Tell me about the 60s

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

I was born in 1960.

One of the coolest parts of my life was when my Dad was a Ph.D. student at the University of South Carolina (1966-1968). His field was structural engineering, and for 3 summers in a row we went to Huntsville, Alabama where he worked as an intern in the space program.

We stayed in some apartments which had a Swimming Pool ! And Air Conditioning ! This was the first time that I had lived in a house with a/c.

There were a lot of eager young men working on the Space Program. I remember the guys dropping by the house, in the evenings or on weekends, talking earnestly over a beer or two about the program. To a big-eyed kid, it all seemed so magical and mysterious, and I was so proud that my Daddy was a part of it.

He still has a little medallion cast of metal taken from one of the flights - Apollo I think it was.

Shadi, you are welcome to e-mail me also. Just put something in the subject line so’s I won’t think it’s spam. :wink:

22

“Anyone who can remember the 60’s wasn’t there.” An old saying.

23

ShadiRoxan,

I was born in 1942, so I have good memories of the 60’s. I lived in Boulder Co until 1964, and then moved to Hawaii where I lived on Maui. Our TV news in Hawaii was delivered by airline pilots to the TV stations every day – there were no live broadcasts to Hawaii then. I spent a lot of time with Peace Corps returnees, misc. dropouts and some Vietnam vets who were trying to make the transition. If you have questions, please email me.

Palikia

24

The 60’s in NE Florida (born in '52)
Early 60’s
Separate water fountains and rest rooms and lunch counters for “white” and “colored” in the stores downtown, including Woolworths, JCPenneys, Sears, WTGrant, May-Cohens. The Civil Rights movement bringing sit-ins to the “white” lunch counters: large groups of (as they were called then in polite society) Negroes would sit at every seat in a lunch counter (a restaurant inside a department store, often including a long bar or counter with stools), and be refused service. They would stay for awhile, until the local cops showed up to run them out.
There were a few days of “race riots”, I forget when, maybe after the MLK assisination in '68, with shops and stuff burned in the “ghetto” areas.
We had a front seat for the Cuban Missle Crisis of 1962 - Jacksonville’s a major Navy town, so there was a lot of activity, with duck and cover drills in the schools, in case Castro lobbed some “A-bombs” at us - with three Navy bases, we felt we were probably a prime target for his short-range missles - only about 400 miles away. Watching long convoys of military vehicles moving south.

On a happier note - watching the space program from the early sub-orbital flights thru the Apollo moon landings. And all the launches were going up less than 200 miles away at Cape Canaveral!
Going to rock concerts in high school - Steppenwolf, Humble Pie, Credance Clearwater Revival, the Association, and more I can’t remember.
The Smothers Brothers on TV, with open anti-war anti-Nixon commentary on a variety show!

That’s about all for now, my memory chips are overloading …

25

I was born in 60. Lived on the NW side of Chicago.
I was pretty ignorant of most political/social stuff was above me - including stuff going on in Chicago. I do remember seeing the war on the news, gold stars in peoples’ windows, etc. And I remember watching the moon landing.

A couple of things that were different back then:
No one wore designer clothes, shoes, etc. - most kids wore what their parents bought from Sears.
Black and white TV - I remember our first color TV in 65 or so.
Most families had one rotary dial phone, often mounted on the kitchen wall.
In Chicago, only soccer was only played in the hispanic and european communities. For eveyone else - little league and Pop Warner football were about the only options.
Add in scouts, and that’s about it for kids’ extracurricular activities.
Most moms did not work out of the house.
Most families had only 1 car.
Transistor radios were cool.
Very few people barbecued. It was very unusual when my neighbor started using a Weber.

26

Dinsdale reminded me of something else.

The phone # for that would be something like this: Normandy 2-1464.

It was dialed by using the first 2 letters of the name so to dial our number was 662-1464. There were still party lines, even in Los Angeles, and you had your own ring.

