Get Out and Get Under the Moon

I was 12 on July 20, 1969. We had just moved to the Town of Cortlandt, a wooded hamlet an hour north of New York. The public schools were becoming too rough and classes too crowded in northern Manhattan, and my artist parents didn't have the means for private school. So on that Sunday, I was in my room with my father's reel-to-reel recorder taping the a…