think 60’s, acid flashbacks and big bongs … with all the stories about ourselves that we’ll never tell anyone else about!
Recent Posts
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- Day 10: The Fascist Regime Blames a Plane Crash on Nonwhite People
You go first!
Thinking which one to begin with …
Aaarrrrrgh … now I can’t remember the funny stories I was going to tell. Will think …
Just to set the mood…
1967: building branch low-impact wikiups, and treeshacks….looked like a poorman’s disneyland by the end of summer
I’d share my most outrageous experience. But I’m afraid I can’t remember it!
I do miss the sense of infinite possibility though.
if you can remember the 60s…you weren’t there
Except that, as opposed to being a child OF the 60s – I was a child IN the 60s!
In those days, all the hippy parents let the kids smoke pot. We’ld all just sit around with the kids coloring. omg, how could they…..just the way it was. Most of those kids I knew back then, turned out just fine…hellava lot better than some others.
So was I! The 70’s I don’t remember.
if you can remember the seventies…you weren’t there….
Gawd, the seventies…I was growing up, doing the teen thing in the 70s…I had some fun in high school – good CLEAN fun, mind you! It wasn’t till I went away to college that I really started experimenting with, erm, well, never mind.
Towards the end of 79 was when I went to China and everything changed after that.
The 70s were a weird, depressing time in a lot of ways.
I had a ton of fun in the 80s! Started playing music, went to UC, etc.
Is it just me, or have the 00s pretty much sucked so far?
It’s not you–they suck!
the naughty aughties, and shrubya has to ruin it.
… then you must have been there.
$75…My first car, no starter motor, had to push it to get it going. No windshield wiper, drivers side…had to stick my hand out the window, to wipe away the rain. No brakes, had to use the emergency. In the rain, I had to drive with my knees, right hand controlled the brake, left hand stuck out the window. I guess that’s not street legal anymore…lol
OMG! And how incredibly inventive of you to figure out how to drive it.
I never had a car until I finally had a “real” (full-time) job, and i made payments like forever on an orange Kharmann Ghia. Oh i loved that car. So did all the guys I knew.
One night we got 13 people in it. Woah.
I had the ghia too…wicked coolest car evah!
I briefly had this DOG VW hatchback thing…there was a bad spot on the starter…so sometimes you had to rock the car back and forth to start it.
My best, favorite car, which I will always regret giving up…
A 1959 Plymouth Valiant with push-button automatic transmission…
valiant – slant six..nothing could kill it
Absolutement! My first car was a 1964 Dodge Dart, which is exactly equivalent to a slant-six Valiant. Cost $200 with 40,000 miles (and came with five extra good tires). That darn thing was ugly, but it was comfortable and strong and by far the best car I’ve ever owned. I kept it for 12 years…so my cost to buy a car from age 18 to 30 was about 15 dollars a year! I’m pretty rich now, but I was darn sure dirt poor for decades. Oh I loved that car.
It had a great overdrive. If you really punched it, it had better get up and go than a lot of supposedly better cars I’ve had in later years.
The speedometer was broken when I got it, so I went 12 years with no speedometer.
Engine would probably have gone for a million miles, but I finally had to junk it after all the side panels finally fell off. I drove for a long time with giant holes in the side where panels had fallen off! It was UGLY, but a really great car!
Girl magnet for you. Boy magnet for me!
not exactly a girl magnet at the time….pretty damn scary, to be sure.
Hee! My best friend/sort of boyfriend/whatever the hell we were…had this car, some non-descript American car that was a vague gold color. He spray-painted the hood with this great psychedelic design. Best part about it was that you couldn’t turn the wheel very far to the left…so you just had to make a series of right turns to get anywhere.
One time, in my car, thankfully, I missed the exit to his place heading south and he mumbled, let’s go to Mexico, which we then did.
FREE…let the spirit move you…
no deeds to do, no promises to keep
Yep. That’s what I miss.
Sounds like a character in this novel I’m reading … heh …
I think we should get that car, Lisa, pile in with Meagert for sure, and head south.
On our little mailing list, weren’t we talking about checking out Bolivia recently? Let’s do it.
maybe, a little, but I was having more fun, I think!
I’ll tell ya, if republicans do win in 06 and 08, I really, truly am leaving the country…
Remember: You can’t tell anyone else what I said here. I think they’re going to win in 06 and 08. We’re too busy eating each other alive…. and we aren’t exciting any bored voters out there.
one half of my family came here in 1630, the other half was already here….I ain’t leaving her to these bastards.
Atta boy! Let ’em have it! I’ll be right by your side!
