Love Persists

Right. The couple you see in the picture are still together.

At the time they were a local upstate New York item, two 20-year-olds who had been dating for about three months, Bobbie Kelly and Nick Ercoline. On the morning of the last day of the concert they were captured embracing in the early morning chill by a young photorapher named Burk Uzzle.

Today they've been married 38 years, are still going strong, have a good-looking family, and a long life together to show for it. And now, 40 years to the day later, they just met the photographer for the first time, as documented last night on NBC nightly news.

Neither of them is as pretty as they were in August of '69 when the picture was taken, but then none of us are. However, we're still here, and we're not done yet.

We were accused at the time, and still are today, of wrecking America. That's half true. America is a wreck, but it wasn't us who wrecked it. All we ever did was call attention to its diseases -- materialism, militarism, greed, and a total lack of authenticity.

It's not too late to erect the country we always wanted and that everybody needs (whether they know it or not) on the ruins of the old one, but we'll have to paint the American flag green.