A Change of Consciousness: A Hippie’s Memoir of the Sixties and Beyond

Chapter 1

"Home-keeping youth have ever homely wits…..

I would rather entreat thy company

To see the wonders of the world abroad

Than, living dully sluggardized at home.

Wear out thy youth with shapeless idleness."

Shakespeare, Two Gentlemen of Verona, I1

In the summer of 1968 Paris was burning and I was running for my life from the Corsican thugs of the Compagnies Republicaines de Securité, (CRS), who’s sole duty was to put down protest with the utmost brutality. All around me, students, workers and innocents like me, went this way and that like a school of fish as predators surround them. We all sought safety from the hard-eyed riot police who were drawing a net around us in the narrow, cobble-stoned streets of the Left Bank. I saw no escape and fear mounted in my mind while my body began to tremble.

I was an innocent, if not in intent, certainly in fact and in deed. I had scarcely had a chance to be otherwise. After 3 years imprisoned in an all-male boarding school, Lake Forest Academy (LFA), where our motto was Give me a Break and our anthem was I Can’t Get No Satisfaction! the summer of ’68 saw me on a Grand Tour of Europe. It was my reward for being accepted to Stanford for the fall. I knew so little of politics that I had won the Best Debater award for defending the Vietnam War, for whose draft I had just registered. My sole act of rebellion to this point was to watch President Johnson’s speech on TV telling the nation he wouldn’t run again. Why was this a revolutionary act? Because I had been denied permission to do so by an idiot posing as a teacher. How little was I prepared for Paris and the Days of Rage? I haled from Danville, Illinois, just down the road from Hoopeston, a farm town that proudly claims to be, The Buckle on the Corn belt. Could I have been more innocent? I think even Mark Twain would agree, no!

So here I was abroad at last and, man o man, had I stepped into the merde. On arrival in Paris I had seen the lay of the land when I was greeted at my pensione on the Left Bank by what would have been a beautiful young woman except for the hideous purple bruise which covered half her face. When I inquired as to what the hell was going on, she filled me in. France was in the middle of a cultural revolution that was the closest thing to an actual civil war that the Sixties saw. Popular revolutionary slogans ranged from, It is forbidden to forbid to I’m a Marxist-of the Groucho variety. May had seen demonstrations and strikes by workers and students that had brought troops into the streets and brought the economy to a standstill. The battles in the Latin Quarter would inspire the Rolling Stones’ song, Street Fighting Man. President DeGaulle even fled the country for a day, fearing a coup. My landlady was about to go out and reenter the fray. I, on the other hand, decided not to join the revolution but instead to cut my stay short. I quickly left Paris to find peace in Spain. And Spain was very peaceful, since it was a fascist dictatorship with Franco’s Guardia Civil on every street corner. After enjoying the delights of Provence, Italy and Switzerland. I headed back to Paris.

Upon my return, even though the side streets still held vans full of CRS troops parked and waiting, there were neither riots nor protests. The revolution apparently being over, I spent several fun-filled weeks getting to know the city with a group of Russian emigrees. My French vocabulary was improving but with what must have been poor grammar and a terrible Slavic accent! I had been on my way to visit my new friends on the Left Bank when I turned a corner and was suddenly facing an angry crowd. Unbeknownst to me, the Soviet Union, in response to the Prague Spring and its attempt to liberalize communism, had just invaded Czechoslovakia. Why the left vented anger against the Reds by attacking their own right-wing government I never figured out. But then I’ve never understood much about politics, other than that I was never any good at it. As I turned to retreat I found only more furious protestors on all sides. I struggled against the masses but no direction yielded an escape route. The noise of chanting became a deafening roar as people reacted to the appearance of the riot police. Soon there were screams as the first contact was made up ahead of me. To the smell of smoke from burning cars or tires was now added the first faint whiffs of tear gas. Fear gripped me as I saw no way out and a close encounter with the thugs who were already beating people with batons quickly loomed.

Just then I felt a hand clutch my shoulder. Startled, I turned to find a young man of about my age, 18, dressed like a student in jeans and a t-shirt. He was saying something but the din of the riot drowned him out. He pointed to the side of the street and yelled in my ear, allez avec moi! He then began to pull me in that direction. He looked like a nice guy and there was no other option. So I nodded and let him pull me along. We held hands, as it was the only way to keep from being separated. He forced a path ahead and I slipped into the spaces he created. As the roars of the street battle mounted, we reached the edge of the crowd. We were pushed up against a building with our backs to the wall. To the left and right, I could see shield-carrying troops coming down the front of the buildings. Soon they would be upon us.

