CHAPTER 114 PROTESTS AND MADNESS. 1967-1968
I’ve heard claims that if you remember the ’60, you weren’t there. Balderdash, I was there and I remember the so-called “Decade of Peace and Love”. I remember that the reality is there was very little peace and love existing during the period. The other myth is this calling it the ‘sixties in the first place. I guess you can’t call it a half-something. What is usually represented as the Love Decade began somewhere around 1964 and ran pretty much until 1974. It basically corresponded to the Vietnam War and there was no peace there and no peace here as the chants of the protesters grew ever louder. (I guess it could have been called, “Decade of the Beatles”)
And yes, Lois and I took part in various protests and marches over the period, probably on everything except Trident and I still can’t figure out if that fuss was about nuclear submarines or chewing gum? I do know Lois and I appeared on the TV during a protest of at Philadelphia City Hall, but am not certain what that protest was about. It was certainly in the “Long, Hot summer of 1967”, but there were many protests that summer. There were anti-Vietnam marches and civil rights gatherings, but maybe it was the Philadelphia School Walkout.
Yes, I do remember the Love Decade. The problem I have is remembering exactly when what took place. I have done my best to pinpoint the moments of action, but it is possible that the following narrative will not always be in the proper sequence. Sorry about that, but you probably won’t notice or won’t care or both.
Someone around he mid-60s credited the poet Allen Ginsberg
(right) for creating the term “Flower Power” on January 14, 1967. I would bet the term had been floating about before he uttered it. Some strung-out Hippie on the street probably blurted in out one day while watching his girl prance around the posies in her birthday suit. But You can say some dude in the crowd said it, unless you’re
writing Forrest Gump, so you got to credit somebody well known. You throw some imaginative gobbledygook around your creative story, like it means no war and no violence, man, it means we aren’t out here protesting; we’re just engaged in peaceful affirmations. It may have been a four-year old trying out sounds. We’re lucky it didn’t end up as Fun Gun or something obscene.
I wasn’t interested in who said it or when, or that it even existed. My concern was my wife’s situation. Going into mid-January we took her for admittance at the hospital. This was a step in trying to preserve her pregnancy and save this baby. On the 21st she was doing okay and having no contractions. On the 23 they propped her feet up, but on the 25th there was a bubble on the membrane. She didn’t feel well the next day and at 2:30 AM on January 27 she loss our fourth child. This time it was a girl, whom we named Sara.
Lois came home on the morning of January 30.
In mid-February she was driving herself crazy itching when she broke out in hives. The doctor gave her some medicine to relieve her. They felt it was a reaction to aspirin.
It had been a time of losses. We had lost our house and now our fourth baby. Our social life had dissolved as well. My conversational buddies had moved on and out of business and my life. Neither Dave Claypoole nor Ed were around to discuss issues with anymore.
All Lois and mine social acquaintances were also lost. To madness, I suppose, for our social world had revolved around Dottie and Jack Walls and their friends). Dottie was my long-time acquaintance from Glenloch and Downingtown, the slightly older girl who was my babysitter once upon a time. My parents were friends with her parents and after Dottie and Jack married we began spending evenings with them. I think Dottie contacted us first.
always a party, usually including a sit-down dinner followed by drinks. She was a disastrous cook. Bakers use to hold cake layers together with toothpicks The piece I was served contained 14 toothpicks in one slice of cake, but these soirées brought Florence and Gene Bare (right) and Susan Franks and others into our circle. When the Walls crumbled to pieces, the circle broke apart and these various people simply departed our life like wisps of smoke . Jack Walls has since died, but his life was in tatters anyway. Along with drugs, he was on the Sexual Predator list and served time in jail for child abuse. I believe some of their children grew up into troubled beings as well, but I have lost touch with that family. Her parents and my parents are gone and the remains of their family has dispelled into the winds of time.
On February 10, 1967, Dottie suffered a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized. It was sad about Dottie. I don’t quite know what was wrong with her, but I remember my grandmother telling my mother when she was my babysitter, “There’s something not right with that girl.” She always seemed to be slightly spaced out and very unsure of herself. She was also boy crazy. On February 2, 1968 Dottie was committed to Embreeville State Hospital (left), what we called an insane asylum, or less kindly, The Bobby Hatch, and that’s the last I ever heard of her.
My own nervous breakdown at Atlantic had lost me my advancement and for a while I feared it would lose me my job. They thought enough of me not to let me go, but gave me a position as a Parcel Postage Clerk, which I believe was a Level 4. They even allowed me to stay at the Level 6 grade I had taken and keep that pay and they promised they would put me in an actual Level 6 when one became available. After a few months, they put me back in my old Addressograph position.
And then in October 1966 someone from Personnel called me and asked if I would be interested in a job in Accounts Receivable as a Ledger Clerk. Indeed, I would.
