1967, a Year of Lost Innocence

Re-reading copies of letters I wrote back in 1967 I hardly recognized that starry-eyed, flag-waving girl I was back then when 'she' was on a mission to write to as many guys stationed in Vietnam as she could. Troops over there, that year, increased to a total of 475,000 and peace rallies turned into war protests erupted around the world, becoming more and more intense and frequent. I was clearly on the side of Uncle Sam and by the end of the year the country and many of us in it had lost our innocence---me in more ways than one.

1967 was also the year when Twiggy was a fashion sensation that started women on a path of viewing our bodies in an unhealthy and unrealistic way and we are still dealing with her legacy all these years later. It was also the year when 7,000 National Guards were sent to Detroit to put down the race rioting and looting in the streets and those scenes were repeated across the nation, including right in my own back yard where one of my co-workers couldn’t go home for nearly a week because her whole neighborhood was blocked off by the police.  

In 1967 the Beatles came out with their Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band album and I have two hats in my closet, bought in the ‘60s that I affectionately call my Sgt. Pepper hats. One hat is white fur and the other is red velvet and the latter one is what I wore when I got my picture taken so I’d have photos to send the servicemen I was penpals with. By the second or third letter I received from a G.I. a picture was usually requested. Also requested was the name of the perfume I sprayed on my envelopes. It was Avon’s Unforgettable and I could probably write an entire essay just quoting the various comments I received about that perfume. One guy said at Mail Call the guys would pass my letters around before he could even open them. Another guy said any girl who "smells like that and has such beautiful handwriting has to be pretty." Several guys said they carried my letters around in their helmets so they could smell the perfume---in one case, when the smell of jungle rot got too much and in another case, the guy wanted to “remember what girls smell like.” One guy said he was charging ten cents for a quick sniff---probably a joke since the guys don't use cash in the military.

Yes, I’ve been staying up way too late reading the letters I’ve decided to send off to the Center for American War Letters. The servicemen’s letters are in good condition, but unfortunately my letters will all have to be redone because they are carbon copies on cheap paper that did not fare well over time. But since the curator of the legacy project said they will welcome the back and forth of pen pals, and since they do accept copies, that’s what they’ll get from my side of the exchanges---if my fingers hold up with all the typing I’ll be doing over winter.

After I read a complete set of letters between me and a particular guy, I look him up on the index of names listed on the Vietnam War Memorial. What a heart-pounding task that’s turning out to be! With one guy out of the thirty I've read so far, I took it a step farther and found him on the internet living about fifty miles away. We had a brother/sister like exchange of eight to ten page letters about every subject on earth including Twiggy. He had a girlfriend back here in the States who was planning their wedding and he had his whole life plotted out. Near the end of our letter exchanges, he was giving me dating advice. (I wasn't give guys a fair chance. Who knew.) Re-reading his letters brought on an urge to send him a note with no return address on the envelope. I’m not sending it until Christmas---IF I do it at all, a full circle kind of thing since our penpalling started at Christmas 1966. I can’t decide if a note could cause trouble for the guy, or not. What do you think? I’ve never been the jealous type so it’s hard for me to predict how a wife would react. If I do it, this is what I'll say:

"If you’re not the ______ _______ who was stationed at Da Dang in 1967 please disregard this note. If you are, you may (or may not) remember a brother/sister type penpal friendship we had back then. Either way, recently I went to a lecture about war letters and it reminded me of our exchange and that I’ve owed you a letter for the past fifty years. That war was a defining era for so many people. I hope the plans you had for your post-military life came to pass. As for me, I found my soulmate a few years later and as they say, we lived “happily ever after.” I hope you find the intended humor and sentimentality in me sending this note all these years later. Sincerely, Jean _______ (the floral designer)"    ©

 

P.S. 8/2025 I decided against trying to connect with any of the guys I'd been pen pals with, this guy included. I look some of them up on the Vietnam War Memorial though to see if they made it home or not.

