There Was A Buckeye Tree

There Was A Buckeye Tree

Terry Pellman


I was sixteen when I left my home in rural Shelby County, Ohio in the middle of the night in 1966. This is my narrative of the life that followed.
Here is where I chronicle for you the events that caused me to leave my parents and home behind, and the experiences I had in the following decades.
When I was in my adolescence I came to understand that I saw the world through a different lens from almost everyone around me. I really cannot fully explain why my thoughts and reactions to the state of our nation so dramatically diverged from those of my friends, neighbors, and family.
At that age I could never have imagined the unexpected turn that my life would take before I had even reached legal adulthood. Nonetheless, I found myself faced with pressures I could no longer withstand. Consequently, after some planning, and after some deceit, I made the life altering choice to break free.
Over the course of the following months, I was to find kinship with like minded people: they dwelled in the communes and the antiwar counterculture of the late 1960s.
And now, as an elderly man, the memories of those heady days are all that I have to cling to.