Hey, your blog! It’s neat!
I’m Welsh too … traced myself back to the Isle of Mann. (Have some Swiss Chocolate German and Irish, etc. in there too. I’ll bet you anything my people got here as indentured servants … the first American slaves.)
Well, no that’s not right. The Native Americans served as slaves to the white land owners, and the Native American tribes — at least every tribe here in the Northwest, including British Columbia — all had slaves (they’d raid each other’s tribes and take children and young women).
Bessie…was taken from her tribe, and adopted. Whites knew better then…yeh right!
My first car was also a VW, a ’71 van, which had a bad solenoid. I bought it for 200USD when I was 16. I would put the van in neutral, wheels turned into the curb — e-brake cable was missing — and jumper the contacts on the solenoid with a screw driver to start it… until late one night with no one around to help, it jumped the curb while idling on a slight hill and I foolishly tried to get in front of the van to stop it. It pinned me up against a chain-link fence and would have killed me via suffocation if, with the last bit of adrenaline I possessed, I hadn’t been able to slip out of it’s crushing grip. It didn’t harm the fence much, but it may have if I hadn’t gotten in front of it to slow it down. Nonetheless, not a recommended course of action.
Don’t tell anyone else about this, m’kay?
Ciao, Gioele
ROFL…not at your pain, but the truth of the story…m’kay
Yeah, it was one of those things that I call an “easy lesson”, an experience serious enough to make you never forget it, but completely without any potentially catastrophic consequences becoming manifest.
We remained GOOD, GOOD friends until towards the end of our senior year.
She’d avoided the Black Student Union because it wasn’t her. Finally, their intense pressure — relentless, really — got her to give in and join, and she became very militant. And I was one of the honkeys then. It was terribly sad. (Even though I was in SDS, etc. at the time, and at least as radical …)
Students for a Democratic Society was an excellent organization, that turned politically wonkish, in favor of marxist/leninist philosophy. Every damn discussion turned into rhetoric, and argumentation. I think that’s why the weatherman went underground…to get away from the wonks….lol
I went to the big national convention in Chicago in the summer of 1969 — we drove from California to Chicago in like a day and a half or so — in some rich kid’s parents’ giant stationwagon.
it was really boring. Dare I say that?
Oh all the thought-police and the revolutionary talk that had to be said just so to separate one’s self from the Maoists from the Trotskyites from the … blah blah blah. Ugh.
I’ve got the only authenticated nude picture of susanhu known. I’m saving it for when the crowd arrives….heh heh
I’ll KILL YOU! I swear I will!
(It’s not the video clip from the orgy scene I did for the student film, Siddhartha, is it?)
is here…
Look, you frog, stop showing that picture or i’ll ..
who wanted to see, susanhu must have deleted it….better left to the imagination, I guess…
I was in the Creative Writing Honors Program (that’s amusing in itself) … and I took a class from this hippie named Ed McClanahan from Kennnnnntuckeeeee.
Ed was a neat teacher. Cool. Hip. Tall and thin like a reed. Mellow. I think he was stoned all the time.
One day, as we were dissecting each other’s short stories, a man walked into our classroom and sat down in a chair behind Ed.
Ed blanched.
I looked at the man. He had a heavy sheepskin jacket on, heavy dark sunglasses, and a cowboy hat pulled low.
“Hello, Mr. X,” Ed said quietly. “Hello,” X said. “May I tell the class who you are?” “Yes,” said X.
“Class, this is Ken Kesey. He is hiding from the FBI so you mustn’t tell anyone he was here.”
And so we spent the next hour and a half talking to Ken Kesey. Turns out, we all found out later, that Ed had hidden Kesey in his attic while Kesey was on the run from the FBI (when they were chasing him for marijuana possession, and what else I forget now).
A few months later, a deathly pale man in a creamy white suit came in and sat down, patting his thinning blond hair and smiling politely.
“Class,” said Ed. “This is Tom Wolfe, and he’d like to interview you about the day that you talked with Ken Kesey.”
And so our class ended up in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
Merry pranksters, The Diggers, Dr. Osley….it brings a tear to my eyes.
I was Waaaay over on the other coast…Boston, Worcester.
I met Abbie, James Taylor, when he was Jim, Bonnie, and Orpheus, when I lived in Worcester.
Heh, heh… that’s my parents generation, I grew up on The Farm. I still kick it with Hugh Romney and Co. here in B-town. My peeps…
OMG! That is TOO wild!
that was just name dropping.
here’s a cool part…back then I helped run a coffeehouse…you know, them hippy kind. We hired all kinds of people, among them was Bonnie. Get this, We paid her 75 dollars for the weekend, four shows. Gawd I love her.
