The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night- The Tattered, Battered Generation of '68-With The Rolling Stones’ Gimme Shelter Redux In Mind

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night- The Tattered, Battered Generation of '68-With The Rolling Stones’ Gimme Shelter Redux In Mind 

Introduction By Allan Jackson

[Not everything that came out of the 1960s was pure gold not by a long shot. Nor did everybody was got washed, clean or otherwise, get religion on the new world a-borning. Couldn’t go the distance and as we can see now as the baby-boomer population settles into twilight we can see that we are very far from having changed enough of the world for enough people to be the least bit complacent about the matter. A lot of it got ground down in person stuff, in not being able to stand alone a bit-to seek shelter from the storm-the clarion call from the Rolling Stones once the forces that were unleashed by the 1960s began to get frayed around the edges and the massive counter-attack on the cultural and about a million other fronts sent us reeling. It is a long, long way although maybe a very short time from Street Fighting Man to Gimme Shelter. Leave it to the Stones to bookend the damn thing for us. Allan Jackson]

********* 

James Jordan usually a stable, steady guy who rolled with the punches, maybe rolled with then too much, was in a fix. James wasn’t sure what to make of the feelings long suppressed about his youth, about the place where he grew up, about his turbulent high school days in the early 1960s, about his problems with girls, about his problems with his mother, about his problems with “Uncle” all of which in the end drove him into what amounted to permanent exile, exile on Main Street he liked to say cribbing from a Stones’ album title. Those mumbo-jumbo broth of feelings that had suddenly simmered and then exploded into a great desire to work through after almost thirty years of statutory neglect what had happened back then.

A couple of years before James started simmering (his term) he had been searching for a couple of old neighbors from the old working class neighborhood where he grew up, Jack Jenkins and Johnny Silver, a couple of guys who he had hung around with, a couple of what they called then, maybe still do, corner boys, corner boys around Be-Bop Benny’s Diner over on Main Street in his growing up town of Clintondale  where the caught hell, caught mischief, and occasionally a stray girl not afraid of corner boys or looking down her nose at them. Both these guys had done their time in ‘Nam when they place was the hellhole for their generation, for him too, although he dodged the draft, did almost two years in Allentown down in Pennsylvania for his troubles when “Uncle” called him on the matter and that was that. That act alone caused big riffs between the three. and not just the three but a couple of other of the corner boys who were not called up, Rats McGee and Clipper Harris, and especially the acknowledged corner boy leader, the late Red Riley who had some bronze star and other ribbons to show for his valor. (Red later got caught up in some bad stuff, drugs James had heard which kind of figured, and was cut down in some unexplained shoot-out with the cops at a White Hen store down in some hick town in South Carolina where he allegedly was in the process of committing armed robbery on the place.)

The last James had heard, this about twenty years before, Jack and Johnny were looking for him to tell him that they finally figured out what he was trying to do by resisting the draft, just trying to keep himself in one piece like they were but just in a different way. But in that twenty years back time James had been in a deep freeze about anything that smacked of the old town, of the old places, of the old days. He had even denied to both his first and second wives, both since divorced, that he was from Clintondale claiming that he had been born in more upscale Hullsville near the water. They had both been both big on “upscale” having come from some new money and thus he did himself no harm by mentioning Hullsville, until they found out otherwise when his first wife, Anna, found out he was fooling around with the woman who would be his second wife, Joyce, when she started looking to find out who he really was. Joyce thereafter did the same thing when he took up with his present companion (no more marriages), Laura. So he was in deep denial, or something like that.         

Maybe if James had tried to locate Jack and Johnny back those twenty years he would have needed the services of some private detective agency, or something like that but the new technology, the new ways of gathering information in the age of the Internet had saved him much time and money. In the process he had, unintentionally, found some other people from his high school class who helped him in his search. (He had done a straightforward Google search for the Clintondale Class of 1962 and had come up first with a commercial high school site which led him to a site which had been established by a committee formed for the 50^th anniversary reunion of that class).

To show how much he had mellowed since those trying youthful days, or maybe showing the extent of his simmering (remember his term) in the process of looking for his former brethren he had gotten caught up in what he, innocently, thought was a simple effort to help out one particular classmate on the committee, a former class officer, Melinda Loring. He agreed to answer some questions for a project that the class, the Class of 1962, was doing in preparation for the next year’s 50^th class reunion. Apparently, from Melinda’s frenzied requests every time he answered one question thinking that was the end of it, this was to be an endless series of questions that seemed to him to start to make the run of the mill entries in that space by others in the class about kids, grandkids, vacations, travel and such who had seen fit to comment but who were not under Melinda’s sway seem like child’s play by comparison.

James finally having figured out Melinda’s mad plan told her (and obviously everybody else on the class website once she placed all his previous answers on-line for all the candid world to see) that he was placing the answer to the question below that she had asked him to write about on the site on his own unmediated by her, as he thought it might be of interest to those who, long of tooth now, had come from that time in question. Here is what one James Jordan formerly in permanent exile from his past on Main Street had to say to the following question:   

Question: Do you consider yourself a member of the Generation of ‘68?

"In that time, twas bliss to be alive, to be young was very heaven"- a line from a poem by William Wordsworth in praise of the early stages of the French Revolution.

“I mentioned in the Tell My Story section of my profile page that while we were all members of the Class of 1962 some of us were also members of the Generation of ’68. I guess to those of us who considered themselves part of that experience no further explanation is necessary. However, if you are in doubt then let me give my take on what such membership would have entailed.

This question had actually prompted by an observation made by my old friend, and our classmate, the legendary track and cross-country runner Bill Collier. Part of my motivation for joining in this work on this site (answering the ten thousand Melinda questions) was to find him (and Jack Jenkins and Johnny Silver my old estranged corner boys who I am still looking for, Melinda is helping and maybe you can too). I have found him and we have started to keep in touch again via the amazing technology that has produced this class site for the computer-able. At one of the bull sessions that we have had I asked him whether he had gone to any class reunions. I had not done so and therefore I was interested in his take on the subject.

Bill said that the only one that he had gone to was the 5^th anniversary reunion in 1969. Of course that year is the high water mark for the Generation of ’68. A key observation that Bill related, as least for my purpose here, was that when he went to that reunion and people came up to him to introduce themselves he had trouble identifying people, especially the guys, because of all the beards and long hair that were supreme tribal symbols at the time. So that is one, perhaps superficial, criterion for membership (for guys anyway).

Frankly, dear classmates, among the reasons that I turned my back on the old hometown right after high school was that it seemed like a ‘square’ (remember that tribal term from our youth meaning not hip) working class town that did not fit in with my evolving political and cultural, or rather counter-cultural, interests. Thus, Bill’s comments rather startled me. My assumption would have been that the ‘squares’ would have gotten a job after high school (or gone to college and then gotten a job), gotten married, had kids, bought a house and followed that trail, wherever it led. This new knowledge may tell me something different.

Is it possible that there were many other kindred spirits from our class who broke from that pattern, as least for a while? Who not only grew their hair long (male or female) or grew beards (male) but maybe dressed in the symbolic Army/ Navy store fashions of the day (male or female) or burned their bras (female)? Or did some dope (Yes, I know we are all taking the Bill Clinton defense on this one. Now) and made all the rock concerts? Or hitchhiked across the country? Or opposed the damn Vietnam War and got tear gassed for their efforts, supported the black liberation struggle and got tear gassed for their efforts, supported an end to the draft, ROTC on campus, etc. and got......well, you know the rest of the line. Or lived in a commune or any number of other things of like kind that were the signposts of the generation of ’68? In short, tried to 'storm heaven'. We lost that fight but these days I sense the storm clouds are gathering again for a new generation that has been beaten down by the hardships of living in this society without succor. Your stories, please (and that includes those ‘squares’ who do not now seem quite that way anymore).

James never did find out what happened to Jack and Johnny despite the best efforts of his and his classmates, especially Melinda who sensed how important it was to him (although she had told James that back in the day she would not go to Be-Bop Benny’s Diner because she was afraid and looked down her nose at corner boys). Seems the trail got cold when either one of them, or both, they were definitely travelling together, had serious problems adjusting to the real world after ‘Nam although the symptoms didn’t get bad until about a decade later around the time that James had heard they were looking for him. They, or one of them since the files were guarded by privacy laws, had been suffering, suffering badly from what a Veterans Administration counsellor at the hospital in Boston (the Jamaica Plain one not the one in West Roxbury) called Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and had taken off to the west, maybe California where a lot of guys with troubles tried to get a fresh start but the trail got cold, went dead, on Laramie Street in Denver. James told the whole class on the site when things seemed hopeless about finding their whereabouts that he hoped Jack and Johnny  had found what they were looking for, looking for like the rest of that tattered, battered generation of’68 who tried to turn the world upside down and got knocked down for their troubles.          

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-The “Last Waltz”- With The Five Satins In The Still Of The Night In Mind

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-The “Last Waltz”- With The Five Satins In The Still Of The Night In Mind 

By Allan Jackson

[In a recent introduction talking about old growing up poor in the 1960s and the institutions, customs and mores that drove a lot of what in the Acre section of North Adamsville, and not just there as I found out later through the magic of television that united “youth nation” many, many others well beyond any on the ground organizing scheme I mentioned the critical role of the drive-in restaurant with those winsome car hops in any romantic endeavors. But thinking about it later and re-reading this piece that scene really belongs after you have what we called “scored,” made contact with some young woman and went from there (that “went from there” a whole separate issue which deserves its own space but for now was filled with so much deception, bragging and pure baloney and lies that the purveyors of each and every one of those conditions may burn in the hell fires if such are available). Yes, well before any “nightcap” at the Adventure Car-Hop Drive-In there was the inevitable attempt to ‘score” which at school or church dances usually had something to do with the “last dance.”        

That last dance no mean thing because two things were necessary one of which was some serious eying of your target earlier in the evening and maybe a few dances and the other which was the ability to dance. Dance close without stepping on toes, having sweaty hands and the lot which put you in the losers’ circle which made hell fire seem tame by comparison. One of the great virtues of serious classical rock and roll music was that you and whoever was opposite you need not touch hands, or feet but you your own way. But come last dance time you either has it or not.  

