This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager
Poet’s Corner- Langston Hughes- Lincoln Memorial: Washington
Lincoln Memorial: Washington
Let's go see Old Abe Sitting in the marble and the moonlight, Sitting lonely in the marble and the moonlight, Quiet for ten thousand centuries, old Abe. Quiet for a million, million years.
Quiet-
And yet a voice forever Against the Timeless walls Of time- Old Abe.
…he, Father Abraham he, pug-ugly he that no monument chiseled stone could render beautiful (damn, that age of photography, that Mathew Brady and his merry band, that damn warts and all pre-digital photography, when a painterly touch, say Winslow Homer’s, might have made him, well, just plain). Yes, warts and all, sitting arched in stone in judgment, eternity self-judgment (did he do this or that right to further furrow his brow first of all, overall, preliminary assessment right on union and abolition). He, furrowed and pug-ugly, thus no catch for gentile Kentucky bourbon belle daughters, or so it seemed, all Kentuck born and Illini-bred (where the best they could do was say nigra when talking about the slave problem. And later, much later the sons and grandsons of poor as dirt Kentuck hills and hollows mountain boys, Harlan County roughs, picked that up nigra expression too, and went to their graves with that on their lips,jesus.). He all keep the races split, let them, the blacks, (nigras, remember) go back to Canaan land, go back to Africa, go to some not union place but keep them out ofChi town (sounds familiar) had a conversion, maybe not a conversion so muchas a lining up of his beliefs with his walk the walk talk.
So he ran for president, President of the United States, not as a son of William Lloyd Garrison, all Newburyport prissy and hell-bent on damning the Constitution, his Abe well-thumbed, well-read constitution , or some reformedwild boy Liberty man barely contained in the Fremont Republican dust but a busted out Whig when whiggery went to ground, (hell, no, on that tack, otherwise he would still be stuck in Springfield or maybe practicing law in bell-weather podunk Peoria, although he would note what that burg had to say and move slowly). Nor was he some righteous son, Thoreau or Emerson-etched son, of fiery-maned Calvinist sword-in-hand black avenging angel Captain John Brown, late of Kansas blood wars and Harpers Ferry liberation fight (he had no desire to share the Captain’s blood-soaked fate, mocked his bloody efforts in fact, as if only immense bloods would render the national hurts harmless when later the hills, hollows and blue-green valleys reeked of blood and other stenches).
His goal, simple goal (in the abstract), was to hold the union together, and to curb that damn land hunger slavery, that national abyss. And since they ran politics differently in those days (no women, latinos, nigras to fuss over) and were able to touch up a picture or two (and stretch his biographic facts a bit when the “wide awakes” awoke) he won, barely won but won. And then all hell broke loose, and from day one, from some stormy March day one, he had to bend that big long boney pug-ugly body to the winds, his winds.
And he did, not unequivocally, not John Brown prophet proud, fearlessly facing his gallows and his maker, to erase the dripping blood and canker sore from his homeland, but in a revolutionary way nevertheless, broke down slavery’s house divided, broke it down, no quarter given when the deal went down. So more like some latter day Oliver Cromwell (another warts and all man) pushing providence forward with a little kick. More like old Robespierre flaming the masses with the new dispensation, the new word slave freedom. Kept freeing slaves as he went along, kept pushing that freedom envelope, kept pushing his generals south and west and east and tightening , anaconda tightening, the noose on the old ways until Johnny Reb cried uncle, cried his fill when righteous Sherman and his cutthroat bummers got to work too. Yes, old Father Abraham, the last of the revolutionary democrats, the last of the serious ones, who couldn’t say black better that nigra, and never could, but knew the old enlightenment freedom word, knew it good.
…and now he belongs to the ages, and rightfully so, warts and all.