Kathy

27

Continuing with telephones…
You rented the phone from AT&T, which was a nation-wide company providing local and long distance. You had no choice, there were no other telephone companies. If you bought a phone somewhere, and wired it in (no quick-plug jacks back then), eventually, Ma Bell (the phone co.) would find you out, and make you either remove the “illegal” phone, or pay extra each month to have an “extension phone.”

Changing the subject
People “dressed up” - men in white shirts with ties, and probably suit or sport jackets; women in dresses, heels, pearls - to go downtown (no malls), to the movies, to football or baseball games, or to fly.

Gawd I feel old.

28

>>>If you bought a phone somewhere, and wired it in (no quick-plug jacks back then), eventually, Ma Bell (the phone co.) would find you out, and make you either remove the “illegal” phone, or pay extra each month to have an “extension phone.”<<<

I remember this throughout the 70s too - I think if you disconnected the ringer (since you’d hear your other phone ring anyway) they couldn’t detect this, as they monitored the voltage drop more when you phone(s) rang to measure the number of extensions (OK, that’s what my Dad said, and I still believe it - not gonna google, so there!).
Since I wasn’t even in school by the time the 60s ended, I’m not too good a source of first-hand information (it seemed sunnier, and my parent’s definitely looked younger…)
But once source where I got a whole lot of information as to the attitudes and culture of the 60s was - Life Magazine (I read many issues when I worked in a College library) - very interesting (once you skip the standard celebrity fawning, which wasn’t as prevalent back then), and lots of photos (of course).
Heh, another change is that popular science magazines (like… Popular Science!) talked about cool technology and inventions of the day, while the current issue of Popular Science talks about -Fart smelling (really - it’s even in the table of contents <Dave Barry>I am not making this up</Dave Barry>).

29

It was exciting.
You could feel the excitement in the air.
I was pretty young (10 in 1968) but i was there.
There were all these cool people dressing how they wanted, suddenly thinking out of the box, trying to make changes…
Abbie Hoffman was my hero.

30

Ah, the 1960s. It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.

I came of age in the 60s. I was born in 1952. As others have mentioned, the beginning of the real 60s to many of us was the Kennedy assassination in 1963.

The Cuban Missile Crisis was a white-knuckle couple of weeks and was the high point of fear during the Cold War, but I vote for 1968 as a defining year. To me, the world (and in particular, America) has never been more frightening.

(To be fair, it probably cannot realistically compare to Europe during WWII, but since I was not alive then, I cannot compare first hand.)

Here is a partial list of the disasters of 1968…

The Soviet Union under Brezhnev keeps the Cold War going strong.
The Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia.
The Pueblo (US Intelligence ship) is seized by the North Koreans.
The Chinese Cultural Revolution is still going strong.
The Vietnam war is in full swing. The Tet Offensive takes place. (with the famous photograph of the execution of a Viet Cong soldier)
Only a few years after John F. Kennedy was assassinated, his brother Robert is shot and killed.
Martin Luther King is assassinated.
Airplanes are being hijacked.
American campuses erupt in anit-war protests.
American cities are ablaze with race riots.
The Democratic National Convention is interrupted by riots and violence.
The summer Olympics are boycott by 32 nations protesting South Africa’s participation.
O.J. Simpson wins the Heisman trophy.
Nixon wins the presidential election.

(OK… these last two are a bit tongue-in-cheek, but…)

War, riots, and assassinations. Sheesh. No one who was not alive during this period can truly understand the national crisis that was boiling over into the streets. From personal experience I can tell you that tear gas is a mighty nasty substance.

But there were bright spots. For example, ccwaterback covered the music. And there was the pride of our space program, culminating with the successful moon landing. I’ll never forget sitting on our family room floor watching the grainy black and white images on the television as Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon.

It’s hard for my kids to understand the lack of technology that existed in the average person’s life. No personal computers, no video games, no calculators, rotary home phones, no CDs, no DVDs (heck, no VCRs!), no PDAs, no cell phones, no Internet, no Instant Messaging, no email, only four network television stations. It was the late 60s before we even got a color set, and even then not all programs were broadcast in color.

