Georgia Totten:  

Due only to my somewhat amazing typing speed at the time, after graduation, I was hired by Chicago Title and Trust and worked the summer of 1969 at a clerical job across from the Civic Center. I threw confetti at the astronauts when they returned from their triumphant moonwalk and witnessed a huge Black Panther protest (walked through it on my return from lunch, in fact), and enjoyed a daily South Shore train commute with Chris Shipley, who worked in the city along with me. As those events are now the subject of PBS documentaries, it seems to me I should have been more attentive to them at the time, but at eighteen, I remained the daydreamer I was in high school, and only gave them brief pause. It makes me wonder what I might have accomplished if I had only been paying attention to all that was going on around me. That same August, I think it was Sue Lamar, Virginia Olson and I, along with another girl (I do not remember who, and quite honestly am working from memory here, that to protect the completely innocent, is not what it used to be), encountered some beaded people in a dilapidated van from Calumet City who asked us if we wanted to head out with them for a rock concert in New York. Well, I recall that Sue, Virginia and I declined; having no knowledge of these strangers, but the other girl went with them, much against our fervent admonitions. The concert was Woodstock, of course. I recall the Dyer police stopping at my house to inquire after that girl¿s whereabouts, as she was absent for a full ten days. I am certain she must have suffered that era¿s unforgiving arrows of social disapproval for quite some time afterward. As I recall, my parents were not at all pleased that I was in any way connected, but did recover. In retrospect, I have to admit that I did not care for hippies. I think I may have paraded as one at one time or another, probably to garner some sort of misinterpreted social acceptance, but in the end, I was more than happy to settle for the status quo. I married Gene Totten (LCHS class of 1967 and a former Boystown resident) that December and spent twenty-seven years raising three children with him. We lived in the San Francisco Bay area early on, and then spent seven years in beautiful southwest Idaho before settling here in Sioux Falls. Sadly, Gene died...Expand for more