Posted on 07/13/2007 7:39:49 AM PDT by Incorrigible
By DICK FEAGLER
Forty years ago, my editors put me on a plane and shipped me off to San Francisco to live with the hippies.
I always had great out-of-town luck. So, on the ride, I met a nice, middle-class couple who were flying out to meet their son. He was a drummer for a band called Big Brother and the Holding Company. He met his parents at the airport.
``You want to know the scene?'' he said. ``Come with me tonight. We got a gig at the Fillmore.''
That's how I entered the Summer of Love _ a summer that changed America.
He took me backstage to meet the band's lead singer. This woman struck me as totally obnoxious. My idea of a lead singer was Doris Day. This woman, who was grungy, sat at a dressing table, patting Southern Comfort whiskey on her face. Her name, she grudgingly told me, was Janis Joplin.
When the show started, I left. It was too loud. I came from the era of Sinatra, and Janis Joplin came from a new age of screech.
The next few weeks were equally startling. The Summer of Love was a summer of sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll and dirty words. It was so foreign to me, I was sure it couldn't last.
Everybody used dope. The only question was, what kind.
I smoked some. I thought I had to. I took my first toke in a fraternity hovel where the bathroom was wallpapered in tinfoil and the housemother was busy baking organic bread. But I got bored and decided to go home.
A bus came along and I got on it. After about an hour, it dawned on me that it might not be the right bus. I pulled the cord and got off. I had no idea where I was. I flagged a cab and he took me back to Union Square.
I went into a bar and ordered a gin gimlet. The bartender wouldn't serve me. ``You're stoned,'' he said. ``I am not,'' I said. ``I only had a couple of cigarettes.''
Next morning, I called the city desk. ``I turned on to pot last night,'' I told the city editor.
``My God,'' he said. ``Get out of there right now.''
When I got home, I wrote a four-part series about Haight-Ashbury. It got a lot of response. The saddest response was from parents who said: ``Did you run into my daughter, Denise? She ran away from home. Did you see her?''
When I wrote that series, I was 28 years old.
So I thought the Summer of Love was just a fad. I was sure the screeching music wouldn't last. The summer of sex, dope, rock 'n' roll and dirty words would be left behind when these tie-dye kids grew up and joined the mainstream. My mainstream.
I have learned since, to my dismay, that those kids dragged their adolescence with them, tugging it along like a security blanket and dragging the rest of us with it.
Sex used to be private; now it's public, in the commercials on TV. Drugs? Well, there are two kinds _ the illegal ones and the Viagra type that guarantees Superman-like instant erections.
Rock 'n' roll? When's the last time you saw a violin in a commercial _ even a commercial that wants to lull you to sleep.
And dirty language? It's commonplace. The words we never used to say because we thought they were gross come regularly out of the TV, for our children to hear, and find their way into music. Music without melody.
I didn't know it then, but the Summer of Love was a summer that changed the culture. The kids _ the most pampered generation we had produced for a long time _ made American music unmusical and American speech obscene. They erased from the American scene any idea of civility or seemliness.
They dealt us today. And now they're stuck with tomorrow.
(Dick Feagler is a columnist for The Plain Dealer of Cleveland. He can be contacted at dfeagler(at)plaind.com.)
Not for commercial use. For educational and discussion purposes only.
Not every boomer deserves it, I know. Just the ones I have been forced to endure at work.
If I hear "________ is just like in the 1960's" one more time, I am going to puke. Add to that, "this is another Vietnam" about every single military engagement since Vietnam.
The only thing that is the same, is the selfish attitude of some of these folks. This includes my neighbor who is balding with a stupid ponytail.
There is nothing - NOTHING - worse than the bald ponytail. Please mention to your neighbor that he looks like a moron.
Within a year of his entrance into the Army, a good portion of his hometown was burned to the ground (Newark, NJ, which was in flames fourty years ago today), and he tried marijuana for the first (and only) time while on weekend with the guys in his company. From 1967-68 grass swept the domestic posts.
What my father saw coming back with the guys from Nam, however, was much harder stuff. He knew of guys who smuggled back heroin and hashish via their body casts (he spent time in an Army hospital in late 1968).
By the time my father was discharged in San Francisco in '69 (due to a mistaken diagnosis of cancer), it was if the entire world had truly done a 180 in the two years since he was drafted. Between the dope coming back with our soldiers (and their addictions), and the huge number of underage, drug addicted prostitutes he saw running around San Fran, it was if his country had changed more dramatically than at any period in his life, before or since.