All of this to confess some fifty years later that I couldn’t dance worth a damn. Horrible, two left feet (or two right but the idea is the same) which left many a young damsel somewhere short of the midnight emergency room. The only one worse than me was the late Peter Paul Markin who really was a tangle anytime he was required to dance close. But see Markin had an aura or something, maybe it was those two thousand facts he would run at any girl who would listen and they thought he was an intellectual, which he was, a street intellectual of the highest order. Get this girls, tangled up in blue or not, would come up to him and ask him for the last dance. I never got too steamed up at Scribe which is what we always called him when he would go on and on about stuff, defended him physically a couple of times when fellow corner boys were ready to wring his neck to get him to shut up so you can see what a conversationalist he was but I would ride him mercilessly on this subject. Until he started sending his “rejects” my way. Enough said. Allan Jackson]       

******* 

Sam Lowell had several years before, maybe in about the middle of 2010, done an extensive survey of a commercially-produced Oldies But Goodies series (this series had fifteen separate CDs, more about its mass in a minute), in twenty to thirty song compilations and had torn his ear off from the endless listening. He had begged for a little gangsta hip-hop to soothe his ravaged soul although he was strictly a white-bread blues guy around that kind of music, around black-burst out “roots is the toots” music) and he had selected one song in each CD to highlight the music. He sought to highlight in particular the music that he and his corner boys had grown up with, Frankie Riley the acknowledged leader, Pete Markin (also known as the “Scribe” for his endless “publicity” for the group, especially the fountain of wisdom put forth by one Frankie Riley, who later when the drug craze hit full blossom in the late 1960s went over the edge down in Mexico trying to rip off a couple of bricks of cocaine from the hard boys and Pete got two slugs and a face down in a dusty Sonora back alley for his efforts), Jimmy Jenkins, James “Rats” McGee, Johnny Callahan, and other guys like Luke the Juke, Stubby Kincaid, and Hawk Healey who walked in and out of the group at various high school points. Better, had come of age with the music in Adamsville, that is in Massachusetts. Sam had been born in Clintondale a few towns over before moving to Adamsville, a similar town, in junior high school and there had been taken under Frankie Riley’s corner boy wing but had decidedly not been a corner boy in that former town for the simple reason that there were, unlike in Adamsville at Doc’s Drugstore and later Benny’s bowling alleys, no stand-out corner to be a corner boy in, for good or evil.

Yeah, the music of the great jail-break rock and roll 1950s and early 1960s when Sam and the guys came of age had driven his memory bank at that time, some of that material had been placed in a blog, Rock and Roll Will Never Die, dedicated to classic rock and roll music (the classic period now being deemed to have been between about the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s although Sam flinched every time he heard some young guy, some guy who might be an aficionado but was nevertheless not splashed by that tide, called his time the “classic age,” yeah, that rubbed him raw).

Sam had received some comments on the blog at the time, mostly from his generational brethren inquiring about this or that song, asking about where they could get a copy of the song they were seeking and he would inform them of the monstrous beauties of YouTube, especially Elvis and Jerry Lee stuff, if you could stand the damn commercials that notoriously plague that site to get to your selection.  Asked about whether he knew where a 45 RPM vinyl copy could be had, had at any price, a tougher task and asked about the fate that had befallen various one hit johnnies and janies whose single song had been played unto death at the local hang-out jukebox or on the family record player thus driving some besotted mother to the edge. Many though, with almost the same “religious” intensity that Sam brought to his efforts, wanted to vividly describe how this or that song had impacted their lives. Sam had presumed then, presumed a passing fancy on their parts, but a few apparently had been in a time warp and should have sought some medical attention (although Sam was too much the gentleman to openly make that suggestion).

A lot of times though it came down purely to letting  Sam know what song did they first dance to, a surprising number listing Bill Haley’s Rock Around The Clock  and Danny and the Juniors At The Hop as the choice, surprising since that would have meant a very early introduction not only to rock and roll but to the social etiquettes of dancing with the opposite sex, to speak nothing of the sweaty palms, broken nerves and two left feet which blocked the way, a task which Sam had not done until he was a freshman in high school. Or some would describe what song in what situation had they gotten, or given, their first kiss and to whom, not surprisingly in the golden age of the automobile generation that frequently took place in the back seat of some borrowed car (a few over-the-edgers had gone into more graphic detail than necessary for adults to go into about what happened after that kiss in that backseat). Yeah, got in the back seat of some Chevy to go down to the local lovers’ lane (some very unusual places, the lovers’ lanes not the backseats which were one size fits all). Or what song had been their first fight and make-up to one, stuff like that.

As the shelf-life these days for all things Internet is short Sam thought no more about that series, the article or the comments until recently when a young guy (he had presumed a young guy since most devotees of old time classic rock fall into that demographic, although his moniker of Doo-Wop Dee could have signaled a young woman) who had Googled the words “rock and roll will never die” and had come upon the blog and the article. He sent an e-mail in which he challenged Sam to tell a candid world (Sam’s expression not Doo-Wop Dee’s who probably would not have known the genesis of that word) why the age of the Stones, Beatles, Animals, Yardbirds, etc., the 1960s age of the big bad guitars, heavy metal, and big backbeat did not do more for classic rock than Elvis (Presley), Chuck (Berry), Roy (Orbison), Bo (Diddley), Buddy (Holly), Jerry Lee (Lewis) and the like did all put together.

Well Sam is a mild-mannered guy usually, has mellowed out some since his rock and roll corner boy slam bang jail-break days, his later “on the road” searching for the great blue-pink great American West night hippie days and his even later fighting against his demon addictions days (drugs, con artist larceny, cigarettes, whiskey, hell, even sex, no forget that, drop that from the addiction list) and he had decided, not without an inner murmur, to let the comment pass, to move on to new things, to start work on an appreciation of electric blues, you know Chicago, Detroit, Memphis urban blues, in his young life. Then one night late one night he and his lady friend, Melinda (and the big reason to forget about that sex addiction stuff above), were watching an old re-run on AMC (the old-time movies channel, featuring mostly black and white films also a relic from his youth and his high school time at the retro-Strand Theater that existed solely to present two such beauties every Saturday afternoon, with or without popcorn) and saw as the film started one ghost from the past Jerry Lee Lewis sitting (hell maybe he had been standing, twirling whirling whatever other energy thing he could do back then to add to the fury of his act) on the back of a flat-bed truck, piano at the ready, doing the title song of the movie, High School Confidential, and then and there Sam had decided that he needed to put old Doo-Wop right. The rest of the movie, by the way, a classic 1950s cautionary tale about the pitfalls of dope, you know marijuana automatically leading to heroin, complete with some poor hooked girl strung out by her fiendish dealer/lover, and of leading an unchaste life, you know that sex addiction stuff that Sam had not been addicted to along his life’s way, as a result was actually eminently forgettable but thanks Jerry Lee for the two minute bailout blast. Here is what Sam had to say to his errant young friend and a candid world:       

“First off the term “last waltz” used in the headline is used here as a simple expression of the truth. But that expression will also give Doo Wop and anybody else who asks an idea of the huge amount of material from the classic rock period, like I said in my blog sketch from the mid-50s to the mid-60s, which was good enough, had rung our running home after school to check out the latest dance moves and the cute guys and girls American Bandstand hearts enough, to make the cut. (And that really was true, out of over four hundred songs at least one hundred, a very high percentage, could have had a shot at the one hundred best popular songs of all times lists). When I had started that Oldies But Goodies series a few years ago in a fit of nostalgia related to reconnecting with guys like Frankie Riley, Johnny Callahan and Frank Jackman from the old hometown I had assumed that I had completed the series at Volume Ten.  I then found out that this was a fifteen, fifteen count ‘em, volume series. I flipped out.

Thereafter I whipped off those last five CDs in one day, including individual reviews of each CD and a summing up for another blog, and was done with it. Working frantically all the while under this basic idea; how much can we rekindle, endlessly rekindle, memories from a relatively short, if important, part of our lives, even for those who lived and died by the songs (or some of the songs) in those compilations. How many times could one read about wallflowers, sighs, certain shes (or hes), the moonlight of high school dances (if there was any) and hanging around to the bitter end for that last dance of the night to prove... what. Bastante! Enough! Until Doo-Wop decided that my coming of age era paled, paled if you can believe this, in comparison to Johnny-come-lately rockers like Mick and Keith, John and Paul, Jerry, Neil, Roger and the like.

No, a thousand times no, as right this minute I am watching a YouTube film clip of early Elvis performing Good Rockin’ Tonight at what looks like some state fairgrounds down south and the girls are going crazy tearing their hair out and crying like crazy because the new breeze they had been waiting for in the death-dry red scare Cold War 1950s night just came through and not soon enough. If Doo-Wop had paid attention to anything that someone like Mick Jagger said about all that work being an overwhelming influence, the foundation for their efforts it might have held his tongue, or been a bit more circumspect. Guys like Mick, and they were mainly guys just like their 1950s forebears, knew that much. Yeah, it was mainly guys since I admit the only serious female rocker that I recall was Wanda Jackson whereas Doo-Wop’s time frame had Bonnie Raitt, Linda Ronstadt, Grace Slick, Janis Joplin, just to name a few. If he had argued on the basis of female rockers I would have no argument that the 1960s was a golden age for female rockers but his specified only the generic term ‘rockers.’ “

Like I said part of what got me going on the re-tread trail had been that nostalgia thing with my old corner boys and all our nights dropping dimes and quarters in Doc’s or Benny’s jukeboxes, listening on our transistor radios until our ears turned to cauliflower, and swaying at too many last change dance to mention but I also had been doing a series of commentaries elsewhere at the time on another site on my coming of political age in the early 1960s. You know the age of our own Jack Kennedy, the age of the short-lived Camelot when our dreams seemingly were actually within our grasp, and of the time we began realizing the need for serious struggles against all kinds of wars, and all kinds of discriminations, including getting a fair shake for the working people, those who labor, the people who populated our old time neighborhoods, our parents for chrissakes, in this benighted world. But here when I am writing about musical influences I am just speaking of my coming of age, period, which was not necessarily the same thing as the former.

No question that those of us who came of age in the 1950s were truly children of rock and roll. We were there, whether we appreciated it or not at the time, when the first, sputtering, musical moves away from ballady Broadway show tunes from Oklahoma, South Pacific and the like and rhymey Tin Pan Alley pieces hit the transistor radio airwaves. (If you do not know what a transistor radio is then ask your parents or, ouch, grandparents, please. Or look it up on Wikipedia if you are too embarrassed to not know ancient history things. Join the bus.) And, most importantly, we were there when the music moved away from any and all staid arm in arm music that one’s parents might have approved of, or maybe, even liked, hopefully, at least left you alone to play in peace up in your room when rock and roll hit post- World War II America teenagers like, well, like an atomic bomb.

