In the winter of 1971, our little band of merry pranksters had travelled from Fayetteville, Arkansas, to Little Rock to attend a concert. I have no idea what the concert was. As cliched proof that I am someone who officially lived through that era, there are a fair number of things that I simply don’t remember. But there are things that I do remember and this is one of them.

Ken, Ted, Tom, Erika and I stumbled into a 24-hour breakfast restaurant in North Little Rock the morning after on a bright, sunny day, made all the more bright because our eyes were not at all accustomed to light. We were the proverbial motley crew. Hippies. Refugees from a college life that afforded us too much privilege and required of us too little diligence, we thought of ourselves as somehow radical, but we were more like the hapless characters from…