Sigh…I could drop a few names, but it would be wrong. (In my contexts…good when the rest do it.)
Went to the Concert For Bangladesh in 1971 at Madison Square Garden at age 17. That was cool!
I’ll never be one-one-hundredth as hip as susanhu. But I had a few moments, he he.
What a time!
By the time I arrived in Paly in 1978, it had just about played itself out.
to check out something called the Woodstock Music and Art Fair. We were never able to get close to the stage but the sound of Richie Havens’ “Freedom” coming over the hill will stay with me always.
We had a sense of community in those days that I fear my children may never know. But then again, most of us had poor relationships with our parents and I sure hope my kids never feel that either.
The sixties was an awesome time – when I hear young people today talk disparagingly of “hippies”, I tell them they don’t know whereof they speak.
Had a VW van. Sold my Datsun 2000 sportscar after I got out of the army in ’71, bought the VW.
Took out the back seat(s), painted the interior with psychedelic (sp?) paint, put a piece of foam mattress in the back, and it was my mobile home for 6 months before I finally moved into an apartment.
One time, the clutch broke. It turned out it was possible to move the shift from one gear to another at certain speeds. I rode around for a week, where I’d jump out of the car at a red light, and start pushing the van until I got to the speed (5 mph, I think) to shift into first gear, then into second at 15 mph, etc..
Another time I was driving on the expressway from NOLA to NY. I heard some funny sounds coming from the motor. It was two am in the morning, so I pulled over and went to sleep. Next morning, I started the car, and drove with difficulty ten miles to the next exit, got off and found a repair place. Turns out, I had lost a cylinder, so I started the car, and drove ten miles on only three cylinders.
Finally, one time in my flowering hippie days, hair down to here, etc, my VW van broke down on the expressway deep in the heart of rural Alabama. I stood by the road with my thumb out, visions of easy rider dancing in my head. A good ole boy in a pickup pulled over, and asked if I need help. I hesitantly asked if he could drive me up to the next exit to find a repair service. He told me in his best southern drawl, well, there ain’t no repair place up there, but there’s one about 20 miles back, so he hitched a rope to the front of my VW, made a u-turn across the median strip of the expressway, and hauled me back to the service station. When we got there, they checked what was wrong, and told me they needed a part, but the closest VW parts place was down in Mobile, about 40 miles away. It was about 4:30pm in the afternoon, and the parts place closed at 5. The station owner called the parts place, asked them to stay open later, then drove to Mobile to pick up the part, returned, fixed the VW, and charged me normal parts and labor for the job.
So much for stereotypes.
a typical day back then. Poverty breeding troubles. Strangers helping out, and the strength from within to keep going on. Yep, you rock.
Now that’s a keeper of a story. Just beautiful. No kidding about stereotypes.
It’s still like that here on the Peninsula. Twice we had tire blow-outs on Highway 101 as we were going to visit my mom before she passed away.
A stranger stopped, and we “two city girls in the woods types” locked the car doors, and barely rolled down the window.
He got out the spare, and put it on for us.
Another time when we had a blow-out, we had to go to Les Schwab near here. We had to call my mom to tell her we’d be late. We didn’t have a cell phone and there was no pay phone. So, I asked the Les Schwab clerk about making a call, and offered to pay for it. He just handed me the phone, and let me dial the long distance number. No problem. He didn’t have to ask anyone’s permission. Cool.
The trip to Nebraska. 1971.
Four of us drove to Fremont, because we heard about a field of pot growing. Two days later, (lots of stories of the in between to make up for the time) we get there in the full moon, wandering the forests. Found the patch, loaded up the car. Weed sticking out the trunk, windows, branches and all (Think Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers). Stopping for gas, definitely brought some looks. Got back to Boston, dishevelled (even more than usual). Threw the stuff on the front porch, and went to sleep. Spent days clipping, and drying. Kicker…Ditch Weed…nothing but a headache. Just another day in the neighborhood.
Cool. Did you ever collect morning glory seeds? They contain lysercic acid!
Or how about nutmeg. Man. Talk about a bad day!
That is, lyserGic acid, easily converted to LSD.
But I used to collect mushrooms off of cow shit.
mellow yellow…eeergghh, worse than eating peyote…almost
Well, I’d post my experiences but as they’re still on-going I shouldn’t kiss and tell…
Off to keep going, catch ya’ll later 😉
No fair!