Not all of the material put forth was good, nor was all of it destined to be playable fifty or sixty years later on some “greatest hits” compilation but some of songs had enough chordal energy, lyrical sense, and sheer danceability to make any Jack or Jill jump then, or now. Think Elvis almost any place where there were more than five girls, hell more than one girl, or Jerry Lee and that silly film high school cautionary film that got this whole comment started where he stole the show at the beginning from that flatbed throne or Bill Haley just singing Rock Around The Clock in front of the film Blackboard Jungle. Here is the good part, especially for painfully shy guys like me, or those who, like me as well, had two left feet on the dance floor. You didn’t need to dance toe to toe, close to close, with that certain she (or he for shes). Just be alive…uh, hip to the music. Otherwise you might become the dreaded wallflower. But that wallflower fear, the fear of fears that haunted many a teenage dream then, that left many a sad sack teenage boy, girls can speak for themselves, waking up in the middle of the night with cold sweats worrying about sweaty hands, underarms, coarse breathe, stubble, those damn feet (and her dainty ones mauled), and bravery, bravery to ask that she (or he for shes) for a dance, especially the last dance that you waited all night to have that chance to ask her about, is a story for another day. Let’s just leave it at this for now. Ah, to be very, very young then was very heaven.

So what still sounded good to a current AARPer, and perhaps some of his fellows who comprise the demographic that such 1950s compilation “speak” to (and some early 60s songs as well). Carl Perkins original Blue Suede Shoes (covered by, made famous by, and made millions for, Elvis). Or the Hank William’s outlaw country classic I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry. Naturally, in a period of classic rock numbers, Buddy Holly’s Peggy Sue (or, like Chuck Berry and Fat Domino from this period, virtually any other of about twenty of his songs).

But what about the now seeming mandatory to ask question the inevitable end of the night high school dance (or maybe even middle school) song that seemed to be included in each of those CD compilations? The song that you, maybe, waited around all night for just to prove that you were not a wallflower, and more importantly, had the moxie to, mumbly-voiced, parched-throated, sweaty-handed, ask a girl to dance (women can relate their own experiences, probably similar). Here Elvis’ One Night With You fills the bill. Hey, I did like this one, especially the soulful, snappy timing and voice intonation. And, yes, I know, this is one of the slow ones that you had to dance close on. And just hope, hope to high heaven, that you didn’t destroy your partner’s shoes and feet. Well, one learns a few social skills in this world if for no other reason than to “impress” that certain she (or he for shes, or nowadays, just mix and match your preferences) mentioned above. I did, didn’t you? Touche Doo-Wop!

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-The Be-Bop The Adventure Car Hop –With Johnny Ace’s Classic Pledging My Love In Mind.

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-The  Be-Bop The Adventure Car Hop –With Johnny Ace’s Classic Pledging My Love In Mind.

By Allan Jackson

[One on the sub-texts, nice word right, of this series was to remember certain institutions, certain customs, certain mores, especially in growing up poor towns like the one I and some of the writers in this space grew up with not as nostalgia pieces although that was part of the mix but to see how all of that fit into day to day life among the  corner boys. And to see how much the dead weight of those institutions, customs, mores acted as a drag when we decided to say the hell with all that. Sort of like telling kids today that not long ago  we would use a bulky typewriter to communicate writing and not this beautiful word processor which makes life so much easier these days.     

Not all those institutions, customs, mores, were world historic or anything like that. Some stuff like the car hop at the outdoor drive-in restaurant make famous by the movie American Graffiti later, the Saturday afternoon double feature matinee, the drive-in theater scam, the juke-box jive scam and the like were just ways for poor boys to get by. Take the car hop thing, the job, the way a lot of young women, some in high school or college so slumming but others who were on a career path (as long as it lasted) as well who gave guys, high testosterone guys, heart attacks every time they passed by. That job except maybe out in Omaha, or Grand Island where they have not gotten the word yet is gone and so a certain version of the male fantasy. Gone too it seems talking to young people, young guys especially is the dream car, dream of car mostly in our crowd which was your cache into that world. Those not in that world, the walker, didn’t mean jack in those days. Allan Jackson]      

No question if you were alive in the 1950s in America, and maybe in other countries too for all I know but I think that this is truly an American phenomenon, alive meaning of course if you were young, say between twelve and twenty- five no older because then you hovered too close to being parents and hence, well hence, square in the golden age of the automobile met the golden age of al fresco dining, okay, okay low-end pre-Big Mac dining. Sorry, I got carried away. Golden Age eating outdoors, well, not really outdoors but in your Golden Age automobile at the local drive-in restaurant (not drive through like today but that may have been true too).

See the idea was that a young guy, maybe a guy who was a wiz at fixing up cars and who had retro-fitted, dual carb-fitted, low-slung wheels-fitted, amp-fitted, radio jacked-up some broken down wreak that some dealer had taken as a trade-in and was ready to ship to the junkyard and made it a “boss” car, like a ‘57 Chevy or Dodge or some nerdy young guy who had two left hands and had borrowed his father’s blah-blah family car for the night would bring his date to the drive-in restaurant and did not give a damn about the cuisine or the ambience against sitting in that car all private and all to munch on burgers and fries. And be seen in that “boss” car or in the case of the father-borrowed car just to be seen with his date. Be seen by the million and one young guys, maybe guys who were also wizzes at fixing up cars and who had also retro-fitted, dual carb-fitted, low-slung wheels-fitted, amp-fitted radio jacked-up some broken down wreak and made it a “boss” car, like a ‘57 Chevy or ‘56 Dodge or some nerdy young guys who had two left hands and had borrowed their father’s blah-blah family car for the night would bring their dates to the drive-in restaurant and did not give a damn about the cuisine or the ambience against sitting in those cars all private and all to munch on burgers and fries. Also to be seen and to be placed in the high school pecking order accordingly. Or if not in high school (but also not over twenty-five remember) to be paid homage for surviving that chore, and for knowing the ropes, knowing the signposts in the drive-in restaurant night.     

My old friend Jack Lowell had succinctly put the idea of golden age automobile and golden age dining out together one night, really early one morning, when he, we,  were feeling a little melancholy for the old days, and when he had had too much whiskey. All that needed to be added to the golden mix was to say that Eddie, Eddie Connell, would have been out, out once again some night, some weekend night more than likely with his ever-lovin’ Ginny, Virginia Stone, in the Clintondale 1950s be-bop night, having a little something to eat at the Adventure Car Hop, that burgers and fries eternal youth night out dining combo (did I mention a Coke or Pepsi, if I did not then those were the standard drinks to wash those hard-hearted burgers and those fat-saturated fries down) after a hard night of dancing to the local rockers down in Hullsville and afterward a bout down at Adamsville Beach located a couple of towns over and so filled with Clintondale and other young couples seeking some privacy from watchful town eyes, in the “submarine race” watching night.

Jack had good reason to want to talk about his best friend back then Eddie, about his “boss” ’57 two-toned, white and green, Chevy, and especially about his girl, his Ginny, since in the love wars Ginny had thrown him over for Eddie, had chosen Eddie’s souped-up car over Jack’s walking feet when the deal went down. Yeah, Eddie and Jack had back then still remained friends, had still been simpatico despite the girl mess-up. See just before the Ginny swap Jack had taken Ellen Riley, formerly the head cheer-leader at Clintondale High back in 1955 away from Eddie, the year they all, Jack, Eddie, Ginny, and Ellen if you are keeping count, had graduated from high school although neither Eddie or Jack knew Ginny or Ellen there. So all was fair in love and war.  Although Jack had thought it was just slightly unfair that Ellen had subsequently thrown him over, Jack the struggling college student with no dough and no car just like he had been in high school, for a guy from Hullsville because she did not want to wait to get married until after he graduated and she empathically was tired unto death of walking. Or worse, riding that clunky old Eastern Transit bus which was always late and did not run after midnight just in case they had something going down at the beach or after the Hullsville dance got out when her father’s hand-me-down car had gone to the graveyard and they had no car between them.      

But maybe Jack had better fill a candid world in on a couple of things to back up why he wanted to talk about Eddie and Ginny that whiskey-filled night. Was feeling just a little pang after all those years for having let Ginny go so easily. Jack and Eddie had known each other since the old days at Clintondale North Elementary and had been through thick and thin together (that “thin” usually revolved around girls, starting with Rosalind in the fifth grade who had eventually thrown them both over for a kid, Ricky Kelly, Jesus, wimpy Ricky Kelly, in the sixth grade). In high school they had drifted apart for a while when Eddie decided that since he was no student that he would take up automotive mechanics and Jack with two left hands pursued the college course.

Drifted apart until come sixteen Eddie, who proved to be a an ace mechanic, a natural, had fixed up some old Hudson that he found in the junkyard and made it a “boss” (Jack adamantly refused to define that term “boss” for that candid world since some things are, or should be, self-evident). That vehicle had been a “fox” lure (girls, okay) all through high school for both young men, except those times when Eddie wanted to take his girl of the week to Adamsville Beach and wanted to use the back seat alone with said honey.  And then go to the Adventure Car Hop for a little something to eat before taking her home.

That all worked well enough in high school since neither young man had any serious relationships. Then after high school the workaday world hit Eddie and he took a job at Duggan Brothers Garage and Jack went off to the local college, Gloversville State, on a scholarship while continuing to live at home. One night when Jack was a sophomore at Gloversville he and Eddie, Eddie with the new ’57 “boss” Chevy then, went to a rock and roll dance down in Hullsville arranged for those still under twenty-one and who could not legally drink (of course there was more booze than you could shake a stick at out in the parking lot which faced Hullsville Beach but that is a another story) and that is where Jack met Ginny, a former classmate whom he had not known in school because, well, because as she told him that night she did not then have anything to do with “corner boys,” so had met her, had talked to her, had danced with her and afterward they and Eddie and a girl he picked up at the dance, not Ellen, had gone to the Adventure Car Hop for the first time together to grab a bite to eat before going home. Strangely Ginny, although she grew up in Clintondale, had never been there before considering it nothing but a male “hang-out” scene (which at some level Jack admitted to her was true).

And so started the love affair between Jack and Ginny, although according to Jack the thing had many rocky moments from the start on the question of Jack, poor boy Jack, not having his own car, having to either double-date with Eddie, whom she did not like then, or worse, walk when Eddie had his back seat wanting habits on. And her carping at Jack for not wanting to quit college to get married and start a family right away (Ginny had not gone on to school after high school and went to work in Boston for John Hancock Insurance where she was moving up in the organization). And that went on for a while.

Meanwhile Eddie had taken up with Ellen, whom he had not known in high school either, nor had Jack, because as she told Eddie “she was into football players with a future, not grease monkeys.” She saw the error of her ways when she had brought her car in for repairs and Eddie worked on the car, and on her. She was going to Adamsville Junior College right down the road but she saw something in Eddie, for a while. Then, although they all had double-dated together she “hit” on Jack one night, wound up going to bed with him a few weeks later down in Cape Cod, where she shared a cottage with six other college classmates for the summer, when Eddie had to go out of town for a couple of weeks to a GM training school and that was that.                      

