Wanderers in Wonder

Galveston, oh Galveston

I am so afraid of dying

Before I dry the tears she’s crying

            Before I watch your sea birds flying in the sun

At Galveston.

Galveston was actually an anti-war song about a young man going off to the unknown of the Army, to the unknown of a distant Asia and Vietnam, to fight for an unknown reason…leaving his young love behind on the beaches of their peaceful youth, in Galveston. 

“My sophomore year in high school the brother of a girl two classes ahead of me was killed in Vietnam. I didn’t know Barbara well, but I knew Billy was her only sibling. As a town we were horrified. As teenagers we could not fathom her loss, nor did we know what to say.

Six years later my two brothers were in Vietnam. Though naval officers, both were in-country. Looking back, I don’t know how our parents kept it together.

As for me, my campus, like many, was in tumult. Like so many in the American Middle Class, I didn’t know anyone who had family or friends in the military. There was no one I felt I could talk with, so I kept it to myself. Into this confusing time came Jimmy Webb’s song ‘Galveston’, a hit for Glen Campbell in 1969.

As anti-war songs go, Galveston was unique for its time. It took the focus off politics and protest and put it on the fears and struggles of the young men war had plucked from their hometowns. It made me cry then, and it makes me cry now—in relief that my brothers came home, in grief that too many did not, and in sorrow that we were never the same.”

    Susan Bennet, a 1960’s American teen.

Glen Campbell would also cover Buffy St. Marie’s classic anti-war song Universal Soldier. Jan Berry of the duo Jan and Dean would release an opposing song Universal Coward which went nowhere. His partner Dean Torrence refused to participate.

Continuing with Texas humor…

From its beginnings in 1824 until the Great Galveston Hurricane of 1900, Galveston was a major seaport on the Gulf Coast. Shipping southern cotton to the Northeast and Europe and moving manufactured goods to the growing inland towns of the West made Galveston rich. The magnificent structures which survived ‘The Hurricane’, as locals refer to the distant disaster, are wonders to behold.

Peace…Wanderers in Wonder.