This was my first “car”. A 1960 Ika pickup truck that I had in Argentina. I was driving on the beach, and wanted to get to the other end. It was summer and a gorgeous day. I came to where this photo was taken, and I thought I could make it. As I found out later that was a big mistake. I got stuck there. I was driving over pebbles, and there was no way I could get out. the more I digged, the deeper the wheels got into the pebbles (actually, the pebbles where over sand, and the sand was on top of water). If you look closely, you will see my butt sticking out right by the passengers side front wheel. I spent hours digging. finally it got to the point where the differential was laying on the pebbles. I must have spent about 5 hours trying to get the damm truck free. Finally some guys came by and helped me. We got the jack on top of a wood board, raised it enough for the wheels of the damm pebbles, and then we placed some boards under the tires.
Then one of the guys told me” we are going to push you, and then go arround there and across the water (he was talking about that water to the other side of the lake0. Whatever you do dont stop” So, they started pushing and suddenly the truck was free. I stepped on the gas all the way, and started picking up speed. I turned arround as I was picking up speed and tried to get across the stream.
I ended up sinking the truck in about 4 feet of water. I made such a wave. Water to my chest.
There was no sense in trying to do anything about it since it was starting to get dark. Next morning I talked to some neighbours who had a tractor. We went to pick it up, and when we got there, the truck was gone. We followed the tracks to a farm rear by, where I saw the truck outside this farmers house. They had pulled it out with a pair of ox.He wanted a huge ransom for it, which I refused to pay. Instead I went to the cops and finally got it back.
Hilarious! That reminds me of the story of how my wife drove her first car, a Gremlin, over a clam bed on a beach near Seattle. And lost it forever.
In 71′, my parents landed in the sticks with a bunch of other, largely middle class, city kids in buses. Thereafter to be harassed by furious neighbors who thought that we were a bunch of heroin addicted nudists — right to some degree about the nudism — that went into heat and had Bacchanalian orgies by the light of the moon. If it weren’t for a mythic centaur like hero in the form of a friendly, appropriately named neighbor, Homer, on his 18-hand Belgian mule, armed with a shotgun as he patrolled our land’s perimeter running interference against the less sanguine neighbors, we might not have lasted the first summer…
The Magic!
Every incident became a thread in the Cosmic adventure. Every story beomes mythical. Strangers always coming to the rescue. Kharma Ruled the days….
Yep, that old man Homer was revered by our community, when he was old and his own kids and grandkids didn’t come round much to help him out, we had folks volunteering to cook and clean for him till the day he died. Homer Sanders, a great man.
Seva. Selfless service. It’s about people helping people, that’s still magic, always has been, always will be.
when Nixon mined the harbors of N. Vietnam, VVAW started a campaign targeting the United Nations. I was, at the time, one of six “National Coordinators” for VVAW, and I went on national tv, and gave the UN an ultimatum that VVAW was giving them 72 hours to take the government of the United States into receivership until such time as a government representative of the people could be elected. If the UN failed to act, then VVAW was going to take over the UN!!
On the appointed day, there were NYC cops lined up every two feet along the front of the UN building. There were about ten of us, so five guys went to the front gate of the UN, and began to cause a small ruckus. Predictably, all the cops immediately migrated to the disturbance. The other five of us, wrapped in chains, ran up the middle, jumped over the fence, and chained ourselves to the UN building, thus symbolically “taking over” the UN. The UN security guys cut the chains, and with as much rough stuff as they could muster, ejected us from the UN grounds.
A`day later, we received a call from students at a high school in the Bronx that the United Nations Organization was holding a formal dinner in the gym of their high school that night to honor George Bush (pere) who was then United Nations ambassador.
We used the same tactics. A small group went to the front of the high school and created a disturbance, which attracted all the security in the area. The students let the other group in a back door, and we burst into the gym, a group of scraggly, long-haired, bearded Vietnam vets among the tuxedoed and evening-gowned crowd. One in our group with the loudest voice made a short speech the last line of which was, “The blood of the Vietnamese people is on your hands!” We then proceeded to throw baloons filled with blood (actually red clothing dye) on Bush and Barbara, and those near them, then hightailed out of there, and got away scott free.
Ah, the old days….
In case the people ever get off their duffs again, are you ready to teach everybody how to do it?
right now…
Oh yeah? Tell me more….
and if you don’t hear a rsponse for a bit, I’m draggin ‘ … been bloggin’ non-stop since 8am and i’m pooped and my tushie is sore.
is that tellin my stories is one of my ways of teaching.
Like everyone else from our time, we lost friends. Never forget.
