The real stars of the book however, are the middle McCarthy son Michael Jr. ...Mick, and his cute, sexy and tough/tender friend and lover, Bridget Connolly.

Eventually any conversation I have about these two main characters winds up with the question; "is Mick you?" And my answer is; "sure, if I'd have been a whole lot tougher, braver and smarter!" Well, we all have our alter ego's so maybe Mick is mine. Kind of like Clark Kent to Superman or Peter Parker to Spiderman... although I don't don a skin tight spandex costume (thank God! my wife screams in the background) and go out to fight crime.

However, I did get a lot of the material from a series of journals that I kept starting in high school in 1963 and continuing through college and ending in San Francisco in 1973. I'm not really sure what I intended to do with them, though since I've always loved writing, I think I must have had the vague idea of perhaps turning them into a book one day. At any rate when I moved back east from California in early '74, I packed them into an old carton and forgot about them for a few decades. Eventually they wound up with other piles of miscellaneous junk and lay moldering in the basement of our present home for close to 30 years until one rainy Saturday three years ago my wife was in one of her 'get rid of all your old crap' moods and sentenced me to clean-up detail. This was a task for which I was obviously unsuited, having the mindset of a pack rat and being totally incapable of throwing anything away! "Hey Barb, look my old college beer mug from 1965 - this'll go great in the living room, don'tcha' think !"

So when she came across a squashed cardboard box filled with dozens of cheap college ruled spiral bound notebooks covered with a fine patina of basement dust and mold, she took one look and heaved them into the trash barrel. Fortunately I was there just like Mighty Mouse 'to save the day' and consequently was able to rescue the hapless records of my misspent youth from the ignominious fate of fertilizing some local landfill. I mean come on - that would have been like Homers wife using the Iliad to wrap last nights fish heads !

Well all's well that ends.... Anyway, I started reading through them and realized that they were my own dusty little window back on history. And although I didn't realize it at the time, I had been smack dab in the middle of one of the greatest social revolutions and pop culture changes of all time!

So 'the Journals' as I came to think of them, are not so much about me personally, as they are about changes. Social, cultural and my generations'.

When I started to re-read them I realized that here was source material for a book - several books. And I thought that the sixties would be a perfect setting for adventure, excitement, change and especially - love. And lest you think that Shadow of Innocence is just for aging Baby Boomers, it was actually my kids who told me that the sixties had appeal to all generations. When they started showing up in bell-bottoms, boots and hippie beads, I knew that this era still resonated with all age groups. And there does seem to be a universal fascination that all age groups seem to have for that most exciting decade of change. The clothes, the fashions, the culture, the personalities, the freedom and of course, the music!

So much of the way we view the world and each other came out of the 60’s. The environmental movement, the belief in social justice and racial equality, the women’s liberation movement, the elevation of pop stars to icon status, the freedom (and expectation) to express yourself …and most of all, the revision of sexual attitudes.

So as I continued to root through that old carton I also came across letters (remember them from the days before e mails!?) And I became increasingly fascinated by the social and cultural history they contained. Although some were silly and stuffed full of corny rhetoric others were really quite touching, even chilling. From friends on their way to Vietnam or hitch hiking across the country or engaging in student protest on other college campus's. And in almost all of them, there was wealth of information about the other great trademark and passion that the 60's generation became known for, .. the music. As I opened a few and began reading, amidst the memories they started to evoke, it occurred to me that there was actually some history in these pages. I read and remembered about concerts with Bob Dylan, Peter, Paul and Mary, The Who, the Stones. People now considered nostalgia by the 60’s generation but ‘legends of Rock’ by our children’s.

I also read in these letters, the youthful idealism of young college age kids caught up in their first serious love. And a girl in another letter who wanted to join the newest idea of the 60's new young President, JFK ...the Peace Corp. And throughout many of the letters, the fears and motivation for the vast political changes that were coming.

These dozens of journals and letters spanning a decade of some of the most profound but exciting changes this country has ever seen, coalesced into the source material for a book about two 20-something's who roar through the counter-culture in search of their own ideas of justice, adventure and of course, love.

And since our Publisher, bless him!... has presented us, his authors, with a unique opportunity to get to know our readers and tell a little about ourselves, I thought that an interesting and fun way to do it would be to let you see the source that I use to get my inspiration from. Thus from time to time, I'm going to post excerpts from these journals and share with you the adventures and changes of an exciting time as seen thru the eyes of a teenage boy living in a small sheltered New England town in 1963, to a much changed - and you notice that I didn't say 'older but wiser' - young man living in San Francisco in 1973.