Of course once the news got around, and in small city Clintondale that did not take long, especially with those summer roommates of hers, of Jack and Ellen to reach Ginny, and Eddie all bets were off. Ginny brushed Jack off with a solo telephone call to him in which she terminated their affair after about three sentences with a “I don’t want to discuss it further, I want to end this conversation,” yeah, the big brush-off. Ellen told Eddie that they were done and while he feigned being hurt about it the truth was that he had not been all that happy with her of late, thought she was drifting away from him when she decided against his protests to go in on that summer cottage. And so they parted, although Eddie was a little sore at Jack for a while, as usual when they mixed it up with their women.

One afternoon Eddie saw Ginny waiting for the bus, that damn Eastern Transport bus, and took her on the “rebound” (although don’t expect him to use that word about or around Ginny, just don’t). Ginny, for her part, decided that Eddie wasn’t so bad after all, and he did have that “boss” car and when they talked about it one night after they had hit the silk sheets was not adverse to the idea of marriage. And so their thing went in the Clintondale night for a while. Let’s hone in on what Eddie and Ginny were up to that long ago night Jack talked about when he got the blues about the old days, okay.  

“Two hamburgers, all the trimmings, two fries, two Cokes, Sissy,” rasped half-whispering Eddie Connell to Adventure Car Hop number one primo car hop Sissy Jordan. Eddie and Sissy had known each other forever. Sissy had been Eddie’s girlfriend back in junior high days, back in eight-grade at Clintondale North Junior High when he learned a thing or two about girls, about girl charms and girl bewilderments. And Sissy had been his instructor, although like all such early bracings with the opposite sex there was as much misinformation and confusion as intimacy since nobody, no parent, no teacher, and no preacher was cluing any kids in, except some lame talk about the birds and the bees, kids’ stuff. Things, as happens all the time in teen love, had not worked out between them. Had not worked out as well because by ninth grade blossoming Sissy was to be found sitting in the front seat of senior football halfback Jimmy Jordan’s two-toned souped-up Hudson and Sissy had no time for mere boys then. Such is life.   

For those who know not of Adventure Car Hop places or car hops here is a quick primer. These drive-in restaurants in the 1950s were of a piece, all glitter in the night (they lost a lot of allure seen passing by in the day and could have been any diner USA at those hours), all neon lights aglow that could be seen from a mile away as you headed out Route 3 from Clintondale Center, a small shopping area eventually replaced as the place to shop by the Gloversville Mall. The neon lights spelling out Adventure Car Hop super-imposed on an outline of a comely car hop also in neon meant, well, meant adventure, mystery, oh hell, sex. So any given Friday or Saturday night and in summer almost any night you would see the place packed with all kinds of youth cars in each striped slot. In summer the walkers, and almost every kid, girl or boy, had done the walk there before their coming of car age could sit and eat their meals on the wooden picnic tables the management provided. In winter they could go inside and sit at the vinyl-cushioned booths and order their meals while listening to the latest hits on the jukebox. Or if single, and that was rare, there were swiveling red vinyl-topped stools to sit at. Sit at and view Mel, Lenny, or Benny (the owner) pulling short order cook duty behind a metallic counter and view as well, get an eyeful if you thought about it, of the really comely car hops doing their frenetic best to keep up with the orders (and since space was at a premium avoid bumping into each other with big orders of drinks on their trays). Really thought if you went from Bangor to La Jolla you would see the same basic set-up so you would never have to worry about a place to go at night at least anywhere in America where ill-disposed parents would not be found in those precincts. 

The Adventure Car Hop, the only such place in town and therefore a magnet for everybody from about twelve to twenty-something was (now long gone and the site of a small office park)  nothing but an old time drive-in restaurant where the car hop personally took your order from you while you were  sitting in your “boss” car. Hopefully boss car, although the lot the night Jack thought about how Eddie and Ginny graced the place had been filled with dads’ borrowed cars, strictly not boss, not boss at all.  Sitting with your “boss” girl (you had better have called her that or the next week she would be somebody else’s “boss” honey). And the place became a rite of passage for Jack’s youngest brother Sam several years later even though the family had moved to Adamsville by then.  That luscious car hop would return to you after, well, it depended on how busy it was, and just then around midnight this was Adventure Car Hop busy time, with your order on a tray which attached to your door. By the way families, parents alone without children, or anybody else over twenty-something either gave the place a wide berth or only went there during the day when no self-respecting young person, with or without a car or a date, would be seen dead there, certainly not to eat the food. Jesus no. 

Now Sissy, a little older then than most Clintondale car hops at almost twenty-two, had turned into nothing but a career waitress, a foxy one still, but a waitress which was all a car hop really was. Except most car hops at Adventure Car Hop were "slumming” through senior-hood at Clintondale High or were freshman at some local college and were just trying to make some extra money for this and that while being beautiful. Because, and there was no scientific proof for this, but none was needed, at Adventure Car Hop in the year 1959 every car hop had been a fox (that beautiful just mentioned), a double fox on some nights, in their red short shorts, tight white blouses, and funny-shaped red and white box hats. And Sissy topped the list. Here though is where Sissy made a wrong turn, made her a career waitress (and made Eddie feel sorry for her, or at least sorry for losing her instruction back in ninth grade to some damn old football player). She had let Jimmy Jordan  have his way with her too many times, too many unprotected times (again in the ignorance 1950s, in Clintondale at least, the fine points of contraception, or even cautious use of rubbers was a book sealed with seven seals mostly), when she was a senior at Clintondale High back in 1955 (and Jimmy was up at State U playing football and also having off-hand quite ignorant sex with a few adoring college girlfriends on the side).

So that year she had had to drop out of school to have a baby (Jack said they called it “gone to Aunt Ella’s” and once a girl was not seen for a while someone would use that term and that was all that was needed to be said, except the occasional sighing about a good girl gone wrong or scorn from the prissy girls who allegedly were saving “it” for marriage). But see Jimmy, caddish Jimmy, left Sissy in the lurch, would not marry her or provide for the child (what the hell he was a student, he had no dough even if he had been willing to do the honorable thing, which he was not) and so she never went back to finish up after that visit to Aunt Ella. She had latched onto the job at Adventure Car Hop to support her child since Benny could have cared less about her maternal status as long as she showed those long legs, those firm breasts, those ruby-red lips and those dazzling blue eyes to great effect in those shorts and tight blouse that kept the boys coming in, even the boys with dates. Yeah, so he could care less for as long as she could keep eyes turned her way.

The story, an old story in town since there were a couple of “role models,” Jenny and Delores working at Jimmy Jack’s Diner over on East Main who followed this career path after having children out of wedlock. And thus all the signs told that career waitress was to be Sissy’s fate, maybe not at that place but probably she would wind up at Jimmy Jack’s or some truck stop diner on the outside of town with a trying too hard too tight steam-sweated uniform, stubby pencil in her hair, a wad of gum in her mouth, still fending off, mostly fending off except when she got the urge or felt lonely for a man, lonesome trucker advances.          

But back to the 1959 be-bop night, the be-bop Friday or Saturday night when those car hops, those foxes, were magnets for every guy with a car, a boss one or a father’s car it did not matter but without girls filling the seats, especially the front seat, hoping against hope for a moment with one of those car hops. And for car guys with girls in those front seats looking to show off their girls, claiming they were foxier, while sneaking furtive glances toward the bustling car hops, even than the car hops, if that was possible, and it usually wasn’t. Although under no conditions let your date know that if you wanted a date next week and not the freeze-out “not home” treatment. More importantly, to show off their “boss cars.” And playing, playing loudly for all within one hundred yards to hear, their souped-up car radio complexes, turned nightly in rock heaven’s WJDA, the radio station choice of everyone under the age of thirty.

As Jack honed in on that remembrance night on Eddie's super-duplex speaker combo The Dell-Vikings were singing their hit, Black Slacks, and some walkers were crooning along to the tune. Yes, if you can believe this, some guys and girls, some lame guys and girls, not junior high kids who couldn’t drive anyway but over sixteen high school students actually walked to the Adventure Car Hop to grab something to eat after the Clintondale Majestic Theater let out. They, of course, ate at the thoughtfully provided picnic tables although their orders were still taken by Sissy’s leggy brigade. Nicely served by those tip-hungry car hops just like real customers with a glimmer of nighttime social standing, although they were still nothing but lamos in the real night social order.

But, getting back to Eddie and Ginny, see Sissy would have known something that you and I would not have known, could not have known, just by the way Eddie placed his order as The Falcon’s doo wop serenade, Your So Fine, blared away from his radio in the fading night. Sissy knew because, being a fox she had had plenty of experience knowing the drive-in restaurant protocol after the battles had subsided down at Adamsville or Hullsville Beach “submarine watching” night, including with Eddie in the days, the junior high days when she and Eddie were nothing but lamo car-less walkers. And what she knew was that Eddie and Ginny, who had been nothing but a “stick” when Eddie and she were an item, a stick being a girl, a twelve or thirteen year old junior high school girl with no “shape,” unlike Sissy who did have a shape, although no question, no question even to Sissy Ginny had a shape now, not as good as hers but a shape good enough to keep Eddie snagged, had been "doing it” down at Hullsville Beach. Doing “it” after spending the early part of the evening at the Surf, the local rock dance hall for those over twenty-one (and where liquor was served). The tip-off: Eddie’s request for all the trimmings on his hamburgers. All the trimmings in this case being mustard, ketchup, pickles, lettuce, and here is the clincher, onions. Yes, Eddie and Ginny are done with love’s chores for the evening and can now revert to primal culinary needs without rancor, or concern.

Sissy had to laugh at how ritualized, although she would never have used such a word herself, may have not been up on her sociological jargon, to describe what was going on in the youthful night life in Clintondale (including the really just slightly older set like the clients of the Surf rock club, Eddie and Ginny, who had learned the ropes at Adventure Car Hop way back when). If a couple came early, say eight o’clock, they never ordered onions, no way, the night still held too much promise. The walkers, well, the walkers you couldn’t tell, especially the young walkers like she and Eddie in the old days, but usually they didn’t have enough sense to say “no onions.” And then there were the Eddies and Ginnys floating in around two, or three, in the morning, “done” (and the reader knows what “done” is now), starving, maybe a little drunk and ready to devour Benny’s (who was doing short order duty that night since Mel had called in sick, “rum” sick Benny called it) cardboard hamburgers, deep-fried, fat-saturated French fries, and diluted soda (known locally as tonic, go figure) as long as those burgers had onions, many onions on them. And as we turn off this scene to the strains of Johnny Ace crooning Pledging My Love on Eddie’s car radio competing just now with a car further over with The Elegants’ Little Star Sissy had just place the tray on Eddie’s side of the car and had brought his order and placed it on the tray, with all the trimmings.

An Encore Salute To The Untold Stories Of The Working- Class 1960s Radicals-“The Sam And Ralph Stories”- The 40th Anniversary Of The Fall Of Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City)(2015)-An American Ex-Soldier’s Story.

