I was born in 1966, and the older I get, the more I realize how much that year explains about the way I see the world.

We were deep into the Cold War with the USSR and fully engaged in the Space Race—two superpowers staring each other down while trying to prove who could reach the heavens first. Vietnam was about two years into America’s escalation, and the war was no longer abstract. It was on the evening news, every night, in living rooms across the country.

Civil Rights was still very much unfinished business. Lyndon Johnson had signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964, but laws don’t change hearts overnight—especially in the South. I was born in Texas, and for many people there, equality was something to be resisted rather than embraced. The tension was real, and it was everywhere.

And yet—culture flourished.

The Sound of Music was all the rage. It would go on to dominate the 1966 Academy Awards, but for my family, it was already personal. That fall in Odessa, Texas, my mom—Judy DeBolt—played the lead. A pregnant nun in rehearsals. I didn’t know it then, obviously, but that detail alone feels like a metaphor for my life: faith, art, contradiction, and hope all sharing the same stage.

Television was shaping imaginations, too. Two of my all-time favorite shows debuted that year: Batman and Star Trek. And then there was It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown!—which followed A Charlie Brown Christmas, first aired the year before. I’ve always felt a connection to Charlie Brown. Quiet. Earnest. A little melancholy. Always hoping the world might meet him halfway this time.

Music mattered in 1966. The Beatles recorded Revolver that year—my first Beatles album, though I didn’t know it at the time. Mom gave it to me for Christmas in 1972, and I had no idea it wasn’t new. The same was true for The Monkees, whom I discovered years later without realizing they were already living in reruns.

The number-one song the day I was born was “Reach Out I’ll Be There” by the Four Tops. Two days later, it was “96 Tears.” The following week, “Last Train to Clarkesville.” Looking back, it feels like the radio was trying to tell me something about longing, mystery, and movement before I ever learned to name those things myself.

There’s also a strange numerical symmetry to my age. I was born in October, and a few months later, the Green Bay Packers played the Kansas City Chiefs in the first Super Bowl—though it wasn’t called that yet. My age has always matched the Super Bowl number. This year, we’re heading toward Super Bowl 59. That little bit of trivia feels oddly grounding, like time keeping score in a way that makes sense.

Not all of what I know about 1966 is easy to sit with.

One day, I found a year-in-review book, and two names stopped me cold. Charles Whitman. Richard Speck.

Whitman murdered his wife and mother, then climbed the bell tower at the University of Texas in Austin and began shooting. By the time it ended, 14 people were dead and dozens wounded. Speck’s crimes feel even darker somehow—more intimate, more cruel. He kidnapped nine nurses inside of their Chicago dormitory and murdered eight of them, one by one. The ninth survived only because she hid and he lost count.

Between those horrors, Vietnam, and the civil unrest of the time, 1966 was undeniably a dark year.

And yet—something joyful endured.

It’s a Small World moved from the New York World’s Fair to its permanent home at Disneyland. Yes, the song can be maddening. But nearly six decades later, the message still holds. Maybe even more so now than then.

It’s a world of laughter
A world of tears
It’s a world of hopes
And a world of fears

There’s so much that we share
That it’s time we’re aware
It’s a small world after all

That’s the year I was born into. A world of contradiction. Violence and beauty. Fear and hope. Noise and sincerity. Maybe that’s why I’ve always believed both things can be true at the same time—and why I’ve never fully given up on the idea that waiting in the pumpkin patch might still be worth it.

Copyright © 2025 Doug DeBolt.