Where Have All The Flowers Gone -Josie's Tale Redux

Where Have All The Flowers Gone-Josie's Tale Redux   

Josie had to laugh, an ironic laugh to be sure, about the days when she had met her first serious beau, Jeff Patterson, freshman year at Wisconsin. (She had had guys, mostly nice Jewish boys that her mother picked out for her but also a few met through her friend and classmate at Hunter College High who was also immersed in the Village folk scene, one who "deflowered" her, although she was ready to be deflowered if it came to that while in high school. Naturally she lied like the devil even to Frida for a while before Frida wore her down and proclaimed to one and all she was a virgin if for no other reason than she didn't want every  guy she met to expect her to "haul his ashes" as the old blues standard had it.) 

Of course coming from the big city, from New York she had to get used to the smaller scale of things on campus, smaller although the campus was large by college, public college standards, it was no bigger than the apartment complex she had grown up in Manhattan, in Stuyvesant Town, and the more sanitary slower life-style of not having to hail taxicabs, having campus buses come on time, no rushing from store to store over any blocks since downtown was for her several shopping blocks and that was it since she was not concerned with the various governmental buildings in the capital, but after a few weeks she adjusted, an adjustment made easier by her roommate from Chicago, Susan Phillips who was totally unlike girls like her high school best friends Dora, Frida and the JAPs (Jewish-American Princesses in the parlance of the time, maybe now too except the princess probably is not capitalized in these more democratic times) from Hunter College High who were catty and devastating to those who were not JAPs, or not on the prowl at Hunter. Susan was the daughter of a kosher meat butcher, a working-class Jewish girl a type of Jew except for Uncle Rudy, her father Nathan’s older brother who was a bricklayer, that she was not familiar with.

Susan was smart but also less pretentious in her manner than any girl at Hunter, including Frida, who were using that institution as a resume builder in order to catch some rich Jewish husband from Long Island, something like that. Susan was different as well in that she did not eat, drink, breath her Jewishness unlike Josie and her brown-eyed, brown-haired, brown everything world crowd but had a boyfriend, a blue-eyed blonde boyfriend, Jason Robbs, from Racine who was into folk music, illegally drinking at the constant frat parties in the Quad, involved in a serious campus project against nuclear proliferation and whose friends were too. Normal Midwestern kids.

Susan had met Jason at the Rathskeller, a hang-out for all Freshman since officially they could not go into the bars that dotted the streets around the Quad, where he was tuning up his guitar to go out into the Quad and sing for a crowd that would gather anytime a singer who could actually sing, some couldn’t if you can believe that but were just being blown in the wind by the craze and playing to the girls that came to listen in hopes of a date or something, would strum a tune, something from the protest songs that were then becoming a staple of the folk milieu. Susan had asked him what he would sing and among the songs on his playlist he listed Pete Seeger’s Where Have All The Flowers Gone which she had only heard once on the campus radio folk hour on one Sunday night but which she had liked. Jason said he would dedicate the song to her and that and a couple of other pleasantries on his part eventually led to that boyfriend status.

Susan certainly was a pleasant roommate to have around but here is where the laugh part of what Josie was thinking about came into view. It was through Susan, or rather through Jason that Josie met Rudy Jones, Jason’s roommate from, Oxbridge, a small town outside of Milwaukee who was even more political than Jason since he organized stuff on campus through Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and was building a reputation as a radical in the Quad. He was a blue-eyed, brown haired guy, slender and could talk a mile a minute which fascinated her. Had, he said, two thousand facts at his disposal for any occasion and guarded then like a king’s ransom. Josie had known plenty of guys, Jewish guys she dated at her mother’s whim who had two thousand facts at their disposal but unlike Rudy they had some motive for knowing them, some get ahead motive and so they didn’t guard them with any kind of intensity like Rudy. More importantly Rudy seemed to pay special attention to her and while he was a campus big shot politico he rather shyly, almost apologetically, asked her for a date after a few talks with her. Naturally that winsome approach got him a date, got him plenty of dates if anybody was asking.