An Encore Salute To The Untold Stories Of The Working- Class 1960s Radicals-“The Sam And Ralph Stories”- The 40^th Anniversary Of The Fall Of Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City)(2015)-An American Ex-Soldier’s Story. 

Greg Green, site manager Introduction 

 [In early 2018, shortly after I had taken over the reins as site manager at this on-line publication I “saw the light” and bowed to the wisdom of a number of older writers who balked at my idea of reaching younger and newer audiences by having them review films like Marvel/DC Comics productions, write about various video games and books that would not offend a flea unlike the flaming red books previously reviewed here centered on the now aging 1960s baby-boomer demographic which had sustained the publication through good times and bad as a hard copy and then on-line proposition. One senior writer, who shall remain nameless in case some stray millennial sees this introduction and spreads some viral social media hate campaign his way, made the very telling observation that the younger set, his term, don’t read film reviews or hard copy books as a rule and those hardy Generation of ’68 partisans who still support this publication in the transition from the old Allan Jackson leadership to mine don’t give a fuck about comics, video games or graphic novels. I stand humbled.

Not only stand humbled though but in a valiant and seemingly successful attempt to stabilize this operation decided to give an encore presentation to some of the most important series produced and edited by Allan Jackson-without Allan. That too proved to be an error when I had Frank Jackman introduce the first few sections of The Roots Is The Toots Rock And Roll series which Allan had sweated his ass over to bring out over a couple of years. Writers, and not only senior writers who had supported Allan in the vote of no confidence fight challenging his leadership after he went overboard attempting to cash in on the hoopla over the commemoration of the 50^th anniversary of the Summer of Love in 1967 but also my younger writer partisans, balked at this subterfuge. One called it a travesty.

Backing off after finding Allan, not an easy task since he had fled to the safer waters of the West looking for work and had been rumored to be any place from Salt Lake City to some mountainous last hippie commune in the hills of Northern California doing anything from pimping as press agent for Mitt Romney’s U.S. Senate campaign in Utah to running a whorehouse with Madame La Rue in Frisco or shacking up with drag queen Miss Judy Garland in that same city, we brought Allan back to do the introductions to the remaining sections. That we, me and the Editorial Board established after Allan’s demise and as a guard against one-person rule, had compromised on that gesture with the last of the series being the termination of Allan’s association with the publication except possibly as an occasional writer, a stringer really, when some nostalgia event needed some attention.      

That was the way things went and not too badly when we finished up the series in the early summer of 2018. But that is not the end of the Allan story. While looking through the on-line archives I noticed that Allan had also seriously edited another 1960s-related series, the Sam and Ralph Stories, a series centered on the trials and tribulations of two working-class guys who had been radicalized in different ways by the 1960s upheavals and have never lost the faith in what Allan called from Tennyson “seeking a newer world” would resurface in this wicked old world, somebody’s term.

I once again attempted to make the mistake of having someone else, in this case Josh Breslin, introduce the series (after my introduction here) but the Editorial Board bucked me even before I could set that idea in motion. I claimed, somewhat disingenuously, that Allan was probably out in Utah looking for some residual work for Mitt Romney now that he is the Republican candidate for U.S. Senator for Utah or running back to Madame La Rue, an old flame, and that high- end whorehouse or hanging with Miss Judy Garland at her successful drag queen tourist attraction cabaret. No such luck since he was up in Maine working on a book about his life as an editor. To be published in hard cop y by well-known Wheeler Press whenever he gets the proofs done. So hereafter former editor and site manager Allan will handle the introductions on this encore presentation of this excellent series. Greg Green]                   

Allan Jackson, editor The Sam And Ralph Stories -New General Introduction

[As my replacement Greg Green, whom I brought in from American Film Gazette originally to handle the day to day site operations while I concentrated on editing but who led a successful revolt against my regime based on the wishes of the younger writers to as they said at the time not be slaves to the 1960s upheavals a time which they only knew second or third hand, mentioned in his general introduction above some of the series I initiated were/are worth an encore presentation. The Sam and Ralph Stories are one such series and as we go along I will try to describe why this series was an important testament to an unheralded segment of the mass movements of the 1960s-the radicalized white working- class kids who certainly made up a significant component of the Vietnam War soldiery, some of who were like Sam and Ralph forever after suspicious of every governmental war cry. Who also somewhat belatedly got caught up in the second wave rock and roll revival which emerged under the general slogan of “drug, sex and rock and roll” which represented a vast sea change for attitudes about a lot of things that under ordinary circumstances would have had them merely replicating their parents’ ethos and fate.        

As I said I will describe that transformation in future segment introductions but today since it is my “dime” I want to once again clear up some misapprehensions about what has gone on over the past year or so in the interest of informing the readership, as Greg Green has staked his standing at this publication on doing to insure his own survival, about what goes on behind the scenes in the publishing business. This would not have been necessary after the big flap when Greg tried an “end around” something that I and every other editor worth her or his salt have tried as well and have somebody else, here commentator and my old high school friend Frank Jackman, act as general introducer of The Roots Is The Toots  rock and roll coming of age series that I believe is one of the best productions I have ever worked on. That got writers, young and old, with me or against me, led by Sam Lowell, another of my old high school friends, who had been the decisive vote against me in the “vote of no confidence” which ended my regime up in arms. I have forgiven Sam, and others, as I knew full well from the time I entered into the business that at best it was a cutthroat survival of the fittest racket. (Not only have I forgiven Sam but I am in his corner in his recent struggles with young up and coming by-line writer Sarah Lemoyne who is being guided through the shoals by another old high school friend Seth Garth as she attempts to make her way up the film critic food chain, probably the most vicious segment of the business where a thousand knives wait the unwary from so-called fellow reviewers.) The upshot of that controversy was that Greg had to back off and let me finish the introducing the series for which after all I had been present at the creation.               

That would have been the end of it but once we successfully, and thankfully by Greg who gave me not only kudos around the water cooler but a nice honorarium, concluded that series encore in the early summer of 2018 he found another way to cut me. Going through the archives of this publication to try to stabilize the readership after doing some “holy goof” stuff like having serious writers, young and old, reviewing films based on comic book characters, the latest in video games and graphic novels with no success forgetting the cardinal rule of the post-Internet world that the younger set get their information from other sources than old line academic- driven websites and don’t read beyond their techie tools Greg found another series, the one highlighted here, that intrigued him for an encore presentation. This is where Greg proved only too human since he once again attempted an “end around,” by having Josh Breslin, another old friend whom I meet in the Summer of Love, 1967 out in San Francisco, introduce the series citing my unavailability as the reason although paying attention to the fact that I had sweated bullets over that one as well.      

This time though the Editorial Board, now headed by Sam Lowell, intervened even before Greg could approach Josh for the assignment. This Ed Board was instituted after my departure to insure the operation would not descend, Sam’s word actually, into the so-called autocratic one-person rule that had been the norm under my regime. They told Greg to call me back in on the encore project or to forget it. I would not have put up with such a suggestion from an overriding Ed Board and would have willingly bowed out if anybody had tried to undermine me that way. I can understand fully Greg’s desire to cast me to the deeps, have done with me as in my time I did as well knowing others in the food chain would see this as their opportunity to move up.  

That part I had no problem with, told Greg exactly that. What bothered me was the continuing “urban legend” about what I had done, where I had gone after that decisive vote of no confidence. Greg continued, may continue today, to fuel the rumors that not only after my initial demise but after finishing up the Roots Is The Toots series I had gone back out West to Utah of all places to work for the Mormons, or to Frisco to hook up with my old flame Madame La Rue running that high-end whorehouse I had staked her to in the old days, or was running around with another old high school pal, Miss Judy Garland, aka Timmy Riley the high priestess of the drag queen set out in that same town whom I also helped stake to  his high-end tourist attraction cabaret. All nonsense, I was working on my memoir up in Maine, up in Olde Saco where Josh grew up and which I fell in love with when he first showed me his hometown and its ocean views.          

If the reader can bear the weight of this final reckoning let me clear the air on all three subjects on the so-called Western trail. Before that though I admit, admit freely that despite all the money I have made, editing, doing a million pieces under various aliases and monikers, ballooning up 3000 word articles to 10,000 and having the publishers fully pay despite the need for editing for the latter in the days before the Guild when you worked by the word, accepting articles which I clearly knew were just ripped of the AP feed and sending them along as gold I had no dough, none when I was dethroned. Reason, perfectly sane reason, although maybe not, three ex-wives with alimony blues and a parcel of kids, a brood if you like who were in thrall to the college tuition vultures.

Tapped out in the East for a lot of reasons I did head west the first time looking for work. Landed in Utah when I ran out of dough, and did, DID, try to get a job on the Salt Lake Star and would have had it too except two things somebody there, some friend of Mitt Romney, heard I was looking for work and nixed the whole thing once they read the articles I had written mocking Mitt and his white underwear world as Massachusetts governor and 2012 presidential candidate. So it was with bitter irony when I heard that Greg had retailed the preposterous idea that I would now seek a job shilling for dear white undie Mitt as press agent in his run for the open Utah United States Senate seat. Here is where everybody should gasp though at the whole Utah fantasy-these Mormons stick close together, probably ingrained in them from Joseph Smith days, and don’t hire goddam atheists and radicals, don’t hire outside the religion if they can help it. You probably had to have slept with one of Joseph Smith’s or Brigham Young’s wives to even get one foot in the door. Done.              

The helping Madame La Rue, real name of no interest or need to mention,  running her high-end exclusive whorehouse out in Half Moon Bay at least had some credence since I had staked her to some dough to get started after the downfall of the 1960s sent her back to her real world, the world of a high class hooker who was slumming with “hippies” for a while when it looked like our dreams were going to be deterred in in the ebbtide. We had been hot and heavy lovers, although never married except on some hazed drug-fogged concert night when I think Josh Breslin “married” us and sent us on a “honeymoon” with a fistful of cocaine. Down on dough I hit her up for some which she gave gladly, said it was interest on the “loan: she never repaid and let me stay at her place for a while until I had to move on. Done

The whole drag queen idea tells me that whoever started this damn lie knew nothing about my growing up days and had either seen me in The Totem, Timmy Riley’s aka Miss Judy Garland’s drinking with a few drag queen who worked and drew the wrong conclusions or was out to slander and libel me for some other nefarious reason. See Miss Judy Garland is the very successful drag queen and gay man Timmy Riley from the old neighborhood who fled to Frisco when he could no longer hide his sexual identity and preferences. To our great shock since Timmy had been the out-front gay-basher of our crowd, our working-class corner boy gay-bashing crowd. I had lent, after getting religion rather late on the LGBTQ question, Timmy the money to buy his first drag queen cabaret on Bay Street and Timmy was kind enough to stake me to some money and a roof before I decided I had to head back East. Done.

