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Arklexee, I sold my '57 after graduation and bought a friends '64 vette convertible. Cool car, drove it for nine years.
Regarding the great music of our time, for me the late 50's through the mid seventies, its cool to see some of them in concert today, still sounding great.
In the '60s I was in college and some of us started a pacifist group. There was more to it than that -- we really thought we could change the world and make it a better place.
We thought that our parents' generation was too materialistic so we rebelled and wanted simple lives.
We thought our marching in the streets could end the war in Viet Nam. I marched in NY City and was held up high on someone's shoulders so I could see Martin Luther King.
Summers were spent in Provincetown and one summer everyone was talking about going to Woodstock. I sort of wanted to go but then I ended up not going for some reason. After it was over I asked somebody and they said, "Oh it was horrible, it just rained all the time." HA! Then I heard otherwise and wished I had gone.
Provincetown was the place to be -- handmade hippie sandals, perfect bell bottoms that you couldn't buy anywhere else, love beads, rose colored sunglasses, and LOVE LOVE LOVE. We left P'town and drove across the country camping all the way -- ended up in LA and just wanted to go back home.
The car had Flower Power stickers all over it -- everybody's car had those stickers, big flowers. LOL Flowers and Love would change the world, it was that simple!
Great great music and every day there would be something new happening. A new Beatles song, a new speech, a new idea, a new rally to go to, always something, never boring. A time of ideas and optimism. Oh, we were going to change the world!
Got married in a mini dress. We both worked and I guess we became weekend hippies because we both still believed in The Cause. Rallies on the New Haven Green, all of us together, united. A friend with a guitar coming over and all smoking and singing LOUD. Living in the country and growing an organic garden, smoking pot and it made us really hungry so we ran out into the garden and picked the corn and cooked it in the middle of the night.
Then they killed our heroes and it all began to fall apart. They took "our" tv shows off the air, like Laugh In, then the Beatles split up, the war dragged on. Kids I had gone to college with were killed in the war, others came home all messed up with their lives in ruins. Kent State. Chicago Seven. Rock star idols died from drugs. It got really depressing.
Then the '70s came along and they were boring but the war finally ended. I never changed my beliefs but I saw others becoming like our parents, only interested in money and superficiality (to my way of thinking).
Last month I sold my "vintage" mini wedding dress and my 1967 hippie bell bottoms in a consignment shop. Still have my Provincetown hippie purse and always will.
I think this new generation coming up is more like us -- going green and I hope they'll try to think of more than just themselves and money and status and bigger houses and bigger cars and spoiled brat kids who get everything. If they take on our former causes, maybe what our generation tried to do, will not have been in vain.
In the '60s I was in college and some of us started a pacifist group. There was more to it than that -- we really thought we could change the world and make it a better place.
We thought that our parents' generation was too materialistic so we rebelled and wanted simple lives.
We thought our marching in the streets could end the war in Viet Nam. I marched in NY City and was held up high on someone's shoulders so I could see Martin Luther King.
Summers were spent in Provincetown and one summer everyone was talking about going to Woodstock. I sort of wanted to go but then I ended up not going for some reason. After it was over I asked somebody and they said, "Oh it was horrible, it just rained all the time." HA! Then I heard otherwise and wished I had gone.
Provincetown was the place to be -- handmade hippie sandals, perfect bell bottoms that you couldn't buy anywhere else, love beads, rose colored sunglasses, and LOVE LOVE LOVE. We left P'town and drove across the country camping all the way -- ended up in LA and just wanted to go back home.
The car had Flower Power stickers all over it -- everybody's car had those stickers, big flowers. LOL Flowers and Love would change the world, it was that simple!
Great great music and every day there would be something new happening. A new Beatles song, a new speech, a new idea, a new rally to go to, always something, never boring. A time of ideas and optimism. Oh, we were going to change the world!
Got married in a mini dress. We both worked and I guess we became weekend hippies because we both still believed in The Cause. Rallies on the New Haven Green, all of us together, united. A friend with a guitar coming over and all smoking and singing LOUD. Living in the country and growing an organic garden, smoking pot and it made us really hungry so we ran out into the garden and picked the corn and cooked it in the middle of the night.
Then they killed our heroes and it all began to fall apart. They took "our" tv shows off the air, like Laugh In, then the Beatles split up, the war dragged on. Kids I had gone to college with were killed in the war, others came home all messed up with their lives in ruins. Kent State. Chicago Seven. Rock star idols died from drugs. It got really depressing.
Then the '70s came along and they were boring but the war finally ended. I never changed my beliefs but I saw others becoming like our parents, only interested in money and superficiality (to my way of thinking).
Last month I sold my "vintage" mini wedding dress and my 1967 hippie bell bottoms in a consignment shop. Still have my Provincetown hippie purse and always will.
I think this new generation coming up is more like us -- going green and I hope they'll try to think of more than just themselves and money and status and bigger houses and bigger cars and spoiled brat kids who get everything. If they take on our former causes, maybe what our generation tried to do, will not have been in vain.
