“O” Street in Lincoln, 1970 Hijinx

“O” Street in Lincoln, Nebraska in 1970

I’ve been reading about and watching videos of this “People’s Convoy” of truckers circling Washington D.C. in their trucks on the beltway. What a pointless fecking endeavor! They are all in one lane going 50 mph. They aren’t doing shit to disrupt traffic. They are just grandstanding.

Back in 1970 in Lincoln, Nebraska, us 18 year old males were looking at the Vietnam War Draft Lottery in the following year. We were just finally getting laid and we didn’t want to go to Vietnam.

So one drunken evening after a few six packs of beer, some of us decided to drive down “O” Street (which is the main drag of Lincoln. It has two lanes in each direction with a median.)

We got in our GTO’s, Fords, and old 1950 Chevy pickup trucks and drove down “O” Street (we called it “Zero Street”) at idle speed. Maybe we were going 10 mph max. This drove the adult drivers nuts. (Which was our intent. These fuckers were sending us to Vietnam!)

Oh, they were honking like mad. The cops were called, but they couldn’t get to us through the back, but we soon saw them ahead so we accelerated and left “O” Street.

The next weekend we realized that we needed another plan. So, even though it was January and about 20F (-7C), we went into the Wyuka Cemetery which was on the north side of “O” Street. You can see it in the attached Google photo.

As an aside, I lived near the Wyuka Cemetery about 4 years later on, and had sex with a girlfriend on the tombstones. I don’t think the corpses minded.

So our new plan was to go into Wyuka Cemetery on a Saturday night at about 8 PM when it was the busiest. We would set up our lawn chairs, beach towels, coolers,.. we even had an umbrella and a radio playing music loudly. We had sunglasses, too. We put on sunscreen.

We set up right next to the street and we got a reaction. The traffic slowed down immediately. Cars honked their horns. People yelled at us. (But there was a 6’ concrete wall with a 6’ fence atop it between us and them.)

Oh, it was a hoot! We raise our beer cans at the cars and gave them shouts of “Fuck the war!” And “How’s the weather?”

After about 30 minutes our lookout saw the cop cars approaching the entrance to Wyuka Cemetery. We scurried out the back way to our own waiting old cars and trucks.

That was fun.

TJM