The Cold Civil Heats Up-In Fear For The Republic-Dump
The Trump-No More Years-Channeling Robert F. Kennedy, 1968- Winnowing Out The
Challengers-Who Has The Stomach To Go Down In The Mud To Take Back This Country-Kamala
(Finally Got It Right) Harris In Portsmouth, NH February 19th
An on-going series until January 20, 2021 by Frank
Jackman
These days, these anguished fearful days I find myself
increasingly channeling beloved Robert F. Kennedy, laid low by an assassin’s
bullet in 1968 just when his high tide was coming in. In those days among other
things which I will get around to later in this series when I have little
off-hand time for sweet schoolboy reminiscences I was fearful for the Republic,
was worried that things were getting so out of hand what with the no end in
sight Vietnam War blazing and dividing the country in almost civil war terms
then as well, viciously suppressed inner city black community uprisings and the
political low road ascendant with one Richard Milhous Nixon and one George
Wallace scorching the earth all forms of political death were in the air
including assassinations of political leaders.
At that time, that 1968 what knows what will happen time,
being a good old Massachusetts boy who at fourteen years of age had knocked on
doors and distributed leaflets for one of our own, our Irish boy made good,
Jack Kennedy in the fall of 1960 (while also having in that period attended a
nuclear disarmament rally on Boston Common sponsored by what would later be
called “peaceniks” but were mainly Quakers and pacifists to show the
contradictionsof the times, and the
contradictions of one Frank Jackman) I could name the villain of the piece. One
Richard Milhous Nixon, petty criminal, low-blow artist and bum of the month who
would go to be President of the United States (POTUS henceforth in today’s Twitter-speak) before the wheels went
off his train and he sulked his way to eternal infamy out in the Pacific Japan
currents.
I would not have put the matter of my concerns in
those days as being fearful for the Republic but in retrospect that is what got
me off my dime to go and work like seven whirling dervishes for beloved Robert
Kennedy all along the East Coast, working with everybody from idealistic “seek
a newer world” college students like myself (not then knowing that RFK had
“cribbed” that expression from Alfred Lord Tennyson on the fly but that was
okay then, and now) to the old-time still standing ward healer bosses like
Meade Esposito and Carmen De Sapio in hothouse New York. Though nothing of earnestly
committing to what was a united front of all those against the devil, unblessed
RMN. These days when I have been able to articulate better my fears I have the
same sinking feelings that we are in for continued hard times if we don’t take
this country back from the night-takers and new league of bums of the month
headed by one Donald Trump, POTUS, petty thief, Putin’s poodle and every evil
associated with RMN writ large. One wag said memorially “Nixon on steroids.”
I headlined this piece which will be a continuing
watch word in this series from now until the next presidential inauguration in
2021 with the dire warning that the cold civil war that has gripped this
country for the last couple of decades has over the past few years and
particularly the past couple heated up. Heated up enough to get me off my own
dime-again. Made me realize that whatever else I might think about the virtues
and vices of a Republic (especially against the long discredited “divine right
of kings” which seems to be the operating principle if that is the right term to
be used in anything talk related to this current administration that is in play
now) it is easier, much easier to work my left-wing politics under the norms of
a Republic than having to look over my shoulder and worry about being sent to
the bastinado every time I get my dander up to go out on the streets and get
“uppity” around some cause.
That feeling has not been one that I have personally
operated on for a long time, mainly going about my left-wing business out in
the streets without feeling I was headed to some dire blackhole fate. Let me be
clear although my experiences in the American Army during Vietnam War times (at
a time when Richard Milhous Nixon was ironically my “commander-in-chief”)
pushed me in a very different direction from those heady Spring of 1968 days
when I was planning to be a consummate bourgeois politician (mucking around
with Esposito and DeSapio serving as an apprenticeship) I had not felt a need
to worry about the fate of the Republic, one way or the other. Now all bets are
off. Now I am ready to make a pact with the devil, make a united front with all
who wish to oppose this drift away from even basic democratic republican
values.