I hope you'll enjoy these little slices about pop culture, music, young love and the wild, free flowing, social and cultural changes of that were the sixties and the setting for Shadow of Innocence.

Enjoy!

As the original entries tended to be a rather short, choppy diary type style, I've edited them into a narrative to make for easier reading.

This first journal excerpt is from 1963 and covers how I got involved in music and performing. This is also where I got the source material for Mick's cover as a folk singer in the book.

In 1963 I met the first 'love of my life'. She was pretty in an esthetic Elizabeth Barrett Browning, sort of way. She also baked dynamite cookies and owned a Goya guitar!

We became an "item"…much to the amusement, scorn, envy, and consternation of friends, enemies, parents, teachers and other mildly interested parties. Holding hands in the halls and moderate "PDA" (public display of affection …well after all, it still was the early sixties!)

We also started to become what I new I always wanted to be but never really had the opportunity to be …Different.

In 1963 New England, which was still technically pre-Beatles and mostly Do Wop Rock & Roll, the most radical sounds belonged to the Beach Boys and Jan and Dean And there is nothing more pathetic than New England kids trying to pretend they were surfers in the waveless waters of Nantucket Sound…I know, I tried it!

From this rather sterile and non threatening environment, my new love took me into the bohemian and unpredictable (at least I thought it was) world of "Harvard Square" in Cambridge Mass., where strangely enough, more than 10 years later, I was to meet the girl who was to become my wife, and there introduced me to a small Harvard student run Coffee House at 47 Mount Auburn Street. As the decade wore on, this nondescript little store front café was to become the launching pad for many of the decades folk and rock icons. So as I was just turning 17, I got a little hand printed membership card that said I was entitled to bring my guitar and drink "Russian Tea"..(it’s made with strawberry preserves you know) and jam(no pun intended) with other unknown or struggling "folkies" like Joan Baez, Tom Rush and a strange, skinny kid from New York’s Greenwich Village by the name of Bob Dylan.

She taught me how to smoke. Oh, I’d smoked before .. who didn’t in 1963. But I smoked like a thug ..lots of snorting and spitting. She smoked like a prep. A slow languid drag, letting half of the smoke drift out her mouth and then inhaling slowly and letting it drift out so that it hung like a gauzy blue halo around her hair. So cool.

Thus at 17, I abandoned high school and everything connected with it.

Every Friday and Saturday night we went into Harvard Sq. to the Club 47 and listened to music and read ee cummings poems - I still can’t understand him.. We pretended that we were both in college and were both Ivy League preppy, folk singing beatniks, (remember, this was pre-hippie days). Looking back I can tell you that this was where all of the booby hatch ideals of the "soon to come…far out" wacko sixties that everyone associates with that political smorgasbord decade, got formulated and later regurgitated. But that was all to come later. At that bright, shinny new moment we could look into one another’s eyes and see all the things we wanted to become…and as it turned out, a few things we didn't. But then, everything was possible.

After our weekends as Ivy League intellectual beatniks, returning to "Be-Bop High" was very difficult. Remember that in 1963 the Ronnetts and Shirells were the most daring music going in high school - although I must admit, I always did have a crush on Ronnie Spector. Also, teachers were not very understanding of "free spirits" back then.

The rest of the world gradually faded away. Friends, who said they were friends, told me later that I sort of just drifted away. It was a drift I was ready for. We made our own world of pages long notes passed between classes. We kissed by the lockers …and that ultimate of high school trust, we shared locker combinations. She would leave poems wrapped around cupcakes and jelly beans in my locker and every afternoon we'd walk the long, short walk to her house. A half mile in three hours. We’d talk until dark and then I'd make my four mile walk home in two or three minutes (or so it seemed to me). No sock hops for us. I backed away from my own sophomore and junior year sock hop band "The Daytona’s". Instead, she gave me her gut string guitar which I "cooly" carried when we went into the Club 47 every weekend. We loved the picture we made when we looked at our reflections in the Harvard Sq. storefront windows. The girl with the plaid skirt, green eyes and long brown hair and the blue eyed guy in the turtle neck sweater carrying the guitar. We would only forsake Harvard Sq. for a world shaking event like ….the Peter Paul & Mary concert!  For that special event, it was my parents borrowed 61’ Buick La Sabre. And the concert itself? My first "big time" concert. The magic of 'Blowin’ in the Wind" and "Don’t think twice". Ah, here was real 'folk music for the masses'

