December 3, 1979

If you are about my age (45) or older, you no doubt remember the tragedy at the Who concert in Cincinnati on December 3, 1979. Scott has been going through Jolie's storage unit and yesterday he brought home a couple of old issues of Rolling Stone. One was this one, which was pretty exciting. It's probably the most famous of Rolling Stone covers with the photo by Annie Liebowitz.

But the one that really sent me back to high school was this one:

You see, three of those eleven kids went to my high school, a small suburban high school, in Cincinnati. I knew two of the three -- Stephen Preston and Jackie Eckerle. It turns out that Jolie, my sister in law, had gone to the concert and not had any idea of the horrific events that occured outside the Colliseum. She must have been obsessed with it for awhile, because she had saved this issue of Rolling Stone and cut some things out of the magazine which probably hung on the walls of her bedroom for a time.

Yesterday, when I saw the issue for the first time in my life, I couldn't believe that I was looking at the photographs of kids I knew in high school on the cover of Rolling Stone, a magazine I regularly read now as an adult, but never read as a kid. When I opened the magazine, I couldn't believe that I was looking at a roomful of mournful teenagers that I recognized and remembered! in Steve Preston's parent's living room. Talk about weird!

Things were so weirdly different in 1979. I went to a small school. Eleven local people were crushed at a concert. Three were from my high school, and yet, I remember that it was business as usual at school. There were no grief counselors. There were no school assemblies or memorials. The hallways were eerily quiet for one day and then back to normal right away. Did the school administrators and other adults in our lives think that it was better to ignore something this tragic than to deal with it? Did I grow up in a time when grownups were afraid to talk about the deaths of young people and somehow felt that only a certain kind of person would go to a rock concert? I wonder then, how my own parents felt when I went to the Van Halen concert the following year, which was the first rock concert at Riverfront Colliseum following the Who.

Anyway, after all these years, I still occasionally think about Jackie, Steve, and Karen (who I did not know), and I think about the human reactions to the tragedy and my own perceptions of that time 29 years ago.
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I ran about 9.5 miles today of my scheduled 17. My legs felt like bricks. Maybe because of the 5k I raced yesterday then the 3 I ran on top of it. Anyway, I really hate the Pfitz program. It's too time consuming and I dread all of the runs. It's just not fun anymore.

WTD: 33

YTD: 422