Change was in the air, with equal parts hope and dispair.

31

Which wasn’t always a good thing.

I was in 3rd grade when the 60s started. My parents were Democrats in a Republican neighborhood and my father loved to argue with friends who had gone through the Depression and World War 2 like him and yet (to his astonishment) were Republican. I and my friends grew up with a better connection to the 1940s than my children and their friends do to the 1960s or 70s.

When astronuts started going into space, TV’s would be wheeled into classrooms so we could all watch the launch. If there weren’t enough TV’s, everyone went into the auditorium to stare at a single black and white TV with a fuzzy picture. The first American spaceflight lasted 15 minutes.

I remember my father being terribly upset when the Berlin Wall went up, and totally scared out of his wits during the Cuban Missile Crisis because he had been driving through Arkansas and actually seen the missiles out of their silos and ready to launch.

We all grew up knowing that their missiles were pointing at us and our missiles were pointing at them, and we could all die with less than 15 minutes’ notice.

When Kennedy was shot, it was our generation’s 9/11 (or like Pearl Harbor to my parents.) Nothing had ever hit all of us at the same time so hard. Much like 9/11, everyone stayed inside, glued to their TV sets for days afterward.

After that, all hell broke loose. Assasinations, anti-war protests, the “generation gap” and battles between parents and kids, drugs and booze, rock and roll, rioting in the cities and on college campuses.

Sex was everywhere, and everyone talked about it, but only in the abstract. If you were doing it (and if you weren’t), you kept it a secret. If a girl got “knocked up” she either got married or disappeared for a few months.

You learned to drive in your mother’s old station wagon (assuming your family had two cars) It was 20 feet long, 7 feet wide and had a “3 on the tree” manual transmission. You burned out the clutch in three months.

My mother was diagnosed with cancer. “Cancer” was a word that people said very quietly, because it almost always meant a long, slow death. My mother surviving made her a hero to a lot of people.

Every school had some kids on crutches or in wheel chairs because they had had polio. Every school had “polio drives” where we all got vaccinated. The adults were VERY happy about this.

The thing was, it was ALL happening ALL the time. You’d go to bed at night and when you woke up the next morning, Israel would be at war, Bobby Kennedy would be dead, astronauts would be on the moon, your favorite musician would be found dead from an overdose (or an airplane crash), or you still wouldn’t know whether Nixon or Humphrey was going to be President.

Like dropzone said, it was like three years being crammed into one, every year from about 1962-1973.

32

I forgot one important little sugar cube. Not LSD, the polio vaccine. And the smallpox vaccine, that little round dot we all have on our shoulder.

33

Thanks every one for taking the time to tell me these stories. The more I read the more I realize how far we’ve come in the past forty years (both good and bad).

I interviewed my boss today and got a lot of insight, especially over things relating to Cuba since he was in southern FL for a while. I wish I hadn’t have woken up at 10:30 this morning when I was suppose to be at work at 10 (something that I’ve never done before), otherwise I would have had so many more questions for him. I’m slightly ashamed to say that I forgot all about the Space Race and a man walking on the moon.

I’m going to talk to my teacher and see what she’ll let me do with all the responses that I’m getting. I might just email her the link.

I’m going to be heading out of town in a few hours and I might not be able to check back here until Monday. If any one else has any more stories to share it would be appreciated. If you have some stories that you don’t mind sharing with me but don’t want to post then feel free to email me at shadiroxan@yahoo.com or the email in my profile. I promise that I will not share any of it without your consent.

34

My adult life began with the decade of the Sixties. I was a twenty year old college student when Kennedy was assassinated. He was so bright, young, popular – and he seemed invinsible. So did our country as long as he was in control. But never again. Everything stopped for three black and heavy days of grieving and watching black and white images on television.

