1968
The year started out like previous years with Uncle Bob calling Mom on their common birthday January 16th. I was doing well in school making A’s in geometry and B’s and C’s in the other subjects.
In February we got out of school for a week when Florida teachers went on strike to protest the state under funding education when attendance was rising sharply.
In March President Lyndon B. Johnson mandated that all computers purchased by the federal government support ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) character encoding. With the growing use of computers, this solved a problem in which different computer manufactures used different character encoding, most notable the largest computer manufacture, IBM, used EBCDIC (Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code). I didn’t know at the time, but this would prove to be important to me a few years later.
April 4th Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated setting off a nationwide wave of race riots reported on by Walter Cronkite in the CBS news. On the same day, NASA launched Apollo 6, the second and last unmanned test flight of the Saturn V launch vehicle which was planned to go into a lunar orbit but there were problems with the second stage engines preventing it from going to the moon. After ten hours of orbiting the Earth, it successfully splashed down in the Pacific Ocean.
In March word spread around school about a boy and girl who went into Warren’s Cave where they fell and got hurt. Warren’s cave is the longest dry cave in Florida with over four miles of mapped passages. This is amazing considering that in most of Florida, if you dig more than 20 feet you hit water reflected by the joke “What do you call a basement in Florida?", “A indoor swimming pool.” Warren’s Cave is not like Linville Caverns in North Carolina that I had seen in when we were on vacation. While Linville Caverns had walkways, stairs, guardrails and lighting, Warren’s Cave is in its natural, undeveloped state, dark, with narrow passages and deep dangerous drops. (Read my story, To Hell and Back about Devil’s Millhopper and Warren’s Cave)
Updated: 10-15-2022