I was busy on the other side of things. As part of our local group, we stood outside the draft boards with instructions on how to avoid the callup, and yes, some of it was in the Group W bench sort of vain. Our apartments were the newer version of the underground railway…chains of apartments leading to Canada.
…with VVAW folks in Colorado during this period. Maybe we even met once or twice. When you guys started doing your thing, those of us in the anti-draft, antiwar movement were ecstatic because it vindicated so much of what we’d been doing for years. Thanks again.
[http://www.vvaw.org/veteran/article/?id=27]
Recognize anyone?
Good looking bunch of freaks man…I would have been proud to know you.
Tell us!
second from left.
This probably isn’t the place to say this but I want to thank you for your comments on my diary the other day. You were so genuine and so gallant.
Now I have a face to put with the amazing man who added so much in the threads. You are a gentlemen and a gentle man and I thank you.
I have to say your experiences as a Vietnam Vet are far more harrowing than mine but I agree in that they helped to make us proud of who we are today.
I was merely inspired by the extraordinary diary you wrote.
And I suspect a coupla the obnoxious guys I lit into on the thread might not quite agree with your “gentleman and gentle man” characterization.
As far as the picture, that is certainly the image of myself that I see in my mind’s eye, but there is a tired old man who stares back at me from the mirror.
Guess it happens to us all.
Ain’t it the truth. I’m always so shocked when I walk by the mirror and see a stranger looking back at me. It seems someone snuck into my house and took over my body without my permission. I am still that young, firm, tanned California Girl, dammit.
You dealt with the obnoxious guys much more cordially than I did. Especially the one I called a fucking moron. Their opinions don’t matter anyway. Ours are the only ones that are important. Why, because they are fucking morons and we’re still so very, very cool. 🙂
i hadn’t read this far down before looking at the picture and wondered which one was you. within the picture, i was immediately drawn to, apparently, you.
i think it’s the smile.
…and I was briefly at the trial, so I should recognize you all. How embarrassing. Is that Don Perdue yukking it up on the right? And Scott Camil looking away right below him?
Perue, who is now fire chief of Ft Lauderdale.
The one you id as Camill is actually John Kniffen, who died a coupla years ago of cancer. Also Bill Patterson, standing next to Perdue, has died of cancer.
Camill is front row left end. Last saw him at the DC demo last September.
…of Camil was that he had the most intense dark eyes. Kniffen, too, I guess. Sorry to hear he and Patterson are gone.
What’s terrific is to know that at least two of you guys are still involved politically. So many of the old gang have abandoned us.
You may have heard of “Katmandu in 72”. I never made it quite that far, but I did get to the end of the Hippy trail in TizNit Morocco. I lived in a cave by the shore (that’s when my pic was taken susan).
Lived next to some Berbers, we all got to be good friends over the months. Cool people them Berbers.
But that story is of Diary length, or more. I’ll save it for another day, or my trial after they come and get me for the stories I’m writing today…heh heh
…outside ageetators in late ’67 had been working closely with the SDS chapter at the University of Washington, essentially teaching people how to organize and recruit. We also had a lot of frequently disturbing political discussions, much of it boosted by reefer, which some but not all of the SDS leadership frowned upon.
About midnight, well lubricated with weed, we realized we had to be in Eugene, Oregon by 2 p.m. the next day, and we needed to get to our car, miles away over Seattle’s famous floating bridge to Bellevue. But besides us three, there were seven locals who needed transportation, too, and we had one car, a 1960 Corvair. Not as tiny as a VW Beetle, but not a limo, either. We managed to cram eight of us into the interior. But no way could we figure out how to get the rest in.
So, we took out the spare tire, and Carlene, someone I had just met two days before, climbed into the trunk, which, as the Corvair was an air-cooled rear-engine car, was up front. For a few minutes I thought, hmmmm, this could be fun all cuddly in the dark.
Then we arrived at the bridge, which, in those days at least, before it sank, had a steel deck. The minute we hit the first bit of steel, Carlene and I knew that this had been a very bad idea. The Corvair’s shocks weren’t great, we had no padding except each other and we were bounced around mercilessly. Plus, the noise! It couldn’t have been more than a couple of minutes, but it felt a lot longer. We wanted to scream to be let out, but there is no stopping on the bridge.
Never again have I volunteered to climb into a car trunk.
An inspiring tale, of morals and fortitude.
We should all take heed to this lesson. Never get in the trunk of a corvair, with a girl named Carlene.
Or a new story might go..
