There are some things in life that just come along, times that you never forget...In the summer of 1971, the Grateful Dead performed at the Yale Bowl to a capacity crowd...you can still listen to the concert on InternetArchive.org, infamous because the curtain closed on rock concerts at the Bowl after that night...storming the fences to get in were hundreds of Dead fans who were thwarted by tear gas and the cops, but that didn't cause the band to skip even half a beat as far as I could tell...I am pretty sure this was the first performance to feature Sugaree but all of it was amazing...I was wearing a Buck knife on my belt that night...I always wore one in Maine, why not New Haven? As we went in, one of the cops grabbed it off my belt and refused to give it back, apparently because I just looked too dangerous and a guy who could not be trusted, you know, like all the other Deadheads...after arguing to no avail, I slipped the sheath off my belt and handed it to the guy saying they needed to stay together...not at all inclined to give it back, even after the concert...going to be thrown in the harbor, he told me...
...I have it today, it took six months of waiting after an intermediary in New Haven talked the cops into returning it to me and it arrived in my mailbox in a pretty nondescript looking package...the way I look at it that cop probably had to go diving in the harbor and sort through a lot of bottom shit before finally, with about 20 seconds of air left, find it and break for the surface...
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