“To Be Young Was Very Heaven”-With The 50th Anniversary Of The “Summer Of Love, 1967” In Mind-Frankie Riley's Story
Revised Introduction by Zack James
[I was about a decade or so too young to have been washed, washed clean to hear guys like Peter Paul Markin, more on him below, tell the tale, by the huge counter-cultural explosion that burst upon the land (and by extension and a million youth culture ties internationally before the bubble burst) in the mid to late 1960s and maybe extending a few year into the 1970s depending on whose ebb tide event you adhere to. (Markin’s for very personal reasons having to do with participating in the events on May Day 1971 when the most radical forces tried to stop the Vietnam War by shutting down the government and got kicked in the teeth for their efforts. Doctor Gonzo, the late writer Hunter Thompson who was knee-deep in the experiences called it 1968 around the Democratic Party convention disaster in Chicago. I, reviewing the material published on the subject mostly and on the very fringe of what was what back then would argue for 1969 between Altamont and the Days of Rage everything looked bleak then and after.)
Over the next fifty years that explosion has been inspected, selected, dissected, inflected, infected and detected by every social science academic who had the stamina to hold up under the pressure and even by politicians, mostly to put the curse of “bad example” and “never again” on the outlier experimentation that went on in those days. Plenty has been written about the sea-change in mores among the young attributed to the breakdown of the Cold War red scare freeze, the righteous black civil rights struggles rights early in the decade and the forsaken huge anti-Vietnam War movement later. Part of the mix too and my oldest brother Alex, one of Markin’s fellow corner boys from the old neighborhood is a prime example, was just as reaction like in many generations coming of age, just the tweaking of the older generations inured to change by the Cold War red scare psychosis they bought into. The event being celebrated or at least reflected on in this series under the headline “To Be Very Young-With The Summer of Love 1967 In Mind” now turned fifty was by many accounts a pivotal point in that explosion especially among the kids from out in the hinterlands, like Markin an Alex, away from elite colleges and anything goes urban centers. The kids, who as later analysis would show, were caught up one way or another in the Vietnam War, were scheduled to fight the damn thing, the young men anyway, and were beginning, late beginning, to break hard from the well-established norms from whence they came in reaction to that dread.
This series came about because my already mentioned oldest brother, Alex James, had in the spring of 2017 taken a trip to San Francisco on business and noticed on a passing Muni bus that the famed deYoung Museum located in the heart of Golden Gate Park, a central location for the activities of the Summer of Love as it exploded on the scene in that town, was holding an exhibition about that whole experience. That jarred many a half forgotten memory in Alex’s head. Alex and his “corner boys” back in the day from the old Acre neighborhood in North Adamsville, a suburb of Boston where we all came of age, had gotten their immersion into counter-cultural activities by going to San Francisco in the wake of that summer of 1967 to “see what it was all about.”
When Alex got back from his business trip he gathered the few “corner boys” still standing, Frankie Riley, the acknowledged leader of the corner boys, Jimmy Jenkins, Si Lannon, Jack Callahan, Bart Webber, Ralph Kelly, and Josh Breslin (not an actual North Adamsville corner boy but a corner boy nevertheless from Olde Sacco up in Maine whom the tribe “adopted” as one of their own) at Jimmy’s Grille in North Adamsville, their still favorite drinking hole as they call it, to tell what he had seen in Frisco town and to reminisce. From that first “discussion” they decided to “commission” me as the writer for a small book of reflections by the group to be attached alongside a number of sketches I had done previously based on their experiences in the old neighborhood and in the world related to those times. So I interviewed the crew, wrote or rather compiled the notes used in the sketches below but believe this task was mostly my doing the physical writing and getting the hell out of the way once they got going. This slender book is dedicated to the memory of the guy who got them all on the road west-Peter Paul Markin whom I don’t have to mention more about here for he, his still present “ghost” will be amply discussed below. Zack James]
To the memory of the late Peter Paul Markin on the occasion of the 50th anniversary year of the Summer of Love, San Francisco, 1967
[Although this small tribute book is dedicated to the memory of Peter Paul Markin from the corner boys days of the old Acre neighborhood of North Adamsville and will have contributions from all the surviving member of that tribe there are other corner boys who have passed away, a couple early on in that bloody hell called Vietnam, Ricky Russo and Ralph Morse, RIP brothers, you did good in a bad war, Allan Jackson, Allan Stein, “Bugger” Shea and Markin’s old comrade, Billy Bradley. You guys RIP too.]