Wow so many thoughts....so many reminders of how it was at that time that many of us still remember. Some really great times....some really sad times. I hadn't thought about Laugh In(the show) in years but I still remember. And so many of us from our generation know people who were killed in Vietnam. I specifically remember one guy I went to boot camp with in 1969. He was the best at everything during training...and wouldn't you know it...he went to Vietnam and was killed. I hope you are right about the younger people...
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Great post , newengland. Many reminders. We really did think of ourselves as revolutionaries .....we were very self-important and all the TV shows (Merv Griffin even) devoted hours and hours to Abbie Hoffman and people like us.
The funniest shows were the old Dragnet shows with Jack Webb that showed hippies nodding off and constantly saying things like , " Heavy, man. Groovy.... " , and of course , becoming
super-strung out and dangerous after one puff of pot. They are especially funny ( & charmingly so ) now in retrospect & innocent in a way also.
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Last edited by nancy thereader; 04-27-2008 at 04:40 PM..
Great post , newengland. Many reminders. We really did think of ourselves as revolutionaries .....we were very self-important and all the TV shows (Merv Griffin even) devoted hours and hours to Abbie Hoffman and people like us.
The funniest shows were the old Dragnet shows with Jack Webb that showed hippies nodding off and constantly saying things like , " Heavy, man. Groovy.... " , and of course , becoming
super-strung out and dangerous after one puff of pot. They are especially funny ( & charmingly so ) now in retrospect & innocent in a way also).
That's true - TV hippies were often sinister characters, especially post-Manson. Marcus Welby MD featured more than its share of hippie freaks leading good kids astray. Someone should do a comparison study, characterizations of hippie types on TV pre- and post-Manson, what writers used them, to what purpose, did those writers and producers believe differently in real life. They were quite a propaganda tool.
The movie Joe. An actress named Kay Lenz who made an entire career of playing flaky flower children. A TV actress who really had the look was Peggy Lipton on Mod Squad! Alice's Restaurant.
Oh, Abbie Hoffman - my raging crush and role model, had I dared, for years, though I never saw him on television. Imagine my surprise when his ex-wife Anita remarked years later, "Abbie was 5'7" on a good day." Here I'd thought he was Superman.
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Location: home...finally, home .
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Abbie and Anita Hoffman lived near me when I lived in the East Village in 1970. They lived on a ground level apartment on East 9th Street and there were no locks on their wooden door . People could just come and go whenever they wanted.
... and , I think that Kay Lenz (you never hear about her anymore) was once married to David Cassidy. That is who I had a crush on. Why , I can not say . Peggy Lipton , I think, appears in Law & Order sometimes ....... but, doesn't everyone ???
__________________ ******************
People may not recall what you said to them, but they will always remember how you made them feel .
Good news, folks. As I was reading several posts back and reminiscing about the Village, handmade sandals, hippies and flower children, I am seeing the light at the end of the tunnel in the kids that in_newengland sees, too.
I remember giving up anything of material value and thinking how deluded our parents' generation was - always talking about the next raise, the new house, a bigger car.
I was in college in the mid-60's and could not do enough to save the planet, save my friends from the draft (Yep, even wrote a few term papers for some of them to keep them in school!), grew a MJ plant on my bedroom window sill - IN MY PARENT'S HOUSE, and was amazed that my dad knew what it was and threw it out!
Somehow, the 60's became the 70's and as in_newengland said, everything started to fall apart. Our dreams were being strangled one by one.
Well, by some trick of nature, I was still having kids in my forties, and yes-siree, I have one of those crazy college kids now! And, it is good news. As I see my son with his friends from college they are expressing the same concerns that we had in the '60's, but they seem to have much clearer and more mature solutions in mind. They aren't just marching; they are doing.
They want to make the same changes we did, but they are leaving the pot and the sandals out of the equation and trying to use their education and resources to accomplish saving the environment, helping to eliminate global starvation and disease, and always considering the power of one as valuable as the power of a group.
These are very smart kids we and our children have managed to raise, most with our values, but many with real answers. We are going to see marches to the polls like we have never experienced before this coming Nov. We are going to see the kids in this 17-25 age group as active as we were and hopefully, this time the dream will continue.
strange so many things that were then more or less harmless fun are now criminal activity. know the penalty for indecent exposure? there goes your career.
I think it was 1970. The college I attended had just opened a new ROTC center. At that time, all freshmen were still required to take 1 year of ROTC. During the dedication, my room mate and I were sitting up in a tree near the front of the building. The "soldiers" were on one side, the protesters were on the other. We'd toss pebbles into one group, then the other - not really looking to cause trouble, we just wanted to see what would happen. Nothing did and life went on.
Rtom, you and your friends really lived on the wild side!
That sounds like the curiosity of 18 yr. olds. You had heard of some of the clashes and wanted to see if they could possibly be true.
Yep. They were, just not at your school.
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They are especially funny ( & charmingly so ) now in retrospect & innocent in a way also.
Peggy Lipton , I think, appears in Law & Order sometimes ....... but, doesn't everyone ???