So right now, I and a few others, unfortunately not
any of my old-time neighborhood corner boys from the Acre in North Adamsville
who continue to declare a “pox on both houses,” Democratic and Republican, are
working through how to most effectively work to get the country back. Right now,
that means, and this is hard for me to say after fifty years of purposefully
working against or avoiding the Democratic Party and its various candidates and
working instead on the issues, mostly around war and peace, I, we are doing our
own personal winnowing out of the candidates, announced and unannounced, who look
to challenge the Donald come 2020. Right now, as well we are policy wonks
looking to see who has the best projected program if they actually defeat Trump
and want to implement things to turn this place around.
Today, today in February 2019, a long year away from
the main actions for nominations I have already staked some ground out in what
I am looking for in winnowing out candidates. This is where beloved Robert
Kennedy rears his head again. Bobby, yeah, let me call him Bobby, could spin
pure gold with his visions and his quasi-Irish poet understandings and cut your
balls off the next minute if you opposed Jack or wanted to take the low road on
some issue important to him-you would wind up in political Siberia and even
your family would not weep for your exile. Then, and now too, just my kind of
candidate. (In that poetic sweepstakes his then Democratic Party opponent after
Lyndon Johnson fell into a crying fit and quit Minnesota Senator Eugene
McCarthy was the real poet without Bobby’s ruthless streak though)
Today as the field expands to some exponentially
impossible number what I am looking for since there are plenty of candidates
with at least minimally supportable programs is what I would call the character
issue for short. All the great programs in the world will, as is graphically
clear these days when things are actually being driven the other way, are so
much dust, so much hot air if a candidate does not understand from the past
three years at least, that 2020 will be a “street fight,” a nasty affair no
question. The question I and my co-thinkers these days will be posing
point-blank and in person if candidates show up in Massachusetts or New
Hampshire, maybe Maine is do they have the stomach to go down the low road to
get elected, to go “down in the mud” with Trump to become POTUS. More, much
more later.
*******
A first wetting of the feet as communicated to those
who are part of a an expanding cohort who are looking for and ready to back one
candidate who we feel can win first the Democratic Party nomination and then
whip the tyrant’s ass:
Report Back From Kamala Harris 2020 Presidential
Campaign Event-Portsmouth, NH -February 18, 2019-
Forward this e-mail to interested parties in your
social network who are looking at 2020 in early 2019 so therefore untamed
political animals like us.
This report was written before I received news that
Senator Bernie Sanders had entered the race for the White House. I am wondering
whether the very positive turn out for Kamala Harris in Portsmouth forced his
hand a bit or whether this was his game plan all along.
[This a contribution to our on-going conversation
about who to support in the 2020 Presidential election cycle in an attempt to
gather a cohort of like-mined organizers around one candidate, if possible, to
have a greater impact on the selected campaign and candidate.
We have generally agreed that right now we are “window
shopping” as the various campaigns roll out and splash in New Hampshire and
that is probably best until the Spring anyway if not until June when the first
debates take place. We have also generally agreed and if I am wrong chime in
that “winnability” is a key factor up to a point (the Biden point). I would
only add here the other factor I am looking at since I think we also generally
agree that 2020 will be a down and dirty “street fight.” All the candidates
have “the fire in the belly” or else they would have backed off like Deval
Patrick and others, but do they have “the stomach to go down in the mud”
against Trump, not in kind for that is worthless but to show some serious grit.
Fight the low blows from the start when they will, hell, have already come.
This time out it is sadly the low road or no road. I’d like other opinions on
what amounts to this “character” issue. Frank Jackman]
********
Pat Riley, Connie Kelly and Frank Jackman attended
this event
Pat, Connie and I arrived about 3 PM for the event
scheduled from 4-6 PM at the U/U Church in downtown Portsmouth and found we
were “late.”(Yawn, what place would you
expect Sen. Harris to speak at but a U/U venue, right U/U partisan Bob Williams).