Maybe some Freeper boomers can share their perspective.
***This includes my neighbor who is balding with a stupid ponytail.***
What? No white beard to go with the balding and the pony tail? They just can’t bear to give up the pony tail as a symbol of their youth and politics. But the white beard? YUK! But then, I live in a university community and they’re probably all professors or masquerading as profs.
You must live here in Carbondale, IL too. Yes, he also has a white beard!" He works on campus at the PBS TV channel. So, you know he is just charming in that liberal, "I am better than other people" fashion.
He refuses to speak, won't mow the yard, but the lady they pay to clean their house is actually very nice. She talks to me and my wife while we are working in the yard. The wife has waved, I guess that kind of counts.
Really now. Would anyone admit to that? :)
Boomers aren’t the problem. Liberal Boomers are the problem. I wish a lot of FR folks would get that straight and stop bashing ALL of my generation.
“Let the Baby Boomer bashing commence.”
That’s too broad a statement. Everything the writer says is true and more, but not everyone was a hippie or subscribed to that kind of behavior. Have you any idea how uncomfortable it was to live through that if you were a boring, blue collar type from the Midwest, wondering what in the world was happening around you? The only consolation is knowing now that we were right.
Wow. I was making a joke (a really bad one). I actually was the family called “Goldwater girls”. Seems really silly now.
I was living in Santa Barbara, it was a very tough time, those days...not all flowers and sweetness....
Go to thecall.com to find the solution
I agree. I was born in ‘61. I think there should be a ‘58-’64 (or perhaps ‘68) middle generation in there somewhere!
In 67, I was in USAF basic training, and retired as a Msgt in 87.
I’m 38, and have never been comfortable with the Gen X thing, though I guess I fit in some ways. I’ve always considered people born between about 1960 and 1972 to be some of a “middle generation.” I call it the Westerberg generation. Google it if you don’t get my tagline.
Don’t forget - keep on truckin’
Well, I was 12 years old during the Summer of Love, but I can recall vividly the positive and glowing commentary at the time from the media and, in fact, from most of the adults that I cared about. My best friend’s sister came back from college and talked with me about getting high with her boyfriend, whom she was living with, and I sat there transfixed by her long hair and peasant dresses. I listened to the low power FM station in New Haven under the bedsheets so my parents wouldn’t know about it. In other words, I was sucked in by the cool feeling that I was on the crest of the wave.
The changes did not come immediately. Instead, it was out there on the edge, tempting us as teenagers. Our high school still banned blue jeans in the dress code in 1969; by my senior year, a girl was thrown out for wearing a see-through blouse and a bunch of guys went streaking down the hall. It was also the same year that weed hit the school in a big way. We all followed Dylan and everybody must get stoned.
Another four years and my community was entirely transformed. There were pockets of discontent, of course, but just about everyone was getting high and being sexually active, right down to junior high. I remember coming back home in 1979 and being astonished at what the 15-year-old sister of that 1969 hippie girl was doing.
So my life went on, and through twists and turns, I am now sober and Christian, and a lot more grown up, and more than a little ashamed of my own participation in the 1970s endless party. The writer is correct. The Summer of Love was a disaster. I can see many people of my own era who were sucked up into the life of sex and debauchery and never came out. Some of us managed to merely waste years of our lives. Some of us lost our lives. The idea that drugs can bring about enlightenment and sex can be shared freely without consequence seem so completely wrong from this perspective that I can hardly believe anyone would accept those ideas. I’m willing to accept the idea that I was too young to know better, but the truth is that I thought at the time it was cool, and therefore signed up for the School of Hard Knocks before I knew better. (My wife, who was not raised in the United States, considers all this to be a sort of cultural madness that she is thankful for not experiencing first hand. We’ve also told our son point blank that there will be hell to pay if we catch him smoking weed and drinking beer.)
I think history will not be kind to the Summer of Love, either.
You should read Ayn Rand on the subject - the summer of love and Woodstock.
I remember my history teacher in 7th grade spending an entire class describing his “trip” at Woodstock that year.
Any Boomer born after 1954 really didn’t participate much in the 60s madness - we were just a hair too young.
Selfish Babyboomers
You da bomb!
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