But enough about me.  This is about two other working- class guys, Sam Eaton and Ralph Morris, met along life’s road one from Carver about fifty miles away from where Seth, Sam, Timmy and a bunch of other guys grew up and learned the “normal” working-class ethos-and broke, tentatively at times, from that same straitjacket and from Troy, New York. Funny Troy, Carver, North Adamsville, and Josh’s old mill town Olde Saco all down-in-the-mouth working class towns still produced in exceptional times a clot of guys who got caught up in the turmoil of their times-and lived to tell the tale. I am proud to introduce this encore presentation and will have plenty more to say about Sam and Ralph in future segments.]

Allan Jackson Introduction To Sam and Ralph-The Wild Boys of Cambridge When Cambridge Was Jammed Full Of Wild Girls And Boys    

[Some guys from the old days, from the old growing up poor in the working-class Acre section of North Adamsville, I still have contact with over fifty years later. Guys like Seth Garth who is now in a “battle” along with his new protégé Sarah Lemoyne who looks for all the world to be an up and coming contributor to this publication against his, and my, old time friend Sam Lowell who promised me he would retire, especially after he provided the key last and decisive vote when the younger writers rose up against my editorship and forced me to retire. Forced me West seeking another job to keep myself solvent causing all kinds of rumors and fairy tales to enter the world which only muddied up the already murky waters. Other guys like beautiful Si Lannon and generous benefactor to this publication Jack Callahan also come to mind. Of course the elephant in the room has always been, and probably always will be, one Peter Paul Markin, who taught us many things before his sadly untimely demise caused by his own hubris many years ago. I honored his memory for years using his name as my moniker in various publishing efforts and will detail the genesis of that decision in the memoir of my time in the publishing industry which I am working on and expect to complete by next year.     

I am proud to have had the chance to keep so many friendships from the old neighborhoods days as I am a man who puts a great deal into things like loyalty and camaraderie. Of course those relationships do not exhaust the number of long friendships and close working relationships. Josh Breslin met in the Summer of Love, 1967, Zack James, youngest brother of my closest friend in high Alex, and Lance Lawrence come readily to mind. Then there are guys, I am only talking guys today as I will deal with gals in an up-coming introductory segment, like fellow Vietnam veteran Ralph Morris from over in Troy, New York whom I met I believe down in Washington, D.C. in 1971 a few weeks before we, Vietnam Veterans Against The War (VVAW), did our part to try to shut down the government to shut down the war on May Day -and failed. Guys like his friend Sam Eaton from Carver about fifty miles from North Adamsville,  not a veteran since he was exempted from the draft as the sole support of his mother and four sisters after his father passed away suddenly of a heart attack, whom Ralph “met” after both had been arrested in those May Day actions in “jail” at the RFK football stadium. They, Sam and Ralph, and I have stayed in contact over the years and have worked on many political projects mostly against war together.    

That brings me to the idea behind having Sam and Ralph as the central characters in a series I helped plan around the story- and fate- of some working- class radicals who for the most part had kept the faith, had not retreated to self, had not given up the mist of change we were struggling for in those halcyon and heady 1960s upheaval days. At the cost of over-generalization the thing that united the North Adamsville remnant, including me, guys like Josh Breslin and guys like Sam and Ralph was our working-class backgrounds. While the road to new understandings of the ways of the world were different we all arrived at some similar conclusions and since then have seen no reason to dramatically change them if in the aging process we are less able to stir the old energies. Have been ready to “pass the torch” for a while. The stories of the old North Adamsville corner boys had by 2012 or so been done to death as had the stories centered on other working-class guys like Josh Breslin from places like Olde Saco up in Maine and so the natural place to turn was the long-time relationship between Sam and Ralph. Things seemed right in the universe doing the series then-and now with this encore.]          

Allan Jackson’s Encore Introduction to “An Ex-American Soldier’s Story”

Some generations are driven by events that have world historic importance-Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941 the day of infamy according to President Franklin Roosevelt, maybe not so to others but that is for the historian to decipher and 9/11 2001 come readily to mind. For the Generation of ’68 Peter Paul Markin’s designation for the generation, or the best part of it that rose up to try and slay the dragon of the Vietnam War that fateful April 30, 1975 when with a puff of air the North Vietnamese Regulars and the South Vietnamese National Liberation Front waltzed int to Saigon, now rightfully Ho Chi Minh City after the great national liberation leader, after a 10,000 day world, the bloodiest and most bloodthirsty part the American invasion from say 1964 to that well-known photograph of the evacuation of the U.S. Embassy by helicopter of the last remnant of the America hubris in the area.

Not everybody, soldier or civilian saw, sees that day as cause for some serious contemplation, reflection about the borders of hubris. Some soldiers, some fellow soldiers, and this is what I want to make sure I get clear in this introduction did their duty as they saw it, came home and as best as they could  got back to the real world, that was probably a majority of the roughly two million military personnel who served in that conflict. Another segment, smaller and more troubled never did get back to the “real” world. Drugs, physical maladies, mental problems, and just getting back the nine to five world they had expected to inhabit proved too much. Guys like the guys who famously became the “brothers under the bridge” that I wrote about for the East Bay Other after I had come back from Vietnam and had had my own troubles getting back into that real world. The epitome, the personal known to me epitome of that soldier though was Peter Paul Markin, whose moniker I used for a number of years to honor my fallen hometown neighborhood friend and brother who taught me, us many things before he went under and who had done okay for a while but just couldn’t get rid of the demons in his head, what Seth Garth, using a line from a Patty Griffin song “put out the fire in your head” used to say.        

Then there were the Ralph Morris-types who came back ready to smite dragons, and is still ready to do so, ready to take on all comers who want to get this country into yet another war and who as a sidebar has fought under various banners for social justice ever since. I met Ralph down in Washington in the spring of 1971 when he, I, was red hot to express his outrage at the murderous actions of his government against people with which he had no quarrel.  We were linked up with other ex G.I.s in various actions as veterans, as guys who knew and saw things up close and personal and ready to do something, maybe give up our lives if it came to that to stop the fucking war (that is still the only way I can describe it with the “fucking” in front).  Ralph knew the war was fucked, knew it in his bones but it took the actual experience of going to sort things out. Sure he had his problems coming home but he stayed the course. A guy like Ralph would not have been as happy, if that is the way to put such a thing, as the North Vietnamese Regulars and the South Vietnamese Liberation fighters to have the damn war finished in 1975 but every year he, we reflect on the day and are proud of our small part in helping try to stop the thing from going on forever.]        

Ralph Morris comment:

Yeah, sure I served in Vietnam, served Regular Army, after I kind of panicked when I got my draft notice from my “friends and neighbors” at the Troy, New York draft board in late 1966 and enlisted expecting, based on a foolish belief in the recruiting sergeant, that I would be placed in an electronics MOS by doing so. I can still remember my G.I. dog-tag number RA038341396, that RA in front of the numbers not like a lot of guys, guys who I wished I had been more like who had “U.S.” before their dog-tag numbers signifying that they were draftees, maybe kicking and screaming draftees like a guy I ran into in the G.I. anti-war movement in 1971, Fritz Jasper, who was a big guy in Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) and who had served a year in an Army stockade before they let him out for refusing to go to ‘Nam.

But what did I know then. What did I know like Fritz who was one of those kicking and screaming draftees out of New York City, Brooklyn I think, about getting with Quaker-driven draft counsellors or military resistance counsellors once he knew after about three day in the Army in 1969 that he was in the wrong place and every instinct told him that year that he was going to ‘Nam if he didn’t do something quick to get the military’s attention. So he did first by refusing his orders and then by refusing to do a damn Army thing. They put his ass in some damn stockade down South   and were going to throw away the key before some people he was in contact with, some Quaker people or people who worked with Quakers got him some legal help and they went to federal court to spring him. Remind to tell you some more of his story sometime because it is kind of interesting when people ask me about military resisters then.

That’s the big case I tell them about because I know it cold although I know there were plenty of others, plenty that got some coverage. Maybe better I will ask Fritz to tell his story sometime because, guess what, that resistance/stockade experience made a peacenik “lifer” out of him. He is working with Veterans For Peace down in the city just like I am in Troy (really the whole North Country area and in Boston when I visit Sam Eaton who has a big part in this story and the VFP chapter there needs warm bodies for an action.) 

And what if I did know how to make those anti-war connections. What good would it have done me since before ‘Nam I was enthrall to some pretty red, white and blue notions, some ideas it has taken my whole freaking dead ass life to break from, and I still breaking from. All I know is this, bloody, forlorn god forsaken Vietnam changed my life, probably has been the number one experience that has kept me going trying to light the lamp of peace. If I hadn’t I today probably would be like a lot of guys and gals who were waving South Vietnamese National Liberation Front (NLF) flags like I did later on when I got “religion” on the war issue. Waved that flag at the end when the “other side” came down Highway One in Vietnam in the Spring of 1975 like bats out of hell and resolved the whole thing in a couple of months, stuff that had taken thirty years of their blood and over ten of ours to conclude not to count the whole torn apart countries left in the wake. Those others have now long past made their peace with the American empire, made it quick and easy when the deal when down and the American government pulled the hammer down and they flinched when it counted a whole bunch of times since, times like Iraq 2003. Yeah, some people learn the hard way but they learn the lesson well. 

Yeah, what good would all of that knowledge done me then. See my old man, Ralph, Senior, ran a high precision electrical shop doing a lot of work for the big employer in the area, General Electric, a company which had many big contracts with the Department of Defense in those years and I worked for him a couple of years in high school and after I got out so I expected that I could do something useful for the Army with that skill. But see beside that little “error” in believing word one from that damn recruiting sergeant, First Sergeant Riley, a good old boy, a “lifer” ( a very different “lifer” from Fritz Jasper) from Arkansas who had already done two tours in ‘Nam and had blessed the Army each and every day for giving him shoes and three squares a day if I recall, the United States of America under the benevolent guidance of some damn Texan, Lyndon Johnson, LBJ, to be exact in 1967, 1968 was looking for nothing but “grunts” to comb the bushes and jungles of Vietnam. Looking for grunts to flush out every commie from every hut in every hamlet in that benighted country no matter how long it took and how much “collateral damage” ensued so I was trained as an 11B (Bravo), an infantryman, a “grunt,” “cannon fodder” although I didn’t pick up that last term until later, later when I got discharged, when people explained to me in concrete terms what I was, all that I was, to the people who ran the damn war.