A year or so later, I was asked to sign a petition in support of President Johnson and the war in Vietnam. I did so without even thinking about it. I had managed to shut the war and politics out of my life and replaced it with things which wouldn’t hurt me – Audrey Hepburn movies, Henry Mancini music, the bossa nova.

I didn’t even hear about hipdom until the Summer of Love. 1967 was also the summer of race riots. By the end of the year I had my first apartment on my own and four months later Dr. King was assassinated. I remember seeing tanks in the streets and curfews after dark. Even after the curfews were lifted, I once had a city bus driver take me to my door.

In May of 1968, I briefly met Bobby Kennedy at Vanderbilt University. Within a month he was dead. I left a job in publishing and then one in advertising to return to school to finish my degree.

By the end of 1969, I had begun teaching in the inner-city, protesting the war and smoking pot. I was both more serious and more celebratory.

The pattern that I’ve just described is almost a cliche for many my age.

I think that the Sixties were a time of Renaissance for some.

Read the lyrics to John Lennon’s Imagine. That remains the dream.

35

Tell you about the 60s. Okay. I turned 12, in 1960. I remember the election campaign…All the “chicken littles” were screaming that if Kennedy got elected, we would be “ruled by the Pope”.

I remember watching Elvis, on the Ed Sullivan show. My mother and her friend came in to watch and laughed their asses off. They told me that he would prove to be a “flash-in-the-pan” and no one would know who he was in a couple of years.

I remember watching Ozzie & Harriet, Father Knows Best, Leave It To Beaver and wondered if families like that really existed.

Girls could not wear pants to school. Our hemlines could be no higher than the middle of our knee. Boys could not have hair so long that it touched their collar. Boys had to wear a belt.

I remember Kennedy’s assassination. Everyone was crying and I felt our country was doomed.

I remember watching the Beatles, for the first time, on the Ed Sullivan show. Their music was so different. Their influence, in the music industry, was (needless to say) astronomical. Our parents hated them. (But then again, our parents hated rock ‘n’ roll period.)

Our high school was affluent so they purchased enough electric typewriters to accommodate 30 students per class and tossed out the manual ones. We thought we were “uptown”.

When I was a jr. in high school, we suddenly became very aware of the Vietnam War. A lot of seniors suddenly got married…thinking they wouldn’t be drafted if they were married. They were wrong. (Two of my high school friends were killed there.) There was a great deal of protesting against the war, but many people don’t realize that there were just as many people who just accepted it or had no opinion about it. I was against it, but I didn’t participate in any protests. My sister did and my dad cut off her college funds.

After I graduated, I left home and headed for California because I was fascinated by the “flower children” scene. By the time I got there, in 1967, the true “flower children” were gone and only the criminals were left. ha.

I became a topless dancer earning $5.00 an hour (big money back then) plus between $80 and $100 a night in tips. (No, I did not prostitute myself.) I didn’t last more than a couple of years because I began to feel guilty about it. I, then became a secretary. While I was a dancer, I met a lot of soldiers, who had lost limbs, etc. while in Vietnam. Their CO would bring them to where I worked…they were ALL under age (actually, I was also, but no one knew). I thought it was hypocritical that they were sent over there to fight, but could not come back here and even drink a beer so we served them even though we could have been arrested for it.

I lived in southern California when the Manson murders went down. The general population thought the coppers were stupid for saying the Tate and LaBianca murders were unrelated, but they stuck to that theory until crazy Susan Atkins set them straight. What many people don’t know is that the father of the Lennon Sisters was murdered about this time as well. It was a scary time.

It was a time of change. The music changed, dress codes changed, attitudes changed.

36

Courtesy of Peter Fonda as Terry Valentine in The Limey:
Did you ever dream about a place you never really recall being to before? A place that maybe only exists in your imagination? Some place far away, half remembered when you wake up. When you were there, though, you knew the language. You knew your way around. That was the sixties.

No. It wasn’t that either. It was just -66 and early -67. That’s all there was.