Summer of '69: Judith Hopkins

Judith Hopkins, 58, East Moriches, is a teacher at Patchogue-Medford High School. She graduated from Brentwood High School in 1969.

"We really were the last generation of women [who] were earmarked as to what we were doing. Because of that, I wasn't supposed to go to college. A lot of us felt that way - we really didn't have a future . . . I came out of high school and got a secretarial job, because that's what I thought I had to do . . . Even at that point, with people telling you were college material, it meant nursing or teaching . . . We were a child of the Fifties.

Everyone's mother stayed home, and dad went to work . . . I almost think that I felt I wasn't part of something. Because you saw the news and you saw Woodstock, and, yeah, my mother wouldn't let me go. In some way I felt distant from that . . . I would say the moon landing was a big thing.

I think you thought the whole country was watching, and it was such an amazing thing to see that. It was almost like you were looking into the future . . . Almost as if anything was possible, and you took a lot of pride in it too, took a lot of pride in being an American."