By Francis Xavier Riley (Frankie)
Markin was a piece of work. If not one of kind then close to it and I can still say that some sixty years since we first met. Met in seventh grade in junior high school at the old North Adamsville Junior High. I had been recognized as the leader of a bunch of guys who hung around the traditional junior high hangout, Doc’ Drugstore, which had the added attraction of being not only a place where the ill and lame got their cures but had a soda fountain attached to a jukebox. A jukebox that got all kinds of play from the young bud girls that were throwing their dimes and quarters into to hear their latest for the minute heartthrob. So you mostly know why we hung around that spot just as our older brothers did and maybe some of the fathers even before that.
Markin had come over from across town, from the Brook Meadows Junior High a couple of months into the school year so he already had one strike against him since by then all the social and personal relationships which would last through high school and beyond (beyond in our case enough to have been around when Markin came making his clarion call to head west and see what the emerging “youth nation” was all about in the Frisco Summer of Love). Moreover he was even then kind of a nerdy guy, you know, always spouting odd-ball facts and figure like we gave rat’s ass about any of it. (That “rat’s ass” which I haven’t said in years maybe since Markin’s time was the “in” word we used to fluff off anything that was not important to us-important being mostly girls, cars and how to get money to deal with either, or both.)
His idea, once we became friends and he would confide in me some of his feelings, not a lot, that wasn’t our style, the style, then that the reason he became a wizard at certain things was because he had maybe read that knowing such stuff, like who was who in folk music when that stuck his fancy also something that then the rest of us could have given a rat’s ass about, was the way to meet interesting girls. Or then any girls once his hormonal urges got into overdrive. I would tell you more about Markin’s theory and the reality of his junior high and high school love life such as it was except this is about the Summer of Love where his approach was something like pure magic when he and the young women were stoned, you know high as kites on the drug of the day. On the West Coast they flocked around him like acolytes-and he took full advantage of that luck.
Another strike, and maybe the definitive one once Markin said he had thought about it later, was that he had come from the even then notorious Adamsville “projects,” public assistance housing. Between the large family, four siblings along with him and his father’s lack of education that was where the family was thrown helter-skelter in his early years. Years that formed the hard edge as he said of that “from hunger” feeling that drove a lot of the seamier side of his personality. Strangely most of us in the Acre section of North Adamsville were in some cases poorer, or at least as poor, as Markin’s family but that “projects” albatross designation hanging around his neck in the small one family houses or at worst a double-decker apartment in the Acre caused him some isolation before we became friends. (My mother when things were tough in our family or when one of us went off the rails would spring the “wind up in the projects” on us to try to make us behave which worked when we were younger but was like water off a duck’s back later.) Funny thought when I thought about it later myself we all had that “from hunger” edge, and acted on it. Some of us grew out of it, some didn’t. Markin never had a fighting chance to test that out either way.
So Markin and I met in seventh grade and after a few disputes we became friends and would stay that way for as long as he was in contact with any of us, when he was alive although Josh Breslin who will tell his own story about Markin not I was the last to see him before the fateful drug trip down to Mexico. I could tell lots of things about Markin but what is important for this piece is that he and his odd-ball facts and figures drove him to the conclusion starting I think in tenth grade that there was a “new breeze coming through the land” or that was his idea that he would periodically pound into us on a stray Friday or Saturday hanging out night when other prospects had petered out. Again the rest of us could have given a rat’s ass about it until much later, later when it was obvious even to the socially dumbest of us that indeed a new breeze was in the air. How Markin, a guy from nowhere in the social firmament, from a hick town to boot knew what he sensed is beyond me all I know is until 1967 every time he would begin his rant I would close my ears, close them tight.
