@waynekaminski5438

2 months ago

Saw Tull for my one and only time in the summer of 1973 between my junior and senior year of high school. My chemistry science teacher worked with my mother to secure me a place at a summer science camp at Nebraska Wesleyan University. The camp was in the top ten of most transformative experiences of my life. It sealed the deal that I would go to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, graduate with a BS and MS in Chemical Engineering which then open up doors to a forty-year career at one company as an automation engineer. A career that was both personally and financially satisfying. The summer camp personnel obtained Jethro Tull tickets for all the students (we were from all over the USA, each bringing their own experiences, of which I was probably one of the least experienced in the ways of an urban city like Lincoln Nebraska, which was truly the big-time for me coming from a small rural agricultural county in central Nebraska). I was really charged up to be seeing my first rock concert. All the students sat along one long row of seats. I was a jock in high school, totally abstaining from smoking tobacco. That was not the case for some of these students, coming from more urban, faster paced environments. I knew what a cigarette was, so when I got a nudge from the person next to me and was handed what I thought was a cigarette, I just passed it down the line. And I thought it was very strange behavior to be sharing a smoke. This passing of a "cigarette" took place throughout the concert. What a rube I was, looking back at it. Later I found out that this was really joints of marijuana! My first introduction, if even in a non-participatory way, to weed. So, Jethro Tull was my first rock concert and the place of my first introduction to marijuana. Never was much of a marijuana user in and after college and have not touched the stuff since the early to mid 1980s. After graduating from UNL with my master's in chemical engineering, I accepted a job in San Francisco, CA, moved out of Nebraska and never looked back. I have to say, the quality of the weed in Nebraska back in the 1970s was like real weeds you would find growing in a ditch compared to the world-class offerings coming out of Northern California, especially Mendocino and Humboldt Counties, and what was being imported from Asia and Mexico.

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