Fleetwood Mac could beat it.

However, Rod Stewart was the one with the most popular song of the year with this ballad:

1976 was a remarkable year for movies. It featured the last film appearance by John Wayne, who lobbied passionately to get the part of J.B. Books, an aged “shootist” or gunfighter who travels to Carson City in 1901 seeking help from the only doctor he trusts, Doc Hostetler (Jimmy Stewart). He had seen a doctor in Creed, Colorado but hadn’t believed his diagnosis.

The book takes place in El Paso, but the sets didn’t exist that could do that city justice. Still, Carson City was just as good.

Hostetler tells Books that he has cancer, and it’s advanced. His patient doesn’t have long to live.

It’s sad, because Wayne was also fighting cancer, and he wanted this to be his swan song.

The movie is touching, a bittersweet send off to one of the world’s most enduring screen icons of all time.

Featuring Ron Howard, Richard Boone, Lauren Bacall, Bill McKinney, Hugh O’Brien, and Harry Morgan, the end title music and Howard’s character walking away from the camera is tear-jerking.

And in a year with mixed cinematic quality, it was a standout.

Other films released included “The Outlaw Josey Wales,” “Midway” with “Surround Sound” and a bloated all-star cast, and a King Kong remake that nobody remembers. Which is only fitting. I forget who it starred, except for Jessica Lange, who has a breast reveal by the giant simian who can’t possibly mate with her (Cringe movie).

The remake with Jack Black was the only one I’ll allow as okay. But it is the original that still captures the story in all its glory.

Then there’s “The Missouri Breaks,” “The Enforcer,” a Dirty Harry outing, and too many more to mention.

Not a bad year, entertainment-wise.

I remember watching a fireworks show in D.C. but nothing of what it looked like.

At a hotel, a group of American Legion “delegates” became sick with what we now know as Legionnaires Disease.

Former president George Washington was given the rank of six-star General, something I find vaguely insulting. It was 200 years late.

As a country, we had been through a lot. Two world wars, the Civil War, the Depression, the dust bowl years, a recession was building up, and outbreaks of the measles, chicken pox, several influenza epidemics, and we had virtually eliminated a proud native population. The unforgivable crime of slavery still haunts us today, as it should.

The Vietnam War was a stain on our honor too, a purely political blot we can never move on from.

Now, today, things are more grim than ever. We have sustained irreparable damage to our government and people act as though it’s no big deal.

Prices are so high that I believe people are dying of malnutrition and disease that should not be happening.

It’s a bad time, a frightening time.

When things get really bad, sometimes the best thing to do is to look back and remember who we were and that we were better back then.

We had landed two men on the moon with Apollo 11, a miraculous feat, and in 1976 Viking I landed on Mars, equipped for durability, and it sent back the most amazing photos. America had done great things. We were proud of that.

But …

America at 250 is not in good shape.

I cannot survive much longer. It’s not possible. Half a century of smoking, a poor man’s diet, poor health care, trauma, and tragedy have taken a heavy toll. I’m proud of the fight I have waged against the odds, with God’s help and the mercy and kindness of others, but all things must end. It’s said that only the good die young. Well….I am not young.

If I leave here, though, I will live on, in a place you can’t go yet. I’ll wait to meet people I’ve never known yet love deeply, and we will remember both the good and the bad, and probably wonder how we survived at all.

The human spirit is still strong in this country, and if we make it through these days of fear, it will be because kind souls have won. I believe that. I’ve met so many great souls, that yes, I have faith that America will endure. If I go before you, remember that I have faith in you and the best of people around the world.

Happy 250th birthday, America. Do better.