My newfound friend yelled, Vite! Vite! He pushed me towards the troops and I was going to resist when I saw a shadow at the end of the wall. My rescuer went ahead and then reached back for my hand. I was pulled into the darkness. It was a narrow alley, just wide enough for a person to go down. I could now see in the dim light a few people running ahead of us. As I ran I prayed no flics were waiting at the other end. And I could run. One reason I got into Stanford was that, in my Glory Days, I had been a starting halfback on an undefeated soccer team.

The sounds of violence and rage and the odors of fires and chemicals had been fading as we ran. As we came out of the alley the air cleared and the roar of the riot died away to a distant, all but inaudible, dissonance. We found ourselves in a plaza with trees and a monument. It was peaceful and calm. I had been saved! Hallelujah! Exhausted, we slumped down on a bench and caught our breath.

My benefactor sat close by me. My gratitude was overwhelming. Our conversation went something like this.

Je suis Rand.

Je suis Jean-Paul.

Jean-Paul, merci beaucoup pour aidez-moi!

He modestly demurred, Mon Cher. C’est ne fait rien. (It was nothing.)

I begged to differ. Au contraire.

Jean-Paul placed his hand on my shoulder and inquired: Mais vous peut aidez-moi. (Can I ask a favor?)

I replied, Certainment. Dites-moi. (Yes???) I was not prepared for the response.

Tu est tres beau. (I think you’re hot.)

Jean-Paul continued, Voulez-vous couchez avec moi, ce soir? (I think he sang this part but I’m not sure.)

I had noticed that Jean-Paul had put his hand on my shoulder when he asked me for the favor. I had thought that was understandable after what we’d been through. Now I suddenly realized: He hadn’t been saving my life, he’d been saving my ass and it was because he wanted it! Jean-Paul was a homosexual. (Not that there is anything wrong with that!) I don’t remember ever thinking at all about homosexuals, as they were called then. Though I must have known about it that is far different from being confronted with its actual presence. It certainly did not exist in Danville, Illinois! (Right?) This was the first time, to my knowledge, that I had ever met a gay. And I would later be flattered that he thought I was attractive. But for now I was flummoxed. His words had quickly disabused me of the notion that my savior’s actions had not had an ulterior motive. I was thankful but not that thankful! I wish I could say that I reacted in a calm and rational way. However, my response was to mumble the following and flee. Merci, mais j’aime les femmes. Bonne chance and au revoir. (Sorry Charlie!) I still regret that I didn’t buy him a beer and that he wasn’t a mademoiselle.

I did find my mademoiselle, which was the main goal of the entire trip, in fact of my entire adolescent existence. It just wasn’t how I had imagined it would be. Having survived the storming of the Bastille and the lust of my white knight, I once again sought more peaceful climes and headed for Amsterdam. I stayed in a wonderful hostel there. I drank beer in the bar where I met lots of people and the jukebox played Ray Charles singing, Hit the Road Jack! Every day we repaired to the Heineken brewery for a free lunch of beer, cheese and mustard. In the afternoon we toured, including the Anne Frank house and the Rijksmuseum.

One evening a couple of American students invited me for a drive. When I got out of the van, it was in an old neighborhood of stone houses and canals. As we walked I noticed the unusual zoning. There was an ancient church not far from several houses, each with large picture windows. The windows were backlit with red lights and featured a lady sitting on a chair or divan. Now you may think like I did that Danville had had nothing like this and we’d have been wrong. A few years ago a review of a book on prostitution in Illinois actually mentioned Danville.³ I then discovered the entire history. The town was infamous for its bordellos, first established by Chicago mobsters in the 30’s. In the 40’s all of Danville was off-limits to the eager troops of the nearby airbase. In the 50’s a visit was a necessary rite of passage for the males of the neighboring University of Illinois. My cousin Barry worked in his father’s fur shop then. Some of their best customers were the ladies of the night who just loved their furs! He remembers guys wandering into the shop to ask directions to the red light district. I’m told this fine, old tradition continues today with massage parlors still to be seen out in the hinterlands of the county. Alas, growing up, my ignorance in things sexual, like most of my generation, was vast. The knowledge of this history, and of the thriving industry my hometown supported, had been most unfairly kept from me. Now I had come across the Atlantic to find what had been just next-door, or had I?

As I window-shopped along the canals, I finally lost my heart to a beautiful young woman framed in one of the windows. She was wearing a Purdue University t-shirt, which she filled out admirably. This grabbed my attention, the t-shirt that is, because Purdue is just down the road from Danville. With her blonde Dutch good looks, she could have been a cheerleader. I rather nervously entered the house and made the young lady’s acquaintance. It could not have been a better introduction to one of life’s greatest pleasures. Not only was she skilled but, most importantly, she was kind and patient. Mission Accomplished!