Crossing Staid lines
better elaborate…
that was “Crossing staid lions, for immoral porpoises”
It was a very old college type joke….you know, where the guy had …nevermind, a long joke that led up to the punchline..
Meteor Blades, That is a funny story! My dear departed brother had several stories like that. You and I had several warm exchanges on DKos, before I got nuclear annihilated under another name (for expressing some unpopular opinions). Who gives a shit, but I have a sense of honor to be sharing a thread with you. Real respect.
I’m late because I was watching Mrs. Harris.
Which leads me right into SEX.
I lived in a small univesity town in Northern California. I hadn’t really started doing drugs yet, I was a late bloomer, didn’t touch the stuff until I was oh, 21. One of my best friends was in a local band. Pride and Joy was the name. They let me get up on stage and ‘play’ the tamborine.
Christine and I were inseparable. She played the guitar in our living room. She told me I could sing, what a laugh. We laughed at all the same things. We were deeply caring for one another.
Then one day she told me she had to tell me something. I thought I was very worldly because I was the assistant manager in the college bookstore. I hung out with professors. I had an English professor who taught me how to reach a climax. He quoted poetry to me while he made mad passionate love. It was just when I started to learn how to talk about sex, what felt good, what I loved and how insatiable I was once I wasn’t married any longer. I was 20.
Anyway, Christine told me she had to tell me something important. I thought I knew, I asked her if it was something she would have to move to San Francisco for, to have a happy life and sex. She laughed and said yes but she didn’t have to move.
I was enthralled. I wanted to know everything. I wanted to know how she knew, when she knew, I wanted to know if she was attracted to me. I asked her to kiss me, not the kisses we always greeted each other with, but a real, wet, sexual kiss. She said she couldn’t. I asked her why and what she said has always stayed with me.
She said she couldn’t kiss me because she loved me. She said she already knew the answer to what I was asking. She said it would hurt her to kiss me, to be that intimate with me when she knew it wasn’t who I was.
We continued to sleep in each other’s beds. We continued to hold hands when we walked through the park. We continued to sing into the night. We were the talk of some parts of the town. We were called names, we were sneered at by some, we were gossiped about. We didn’t care. We had each other afterall. I learned in those years what true friendships truly are. I have never forgotten.
Wow. I was going to confess to eating a bowl of chocolate frosting this evening…but yours is much better.
Uhhhhhhhhhhhh I don’t know, chocolate frosting is the icing on the cake, right?
Hey! Maybe if we combine our stories…
Anything I say here would be taken wrong…including what I just said…..
I don’t know what you said so I can’t possibly take it wrong. 🙂
What a bunch of wussies! 1987, I was 22 and went back home to be an attendant at one of my high school girl friends weddings (her second already). It was the weekend before rodeo also and rodeo is the Redneck Mardi Gras. We did the bachelorette party the night before (always a bad move). Everybody went home at 2:00 am and the bride and I felt like there was so much left of the night. We decided we needed the help of an old guy friend who was always good at shaving the edge of almost getting arrested. Went to his apartment and woke him and loaded him up in the car and drove to Lake Desmet to skinny dip. At 4:00 am it’s kind of freezing and God forbid sobering. The three of us headed back to the car and suddenly getting dressed seemed like too much effort. We drove back to town on the back highways. I noticed a really nice Cadillac in front of us with it’s same older married couple passengers so I told our friend Don (who was driving because Kim and I were not sober) to pass the couple and when he drove ahead of them I popped out of the sunroof naked. I thought it would be a great joke. Never considered that I would almost give the people a heart attack because they would think we were the next Manson generation. Thank God cell phones weren’t common then. Having failed to have any fun doing that we noticed a very very large road construction project up ahead (I think Don planned this part, he knew that the road construction was happening and he just had to have someone get see him in a car with two naked girls!). We found ourselves stopped and second in line behind the flagger. Kim was worried and wanted to get dressed but I blew that off….told her they were an out of state company, they wouldn’t know who we were – not like we’re going to go in the history books for this. Finally we were allowed to move single file slowly again to the next flagger and we found ourselves first in line. Don rolled his window down trying to get the flag girl’s attention…..I mean come on here We Are Naked. She keeps staring straight ahead but we could hear her radio crackle off and on. Finally Don speaks and he says, “Hey, you’re getting sunburned!” Without even looking at us still she says very cooly, “So What, you’re naked!” Eventually we get to move again and make our way out of the road construction and Still we have no Satisfaction. Nobody finds us entertaining and some barely even think we are interesting. We also need more beer….too much cold water and nobody wants to sober up in the middle of a “naked binge!”. We pull up to the dump called the Ucross Bar. We have all been to the Ucross Bar at some point. Usually Buzz Mally is working it and he opens up at 6:00 am in the middle of the sticks. If you are underage though and Buzz was in a good mood and you barely ruffled a hair on anybody’s head with a stray breath Buzz could seem to not notice you there and he might even not notice that someone smuggles you a beer, so we had all been to Ucross at some point in our teen years. Once again Buzz is open. We pull into the drive thru and Don orders a six pack of Bud. Buzz takes a second look in the car and says, “Holy shit boys, get a camera!” Then he says slyly, “Would that be long necks ladies?” Finally we have satisfaction! Someone is impressed that we are naked! Buzz leaves the window to go get the beer and suddenly Kim and I find that we now have become overly satisfied. It seems that somebody was giving us some competition in the loser of the month club race to stupidity. Five very known grinning faces appeared in the drive up window. The kind of familiar that only comes from fighting with each other on the play ground, feeling awkward and stupid around each other……and of course pimples and puberty. Five guys who were going to be at the wedding with us in about seven hours. Five guys who were staying in town for rodeo too. As Martha would say, “This is not a Good Thing!”
