There was a real stunner (for me) in the paper the other day. An article about all the celebrations planned for this summer because it’s the fortieth anniversary of the “summer of love”—1967. Before I saw the article, I couldn’t have told you the year, though I was there, sort of. I graduated from library school in 1965 (when I was thirty) and was working at my second library, the Sunset Branch of San Francisco Public, in the spring of 1967. The branch was two blocks from Golden Gate Park, and I went to the Be-In—which the paper said was the first big hippie event of that year—on my lunch hour. I was married, working full time, and putting most of my spare time and energy into another manifestation of the sixties, peace marches—where we dressed up in non-hippie clothes so we would be taken seriously. The assistant to the City Librarian wore a button at work that said ”plainclothes hippie.” Last night we went to the Freight and Salvage to hear Rosalie Sorrels. She just gets better. In her introduction to her song about hitchhikers in the rain she talked a bit about that time, but said, "I never call them the sixties because they started in the mid-fifties and lasted into the mid-seventies.”  “It was a time of trust and generosity,” she said. “We thought for a while we could make it all work.” It made me think about the hitchhikers I picked up then. I had to—I had a flowered VW bug, and it stopped for them. I picked up one young guy on my way to my parents’ house in Berkeley (we were living in San Francisco) and invited him to come in for lunch. My mother saw nothing odd in this. When I was a kid, during the gas rationing of the Second World War, everybody picked up hitchhikers. My parents picked up a seventeen-year-old and listened to his story. He wanted to join the navy, or maybe it was the merchant marine, but couldn’t without his parents’ permission, and they were in the Midwest somewhere. My folks put him up for a week while he wrote home—and helped him figure out what to say. I had a flowered car because when I got a job in a school library in Sausalito and needed my own car, my husband had found me a used tan VW bug that had a bullet hole in it and smelled of cigar smoke. It wasn’t me. So I invited some friends over and we painted a Pennsylvania Dutch hex sign (to ward off accidents), some redwoods, some mushrooms and flowers, and I don’t remember what else all over the car. I shared rides with Julie, one of the teachers who also lived in San Francisco. We picked up a couple in Sausalito, and when they offered to share a joint with us, we had to persuade them not to light up in the car and get us in trouble. Then I got a job in a library down the peninsula. I picked up a guy on my way to work who was hitching to see a friend at a mental hospital farther down. As we talked, I got it that he had a few wires crossed himself, but he was harmless. Everything seemed harmless then, and I suppose part of it was the times, but part of it was that I was still young and invincible. When I think of the sixties I think first of the political stuff—peace walks and the free speech movement and the March on Washington and the Palace Hotel sit-in—all of which which I will write about later—but then there were the other sixties, and yes, we did our share of partying too, not just the big dances at the Fillmore and the Longshore Hall, but partying with our neighbors and friends. And strangers. Until the sixties, my husband didn’t dance much. He could do the Charleston, so I made assumptions, but it turned out that was all he could do. He would rather play banjo or piano in the band. So I took up Balkan and Greek line dancing, where you don’t need a partner, and Jerry would play mandolin to the dance records or sit in with the occasional band. There would be a hambo (a whirling Swedish dance that is one of my favorites) during the break, and luckily there was a really good dancer there whose wife didn’t dance, so I got a weekly fix. The line dance classes were at the Potrero Hill Neighborhood House, and sometimes on the weekends somebody on the hill would have a house party with line dancing. There was also a Greek restaurant downtown with dancing then, and we had friends who knew when the Armenian Relief Society had their fundraising dances with some band from Fresno or LA and delicious food. These were family affairs—the kids came too. We would do the line dances, and then watch while the young women danced in the center of the ring and collected money for the cause. We could see the five-year-old girls on the sidelines imitating the dancers in the center. Then came the sixties. People started dancing freeform, and Jerry could do that, so we went to the dance/light shows at the Longshore Hall and at the Fillmore. We also found that dancing the Charleston under strobe lights made us feel happy like an old-time movie. We had a few great years, then, suddenly, as though by command, people started sitting down on the dance floor and listening to the music! I found this appalling. We could still dance in the corners but it wasn’t the same. We lived in an apartment on Potrero Hill from 1960 to around 1965, then in a rented house on Bernal Heights that was up about a thousand stairs. I know we were living there when I turned thirty because I remember unwrapping my birthday present from my mother in that living-room: The Beatles’ Rubber Soul. Perfect. We cut a gate into the fence so we could visit the couple next door without going all the way down and up. One night we were having a party at our house—Jerry was playing some nice blues autoharp—and a guy we didn’t know came to the door, said hi, smiled. We let him in, thinking someone at the party knew him. He enjoyed the music for a while, then left. Turned out nobody knew him. When Jerry and I bought a house on the other side of Bernal Heights, there were a poet (day job, editor) and a weaver living across the back fence. They were also practicing pagans and we were initiated into their coven by standing in a circle with a bunch of people in their back yard in the sunshine and saying stuff. They had guinea pigs. One day we looked out our dining-room window down into the empty lot next to us and there they were, with a bunch of friends, advancing in a line across the lot. Arcane pagan ritual? No. One of the guinea pigs had gotten lost and they were looking for it. We went with the coven on a picnic on Angel Island. Of course at one point we were passing a joint or two around the circle, and just then a guy in uniform came up to us. Uh-oh!  But no, he was a Boy Scout leader and he’d forgotten his knife and could he borrow one. Sure. I’m glad I was young enough to enjoy the sixties and old enough not to be messed up by them. My mom wrote a couple of songs about the flower children who got lost—for a while or permanently. Here’s one.  On the Rim of the World ©1973 by Malvina Reynolds ©2007 by Nancy Schimmel http://www.thefreight.orghttp://www.rosaliesorrels.com/
Here I am wrapped in a Cowichan Indian sweater against the San Francisco summer low overcast, singing to kids at the Bernal Heights Art Fair. Photo by Jerry Schimmel.
Thursday, June 21, 2007
HAPPY SOLSTICE!