And so the days of cold, wet, early New England Spring passed into the soft, warm, pale pastel green "perfect for being in love’ springtime. A Norman Rockwell/Currier and Ives picture of young puppy lovers. Easter came, a time for yellow jelly beans and marshmallow Easter chicks. Then April, my birthday, and a cake baked by my true love’s hand - chocolate with vanilla frosting (my favorite), wrapped in a napkin and left in my locker (and smelling something like my old gym socks by the time I finally got to it. But hey, love knows no bounds…not even with old gym socks)

Days passed and the magic nights as well. Walks through the old grave yard by her house. I told her all the old spooky stories I’d heard as a kid in Scout camp and others I’d read and still others I’d cobbled together myself from old legends and tales. Putting them all together in my best supernatural story telling style and she’d listen with eye’s wide and glowing and just say…"oh wow!" - the coolest of cool prep phrases in 1963.

High school went on to the beat of the Beach Boys, Jan & Dean, the Chiffons and the Shirelles. But I wasn’t there anymore. I was mentally, physically, emotionally and every other "lly", in Harvard Sq. …holding hands, listening to Dylan and reading, and even pretending to like, ee cummings! We became the great iconoclastic couple, scorning all that was high school, until … the Junior Prom.

Now you may think, what could this avant guarde, new model, cool, high school disdaining couple have in common with something as predictably pedestrian as the Junior Prom? Well as a matter of fact I thought that too. But as it turned out, for all of her cool, preppy sophistication, my true love had never been to the prom and I think had a secret guilty "left over from the 50’s’ yearning to go …and so we went.

I rented a white tux and got her some pink carnations - borrowed the family car again and off we went, to good old 50’s Americana...well, for a little while anyway. As I recall, after "Southern Comforting" the punch and cutting up all of the other couples who were also dressed in white tuxes and pink carnationed dresses, we bugged out to the town sand and gravel pit or "the passion pit" as it was euphemistically known, for a night of loves declarations under the stars and a healthy dose of early 60’s, teenage sexual frustrations. Which consisted basically of a lot of grouping and panting interspersed with deep, passionate French kisses that tasted like a combination of cigarettes.. Newport's, mine - Tarrytons, hers. And of coursed the obligatory Southern Comfort mixed with coke. We like those drinks sweeeet in the 60’s. No wonder we threw up so much!

And so the spring passed. I walked her home everyday. We spent every weekend in Harvard Sq. where I was exposed to not only the Kingston Trio plastic pop type of folk music, but bluegrass, English ballads,, urban blues. I gave up my high school instrumental rock band "The Daytona’s", and sat in on open mike nights at the Club 47 and got to jam with the likes of Tom Rush, Dave Van Ronk, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan. …using of course my 'true love’s nice gut string guitar by the way. My only guitar was an electric Harmony bought with my earnings from jobs playing at sock hops, sweet 16 birthday parties, and Bar Mitzvah’s. It had a crappy tone and an action so high and stiff, that my finger would bleed if I played it for more than an hour at a time!. But being a folk singer fit both of our images as the folky/prep couple we thought we wanted to be. I actually put that down in my high school yearbook, 'Folk Singer', under "Ambition" …you know, where most kids put down Doctor, Lawyer and all the other things their parents want them to be and they never become. My poor parents almost moved out of town after they saw that one!                                           

So we decided to become famous. She was going to sing and I was going to play. We were going to write important songs of protest (against what I don't think we ever decided) and gritty urban blues - right.  She selflessly gave me her beautiful Goya classical guitar, and we were on our way.

She would write me notes in class leave them in my locker. Notes that told about how we would become a famous folk singers and would tour the country in a yellow MGB - she had a thing for yellow. Unfortunately, there were no yellow MGB’s in our future or world famous folk singing gigs together either, because in late June of 1963 my love and I were going through our first separation trauma called "the summer job away from home."

On our last night together, we kissed and cried and swore our undying love and then cried and kissed some more - there are some great parts to separation trauma, aren’t there? And as I headed off for my summer job as a dishwashing folk-singer on Cape Cod, my tearful teenage love gave me one last wet sniffing kiss and slipped a perfumed letter into my hand;

Ric Wasley

Author - Shadow of Innocence

Kunati - April 2007