Here is the funny part their first date almost didn’t happen, or rather almost didn’t lead into another. Of course in those days rich or poor the guy, especially on the first date, was supposed to ante up the dough for the date. Rudy though was a dirt poor kid, a working class kid at Madison on scholarship and financial aid and so he was worried about whether he would have enough to cover his expenses on this date. See the cheap dates then, the cheapest except maybe going to some ill-lit cafeteria and having a seemingly see-through cup of coffee and watching the winos, con men, hoboes, drifters and other nightly flotsam and jetsam do their thing hardly the stuff to impress on the first date, was to hit the coffeehouses which also dotted the Quad. The one “assigned” to the Freshmen was the Grog (a whole sociology dissertation could have been written about the social class structure and where each class could or could not be seen at that university then but that would have to await another day) and that night Guy Vander, an up and coming folk singer who did covers of guys like Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, and Josh White was playing  so beside the coffees and maybe a shared pastry he would have to throw a couple of dollars into the “basket” that would be passed around and which up and coming folk singers used to keep themselves going, at least keeping some ill-disposed rent collector from the door.

Borrowing a dollar from Jason Rudy though he would be okay. Rudy picked up Josie who looked lovely that night in a skirt and peasant blouse that all the folkie women were wearing then having seen Joan Baez or Judy Collin wearing one in a performance and so everyone, every young woman who wanted to make a statement had to run out and get one, or rather more than one since unlike the flannel shirt, black chinos, sneakers young folk men young folk woman at that time still would not be seen in the same outfit too often (same thing with the long-ironed straight hair look that Joan Baez pioneered but Josie had such frizzled hair it would have she said taken a steamroller to get the damn thing straight so she gave up the one time she tried it and scorched her hair although she did wear that fizzled hair much longer than she had in high school and made her oval-shaped face more attractive).

They talked as they walked to the Grog, or rather Rudy talked a mile a minute about Guy who had gone to Wisconsin and about an anti-nuclear bomb demonstration he, Rick, was helping to plan on campus. When they got to the Grog they found a table for two toward the back which Josie was pleased about since he might hold her hand, something like that at least that is what she hoped, that is what she thought Rudy was about with women. Rudy ordered the obligatory two coffees and asked Josie if she wanted some pastry thing to eat with the coffee (this coffee or some drink other than tap water thing was a necessity since although the place did not charge a cover you had to buy something to have in front of you or face the boot out the door to let paying customers in). She said they could share a brownie. Rudy breathed a sigh of relief.

Guy came on shortly after and did great job on the first set especially on Pete Seeger’s Where Have All The Flowers Gone which was starting to become very popular on campuses among the myriad students worried about whether there would be a tomorrow what with the nuclear bomb threat hanging over everything that happened in the world. Shortly before intermission though Josie said she was thirsty and a little tired so she would like another coffee to perk her up (and also to help finish off the that brownie she was nibbling at since she was a little nervous about whether Rudy would like her since she had not been out with a non-Jewish boy since she was a junior at Hunter College High in Manhattan, Ted Higgins, a budding folksinger who after a few dates went off to try and “find himself” and had only selected, by mother or friends, “nice Jewish boys after that). Rudy looked stricken at that moment.

Josie now with her father’s good fortune through Uncle Larry not having had to worry about money or about asking her “nice Jewish boys” whether they could afford to pay on a date, momentarily thought it was something she had done or said to make him turn red like that. Then a light bulb or something went off in her head and she rescinded her request by say “maybe I had better not have another cup I have to get up early to study for that Western Civ test Monday and the coffee would keep me up all night if I have it this late.” Beautiful, and Rudy immediately relaxed. As they were leaving after the second set was over and Rudy had paid the check and put that couple of bucks in the basket Josie said, “Hey, that anti-nuclear protest of yours is going to require all your money so next time let me pay, call it a donation, okay.” Needless to say there would a next date, more than one, no question.