The 1960s were a great decade to be young in

I suppose if I had a choice I would pick the 1960s as the perfect time to be young. In those days, we really had the best of everything.

As I look back at that decade, I see a time of sweeping changes and momentous events. It's the decade that began with Richard Nixon as vice president and ended with him in the White House after he had been beaten in his initial bid for the presidency. I don't know if there was a face aside from Nixon's that figured prominently in both 1960 and 1969.

And who would have thought in 1960, that before the decade was out we would be landing Americans on the moon, Woodstock would be famous and the country would become entranced in a football game between the NFL and a league that didn't even exist in 1959.

Another thing we had in the '60s took root in 1964 when the Beatles crossed the Atlantic Ocean, played the Ed Sullivan Show and Municipal Stadium in Kansas City and ushered in a period of the greatest music in the history of civilization. Many of the '60s recording artists are still on tour, although they've had to fill in a few holes here and there.

One thing we never had in 1967 was a $600 or $700 price tag for a Super Bowl ticket. And that's face value. I don't know about you, but of all the football I've watched in my life, I can't think of a single game I'd spend $600 that I don't have to attend when I can sit and watch it on TV. But back in the '60s, you could get in for under $20.

I still remember the first Super Bowl, known then as the AFL-NFL Championship. My mom and I watched that game, like we did so many, at my grandmother's house because she had something we did not. A color television, something we take for granted today. We'd never heard of high definition or LCD quartz or even big screens. Yet, we were happy.

As far as I was concerned, the benchmark year was 1967. It was the last year we had the Kansas City A's and the circus Charles O. Finley called baseball. As it turned out, the joke was on us because the A's, doormats for so long in KC, were World Championships by 1972.

But it was 10 years earlier, Oct. 15, 1962 to be exact, that our whole world started to unravel. I hurried for home that warm, pre-global warming afternoon in order to catch the latter innings of the World Series' sixth game, won 5-2 by San Francisco, setting up the next day's finale. (Note day: When they played under God's sunshine) That evening on the Huntley-Brinkley newscast we learned of missiles in Cuba, touching off a couple exciting weeks for a kid not quite 16. I still remember the eerie echo of the Nevada High School intercom radio as I sat in Martha Armstrong's American History class with the world on the brink of nuclear annihilation. When the Soviet ships turned around, we exhaled and went back to work.

A little over a year later, that same intercom informed us one cold, sunny November Friday that the president had been shot in Dallas.

There was the summer that Finley threatened to move the A's to Peculiar and play "in a cow pasture" because the council wouldn't give him as favorable a rental agreement for Municipal Stadium as the Chiefs had received.

Sometimes, I agreed with Finley. They made him stop shooting off fireworks when the A's hit home runs because there was an ordinance against it. The Royals have done it for years. But despite it all, it was a happy time.

There were always Saturday night dances to Eric and the Norsemen at the pavilion with the outside chance someone might have gotten wet in our nearby, and unique, swimming pool. Walton was a fishing lake that you bought shares of stock in for a chance at the big fish.

In 1960 we had a terrible A's baseball team and no football team in Kansas City. By the end of the decade we had a brand new expansion team in Kansas City and the best football team in the world. As I said, it was a happy time.