MY FAVORITE YEAR

When I was 17, it was a very ...

There was a wonderful movie that came out about 20 years ago called "My Favorite Year."

It starred Mark-Linn Baker, who can't ever be forgiven for later starring in that horrible sitcom with Bronson Pinchot but was pretty good here.

He was basically playing a young Mel Brooks, and his favorite year was 1952, when television was live and everybody liked Ike.

I don't remember much about '52. I was just two years old for most of it, and my parents split up for good that fall. I never saw - or heard from - my dad again.

So it's easy to understand why 1952 wouldn't be at the top of my own list. There are a number of years I remember fondly - 1969, 1975, 1987 and 1992, to name four. And every year since 1992 has been made special by the love of my life, my lovely wife Nicole.

If I had to pick one, though, I suppose my favorite year would be 1967. It was the last year before everything fell apart for a while, both in my own life and in the country, and it was a year of many fond memories. Before the first month was over, the first Super Bowl had been played, the Boston Strangler had been convicted and three astronauts had died in the Apollo 1 fire.

Quite frankly, I don't know how much of it was even registering with me. I was in my last five-plus months of high school, 17 and yearning to be 18 and out the door.

I graduated on D-Day 1967 and had one of my last idyllic summers, with maybe six weeks of my first job - busing tables at a steak house - and my last family vacation. We went to Montreal for Expo '67 and on to Quebec City and New England.

Best of all, I met Cheryl Newman. She had lived five houses away from me for years, but she was three years behind me in school - two years younger - and we had never actually been introduced.

She was one of those rare high-school queens for whom high school didn't wind up being the high point of her life. She was captain of the cheerleaders, homecoming queen and all the rest before she was finished; now she's a doctor doing AIDS research in Georgia.

We met at my friend Gary Oleson's house in late August. Gary, his sister Diane, Cheryl and I spent an afternoon playing Risk. I walked her home, told her I was leaving for college at the University of Virginia and wished her well that fall.

When I came home for Thanksgiving, I asked her out. We dated on and off for three months. I took her to dinner, to movies and to a Peter, Paul & Mary concert. I was crazy about her, but I was too shy to even kiss her.

She was the only girl I ever loved for whom lust wasn't a component of it. Years later, I'm amazed I was ever that innocent.

But her dad didn't want her getting involved with a college boy, so I wound up getting one of the nicest "Dear John" letters ever written. I still remember the best line. I'll remember it if I live to be a hundred. "You have done more things to make me happy than any boy I have ever known."

But that happened in 1968. In 1967, I was still hopeful and optimistic. I went to college in September, and even though it wound up going as badly as it could have, those first few months were fun.

It was the year of the Summer of Love, of Scott McKenzie's "San Francisco (Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair)," of "Bonnie and Clyde" and "In the Heat of the Night."

It was the year of "Get Smart" and "Mission: Impossible," of "Star Trek" and "The Graduate."

It was the year we wondered what it was Billie Joe McAllister had thrown off the Tallahatchee Bridge, the year we marveled at "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" and the year Rolling Stone began publishing.

It was the year of the "Impossible Dream" Red Sox, the last of Vince Lombardi's great Green Bay Packer teams and the year Muhammad Ali was stripped of his heavyweight boxing title because he refused induction into the army.

It was the year of the first Endangered Species List, the first microwave oven and the first successful heart transplant.

It was the year just before the Tet Offensive, the year before many of us turned against the war in Vietnam. Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King were still alive, and no one thought Lyndon Johnson wouldn't be running for re-election in 1968.

The U.S. population reached 200 million in November, and it was projected to push 400 million by the end of the century. Then everyone stopped having kids. It's 2004 and we still haven't reached 300 million.

The following year has been called all sorts of things, including the year everything went to hell. Kennedy and King were killed, the Vietnam War went south and Richard Nixon got elected president.

I flunked out of college and Cheryl Newman stopped dating me.

No, I'll never remember 1968 fondly, but 1967 was special. Call it the last innocent year or whatever you want, but it was my favorite year.