 

s

My Sgt. Pepper Hat, 1967

Fashions, Hormones and Farmers Markets

I don’t know why it took me until the middle of July before going to the farmers market for the first time this summer. Where else can you pay $7.00 for four Lemon Dream cookies and feel good about it because all the proceeds go to charity or see people with their dogs impatiently waiting for them to pay for homemade beef jerky sticks or watch kettle corn being made next to a vendor selling goats cheese? I bought more cut flowers than healthy eatable’s but that’s okay. I gave up on having a Twiggy-like figure the first time I had the stomach flu and if you understand that statement, you probably came-of-age in the 1960s. Thunder-thighs that I was back in those days (and still am) I both hated and loved Twiggy for the impossible standard of anorexia induced beauty she set. Who didn’t want to look that skinning in a polyester knit A-line dress? Raise your hand. I really want to know.

On the way home from the farmers market the prime country radio station was playing a song by Billy Currington and I was smitten with his ability to tell a sweet, boy-meets-girl story. If I had a pinky’s worth of musical talent I’d try my hand at writing songs but I spent so many years trying to learn how to flesh out my written thoughts that it would be difficult to condense my words down to the just the important ones to carry a story along. But mostly songs like Billy’s Good Directions have me reminiscing about what it felt like to experience sexual attraction like I did back in my husband hunting days when I wore A-line dresses and go-go boots. I can’t even remember the last time that actually happened. Even George Clooney and Matthew McConaughey have lost their power to make my heart skip a beat. Raise your hand if they still have power over your hormones. I really want to know.

“I was sittin' there sellin' turnips on a flatbed truck

Crunchin' on a pork rind when she pulled up

She had to be thinkin' this is where rednecks come from

She had Hollywood written on her license plate

She was lost and lookin' for the interstate

Needin' directions, and I was the man for the job.

“I told her way up yonder past the caution light

There's a little country store with an old Coke sign

You gotta stop in and ask Miss Bell for some of her sweet tea

Then a left will take you to the interstate

But a right will bring you right back here to me.”

It’s not hard to guess that after a few more verses Billy Currington wrote the girl “of his dreams” coming back to the flatbed truck with the last line of the song saying, “Thank God for good directions...and turnip greens.”

Recently I went to a fashion trunk show. Yes, you read that right. Me, the woman who’d gladly live in a bathrobe all day long if society wouldn’t judge that as an indicator of poor mental health or senior depression. But it’s true; I’ve gone from the A-line dresses of my best fashion plate years to a look that says if-my-breasts-and-tushie-are-covered-up-good-enough. I didn’t actually sign up for this trunk show. An acquaintance was offering the ticket to anyone who was available on short notice. I spoke up with no more forethought than I had the afternoon open.

I’d been to a couple of trunk shows in my past but this one was different. It was a like Tupperware party for what they called ‘investment pieces’---blouses, jackets and gauze vests one supposedly can wear for decades. They were all bright, floral and geometric prints that---to me---were so memorable I’d have trouble wearing them two seasons, no matter how many different basic, solid colors you can wear underneath. They also showed a line of ‘investment’ bling. “A woman should never leave the house without her bling” and if you bought into their spiel you’d be stacking bracelets up your arm like cord wood on an Amish farm. They talked about earrings and keeping them in scale but I stopped listening when they brought out the chunky hubcaps "for our bigger gals" that would elongate even a young person’s earlobes under their weight. Flabby, Golda Meir earlobes makes a person look older than gray hair and I fear them more than liver spots and arthritic knuckles. I did have fun at the trunk show, though, resisting the temptation to laugh in all the wrong places. Raise your hand if keeping up with fashion still matters to you. I really want to know.  ©

