Summer 1967 - Tale of Three Americas

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my parents gave me a pigshave until I was 12. then they let me grow it to my shoulders or so.

...,Before this phone last ran out of juice and ZI had to recharge I posted re: that Mature Audiences thing and coming-attrahchioned re: the MPAA and what happened in '72. I thought it went up but it did not .I will say more later, when more time have.
Remember, I as m in s HL shelter bed, it approaches midnight, to-doaitch I have special plans and I need to not be mid-day s ppl eepy. I want to go to a special movie, my first in a while, why don't:t you look up and see what movies play S.F. Tues the 11th and guess what it is? One of the " cool things " that I in theory stay in S.F. for the availability of that in practice I can almost never do,:-(.
" Practical " reasons for staying in S.F. are the many hospitals/being plugged into the system, considering my state, and the CCSF possibility.
I never had really " long " hair. I got sort of caught up in the (if you will) original punk/new wave era when it came along in the late Seventies! I got myself in DEEP trouble for sharing my head in 1980 (SOB!) - now it's commonplace.
My male of the two sh***y cousins I've told you about, AB, 8 years older, also had 'Nam-ers military involvement. More later.

_________________
Renal kidney failure, congestive heart failure, COPD. Can't really get up from a floor position unhelped anymore:-(.
One of the walking wounded ~ SMASHED DOWN by life and age, now prevented from even expressing myself! SOB.
" Oh, no! First you have to PROVE you deserve to go away to college! " ~ My mother, 1978 (the heyday of Andy Gibb and Player). I would still like to go.
My life destroyed by Thorazine and Mellaril - and rape - and the Psychiatric/Industrial Complex. SOB:-(! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !!

Racism against blacks and "Puerto Ricans" was taken for granted in NYC in the 60s and 70s. Racial attacks didn't make the news, really, until Howard Beach in 1986.

It was taken for granted that "minorities" "weren't allowed" in certain neighborhoods.

Racism was much worse then.

when will these permanent wars finally end? when the chickens come home to roost, we will belatedly find we've sowed a bad seed of destruction, and will reap a whirlwind that will rent us asunder. but nobody cares.

Very Barry McGuireish......

Woodrow Wilson sort of had the right idea----but he had other problems.

He preached about WW I being "the war that ends all wars" and all that---yet he couldn't convince the Senate to ratify the League of Nations. He sort of pulled a Trump on that one, that's why. In the sense where he tried to browbeat the Legislative Branch.

I don't remember the year, specifically, but I remember all "3 Americas", in that I vividly remember hippies, riots, and going to work with a shirt-and-tie (adults did, I mean).

I remember the ERA, very well----I associate each era, mostly, with music and TV.....

To me, Rock, Country, R&B, and Gospel, are VERY closely related----so, I was into all of those; and, a few from other genres. I was very big into what they called, in-those-days, "The Black Sound" (meaning, black singers, in general [or, whites who were thought to "sound black"] - not just Motown): Elvis, The Righteous Brothers, Simon and Garfunkel, Jefferson Airplane (later "Jefferson Starship"), Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, "The Jimi Hendrix Experience", The Supremes, Marvin Gaye, The Monkees, Martha and the Vandellas, The 5th Dimension, Dionne Warwick, Petula Clark, Jackie Wilson, The Temptations, The Chi-Lites (very first 45 - "Have You Seen Her" - still have it), The Mamas & the Papas, Ray Charles, Four Tops, Sonny and Cher, Johnny Rivers, Tom Jones, Neil Diamond, The Doors, The Who, Peter, Paul and Mary.....

On TV, I remember, most: "The Ed Sullivan Show", "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea", Walter Cronkite, "I Spy", and "Peyton Place" (which I didn't like, and thought it was total hooey!).

I remember that down-home, my family didn't have indoor plumbing (and didn't 'til around near-mid-70s); and, seeing signs "Coloreds Around Back".

In fashion, women still wore hats and gloves, and men wore fedoras.

Socially, virtually everybody was religious, and went to church on Sunday (or Temple [Jewish], on Saturday). The whole family would sit-down and eat supper, together. Moms stayed at home, and took care of the house and kids----and, dads went-out to work, and mostly, it seems, worked 'til they dropped dead of a heart-attack. Divorce was almost unheard-of. ALL stores were closed, on Sunday. Kids played outside----and walked to school, by themselves----without fear of being kidknapped. There were no seatbelts, in cars. No malls. Only the rich vacationed in Europe----others vacationed, locally (went to the beach, or neighboring states).....