But as I still had ten days left before my return flight, it was on to Edinburgh for the Festival. It was my first real festival, the Sweet Corn Festival in Hoopeston doesn’t count, and one of the most memorable. Although the concerts and plays, which were held throughout the city, were wonderful, the Tattoo in the castle was the highlight. I went with an American girl I met at the B&B I was staying in. As evening fell, we climbed the steep hill above the old town. Up through the swirling mists the castle at last appeared. The floodlights illumined massive gates through which we entered and found our seats facing the parade ground. Soon, a troop of gurkhas marched out and preceded to do amazing tricks with their long deadly, curved knives. After the gurkhas came the ROTC drill team from Rutgers. The cadets began to twirl and toss rifles with fixed bayonets and thrilled the crowd with their evolutions. The finale was the march of the bagpipe bands of the Royal Army’s Scottish regiments. The skirling was sterling! We returned after midnight to find that our landlady had left us a thermos of hot chocolate and delicious scones with which to close out the night. Hurrah for Scotland! Now it was time to go join the counterculture in its San Francisco home.

Chapter 2

The Generation Gap

What’s good for General Motors is good for the USA.

The Fifties

We don’t trust anyone over the age of 30.

The Sixties

Where did the counterculture come from and why was I joining it? The previous generation, The Greatest Generation, had survived the Great Depression of the Thirties, won World War II and bequeathed to its many children, the baby boomers, the economic miracle of the Fifties. This was an economic prosperity never seen before or since. It was based on a military/industrial power that dominated the globe. It was a domestic tranquility based on conformity to conventional behavior, with dire consequences for those who did not conform.

I was born in the Fifties, a cultural decade running from 1945 and the end of World War II to 1963 and the assassination of a president. This decade had little room for individual expression either culturally, politically or sexually. Books were banned, Americans denied work because they wouldn’t sign a loyalty oath and yet other Americans jailed for refusing to testify about the alleged un-American activities of their friends and colleagues. Sex was not supposed to be discussed, abortion was illegal, divorce was frowned upon and single parents were a scandal. It was a society based on injustice and discrimination, often violent, against blacks, Jews, gays and others. Women were to be seen, not heard, and certainly to be kept from power, economic and political. Racism and segregation were enforced by the Jim Crow laws of the southern states. When additional means were necessary, there were murders, lynchings and bombings.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us of the military/industrial complex which was taking over our country and driving a cold war and a nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union. School children practiced duck and cover to ward off the threatened nuclear annihilation of the mutually assured destruction promised if the cold war ever went hot. The ever growing destruction of the earth and our environment by the military/industrial complex became all too obvious as smog blanketed our cities, rivers caught on fire and oil covered the seas.

The World was in chaos as, following World War II, the European colonial empires had begun to dissolve as local populations sought their independence. There were wars, civil wars, genocides and huge exoduses of populations to and from newly founded states. For example, the French fought insurgents for control of both Indochina and Algeria. In Indochina the French were defeated in 1958. Vietnam was then divided into two new countries. The Soviet Union backed the North and the U.S. backed the South. The North continued to fight to unite both Vietnams. Having learned nothing from the French failure, our involvement in the struggle gradually grew. We did not recognize the truth that this was a national liberation movement but instead saw it as a first step in a communist push to conquer Southeast Asia and then the world.

The Fifties ended shortly after the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis which almost ended the world. For 13 days, the Soviet Union and America faced off against each other with their fingers on the nuclear trigger. It may have been the closest we came to nuclear annihilation throughout the cold war.

Given all of the above, beneath a prosperous and placid surface, a great angst ran through society. The Beat movement was a response to this anxiety. It was composed of the voices of many individual artists. Kerouac took us on the original road trip. Lenny Bruce used words not heard before in public, for which he was hounded by the police and convicted of obscenity. And Alan Ginsberg Howled about it all. These voices were heard by my generation. When LSD and rock ‘n roll were added to the message of the Beats, a mass movement was born, the counterculture.

Chapter 3

The Politics of the Sixties

It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.

United States Army, Vietnam

Make love not war

Flower power

I came of age in and was defined by the Sixties, the cultural decade that began in 1963 with the assassination of one president, John F. Kennedy and ended with the resignation in disgrace of another, Richard Nixon, in 1974. These events shook the country to its core. Like Pearl Harbor and 9/11 everyone remembered where they were when they heard the news of JFK’s death. I was dissecting a frog in Junior High Science class when the announcement came over the loud speaker that the young, charismatic leader who seemed destined to take us to new heights was dead. Kennedy had been the youngest president ever. He had brought us through the Cuban Missile Crisis, given us the Peace Corp and had said that the question was not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country. The handsome king of Camelot had had a gorgeous classy wife and two beautiful young children. We were all stunned at his death. But it was just the beginning of a violent decade at home which echoed the much greater violence we were creating overseas in the Vietnam War.