I was shocked, we all were shocked, when Markin told us one day in the spring of 1967 that he was dropping out of school, out of Boston University, where he had a scholarship and maybe some financial aid. All I know is that his family not matter what the tuition had no money, none, to send him, the first in his family to go to college, there. Even in my own case where I went to a branch of State U later my parents were hard-pressed to find some spare dough to send me and I had to work as well all through school. The idea he presented to us was that from what he had heard about what was happening out West that the time of the new breeze had come and he was going to what he called “find” himself.(Of course as Alex James has already mentioned in his introductory piece that fateful decision which sounded good in the short haul especially when we imbibed some weed a habit which Markin had begun to indulge in at college along with about half our generation and introduced us to wound up in the long haul not so good. I won’t repeat here what Alex has said but Markin eventually wound up getting drafted since he had lost his student deferment, getting his ass into Vietnam, and afterward, after coming back to the “real” world he called it, the trip down the slippery slope. The ultimate “from hunger” move that haunted his whole blessed life.)
Markin would sent back reports about what was happening out West when he finally got out there after hitchhiking out on his first trip. (That first hitchhike road inspired by his inflamed reading of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road in high school and trying. Again just then we could have given a rat’s ass about that.) He wound up in Golden Gate Park where a couple of stray California girls befriended him once they heard his accent and thought it was “cute,” or something like that. That and about ten thousand facts about music and literature, On The Road, finally getting him some positive play when they found out that he had hitchhiked out across the country to find out what was what out West, found out if that new breeze was really here.
The thing about the spring of 1967 is that like lemmings to the sea lots of young people were heading west (according to Alex’s report on the deYoung Museum exhibit something like 100, 000) and the town was taxed to the limit with so many stray kids, some runaways from Podunk towns like ours, some like Markin looking to “find” themselves so it was fortunate that Markin had run into Aphrodite and Venus (not their real names but I don’t remember them, their real names, and besides what was important at that time was coming up with a moniker to “reinvent” yourself with. Markin was the Be-Bop Kid paying homage to his semi-beat roots and I was Cowboy playing to my childhood love of watching Westerns on television Saturday mornings and later at the Strand Theater Saturday matinees. Others can give their monikers in their pieces if they wish.). They had actually come up from Laguna Beach a couple of months before on Captain Crunch’s converted yellow brick road school bus (Markin’s expression for the vehicle) and that was where after a couple of days of sleeping out in the air on his improvised bedroll in the Park he wound up.
This Captain Crunch was his own piece of work. He was an older guy, older then being maybe thirty or a little younger, who had been travelling up and down the Pacific Coast Highway in his own version of what the author Ken Kesey had started with his own school bus Further On complete with Merry Pranksters who set the tone for the whole West Coast experience of “drug, sex and rock and roll.” Kesey had been the guy who did all the “acid test” stuff that the writer Tom Wolfe would write about later and drive even more kids west (or if not West then to do what was happening there in towns like New York City, Boston, Ann Arbor, Chicago, Madison and any place where there were enough young people to hold the experience together. The Captain knew Kesey and as Alex mentioned we had been to his place in La Honda when we went out and joined Markin on the bus. Reportedly, and in all the time we were on the bus we could never pin the story down fully anyway, the Captain had traded a bag of serious dope for the bus. All I know is that we never lacked for drugs all through the experiences as the Captain always had a ready supply from weed to speed to acid.
When Aphrodite and Venus introduced Markin to the Captain a couple of days later once they thought he was “cool” the pair immediately took to each other. Had some kind of wavelength thing that I could never quite figure since the Captain had gone to an elite Ivy League school, Columbia if I recall, and had a certain aristocratic sensibility about him. Maybe it was Markin’s ten billion facts, or his enthusiasm, or maybe they were connected because each in their own way were what Alex called small letter prophets the Captain too having sensed early that a new day was coming and had grabbed the bus and all and started to live out the dream. Before Markin would come back to make his pitch in the late summer he had gone with the bus twice down toward Los Angeles and back again. As Markin was at pains to tell us in his pitch every day was another days of drug, sex and rock and roll if you wanted it. (Aphrodite and Venus before they left the bus just before Markin headed East were successively his first two girlfriends out West. They were totally unlike the tight Eastern Irish Catholic girls we grew up with or even like the girls who would hover around Markin at Boston University. They were converted “surfer girls” and had nothing but easy ways and good time delights on their minds. They would Markin thought not make the long road in the search for utopia that was what we were really looking for if you had to give an academic explanation for it but were a very pleasant diversion along the road.)
