Author Talk on A Hard Rain: America in the 1960s, Our Decade of Hope, Possibility, and Innocence Lost

About the Program:

This program will be a conversation between life-long friends from the 1960s. Two friends who took different paths in that divisive time. One found his way in journalism (Frye Gaillard) and the other found his way in the Navy (Wayne Lord). Wayne and Frye will share stories that will bring the 60s to life. Frye's book will be available for purchase.

About the Book:

A HARD RAIN:
America in the 1960s, Our Decade of Hope, Possibility, and Innocence Lost.

Frye Gaillard has given us a deeply personal history, bringing his keen storyteller’s eye to this pivotal time in American life. He explores the competing story arcs of tragedy and hope through the political and social movements of the times ― civil rights, black power, women’s liberation, the War in Vietnam, and the protests against it. But he also examines the cultural manifestations of change ― music, literature, art, religion, and science ― and so we meet not only the Brothers Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X, but also Gloria Steinem, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Johnny Cash, Harper Lee, Mister Rogers, Rachel Carson, James Baldwin, Andy Warhol, Billy Graham, Thomas Merton, George Wallace, Richard Nixon, Angela Davis, Barry Goldwater, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and the Berrigan Brothers.

“There are many different ways to remember the sixties,” Gaillard writes, “and this is mine. There was in these years the sense of a steady unfolding of time, as if history were on a forced march, and the changes spread to every corner of our lives. As future generations debate the meaning of the decade, I hope to offer a sense of how it felt to have lived it. A Hard Rain is one writer’s reconstruction and remembrance of a transcendent era ― one that, for better or worse, lives with us still.”

About the Author

Frye Gaillard, writer in residence at the University of South Alabama, has written extensively on southern race relations, politics and culture. He is former Southern Editor at The Charlotte Observer, where he covered Charlotte’s landmark school desegregation controversy, the ill-fated ministry of televangelist Jim Bakker, the funeral of Elvis Presley, and the presidency of Jimmy Carter. Gaillard has written or edited more than twenty-five books, and his award-winning titles include the following: Go South to Freedom, Cradle of Freedom: Alabama and the Movement That Changed America; The Dream Long Deferred: The Landmark Struggle for Desegregation in Charlotte, North Carolina; Watermelon Wine: The Spirit of Country Music; If I Were a Carpenter: Twenty Years of Habitat for Humanity; Prophet from Plains: Jimmy Carter and His Legacy; and As Long As the Waters Flow: Native Americans in the South and East. Gaillard now lives on the Alabama Gulf Coast with his wife, Nancy, who teaches in the College of Education at the University of South Alabama. Gaillard's by-line has appeared in such publications as The Washington Post, The Oxford American, and the Journal of American History. He has also co-written songs recorded by Nashville artists Anne E. DeChant, Davis Raines, Pamela Jackson, Kathryn Scheldt, and George Hamilton IV.

Book for purchase provided by Winchester Book Gallery.

NPR Great Read of 2018
“Masterful… Gaillard writes with determination to make the events of the 1960s relevant. He is a gifted storyteller, and I’m giving copies of this book to my sons and daughter to help them understand how we got to now.”
– Timothy J. McNulty, The Chicago Tribune

"...smart, readable ... at once personal and universal... An illuminating, you-are-there view of events on the ground in the turbulent 1960s."
– Kirkus

About the Moderator

Dr. Wayne Lord, a resident of Winchester, is a native of Mobile, Alabama and a life-long friend of the author, Frye Gaillard. Wayne holds a doctorate in history from Georgetown University with specialties in Russian history, Soviet politics, and U.S. diplomatic history. He served in the U.S. Navy during the Vietnam era with assignments on board the aircraft carriers USS John F. Kennedy and USS Independence.