The Vietnam War dominated the Sixties. 1964 had seen the beginning of the escalation of the war, the draft and the anti-war movement. The Gulf of Tonkin resolution authorizing war was soon followed by the bombing of North Vietnam and the introduction of US ground troops. The draft that sustained the war threatened all the young men of my generation with being thrust into the Heart of Darkness to kill or be killed. This existential threat gave birth to the anti-war movement and sparked both nonviolent and violent opposition to the war and to authority.

The anti-war movement grew out of the anti-nuclear movement. The semaphore symbols for ND, nuclear disarmament, formed the iconic peace symbol of the anti-war movement. The anti-war movement’s growth accelerated with the increase in numbers of draftees and casualties. It further expanded as government lies about the conduct of the war were revealed, especially by the publication of the purloined Pentagon Papers. In 1967 the yuppies surrounded and tried to levitate the Pentagon. Here the picture was taken of a young girl putting a flower in the barrel of a soldier’s rifle. Martin Luther King then tied the civil rights movement to the anti-war movement when he came out against our involvement.

The Civil Rights movement was another source of turmoil and violence. Blacks had begun to gain political power in World War II as they moved North to work in Defense industries and served bravely in the Armed Services. Yet, the North saw continued discrimination. Burn Baby, Burn was the motto of rioters as riots swept black urban areas. Meanwhile the southern states worked hard to keep blacks in their traditional place, that is as close to slavery as possible, with segregation, deprivation of voting rights and violence as needed. In 1968, the Kerner Commission would find that our nation’s moving towards two societies, one black one white -- separate and unequal.

Dr. Martin Luther King led the Civil Rights movement. He combined soaring oratory with the civil disobedience of Thoreau and Gandhi to change completely the relationship of black and white Americans. In 1963, Dr. King said, before 200,000 people on the national mall in Washington, I have a dream all men will one day be brothers. He began to see this dream move forward.

President Lyndon B. Johnson, who succeeded Kennedy and was a Southerner from Texas, was able to push legislation through Congress. As a result in 1964, the Civil Rights Act passed ending legal segregation. In 1965, the Voting Rights Act passed guaranteeing the rights of blacks to vote. The Democratic Party was torn apart by both the anti-war movement and the reaction to the enactment of Civil Rights Laws. The Democrats of the southern states went over to the Republican Party and, as a result, in 1968 Republican Richard Nixon became president. And the Republican right wing, which is so powerful today, was born. The country was now moving through a landscape that was changing and was changing rapidly, and on seemingly every level, bringing chaotic and violent reactions and counter reactions from every direction.

The Sixties ended in 1974 with the trauma of the realization that indeed, as many had suspected, Richard Nixon was a crook. He had sat in the White House using his vast power to commit felonies in aid of his reelection. The Watergate scandal started with a botched burglary at Democratic headquarters. This eventually led to charges of impeachment, and, before a trial could be held, to the resignation of President Nixon. This had followed the resignation of Vice President Agnew who was later convicted of bribery. Who could be concerned about breaking the law by evading the draft, smoking marijuana or taking LSD when the President and Vice President were themselves committing felonies? Violence through political assassination, unprovoked police attacks on nonviolent demonstrators, National Guard shootings of our students, and bank robberies, kidnappings and bombings by radical leftists all fed into the feeling that our society was out of control.⁴

Chapter 4

1968

America, love it or leave it.

We are all astronauts on the Spaceship Earth.

James Lovell, Apollo 8 Astronaut

1968, the penultimate year of the Sixties, was the year I graduated high school and set forth on my own path in life. The country, the world, was in violent turmoil and I was headed right into the center of the whirlwind, to San Francisco to begin college at Stanford.

On January 31, 1968 an unexpected offensive was launched by the North Vietnamese. The US Embassy grounds in Saigon were taken and held for 6 hours. An iconic photo of a South Vietnamese general brutally executing a prisoner filled the papers. February, the month I became eligible for the draft, saw the highest weekly casualty report of the war, 500 US dead in one week.

While the offensive would end in a military defeat for the North Vietnamese, they achieved political victory. The most trusted man in America, CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite, returned from a visit to South Vietnam and contradicted the military’s claims that the war