Day Trips and Secrets from the Past

From first grade throughout high school I was in the Birdbirds, Camp Fire Girls and the Horizon Club which have since been expanded into five, renamed groups that now include boys as well as girls. What hasn’t changed---from what I can tell---is the motto and basic purpose of the Camp Fire franchise which is to give kids opportunities to “light the fire within.” I had no choice but to light my fire back in my youth because my mom was a leader. Heck, even my dad got into the act because he built six benches to go around a ping-pong table that our group used in our basement for many years. One of those benches is still in existence at the family cottage, painted red and used as a long coffee table on a screened-in porch. Can you believe it, I also still have my navy blue felt Camp Fire vest with all my colored beads sewn on, and all earned for completed projects. I wish I still had my Camp Fire Trails manual because I’d like to know exactly what I did to earn what looks like close to 200 beads.

What got me thinking about this topic was a day trip I went on this week through the senior hall. It was a restaurant hop in a tourist town on Lake Michigan. Before the bus dropped us off in the shopping district it took us up along the channel headed toward the beach, past the Pronto Pup shack that has been there since I was a kid, past a hillside collection of yard-less cottages where our Horizon Club stayed a week the last summer we were together, before many of us went off to college. The Pronto Pup shack is such an iconic landmark that when it opens early in the spring, it makes the local news where I live, forty miles away. One of my best memories of that week involves my best friend Nancy, me and a pack of candy cigarettes. We thought we were hot stuff as we walked past the Pronto Pup shack pretending we were smoking real cigarettes. Boys were driving by, honking their horns, prompting us to put a little more swing in our hips. We'd find a place to sit on the channel wall so I could sketch boats moving back and forth to the Big Lake and that’s where I discovered what a guy magnet it is to draw in public. 

As the senior hall bus took us past the house our Horizon Club rented that summer I had a flashback of my mom swinging a broom and another chaperon swinging a mop as they leaned out of an upstairs windows. They were trying to get a couple of guys off the porch roof. Some of the girls had invited them to come over but our chaperons had other ideas about what proper young ladies in 1960 should be doing with our evenings and that was spelled b-o-a-r-d-g-a-m-e-s, not bedroom games. One night that week Nancy and I pretended to get drunk as we drank glass after glass of chocolate milk and I guess we were pretty convincing because some of the girls actually believed we had spiked the bottle. I don’t think my mom was fooled, though. She’d seen the two of us being silly before, without any milk or alcohol involved. 

Now, I’m about to confess something I’ve never told a living (or dead) soul. One night at that cottage I pretended I was having a nightmare behind a locked bedroom door, waking up half the girls in the house. I could hear them talking through the thin walls, heard my mom calling me and finally one of the girls crawled over the wall to unlock the door so my mom could "wake me up." My older brother had a lot of nightmares growing up so I knew just how to act. My folks had taken him to a doctor about his nightmares and were told they were caused by him being too active before bedtime, which probably explains why my mom never questioned why I was having one out of the blue. Nancy, who was in the other bed in the same room, slept through the whole thing. I wonder if she still sleeps like a rock.

Back to 2016: The restaurant hops work like this: The bus drops us off at one end of the main drag of a tourist town and at appointed times we meet up three times, in three different restaurants along that street, broken up with shopping in between courses. We pick out our menu choices when we pay for our RSVPs so we don’t waste time ordering or paying but it’s more than enough time to soak up the ambiance of first class places. I had a Tai crunch salad with peanut sauce dressing in one place, a beer brew hamburger with bacon jam, a fried egg and haystack onions on it at another place and for the dessert round, I had an ice cream brownie sundae. (Michigan has gone micro beer crazy. We can even get ice cream with beer though mine, that day, was caramel infused.) I’m not a big fan of shopping so in between the entree and dessert I sat on a park bench soaking up sunshine, enjoying the clean breeze coming off Lake Michigan and remembering that week spent at the beach fifty-six years ago when I took my carefree and easy life for granted. But carefree and easy would not last forever. The turmoil of the '60s was a building drumbeat that would leave a dark and lasting stain on my life. ©

P.S. That's not my vest in the photo above but it's very much like mine. Mine is buried in a box and I'm too lazy to dig it out to photograph it.