When Markin hitchhiked back from Frisco he was taking no prisoners, not taking no for an answer among the corner boys who were still around (a couple of guys were in the service, in Vietnam where Ricky Russo and Ralph Morse would lay down their heads and be forever etched in black granite down in Washington and at the town square memorial in Adamsville, North Adamsville is for governmental purposes if not for social purposes part of Adamsville proper, and a couple of others had left town for jobs or some other reason but the bulk of us were still attached to the town, a few still are). The breeze was here and whether we liked it or not we were going to check it out. This by the way was very unusual for Markin to assert himself so forcefully since he usually was the guy who proposed stuff to me and I would take it from there in the hierarchy which ruled at the time which was headed by me. Frankly, and this may tell something about why Markin fell down in Mexico trying to deal with organizing something. He was a great idea man for fresh breeze stuff and the stuff that we did give a rat’s ass about which was grabbing dough fast and easy. That is the part of Markin I always appreciated. He always had an idea, maybe ten at a time, on how to get dough fast and easy. He would conger up some scheme and I would lead the operation. The one time he actually did try to lead one of his schemes he almost got us all arrested since he forgot the cardinal rule to have a lookout when you were going through a house not your own.
As Alex mentioned once Markin got us fired up he and Markin took off for California via the hitchhike trail since Alex had no job to ditch which I had to do before I could head out. I keep thinking today how crazy we were to even attempt to hitchhike across town never mine across the country with all the crazies out there but we did it collectively a couple of dozen times without a problem. There was a point maybe sometime around the exposure of the Charles Manson madness in Southern California when hitching became dangerous and passé but by then we were all off the road one way or another.
In any case my first trip out along with Jack Callahan, the great football player from our high school days who despite that acclaim was nothing but a hardcore corner boy and good to have around since he was as tough as nails (except with his high school sweetheart Chrissie McNamara whom he is still married to all these years later unlike me with three marriages and three divorces under my belt) was via the Greyhound bus. Part of that was to placate my mother who would have run me down all the way to China if I had told her I was hitchhiking. Nevertheless that bus ride was the only time I, we, used that horrible form of cross-country travel. Travel with screaming kids, overweight people sitting next to you or snoring and just the nerve-racking experience of being cooped up in a bus without proper hygiene for five or six days straight. No matter what they say about the health conditions, sanitary conditions, in Haight-Ashbury it was no worse than the damn bus. Certainly when we got onto the Captain’s bus that was clearly healthier if more primitive since the Captain and his lady Mustang Sally made that a condition was travelling with them. Over the couple of years I was on that bus several people were summarily excluded for poor hygiene or not pulling their weight keeping the quarters clean.
I will say that Markin who as you might have suspected of a minor prophet was filled with hyperbole about lots of stuff but he had the skinny on the wild and wonderful scene out in Frisco town (and later on the trips up and down the coast). Now when we were growing up, when we were hanging around the corners of North Adamsville, even the idea of drugs other than the traditional alcohol haze that half the Acre drifted around in was anathema. That stuff was for junkies, guys like Frankie Machine in the film adaptation of Nelson Algren’s The Man With The Golden Arm but the stuff Markin had us try Columbia Red, good weed, got us all changed around. Needless to say except for LSD, acid, none of us turned down whatever drug was cooked up. That combined with the wild girls, wild girls in comparison the rough bible between their knees Irish Catholic girls who drove us crazy and gave us nothing whatever we might say on the corner about how we scored like crazy with some Suzy.
But it was not just the drugs, the wanton women, the music, or even all of them put together but that new spirit of adventure that took us, us corner boys from North Adamsville out of our ruts and gave us a sense of community which we never had beyond our corner boys’ bondings. On the 50th anniversary hell I still miss it, still wouldn’t mind travelling that road again. Yes, Markin, the Scribe, as I dubbed him half in fun when we first met can take a bow even all these years later for that. And yes I still miss the crazy bastard as much as ever.
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