It depended where you were. I lived in London in 61 and worked in a suburban pub. The West End was like a different country; girls in mini skirts and boys in flared trousers. Carnaby Street, where tiny shops stayed open all hours selling exotic clothes in a City where most shops closed on Saturday afternoons.
Music and dance were probably the most significant things; Rock and Roll from the US pushed out the big bands and the twist took over from ballroom. The Pill, supposedly for married women only, but widely available, liberated women and we discovered sex. Radio Luxembourg was the music station of choice until 64, when Radio Caroline (broadcasting from a ship offshore to beat the regulations) took over.
In 63, I moved for a while to a city in the North East and it was like going back to some pre-war black-and-white film. Women in long dresses and men in baggy suits and flat hats. Smoke and grime everywhere and huge gaps where The Luftwaffe had been at work.
1964 is generally chosen as the beginning of the 60s because of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. Maybe throw in Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are A-Changing for good measure. The Beatles coming to the US is important in rock and roll history, but they were still a pop band then having little, if anything, to do with the counter-culture. That changed quickly, of course.
I will quibble a bit about when folks began “looking like hippies”. Look at album covers from the time. Even in 1964 you’d see the Rolling Stones wearing “band costumes” of matching clothes. Fast forward to 1967 and pretty much anything goes. Check out this 1967 pic of Big Brother and the Holding Company. Remember that the Summer of Love was 1967, so there were lots of folks of college age who “looked like hippies”.
I think most high schools in the US had fairly strict dress codes until the latter part of the 60s, early 70s (I know mine did), so judging people by what they wore to school is a bit misleading.
If you were drafted, your active service would be over after 2 years.
I can’t speak for 60-63, but 5 years later, some draftees were sent to Vietnam immediately after basic and other specialty training, if any, long before the 2 year hitch was up.
You need to work Woodstock into that equation, very much a 60’s thing.
This post appeared in the evening at the same time as a flurry of those nonsense one sentence posts that turn into streaming sports spam a couple minutes later. Between the newbie poster and the half formed quasi-question in poor English this looked like one of those to me.
In my report I said it *might *be streaming sports spam. Turns out I was wrong. Oops.
It’s just shorthand to set a frame of reference. Historians deal more in eras. I had a college class called “19th Century Europe” that covered the period from 1815 to 1917, basically the end of the Napoleonic Wars to the Russian Revolution.
I was born in 1951, and grew up during the fifties and sixties. For me the watershed date was 1963 and the Kennedy assassination. In retrospect, that felt like the moment when “everything changed.”
But the cultural shift was very rapid between 1963 and 1967, and you could probably pick any year in there as the crucial one. Certainly 1957 and 1962 weren’t very different, while 1962 and 1967 were drastically so.
I was born about the same time and very much agree.
I’m also going to posit that Nixon’s resignation in 1974 didn’t kick-start the 70s as much as disco did a couple years later. The switch to coiffed hair, dance clubs, and general escapism was a big one. A significant number of my friends just turned into completely different people seemingly overnight. Nixon bummed me out, but disco made me want to put my head in the oven.
I don’t think you can overemphasize how huge the gap was between the cutting edge rock stars and the general public from 1965-1968. There were hippie movements in San Francisco and Greenwich Village but the vast majority of the country in the middle was still burdened by older morals and dress codes and disapproving parents. The change spread to other big cities and to a small number of kids and then to smaller cities and a larger number of kids. But it took years to get everywhere. Even there it didn’t get to everyone.
1954 kid checking in. Obviously 3 years’ difference in age is huge at that age, so your impressions are much more trustworthy than mine. But my memories still go back to 1957, and the late 1950s and early 1960s seem to be more or less of a piece in my recollection.
And then JFK’s assassination and the British Invasion, Selma and Vietnam. By 1965, certainly, it was The Sixties. 1963 wasn’t. And 1964 may have felt much like 1963 in real time, but in retrospect it feels a lot more connected to now than 1963 does.
Things were happening fast, so it’s hard to draw a line, but once you make the cover of Time Magazine, you’re pretty well established. Time Magazine’s July 7, 1967 cover.
For those of us already in college, “dress codes and disapproving parents” were pretty much nonexistent. There were already groups of hippies beginning in '66, possibly earlier.
That may have depended on where you were in college. The notion that colleges were acting in loco parentis was still very much alive through most of the 1960s.
A few years back, somewhere else, the question was describe the late 50s, early 60s and late 60s each with one word. I went
late 50s - fear
early 60s - hope
late 60s - anger
No, when you make the cover of Time you’re at the end of the line of your fad. Certainly the case for the true hippie movement in San Francisco, which was actively dying by July 7, 1967. Pseudo and plastic hippies multiplied across the country in clumps and patches and various time periods over the next half decade, as I said.
And I agree with brother RTFirefly that only a small percentage of colleges stopped in loco parentis by 1966, and probably fewer than half did so by 1970. There are thousands of colleges in the U.S., at least a thousand of them religious institutions or from other conservative settings. What happened in Columbia and Berkeley was not typical, no matter how much we want to go back and rewrite history today.
