(Pictured: Robert Kennedy campaigns in Indiana on May 7, 1968.)

We can never know how it really was. We try, in our own lives, to remember how it really was. We study the history of bygone times in hopes of learning how it really was. What was it really like to come ashore on D-Day, or to be a peasant farmer on a 14th century English manor? We read memoirs and news reports, we study the evidence and the reconstructions, and we get a sense of it, but we can never know how it really was, in the moment, for the people who were living it.

What do we know, for example, about the spring of 1968? Mostly broad outlines. A bitter presidential campaign is underway. Social movements are blooming: minorities continue work for racial justice, and we perceive stirrings of women’s liberation and gay liberation. We see hippies trying to get back to the garden, and well they might, for it is a violent age, and not just in Vietnam and on the front lines of protests around the world. In the month of May, Martin Luther King has just been shot, and Robert F. Kennedy soon will be.

As we look back from here, in 2023, it seems that seismic shocks were rumbling the nation’s foundations. But were they, really?

A few years ago, I wrote about Los Angeles radio personality Dick Whittinghill, and my piece included an aircheck of his KMPC show from June 10, 1968, which I described as “a remarkably calm half-hour of radio.” Recently, I spent some time noodling with the Billboard Easy Listening chart dated May 18, 1968.

And I thought about my parents.

Over the years, I have asked them what they remember about various historical events, but their impressions are often fragmentary. Dad was cleaning manure out of the chicken house on the day of JFK’s assassination; they woke up my youngest brother, who was not yet three, to watch the astronauts walk on the moon. But they cannot tell me how it really felt to be alive in the moments when history was made, not the way I crave to know it.

That they cannot do so used to strike me weird, but it shouldn’t have. The big events of our times are always projected against a backdrop of the mundane (which is the One Day in Your Life mission statement, basically). And certainly, what looks mundane to us now didn’t seem that way to them then.

In the spring of 1968, my parents were 35 and 32 years old. They had been married not quite 10 years. They had three sons aged eight, six, and almost two. Dad ran a dairy farm with his father; Mother was busy taking care of the house and raising their boys. Such responsibilities were anything but mundane, not if they wanted the kids to eat, and to grow up into civilized adulthood. In the spring of 1968, as in every other spring, Dad had cows to milk (twice a day, seven days a week), crops to plant, and literally dozens of other tasks contending for his time; Mother had chores of her own, plus kids to wrangle.

For them, the news was something that came on the radio at 7:25 and noon, and on TV at 6 and 10, but if it wanted significant attention from them, it had to elbow its way past the responsibilities of their everydays. They did not kill time  contemplating their place in the great sweep of history, not like their oldest son would do one day. They may have, from time to time, considered how much trouble there was in the world, and how much change. But as long as they kept doing what they needed and wanted to do each day, the foundation they were building—a farm, a home, and a family—did not rumble, and would not.

No doubt there was privilege involved in not having to concern themselves overmuch with Vietnam, or civil rights, or gay rights, but in their defense, Dad and Mother were not alone. Millions of people like them went about their days focused on running their businesses and their households, and raising their kids. And they often did so while listening to their local equivalents of KMPC and Dick Whittinghill.

What were they hearing, specifically ? I am up against my self-imposed, completely arbitrary word limit for this post and I have not even begun to discuss that. So tune in again later this week.

By 1966, the youth market was growing exponentially. Moguls and money-men had dollar signs in their eyes. For The Youth themselves, there was the allure of stardom, of hearing your songs on the radio, singing on TV, posing for magazine covers, being the name on everyone’s lips. (And dollars, too.)

And into this exciting era came the Swingin’ Six. Their album For the First Time!, released in January 1967, was a mix of original songs and covers. The music is mostly in the pocket for 1967, if not all that distinctive; a couple of Internet writers compare them to the Jefferson Airplane and the Mamas and the Papas, but they lack the edge of those groups, and some of their song choices are a little suspect. At the time, absolutely everybody was recording “The Impossible Dream” regardless of whether it was a good idea, and there is no way to make “Round and Round” sound like anything other than ripe cheese. Their busy cover of Ray Charles’ “Leave My Woman Alone” is, well, I don’t know what the hell to call it.

But it isn’t all uncomfortable. A couple of originals give the group a more interesting personality, especially “Pack Your Bag” (which was released as a single) and “For the First Time.” Another original, “Bad News,” wants to be trippy but doesn’t really get there, although I like it. The contrast between the folk rock the Six wrote and the adult standards they covered indicates that may have been some push-and-pull between what the Six themselves wanted to do and be, and what their producer, record-industry veteran Harry Meyerson, and their label, Decca Records, wanted them to do and be. If so, it’s a familiar story.

The Swingin’ Six were put together by a wannabe mogul named Ronn Cummins, and nearly all of what we know about them comes from the liner notes Cummins wrote for their album. Steve Burnett, John Fisher, Pat Lanigan, and Richard Neives were all musicians who had done Broadway, television, and nightclub work. Ann Rachel and Carol Richards were stage actresses and sang on commercial jingles. If Cummins inflated the significance of his group’s credits (and he almost certainly did), he also makes clear that the Six were ambitious kids who were already putting in the work, chasing success in showbiz. Cummins himself had been such a person, with Broadway and recording credits of his own before (and after) becoming a talent manager.

On December 24, 1966, Billboard reported that the Swingin’ Six would appear at a New York club before the release of their album in January. Cummins was confident that they would be big. Billboard wrote that he was already auditioning musicians for two more groups, “and he will also create a ‘farm system’ for the Swingin’ Six to provide replacements for the group should it become necessary.”

Spoiler alert: it would not become necessary. The Swingin’ Six made some TV appearances, but their single did not hit (although WWDC in Washington listed the B-side, “The Green Door,” for at least one week). Their album did not hit. In fact, no member of the Swingin’ Six went on to anything like stardom, although Burnett had a few post-Six musical credits.

The only reason to remember them today is for a separate gig. In 2021, I wrote about how the federal government enlisted popular TV shows to promote savings bonds. Shows from Father Knows Best to WKRP in Cincinnati were part of the effort. But the feds produced public service announcements and short films for many other purposes. The short films might appear on TV as interstitials, to fill time between the end of a game or a movie and the next scheduled program, or they might be shown by community groups for public education. In 1967, the Post Office was launching the ZIP Code program, and part of the task was explaining to Mr. and Mrs. Average American what the codes were and why it was important to use them. So they hired the Swingin’ Six to appear in a 15-minute film introducing ZIP Codes, with production numbers and original songs by Steve Burnett. The film is both cheesy and charming, and it’s educational, too: I was today years old when I learned that each five-digit ZIP Code breaks down into three parts with specific meanings.

I am not the person to write a book about how governments use popular culture to sell programs and ideas to the governed, but I’d read it. And if somebody wrote it, the Swingin’ Six should be in it.