Once we survived the upset of losing the fourth baby, our world began to improve, at least for me it did. Lois had sunk into one of her depressions, hardly unexpected, but she was also becoming paranoid again, this time about her father. He was spying on us, she believed. He kept a loaded gun under his pillow. Her suspicions would grow. Otherwise, life was fairly mundane.
half of 1965 due to finances, I hadn’t been back. On April 29 Lois and I drove to Shillington, Pennsylvania to view the house and environment where John Updike had grown up and placed many of his first writings. I identified with Mr. Updike or I should say I identified with the world he wrote about in his younger years. He had grown up in Shillington and went to school in Reading. I grew up in Bucktown, a small village near Pottstown. As a teen I spend a lot of nights driving up 422 to Reading, sometimes to play miniature golf or bowl, sometimes just to race other cars on the highway. I was beginning to mimic his writing in my own.
The water was cold. She felt pain in her gums drinking it and the ice cubes bumping her upper-lip was annoying. She set the glass on the nightstand, dipped two fingers and dabbed the chilly drops on her forehead. They slid down the sides of her nose into her eyes. She blinked.
She inched across the width of the bed and by stretching both body and one arm was able to raise the window shade. The sky was now a framed picture in the wall. She held the pull loop tightly, squeezing until the slicing pain in her side eased and then she let it go and fell back against her pillow.
She was exhausted.
Her pillow was hot. Her short hair twisted and prickled her neck. The room was like an oven. She wished the window were open or even the door.
Yellow light shown through the crack at the bottom of the closed door and voices seeped through from the room beyond. The muffled voices made it impossible to understand the words. The tone was discernible and by it she could tell the speaker. Her husband’s voice was controlled, but weary with a touch of anger.
She wished their neighbors would go. They came out of kindness inquiring to her feelings, but they refused to leave and she found that cruel. They had paid their social debt why didn’t that satisfy them?
There was a change in tone. Her husband had stopped talking. Maggie Braum took up the conversation. She was shrill and high-pitched. Maggie was probably rehashing the facts, making certain she had the story from beginning to end, memorizing her talking points for tomorrow’s round of koffee-klatches. What would Maggie tell?
Tell them about Dr. Lewis, please, she thought. She dragged the sheet halfway over her face. Just tell them about him.
She recognized her name being spoken by her husband, but couldn’t make out anything else. The voices were moving away. Did that mean they are leaving? The sounds dwindled across the living room toward the front door. She listened focusing all her attention on the sound. Her husband stopped speaking. There was a long silence. She listened, biting the sheet. The silence scared her. She would scream if it continued.
Then there was a hollow booming voice. This was George Braum. The conversation went on. Why wouldn’t they leave?
Pain jolted her diaphragm. She smelled blood again for a moment. It clung to her, that dreadful odor and the stain would not wash out. She had attempted to clean herself, but was weak and couldn’t scrub hard enough. The scent was filling the room. She whimpered. Her stomach rolled and she swallowed.
Excerpt from “A Beautiful Star-filled Night” (1964)
From my Collection: Daily Rhapsody. (1971)
Updyke and I came from the same general area. He was only 9 years older than I. What he wrote of I was familiar with, the area, the people, the lives of his characters. My own writing was drifting over in imitation of him, but I was a chameleon as a writer. I had written over the years like Evan Hunter, Charles Beaumont, H. P. Lovecraft, Sinclair Lewis and Ernest Hemingway; why not John Updike as well.
Probably I felt a good deal of envy for John. After all he came from my territory, but here he was in his mid-twenties as what could be called a successful writer. If nothing else, he was a self-sustaining writer, making his living by his words without some day job stealing his time. He was a staff writer for “The New Yorker” for gracious sake by the time he was in his early twenties and his stories and poems were selling to top paying publications. He also went to art school, because he wanted to be a cartoonist, just like me! I guess he was living my life!
I turned away from Updike, though, when Couples came out. I
had loved Rabbit, Run and The Centaur, and I know Couples got great reviews from the elite critics, but I didn’t like it. For one I couldn’t take the sex seriously. People were saying really ridiculous things to each other that were supposed to be provocative and naughty. I found them silly. Nobody talked like these people during sex.
Secondly, I secretly suspected he sold out. He was a working, regularly published, well-received writer, but in a sense not a star. Did people get excited by The Poorhouse Fair, by the stories in Pigeon Feathers or The Same Door? Couples seemed to me a way to get attention by flaunting sex like a flag in the face of America. It worked, Updike made the cover of time and the best seller lists and onward and upward.
But I lost my identification with him and I found Couples a boring read.
I think about then I got very engrossed in another John; John Steinbeck. Maybe those people on Cannery Row and Tortilla Flat fit more with the Hippie scene. Actually the first book of Steinbeck’s I read was To a God Unknown and I really liked it. This Dell paperback issue of the novel makes it look more lurid than it was. This looks more like something from the Erskine Caldwell collection. Steinbeck did win the Nobel Prize, something Updike never achieved…or am I just being mean now? Sure as little green onions, I ain’t ever going to win the Nobel Prize.
Put all that aside, my duel life was emerging into blossom.
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