That discharge business is important because unlike a couple of guys I heard about who were raising hell about the war, in Vietnam if you can believe that, yeah, raising holy hell, and guys I ran into later at Fort Dix who had joined the G.I. anti-war resistance after I came back to the “real world” I didn’t raise any hell while I was in the Army. (And knew nothing about Fritz’s case even though as he showed me a copy later it was publicized at Fort Dix via a G.I. newspaper, The Morning Report, run out of one of the G.I. coffeehouses that were sprouting up around military bases when the civilian anti-war movement, the radical students mainly, realized they had to get to the grunts if they were going to end the war on their terms not that of the American government.) Didn’t see the percentage in it, didn’t want to wind up in Long Binh Jail, the LBJ as everybody in-country called it, or worse, some long forgotten stretch out in the prairies of Kansas at Fort Leavenworth, the place where they now have the heroic Wiki-leaks whistle-blower Private Chelsea Manning doing a hard thirty-five year stretch just for telling the truth about American military atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001. [Since has had her sentence commuted by former President Obama before he left office in 2017-AJ] Although this piece is about my own military service and what I did or didn’t about what was going on in Vietnam, mainly didn’t, except a few words to buddies over beers at the PX or over a joint in the barracks or boondocks the Manning case grabbed me, grabbed me hard and I took her case to heart. [For those not in the know or who don’t recognize the case by that name before her conviction and sentencing in August 2013 she was known a Bradley Manning before coming out as “tran” which makes her being at the all-male prisoner Leavenworth that much  harder.] I went to many rallies in her support, raised money for the legal defense, circulated every kind of petition to get her free, still do, and went down to Fort Meade where she was tried by court-martial a few times. Yeah, call it guilt maybe, call it pay back, but I was supporting a fellow soldier in her hour of need, something I didn’t do back then. But enough of this.  

In ‘Nam whatever I did or didn’t do is where I got the “fire in the belly” to see that the whole war was off balance, didn’t make the kind of sense right there in-country that it did in faraway propaganda-drenched America, fighting commies, fighting dominos, picking up on my father’s “my country, right or wrong” mentality or my corner boys looking for some cheapjack glory learned from watching too many Green Beret-type movies. The reality: picking off random peasants who got in the crossfire because we were too scared to go forward if we thought VC was in the area or at night when we knew, not at first but by 1968, that “the night belonged to Charlie” as we called him, first as a term of disrespect but finally after Tet 1968 as an enemy worthy of respect whatever the NCOs and officers said. Jesus. Yeah, that’s the patriotic hogwash what I had to fight against, get rid of from my mind, and frankly it has been a lifelong struggle on some things. (But get this who would have thought that a sixty-something purple heart ex-soldier would be out on the hustings to get a transgender woman, Chelsea Manning, out of hard rock prison back then, now even.)       

But back in Vietnam days, in-country not affected too much by reports of draft resistance in 1967 although I had had heard on Armed Forces Radio the bit about the student radical trying to “levitate” the Pentagon (and thought it a weird thing to do with gunfire all around me) and like I said a little about guys bucking against the military system, mostly blacks who I got along with personally but there was a lot of black nationalism in the air and we didn’t’ mix that much in 1967 (1968 yes after the Tet offensive showed what the hell we were up against we made an “armed truce” to survive) but that was kind of so much air then. I had been progressively getting more and more fed up with the war, with the killing, with what it was doing to me, what it was doing to my buddies, and what the United States of America was turning me and them into, nothing but animals. 

I even extended my tour from the usual year (thirteen months really when you figure in the 30 days of R&R) to eighteen months so if I didn’t get killed I could get out a few months earlier from my three year enlistment (and get as a bonus stationed at Fort Dix at the end of my enlistment on the East Coast only a couple of hundred miles from home). Well I might have had a death wish or something extending my tour of duty but I made it out alive with only a small purple heart wound but when I got out in late 1969 I joined, not right away but soon, that VVAW that I talked about earlier. Yeah wound up joining the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, the main anti-war veterans group at the time. Such a move by me and thousands of other soldiers who had served in ‘Nam is a real indication even today of how unpopular that war was when the guys who had fought the damn thing arms in hand, mostly guys then, rose up against the slaughter. I wound up taking part in a lot of VVAW actions around Albany and New York City mainly.

Nah, I thought I was going to but no I am not going to tell war stories here about what happened in Vietnam, the “dog soldier” stories because you can read about them, or see a movie like The Deer Hunter or Apocalypse Now, films like that to get a flavor of the heat and humiliation of battle or books by guys who did want to tell “dog soldier stories” like Mike Caputo, and Phil Jackson. What I want to talk about in this the 40^th anniversary of the fall of Saigon is the “afterwards” part, the VVAW part, the May Day 1971 part, the “red collectives” in Cambridge part with my old friend and political activist associate Sam Eaton, and the part where I, not without some conflict came to cheer on the DNV/NLF offensive in the Spring of 1975 which led to the fall of Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City, and left ashes in American governmental mouths (and mine too but for different reasons). 

I didn’t really want to tell any stories, didn’t want to think about Vietnam at all although that experience one way or another touches my soul every damn day I live. I had in fact for some years later denied to strangers that I had even served in Vietnam including one girl, Joyell who I ran into at an anti-war rally on Cambridge Common one time when I went there to visit Sam where she was waving a NLF flag which made me wince at first but she was a beauty and very smart too so I took a run at her and she at me, yeah, Joyell, a radical girl from Cambridge when that was a cool thing to be in say 1972, 1973,  whom I dated for a year and had told that I had been a draft resister and when she found out I was a Vietnam vet, even with the VVAW imprimatur, had left me flat.

But see Sam, Sam Eaton, and I had been talking one night a few months back after having a few high-shelf whiskeys at our favorite watering hole, Jack Higgins’ Grille down just outside the Financial District near Quincy Market when I had come to Boston to see him on one of our periodic visits with each other and he said I “owed it to the movement,” owed it to “the generations that came after” to paraphrase a poem by Bertolt Brecht to tell how an average patriotic guy from a sternly patriotic Cold War “my country, right or wrong” family, neighborhood, city got “religion” on the issues of war and peace, and had kept the faith ever since despite having to swallow some sad truths like that I had fought on the wrong side of history in that fight, that whatever happened later the fight was for the Vietnamese people to figure out without the mightiest military power in the known world and in known history raining hell and damnation on those benighted people.

See Sam, a guy who didn’t go to war, didn’t have to go to war, because his draft board (his “friends and neighbors”) in Carver, Massachusetts had exempted him on the very reasonable grounds that he was then the sole support of his mother and four younger sisters after his drunken sot of a father (Sam’s term) passed away of a massive heart attack in 1965 is very keen on his history these days, has been since the days when we got involved in those “red collective” study groups back after the May Day 1971 fiasco. He had read that the United for Justice and Peace (UJP) was hosting a series of events commemorating that fall of Saigon by taking a retrospective look at what the American anti-war movement in general did to aid that decisive event and how the various civilian and military resistance movements, you know stuff like Fritz Jasper did by refusing to go to Vietnam when under military orders to do so, did as well. So he dragged me to that series and then bugged me for a couple of months afterward to write something like a cautionary tale from a guy like me who was not a draft or military resister but who nevertheless got “religion” on the war issue and unlike guys from VVAW like the current Secretary of State John Forbes Kerry [2015]didn’t forget the lessons when the “main chance” came along and he, Kerry, abandoned every decent instinct he ever had.     

So here goes. But like I said I don’t want to, maybe can’t tell war stories except maybe a little to show a point but no blood and gore stuff because all you need to know is 58,000 plus names on black marble down in Washington, D.C., hundreds of thousands injured with small physical wounds like mine or grievous ones like Johnny Jann from my platoon who lost both legs, mostly uncounted thousand with PTSD, a mass of unnumbered suicides, tons of guys who never made it back to the “real” world and wound up homeless living like Bruce Springsteen said like “brothers under the bridge,” Vietnam bombed back practically to the Stone Age maybe before if the Air Force generals had been totally unleashed, countless hamlets, villages, towns blown to smithereens, millions of luckless innocent people who didn’t bother a soul killed, almost as many “enemy” soldiers and “friendlies” too. Yeah, that is all you need to know.          

I remember commenting to Sam during the course of our conversations on the fact that no way, no way in hell, if it had not been for the explosive events of the 1960s, of the war and later a bunch of social issue questions, mainly third world liberation struggles internationally and the black liberation question at home we would not even be having the conversations we were having, not the two of us anyway, talking stuff about the virtues of the “enemy” which would have been treason talk if not legally then emotionally (both of also as we rattled on chuckling a little at using the old time terms, especially the use of “struggle” and “question,” for example the  black, gay, woman questions since lately we have noticed that younger activists no longer spoke in such terms but used more ephemeral “white privilege,” “patriarchy,”  “gender” terms reflecting the identity politics that have been in fashion for a long time, since the ebb flow of the 1960s). 

I (and Sam too) had imbibed all the standard identifiable working-class prejudices against reds, some of those prejudices more widespread than among the working class among the general population of the times, you know, like the big red scare Cold War “your mommy is a commie, turn her in,” “the Russians are coming get under the desk and hold onto your head,” anybody to the left of Grandpa Ike, maybe even him, nothing but communist dupes of Joe Stalin and his progeny who pulled the strings from Moscow and made everybody jumpy; against blacks (I had stood there right next to my father, Ralph, Sr., when he led the physical opposition to blacks moving into the Tappan Street section of town and had nothing, along with my corner boys at Van Patten’s Drugstore, but the “n” word to call black people, sometimes to their faces. Sam’s father was not much better, a southerner from hillbilly country down in Appalachia who had been stationed in Hingham no too far from Carver at the end of World War II and stayed, who never could until his dying breathe call blacks anything but the “n” word); against gays and lesbians (me and my boys mercilessly fag and dyke baiting them whenever the guys and I went to Saratoga Springs where those “creeps” spent their summers doing whatever nasty things they did to each other and Sam likewise down in Provincetown with his boys, he helping, beating up some poor guy in a back alley after one of his boys had made a fake pass at the guy, Jesus; against uppity women, servile, domestic child-producing women like our good old mothers and sisters and wanna-bes were okay as were “easy” girls ready to toot our whistles, attitudes which we had only gotten beaten out of us when we ran into our respective future wives (and me with Joyell too but don’t mention that to my wife Laura since all these years later she see red when I mention her name in any content) who had both been influenced by the women’s liberation movement although truth to tell they were not especially political, but rather artistic types.  Native Americans didn’t even rate a nod since they were not on the radar, were written off in any case as fodder for cowboys and soldiers in blue. But mainly we had been red, white and blue American patriotic guys who really did have ice picks in our eyes for anybody who thought they would like to tread on old Uncle Sam (who had been “invented” around my way, my Troy hometown way).      

