The Saturday Evening Post July/August 2019

I had just turned 17 in the spring of 1969, and already there was a buzz about a music festival in summer with nearly every band you could possibly want to see. It’s hard to believe this now, but the three-day ticket price of $18 seemed a bit steep at the time. Single-day tickets were $8. Affordable. After analyzing which day was the best, I finally settled on day two, Saturday. My 15-year-old brother Jonathan and I bought our tickets and pinned them to a corkboard in the bedroom we both shared. As is well known, the festival drew such massive crowds by Friday that it effectively became a free concert. By Saturday morning, as we were getting ready to leave, newspapers had declared the region a disaster area. Doctors were being…

Dan Freedman At age 66, with his own retirement looming, Freedman wondered what to do with all the extra time he would have on his hands. “Most stories on retirement are about money,” says the veteran journalist and author of “How to Retire” (page 52). “Few take on what is potentially a much more difficult question: ‘Are you psychologically prepared for retirement?’” Freedman discovered that a little self-knowledge can help you avoid the common pitfalls of your post-career life. Douglas Brinkley In “Moonshot” (page 46), Brinkley takes a fresh look at the backstory of the first lunar landing and President Kennedy’s inspiring challenge to beat the Soviet Union to the moon. “I was a space geek,” says the award-winning historian. “I was only 8 years old on July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong…

In Living Color Shari Erickson’s cover (Pretty in Pink, right) is by far my favorite cover in years! The colors are vibrant and fresh and the illustration is full of life and energy. Congratulations on a beautiful work of art that honors the Post’s long-standing tradition of great cover illustrations. Cris P., Indianapolis, Indiana No Regrets “Taking Your Shot” (Editor’s Letter, May/June) was a home run. As you say, one of the saddest things is to look back at the end of one’s life and realize you never took a risk, never took a chance to create something for yourself. You and your crew are doing a heckuva job holding the magazine’s banner high in this wacky 21st century. Charles Coe, Cambridge, Massachusetts Puppy Love I love your special publication A Celebration of Dogs! I can’t imagine…

Of the three ancient ways of obtaining food — hunting, plant foraging, and fishing — only the last remained important after the development of agriculture and livestock raising in Southwest Asia some 12,000 years ago. Yet ancient fisher folk and their communities have almost entirely escaped scholarly study. Why? Such communities held their knowledge close to their chests and seldom gave birth to powerful monarchs or divine rulers. And they conveyed knowledge from one generation to the next by word of mouth, not writing. That knowledge remains highly relevant today. Fishers are people who draw their living from a hard, uncontrollable world that is perfectly indifferent to their fortunes or suffering. Many of them still fish with hooks, lines, nets, and spears that are virtually unchanged since the Ice Age. Deep-water trawls, diesel…

When I was a magazine editor, prisoners often sent me letters. Nearly all asserted they were wrongfully convicted, sometimes in way-too-colorful detail. What grabbed me, however, was that the screeds were handwritten. Passionate, personal, brimming with emotion. Lots of free-flowing anger there. But again — handwritten. Delightful. So, who says the art of hand-penned letters is dead? Just about everyone, actually. At least until recently. Inmates are no longer among the few who put ink on paper to share their most urgent thoughts. It’s becoming a thing again to write letters and drop them into a physical mailbox. I approve. Early in my journalism career, over a period of several years, I maniacally scribbled literally thousands of letters and notes to virtually everyone who I thought could give me a break.…

Several years ago, I read a book about Harry Emerson Fosdick, who pastored Riverside Church in New York City. It was an interesting book, chock full of curious facts, chief among them that Riverside Church gave Fosdick the summer off each year. I’ve pastored for 35 years and am itching to have a summer off, but when I suggested it to my church, the idea landed with a splat, like a fat man doing a belly flop. My wife is a school librarian, so has a summer break before hitting the books again the first week of August, which signals the conclusion of summer, even though it officially ends in September. Summer is over once the kids head back to school. If I were the president, the first thing I’d do…