Sitting on a train between Hamburg and Frankfort Germany reading Time magazine open to the riots in the US and an image of a burning school bus - looking up to see the look of sheer horror on the face of the little old German lady sitting opposite
I lived overseas on military bases in the Pacific for a good part of the mid-Sixties and early Seventies.
I was always a very conservative kid, living in a military family and such, so as a military brat, I read and watched accounts of what was going on back in the USA with a large degree of trepidation.
I detested the hippie culture and anti-war culture. Not because they were anti-war, but because they slandered people like my dad and others in the military as “baby-killers” and such, so I grew to despise them.
I saw the reports of the protests and unrest. I read accounts of school kids having LSD secretly introduced into their food and drink at lunch, and the concept terrified me. (Truth or urban legend-I have no idea, but this is what my perception of the USA was during those years)
But when we did return to the States, and we landed at JFK in New York, when we deplaned onto the tarmac (that was what was often done in those days) I literally got down on my hands and knees and kissed the asphalt. I was that happy to be back in the USA after more than five years overseas.
That was in 1971-72.
I had a great time in the Seventies, but again, half of it was spent in the USN, so military life then was a bit different. We spent more time at anchor than warships do now (I think) we flew and steamed less, supplies were tight and we often did not have what we needed to operate on, didn’t even have adequate cold weather gear when we went up above the Arctic Circle in November (issued jackets good to 40 degrees, so we stuffed cleaning rags inside them for insulation when we worked on the flight deck) but...like so many in the Seventies, that was the way things were, so that was how we did them.
I was still a young girl living in Switzerland for a couple of years with my family in the early 70s (Dad was a scientist), and I remember how horrified the Europeans were at the riots and violence, too, but then the terrorists in Europe were horrifying as well. Swissair Flight 330 went down within sight of my school (Palestinian bomb).
The trains were great. You could guess what country a person was from by his or her shoes. Russians gave away themselves away with sideburns and fillings, even if they got the shoes right, though. Basel train station was a hive of Cold War spies. The exchange rate was great all over Europe before Nixon gave us funny money, and that was nice.
I saw my first hippies in real life in Vondelpark and was shocked. I’d only seen them in photos in Time and Newsweek before that. Ah, those were the days ...