A Story from Fifty Years Ago.

This is a true story from October 31, 1974.

If you’re a boxing fan, you might recognize the date as the day after the Ali-Foreman fight. Like a lot of Ali’s fans, I decided not to go to see the fight at a closed-circuit theater because I thought Ali would get killed.

It never occurred to me that if Ali couldn’t win a prize fight in Africa, he couldn’t win a fight anywhere.

Anyway, Ali won the fight and the next night I was at a victory party in a floor-thru apartment somewhere on Manhattan’s West Side along with just about anyone who had been involved in the anti-war movement for which this fight was something of a bittersweet moment because even though Nixon had resigned in August, we all knew that the wondrous feelings of the late ‘60’s and early ‘70’s were coming to an end.

The apartment was crowded, and everyone was sharing either standing or sitting space with the exception of two people who were sitting on a couch in the middle of the living room and were being stared at but left alone.

The two people happened to be Patty Hearst and Bill Walton, who had been going around the country in Bill’s VW bus avoiding a national search for Patty because she was on the FBI’s ‘most wanted’ list.