Now THAT is a hell of a story!
Well…there was that ignominious night in 1972 when I lost my virginity. I was 18, working at a shipyard as a union metal carpenter. (Fairly smart, but no money for college.) Invited to visit a young woman at college, a friend from high school. Lots of beer. Sitting around on dorm floor with some kind of fancy electric hookah with about six long mouth-tubes (whatever you call ’em). Really good bud. Half-naked people playing guitars. Vague memory of … well, you know. This was in a dorm where people had single rooms but two rooms shared a single small bathroom. Waking up to learn from my disgusted lover that I had, apparently, at some point in the middle of the night in a complete fog, walked into the bathroom and on through to the next-door room and unloaded about a gallon of hot smoking pee onto the bed of my friend’s suitemate. While we were having breakfast that morning at a local Burger King, my friend “accidentally” sprayed me from face to waist with about half a bottle of ketchup. It was a short romance. But I remember it was a very cool hookah. (So…do I win a prize or something! Heh heh.)
was the ketchup….
and a 4.
Okay, it’s time to talk about the peace marches.
I do believe this nation is in danger of committing itself to goals and personalities that guarantee the war’s continuance. Senator Edward Kennedy
I was assistant manager in a college bookstore when the largest peace march was being planned in 1969. We had gone to several already in San Francisco. We had held vigils on the campus but none of us had been to a march the size of what was anticipated in ’69’.
We were living the sixties in all ways possible. We were into sex, drugs and rock and roll. Fillmore West was our second home. We saw hundreds of hundreds of concerts and hundreds of bands. We took acid, we took mescalin, we took peyote, we ate mushrooms, we smoked weed, we took qualuudes, and downers. We had fleeting attachments, we thought knowing each other’s last name was a sign of commitment.
We marched for the ERA, we marched for Roe v. Wade. We marched against those in power, we marched against a senseless war.
It’s hard to imagine being a young person in California and not being reared on dissent. We had the civil rights movement and the leaders who showed us the way. We had George Jackson and Angela Davis, we had David Harris and Joan Baez, we had Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice. We had the Attica Prison riots. We had Mario Salvo, who stood on the trunk of a car in 1964, tell us what free speech meant in this country and we learned the price that could be paid for that right when we watched our peers being gunned down at Kent State.
It isn’t too difficult to figure out how so many were swept up in protests against the powers that be, it’s isn’t so difficult to know what drove us to speak out.
I was so naive in those years. I hadn’t stepped out of my box very often. I didn’t know I had a voice. The sixties changed that for me. So while we got swept up in planning for the largest marches in this country’s history we all threw our hats in the ring with our names along with them.
I became one of the coordinators for the buses north of Sacramento to take students to San Francisco. We were filled with excitement on the way down. We were a little anxious but we weren’t afraid. We had been raised on dissent. We had the best teachers imaginable. When we got off the busses we saw an ocean of people. We saw young people, old people, we saw white people, we saw black people, we saw brown people. We saw women and we saw men, we saw babies on the hips of their mothers. My son was one of them.
I’ll never forget that day. We heard speeches, we heard music, we heard the sound of our own voices. We saw hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people who gathered for one reason, because we all had a common goal, we wanted an end to the killing of our brothers and friends, we wanted our America back.
On the way home I realized what we had done. We made Nixon say he wasn’t paying any attention. We knew when we heard that that we had indeed been heard.
