Third Movement: Andante

On September 24, the CBS news magazine "60 Minutes" premieres on CBS on a Tuesday night.  On September 30, the first Boeing 747 is rolled out of its Everett, Washington assembly building.  In September, the Big Mac is created  in Pittsburgh by McDonald’s franchisee Jim Delligatti . It sells for 49 cents.  Also in September, the Soviet spacecraft Zond ("Probe") 5 became the first to loop around the moon and return to Earth.

Loop around the moon? Kitty and I are just trying to leave Munich and go to Turkey. We might have done better on the Zond 5!

 On October 11, Apollo 7 is launched from Florida for an eleven day journey which will orbit the Earth 163 times.  October 18: the US Olympic Committee suspends two black athletes for giving a black power salute as a protest during a victory ceremony in Mexico City.  On October 20, Jacqueline Kennedy is married to Aristotle Onassis, a Greek shipping magnate, on the private island of Skorpios.  At the end of the month, President Johnson announces a total halt to US bombing in North Vietnam.

As for Kitty and I, we are oblivious. We are happy selling our blood in Thessaloniki and celebrating Halloween with the multi-national group of hippies then camping out in the Caves in Crete in Matala.

On November 1, Georgios Papandreou, Greek minister and premier; dies, and on November 3, hundreds of thousands of people demonstrate against Greece’s fascist junta as he is buried. 

Richard M. Nixon is elected the 37th US President on November 3, defeating Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey and third-party candidate George C. Wallace.

November 12 sees the US Supreme Court voiding Arkansas law banning the teaching of evolution in public schools.

The US "National Turn in Your Draft Card Day" on November 14 features draft card burning as the Vietnam death toll approaches 30,000. 

On November 22, Beatles release the "Beatles," (White Album), their only double album (and 6 days later, John Lennon pleads guilty to possession of cannabis resin in London on November 28 and is fined 150 pounds plus 20 guineas costs).

On November 26, the South Vietnamese government agrees to join in the Paris peace talks after stalling for months. 

At start of the month, Kitty and I witnessed that demonstration in the streets of Athens, but the end of the month found us back in Munich, and thinking of home.

On December 21, the U.S. launches Apollo 8, sending its first manned mission to the Moon. On December 24, the 3 astronauts, orbiting the moon, read passages from the Old Testament Book of Genesis during a Christmas Eve television broadcast, and the first pictures of an Earth-rise over the Moon are seen.
On December 24, North Korea releases the crew of the USS Pueblo after 11 months of captivity.

On December 27, the 3 Apollo 8 astronauts make a safe, nighttime splashdown in the Pacific.

And after living a weird half-life of nights sleeping in an unheated storage closet in the basement of a Munich apartment building and days at an American military base library, on December 22, Kitty and I make our own “splashdown” when, at last, we fly home.