So he left a message at the state Historical Society and before he knew it, historians were at his door. He gave them boxes and boxes of stuff. Holbrook is not making a presentation at this year's annual meeting, however. He has not yet finished going through his stacks of leaflets and photos and tape recordings. He meets with a state historian for several hours at a time, several times a week, and together they decide what to toss and what to save.

In the early '60s, barely out of his teens, Holbrook worked for Utah Congressman Sherm Lloyd in Washington, D.C. When a delegation of Utahns came to Washington in 1963 to march with Martin Luther King Jr., Holbrook took their photos on the steps of the Capitol.

He'd never known them, or any African-Americans, when he lived in Utah. He'd never known that, in the South, blacks were not allowed to vote.

But in his civics classes at Bountiful High School, he'd been given a vision of the United States of America, a vision he believed in. So the next summer, and the summer after that, Holbrook was in Mississippi, registering black voters — and being thrown in jail for his efforts.

Of 250,000 African-Americans who could have voted in Mississippi, only 18,000 had been allowed to register, Holbrook recalls. He came back to Utah a committed activist. He organized war protests. He helped stage a sit-in to block the door of the draft-induction center. He was part of the local civil-rights movements that ended up spawning the women's movement and the environmental movement. He ran for various offices and was eventually elected to the state Legislature, where he led reforms in low-income housing, youth corrections, pollution cleanups and the way the state cared for its homeless.

Sanders defines the '60s as a decade that actually began in 1963, with the assassination of JFK, and ended 11 or 12 years later with the resignation of Nixon or perhaps with the fall of Saigon and the end of the Vietnam War. The music was inseparable from the politics of the time, Sanders says. Holbrook agrees.

As he tries to describe what it felt like to be young and politically active in the '60s, Holbrook mentions a song written by Stephen Stills and performed by Buffalo Springfield. "Somethings happenin' here, what it is ain't exactly clear. . . ," Holbrook quotes.

The rest of the song celebrates, "Young people speakin' their minds, meeting so much resistance from behind. . . . Think it's time we stopped, children, what's that sound? Everybody look what's going down. . . . "

If you go

What: The Salt Lake Sixties