Widows in Songs and Political Unrest

 

Have you ever had a song come on the radio and it annoys the heck out of you every time you hear it? That’s the way I feel about That Summer sung by Garth Brooks. It tells the story of a teenage virgin who takes a summer job working on a widow’s farm. And you know what comes next. She needed to “feel the thunder” and therefore she teaches him all about sex, “her hands of leather, turning to velvet in a touch.” Yadda, yadda, yadda. The summer ends, he goes on his way but years later he can’t go by a wheat field without thinking about “that summer” and all the things the widow lady taught him. Bring on the violins and gag me with a spoon! First of all, if the sexes were reversed and it was a teenage girl being groomed as a sex toy for an older widower, we’d all want to prosecute the widower for a crime in 38 or 40 states. Two: I don’t like the stereotyping of widows as predatory creatures. Don’t we have enough baggage to carry around, given the fact that half the married women probably think we widows are after their man now that we don’t have one of our own? Do we need to have them start worrying about their sons as well?

If people are going to write songs about widows and widowers I much prefer Dave Matthews’ One More Day. It’s a song about a drunk in a bar bemoaning the fact that he’ll never get another day with his beloved Grace. This widower is singing, “You think of things impossible and the sun refuses to shine, I woke with you beside me, your cold hand lay in mine. Excuse me please, one more drink. Could you make it strong cause I don’t need to think.”  Ya, I guess I’m a sucker for a drunk who proclaims he no longer needs his heart and eyes because he can never again be with his lovely Grace. Can you believe it, my life is so mundane at the moment that I’m writing about country western songs?

And that’s not what I want to do. All week long I’ve been trying to find a topic to write about that borders on deep and profound. No such luck, I’m all out of deep thoughts and pretty words. Do you ever get in one of these moods where you think you should be able to dig deeper and find a grain of Universal Truth to expound on? My restless writing mood, I suspect, was initiated by the coming CNN ten part series on the 1960s, “the decade that changed everything” as their promos say. My life, like that of the nations was in such turmoil back then. I want to see the series but I’m not sure I really want to take all my sixties related skeletons out of the closet for closer examination. But on a broader spectrum, it will be good for younger people who didn’t live through the sixties and who think the world is falling apart now, to see it. We’ve lived through tough time before, stressful times and more good came out of the turbulence than bad. It just takes a long-range view to put things in prospective.

Take, for example, the people who point to the outrage over NBA owner Donald Sterling and rancher Clive Bundy’s racial slurs and say that’s a sign that "the liberal's political correctness agenda” has gone too far and, they say, that is threatening free speech. They also say racism is at an all-time high. I say it's just the opposite i.e. more and more people, now, have the freedom to speak up when they are offended by the likes of Sterling and Bundy and that’s evidence that racism in America is on the decline, not on the rise. It's like we've lanced a boil and all the poison is splitting out. When I was younger people would say something racist and no one had the guts to call that person out for those attitudes and that silence bred more of the same and gave permission for people to treat others of color with disrespect. Public scorn does not equate to being punished by the government, so therefore there it is no infringement on free speech. The Sterling's and Bundy's of the world are still free to say what they want BUT we should never forget that everyone else in America is equally free to condemn or agree with them. It hasn’t always been that way in my life time. Thank you, Archie Bunker's son-in-law for showing us the way to stand up to old-school racial slurs. It's been a long road we've all been on since those days.

Well, now I’ve done it. I’ve broken my rule about writing about politics or controversial topics in my blog. Unfortunately---or fortunately depending on your point of view---I’ll probably be tempted to do it a few more times as the CNN series on the sixties unfolds. I am a political junkie in another facet of my being, a facet I rarely show here or to family and friends. ©