Except for the discrimination against blacks, the riots, and some other things..... Ahhh, THOSE were the days!!

In those days, teenagers used to lug record players to each other's houses so they can listen to records together.

"Gay" didn't mean homosexual to most people then; it meant "happy." The "Gay Divorcee" wasn't a lesbian.

My brother got a record player for Christmas (this was December, 1965), and he told me I better not break it or else I'd be sorry. He kept on playing "Hanky Panky" by Tommy James and the Shondells constantly.

My parents got me a crew cut even in the winter. I used to get a lollipop for being good at the barber's. I had to sit on telephone books on top of the barber's chair.

Women used to carry around special bags which contained their hats. They were round. They also wore girdles.

We had to wear dress shirts, slacks, and shoes to school every day, not just for assembly. On June 14th, everybody had to line up outside the school as if there was a fire drill, and salute the flag, because it was Flag Day.

Even in first grade, we sat in individual desks, and had to fold our hands while the teacher spoke. There was no "circle time" in first grade then. We were really "going to school." If we talked back to the teacher, we either got hit with a ruler, or got thrown out of class into the hall. The teacher used to do the "V for Victory Sign," and say "shhhhhhhh" if she wanted silence. We had to say, "Good Morning, Mrs. Whatever."

Even though my mother was Jewish and my father was Catholic, I still had to get dressed up for Easter, and promenade around the main drag.

My father used to give me a quarter in 1968 to go get the Sunday New York Times. I could barely carry it home. I got lucky once because I dropped it right next to a grate, and it didn't go down the grate. You weren't allowed to waste a quarter then.

My grandmother used to call me "Master Don Richard." "Master" was the formal title for a young boy.

I remember the sound quality of most reproduced music sucked big wind. no internet back then, was familiar with the library card catalogue, spent a LOT of time in there!

...I meant shaved my head in 1980, above.
In 1972, AB, my parents + aunt/uncle rather thought I should go for some training-type berth (They just discussed it among themselves, they didn't say it to me.), rather like my (as it turned out) sh***y, thieving, male cousin 8 years older joined the Air Force, IIRC. He became a FedEx pilot so he must have received some training somewhere but I recall expression of disappoinment that he didn't get quite the training that they thought he was going to get - Ya think the recruiter lied to him/misled him a bit?

_________________
Renal kidney failure, congestive heart failure, COPD. Can't really get up from a floor position unhelped anymore:-(.
One of the walking wounded ~ SMASHED DOWN by life and age, now prevented from even expressing myself! SOB.
" Oh, no! First you have to PROVE you deserve to go away to college! " ~ My mother, 1978 (the heyday of Andy Gibb and Player). I would still like to go.
My life destroyed by Thorazine and Mellaril - and rape - and the Psychiatric/Industrial Complex. SOB:-(! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !!

I was 14 when the Summer of Love happened, so I should remember it better than you guys but in reality i don't think about it all that often. OTOH I tend to be obsessed about the period 10 years later i.e. the period after Watergate ended and before the Reagan Revolution got going. It was a much more memorable period in my life, having been a late bloomer.

TBH I seriously question the relevance of a lot of what was going on at the time, which is so often idealized in the popular press. A few things stand out as noteworthy e.g. Janis Joplin (could such a person even exist nowadays?) or Woodstock when thousands of people sat in the mud for three days then came back and told the world they had experienced 3 days of heaven on Earth.

The people who seem to have been most profoundly affected by the times are those about 5 years older than I who were in college at the time and faced being drafted at the height of the Vietnam war. I know one guy who went to Stanford at that time and to this day blames all of the world's ills on Capitalism.

BTW I know exactly what @kraftiekortie means when he talks about enforced Kumbaya.

We might all be better off if the counterculture had never happened. Consider how the lifestyle depicted in Easy Rider was championed, then think what most likely happened to anybody who chose to embrace that lifestyle in a serious way, rather than just a pose. Maybe we'd all be better off if we'd just continued to put on a tie every morning and go to work.

in terms of honesty, I put military recruiters on the same level as pols and used car salesman.