Yes, I am old enough to remember the first Earth Day. I was a senior in high school. It was the end of the 60's--the real Age of Enlightenment, you know. Yeah, we were enlightened, all right. Actually, not so much. We wore the bell bottoms and love beads, and grew our hair, or at least most of us did, but it was someone else who really cared enough about the environment to bring about such things as Earth Day.
As I said, we were still in high school and being such, we were taught about the environment and earth day, and given an assignment to do a project concerning the environment. I did a lame poster. Everyone did a lame poster. Hey, it was the first Earth Day. We didn't have much history to support us. Rick Brown also did a fairly lame poster. Rick was a brainiac of sorts. When I said that most of us wore the bell bottoms etc., Rick was not part of the "most". When the rest of us were growing our hair long to be different, Rick wore his own hair style. As I remember it, he wore his hair in a length of about two inches long standing straight up without the help of what we call today, product. When asked why he wore it that way, his response was something to the effect that the prominent thought of the day is going natural, and that this was how his hair naturally went. That's the way Rick was, self assured but different.
Rick did a lame Earth Day poster project too. Well, it was a poster project, it may not have been lame. I don't remember, but that's not the point of this writing. What has stuck in my memory to this day, is how he arrived at school the morning of earth day. He was wiped out--totally out of breath and barely able to walk. You see, Rick had ridden his bike to school that day. His bike wasn't a 36 speed racing bike like might be ridden today. His bike wasn't even a 10 or a 3 speed bike like was becoming regular for the time. Rick had ridden his heavy weight, single speed, fat tired behemoth of a bike seven miles to school that morning. Had he missed the bus? No. Were there other extenuating circumstances? No. Then why? His response was, "It's Earth Day. I decided to choose the least polluting form of transportation I could think of to get to school today." Wow. I don't know how many others were impressed, but I definitely was. So much so that I have remembered it to this day.
Rick got it--Rick made a choice that mattered--on the first earth day...and I remember.
I made a poster. It had trees on it, I think. I don't remember.