As I write this I hear Richie Havens singing Freedom. I hear the singing of hundreds of thousands of us, I hear hundreds of thousands of hands clapping. I hear the beginning of the silence of the guns in a foreign land. A golden silence we had waited years to hear.
We are shaped by the generation we’re born into. I thank everything holy and not to have been born into the generation of dissent.
one tenth of the passion, fervor, and commitment to cause, out there today in the younger ones, we “will survive”.
I thought all my heroes were dead, but I see they just live on here at booman.
May the spaghetti monster bless you all..
“The first duty of a revolutionary is not to be caught” – Abbie Hoffman
Amen. [I’ve written and deleted three essays here. Let me just stop with that.]
But yes, I remember it well !
Go Nude Blogging !
otherwise known as van with a corvair engine, air cooled, in the rear, like the VWs, also recognizable by the oil covered back doors, design flaw, main bearing seal was always bad in those things.
Anyway, probably Jan ’71 I was driving from Winnipeg, Manitoba, south back to Grand Forks. It was -20F. Like the VWs with the air cooled engine crappy for generating any heat. And of course the CorVan had a bigger volume of air to heat. So we were getting colder and colder.
Not long after crossing the Canadian border our top speed dropped to 30-35mph. Another flaw with that engine was that the carburetor had a tendency to ice up inside at cold temps, so more gas-per-air, less speed.
Toes are going numb, well that’s happened before, no big deal. Calves are going numb, hmmm, could be a problem developing here. So we lit a couple of emergency candles. Hmmm, pleasant sight, but that was about it.
Would have stopped at a farm house, but my hippie buddy, C I, had hair down to his waist. So I wasn’t too sure of our welcome in some rural farmhouse. Mine was down to the shoulders… I guess somewhat “conservative” for those times.
Finally we limped into GF. Parked outside a friend’s place and “walked” in. I say “walked” ’cause the only way I knew my feet were touching the ground was by sight alone, as by that time we were both numb all the way to the knees. So we hobbled along like Dustin Hoffman in Papillion.
We were very lucky. No toes lost, no frost bite, nothin’, except about 45 minutes into the rewarming we started a good 1/2 hour’s worth of very intense unpleasurable tingling.
Later that winter took the CorVan to Denver/Boulder. Wild place in them thar days. After a few weeks continued on to El Paso and met up with a German globetrotter, Berny. We toured White Sands and Carlsbad, then headed for the Mexican border.
About this time the motor was going ping, ping, ping. So instead of the 600 I’d been offered days before I only got 300 cash for the grub stake for touring Mexico.
Sold the Van in Laredo, boarded the train for Mexico City, bus to Durango, Zacatecus, etc, Puerto Vallarta when it was still small hamlet, then Mazatlan for Mardi Gras. Train to Mexicali, bus to T, thumb to San Diego.
Later that summer my father asks me, “Do you still own that Van that B__ sold you. “No, didn’t I tell you that I sold that so I could spend that month in Mexico. Ah… why do you ask?” “Well, there was a man here from the (reverse next letters of course) i b f to visit with me. I asked for his ID.” (“Ha, ha good for your dad,” I thought.) “Well, what did he have to say?” “He said they had it under surveillance south of the border and it was packed solid with __“
At which point I reaffirmed that the Van had been sold back in Feb. Then curious, I asked, “When was that guy from the i b f here?” “Oh, about three months ago.”
Well, ha ha, I guess he was waiting to see if indeed I did have anything to do with it. I wasn’t “quite” that brave however.
That was the first time that summer my father had that sort of visitor. The second visit that summer came within a month or two after my first induction refusal.
I had to refuse a second induction as my father had been on my home county’s draft board, so I’d been sent to a neighbor county for that one. My second refusal happened on the same day as my long-haired friend mentioned above. There was quite a tizzy in the place over having two of them in one day.
(After two years of “limbo” the grand jury failed to indict, although ultimately the whole deal did contribute to the derailment of a career based on my degree.)
Summer of ’72 we had Phil Ochs and a couple of Chicago 8 guys up to UND the night before a big demonstration at what was to be the ABM site in Nekoma. Ran into a couple of old dudes (wobblies) there who knew my grandpa. Pretty amazing times all around.
Thought I’d just throw all this in here so you’d know us NDns did a little hell raisin’ back in those times too, and then, just in case we end up on the wrong side of the barb wire, we’ll already have a leg up on getting acquainted.
managed to survive the Vietnam bullshit and lived to tell the tales and share their success of fighting off and ending a different bullshit war than the current bullshit war that we have now!