See I, Sam too for that matter, had joined the anti-war movement for personal reasons at first which had to do a lot with ending the war in Vietnam and not a lot about “changing the whole freaking world” (Sam’s term). Like I said my story was a little bit amazing that way, since I had served in the military, served in the Army, in Vietnam. But like I already told you in 1967, 1968 what Uncle needed, desperately needed as General Westmoreland called for more troops, was more “grunts” to flush out Charlie and so I wound up with a unit in the Central Highlands, up in the bush trying to kill every commie I could get my hands on just like the General wanted.  

After I got out I worked in my father’s high precision electrical shop for a while to make some dough and head west, head somewhere not stinking nowhere Troy, not the woe begotten North Country. One day in 1970 I was taking a high compression motor to Albany to a customer and had parked the shop truck on Van Dyke Street near Russell Sage College. Coming down the line, silent, silent as the grave I thought later, were a ragtag bunch of guys in mismatched (on purpose I found out later) military uniforms carrying individual signs but with a big banner in front calling for “Immediate Withdrawal From Vietnam” in big black letters and signing the banner with the name of the organization in red-Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). That was all, and all that was needed. Nobody on those still patriotic, mostly government worker, streets called them commies or anything like that but you could tell some guys in white collars and ties who had never come close to a gun, except maybe to kill animals or something defenseless really wanted to. One veteran as they came nearer to me shouted out for any veterans to join them, to tell the world what they knew first-hand about what was going on in Vietnam. Yeah, that shout-out was all I needed, all I needed to join my “band of brothers.”                               

Let me tell you thought how Sam and I met in Washington on May Day 1971 because that will explain a lot of why I am writing this thing that almost half a century later still hurts my brain. I remember that I had first noticed that Sam was wearing a VVAW supporter button when I saw him on the football field at RFK Stadium and I had asked if he had been in ‘Nam. Sam, a little sheepishly, explained that he had been exempted from military duty since he was the sole support for his mother and four younger sisters after his father had passed away of a massive heart attack in 1965. (He had also said he had gone to work in Mister Snyder’s print shop where he had learned enough about the printing business to later open his own shop which he kept afloat somehow during the late 1960s with his high school friend Jack Callahan’s help and which became Sam’s career after he settled down when the 1960s ebbed and people started heading back to “normal” in the mid-1970s)

Oh yeah the reason we were in RFK was not for a football game, the NFL Washington Redskins did not play that game in May, but because we both respectively had been arrested along with thousands of others in a massive civil disobedience action that I will tell more about in a minute. Sam told me, since we had plenty of time to talk, the reason that he had joined the anti-war movement after years of relative indifference since he was not involved in the war effort had been that his closest high school friend, Jeff Mullins, had been blown away in the Central Highlands and that had made him question what was going on. Jeff, who like us had been as red, white and blue as any guy, had written Sam when he was in Vietnam that he thought that the place, the situation that he found himself in was more than he bargained for, and that if he didn’t make it back for Sam to tell people, everybody he could what was really going on. Then with just a few months to go Jeff was blown away near some village that Sam could not spell or pronounce correctly even all these many years later. Jeff had not only been Sam’s best friend but he said was as straight a guy as you could meet, and had gotten Sam out of more than a few scrapes, a few illegal scrapes that could have got him before some judge. So that was how Sam got “religion,” not through some intellectual or rational argument about the theories of war, just wars or “your country right or wrong” wars, but because his friend had been blown away, blown away for no good reason as far as that went.  

May Day 1971 was a watershed for both of us, both of us before May Day having sensed that more drastic action was necessary to “tame the American imperial monster” (Sam’s term picked up from The Real Paper, an alternative newspaper he had picked up at a street newsstand in Cambridge) and had come away from that experience, that disaster, with the understanding that even to end the war would take much more, and many more people, than they had previously expected. I, in particular, had been carried away with the notion that what I and my fellow veterans who were going to try to symbolically close down the Pentagon were doing as veterans would cause the government pause, would make them think twice about any retaliation to guys who had served and seen it all. I got “smart” on that one fast when the National Guard which was defending the Pentagon, or part of it that day, treated us like any Chicago cops at the Democratic Party Convention in 1968, treated us like cops did to any SDS-ers anywhere, and treated us just like anybody else who raised their voices against governmental policy in the streets.

I told Sam while were in captivity that I had been working in my father’s shop for a while but our relationship was icy (and would be for a long time after that although in 1991 when Ralph, Senior retired I took over the business). I would take part in whatever actions I could around the area (and down in New York City a couple of times when they called for re-enforcements to make a big splash).

I had, like I said, joined with a group of VVAW-ers and supporters for that action down in Washington, D.C. See the idea, which would sound kind of strange today in a different time when there is very little overt anti-war activity against the current crop of endless wars but also shows how desperate we were to end that damn war, was to on May Day shut down the government if it did not shut down the war. Our group’s task, as part of the bigger scheme, since we were to form up as a total veterans and supporters contingent was to symbolically shut down the Pentagon. Wild right, but see the figuring was that they, the government, would not dare to arrest vets and we figured (“we” meaning all those who planned the events and went along with the plan) the government would not treat it like the big civilian action at the Pentagon in 1967 which Norman Mailer won a literary prize writing a book about, Armies of the Night. Silly us. 

Sam and I after the fall-out from May Day were thus searching for a better way to handle things, a better way to make an impact because those few days of detention in D.C. that we had jointly suffered not only started what would be a lifelong personal friendship but an on-going conversation between us over the next several years about how to bring about the greater social change we sensed was needed before one could even think about stopping wars and stuff like that. (The story, in short, of how we got out of RFK after a few days was pretty straight forward. Since law enforcement was so strapped that week somebody had noticed and passed the word along that some of the side exits in the stadium were not guarded and so we had just walked out. And got out of town fast, very fast, hitchhiking back north to Carver first, and me later going back to Troy).

Hence the push by Sam toward the study groups led by “red collectives” that were sprouting up then peopled by others who had the same kind of questions. Collectives  which we would join, unjoin and work with, or not work with over the next few years before both of us sensed the tide of the rolling 1960s had ebbed. 

Old time high school thoughts even with the cross-fire hells of burned down Vietnam villages melted into the back of his brain crossed my mind when I first thought of Marx, Lenin (I, we, were not familiar with Trotsky except he had “bought it” down in Mexico with an icepick from some assassin), Joe Stalin, Red Square, Moscow and commie dupes. Sam had not been far behind in his own youthful prejudices as he told me one night after a class and we were tossing down a few at Jack’s in Cambridge before heading home to the commune where Sam was staying. That was the summer of 1972, the year I broke from my father’s business and spent the summer in Cambridge, the summer I first met Joyell, her waving in the breeze NLF flag and her jet black hair and pale blue eyes. 

I had gone out of my way to note in a blog entry for Fritz Jasper’s New York VFP chapter that before I got “religion” on the anti-war and later social justice issues I had held as many anti-communist prejudices as anybody else in Troy, New York, not excluding my rabidly right-wing father who never really believed until his dying days in 2005 that the United States had lost the war in Vietnam. I had realized that all the propaganda he had been fed was like the wind and my realization of that had made me a very angry young man from the time I got out of the Army onward. I tried to talk to my father about it but Ralph, Senior was hung up by a combination “good war, World War II, his war where America saved international civilization from the Nazis and Nips (my father’s term since he fought in the Pacific with the Marines) and “my country, right or wrong.” All Ralph, Senior really wanted me to do ever was to get back to the shop and help him fill those goddam GE defense contract orders. And like I said I did it, for a while.

I had also in that blog entry expressed my feelings of trepidation when after a lot of things went south on the social justice front with damn little to show for all the arrests, deaths, and social cataclysm when me and Sam had gotten into a latter study group in Cambridge run by a “Red October Collective.” That group focused on studying “Che” Guevara and the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky after an earlier introduction to the Marxist classics. Sam was constantly trying to figure out why we were spinning our wheels trying to change the world for the better just then and to think about new strategies and tactics for the next big break-out of social activism so he would drag me along half-kicking and screaming. At the end of each meeting we would sing the Internationale before the group broke up. At first I had a hard time with the idea of singing a “commie” song (I didn’t put it that way but I might as well have according to Sam) unlike something like John Lennon’s Give Peace A Chance, songs like that. As I, we got immersed in the group I lightened up and would sing along if not with gusto then without a snicker.

That same apprehensive attitude had prevailed when after about three meetings we began to study what the group leader, Jeremy, called classic Marxism strategy, the line from Marx and Engels to Lenin and the Bolsheviks. A couple of the early classes had dealt with the American Civil War and its relationship to the class struggle in America, and Marx’s views on what was happening, why it was necessary for all progressives to side with the North and the end of slavery, and why despite his personal flaws and attitudes toward blacks Abraham Lincoln was a figure to admire. All of which neither of us knew much about except the battles and military leaders in American History classes.

What caused the most fears and consternation for me was the need for revolution worked out in practice during the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917. I could see that it was necessary in Russia during those times but America in the 1970s was a different question, not to speak of the beating that we had taken for being “uppity” in the streets in Washington, D.C. in 1971 when we were not thinking thought one about revolution (maybe others had such ideas but if so they kept them to themselves) and the state came crashing down on us anyway.    

At the beginning in any case, and that might have affected my ultimate decision, some of my old habits kind of held me back, you know the anti-red stuff, Cold War enemy stuff, just like at first I had had trouble despite all I knew about Vietnam, what it had to meant to me and my buddies, that the other side had the better argument in history calling for victory to the Viet Cong.  But I got over it, got in the swing, mostly. Joyell and her energy helped a lot then too. And I still think that was the right outcome. Enough said.  

The Marxism did not come easy, the theory part, maybe for me a little more than Sam who had taken junior college night classes to bolster the small print shop he had built from nothing after Mister Snyder moved his operation to Quincy to be nearer his main client, State Street Bank and Trust (although for long periods his old Carver friend, Jack Callahan, managed the place when Sam was off on his, our anti-war campaigns). We got that the working-class, our class, should rule and be done with inequalities of all kinds but the idea of a revolution, or more importantly, a working class party which was on everybody’s mind in those days to lead that revolution seemed, well, utopian. The economic theory behind Marxism, that impossible to read Das Capital and historical materialism as a philosophy were books sealed with seven seals for us both. Nevertheless for a few years, say until 1975, 1976 when the tide really had ebbed for anybody who wanted to see we hung around with the local “reds,” mostly those interested in third world liberation struggles and political prisoner defense work.

Those were really our earnest “socialist years” although if you had asked us for a model of what our socialism looked like we probably would have pointed to Cuba which seemed fresher than the stodgy old Soviet Union with their Brezhnev bureaucrats. Yeah, those were heady times, we made a ton of mistakes but one that we didn’t make was having silent thrills in our hearts when the DNV/NLF troops came swooping down on Saigon April of 1975. Even if I gave the slightest pause at first hearing.