What we found was that there was a line that extended around a few blocks and
we were pissed off that we had not come earlier as originally planned since we
did not expect to get in and did not want to watch the event out in the street
in the snow and cold on the screen the campaign had set up.
We did get in although up in the balcony which
precluded our being able to ask the Senator any questions. The crowd was
estimated by the fire department I believe to be over one thousand. I am not
sure whether that included the hundred to one hundred and fifty who watched on
the hallowed basement of the church where an additional screen was positioned.
The size of the crowd surprised me as I figured that based on the snow, the
distance from the February 2020 primary, and the lesser name recognition of the
candidate, that maybe a couple of hundred diehards would show. (Connie was the
only one who thought she would draw a big crowd.) The crowd, a mix of young and
old, the vast majority white, the state by the 2010 census was 2% black and 93%
white which must make it one of the whitest states in the country, was patient
maybe reflecting the old New England character with our freaking weather.
The event pretty much ran on time and ended on time
with not much pre-speech build-up except an introduction by a NH state senator
whose name I didn’t get and who is chairing the Harris campaign in NH. In her
fairly short speech Senator Harris, as all serious politicians do, honed-in on
her stump issues. Her overall theme was that while acknowledging the deep
divides in America that we as a nation have more in common that what separates
us. For now, she is going the high road as she works out the kinks in her
message. Senator Harris seems to be staking out a position on the
left-supporting the litmus test issues-Medicare for All, Green New Deal Plan,
No Wall, a more humane immigration policy, serious attention to the impending disasters
with climate change, fighting the opioid addiction problem (acute in NH). She
addressed other issues in the question and answer period generally on a
left-liberal, progressive agenda line. What was not addressed in either segment
were any issues around the huge military budget or foreign policy which I am
not sure was by design or because she was playing to her audience.
Speaking of audience when it came time for question
and answers, I am not sure whether campaigns “plan” this stuff, but all the
questions she receives were “soft ball” hit out of the ball park things. This
is where in response to questions she answered that she favored a comprehensive
prescription drug policy, more help for the elderly and chronically ill,
support to the union and union organizing movement in answer to a question from
a former Portsmouth Naval base worker (although nothing about the fight for
$15), support for an NH bill fighting against voter suppression and making it
easier to register and vote (which drew one of the big applauses of the day),
increased gun ownership requirement invoking Parkland and other horrors, and
support for stripping the bastard Columbus of his designated day and making the
day Indigenous Peoples Day.
*******
I made a special effort to talk to people to see why
they had come because frankly I was impressed not only by the turnout but how
they found out about the event and why they were there as I grabbed as much on
the ground political intelligence as I could. Granted it has been a long time
since I have been involved in presidential politics but I wondered how much of
the crowd turnout for Senator Harris reflected her very public role grilling
Brent Kavanaugh at the Judiciary Committee hearings (a lot), being a woman (a
fair amount), being an interracial woman (hard to tell but important in the
long run), and having a much better organization on the ground than I would has
suspected in NH this early (by comparison somebody I talked who had been at a
Sen. Booker event in Portsmouth on Saturday and said it was very much smaller).
Of course, the elephant in the room, especially for
the young (many of whom I saw busily texting during the event) is the role of
social media in the organizing efforts. In other conversations after the event
I talked to longtime NH residents who told me that every four years this stuff
is a rite of passage and there is a certain “competition” to see who goes to
the most events, etc. So that is an element as well as is the fact greater
Portsmouth unlike say North Conway or places like that is a Democratic Party
stronghold, especially with the conversion of Pease AF base to civilian uses
and increased working class jobs and more affordable housing in the area in
places like Exeter (even fairly rural Newfield about twenty miles away and the
home of the governor Hilary polled 68%)
Evaluation based solely on this event: Senator Harris
as an experienced politician is good on her feet in answering questions. Her
style also reflected her obvious personal concern for the downtrodden, the hurt
and the underappreciated in this society and her own life story which she
alluded to at several points. While I am far from being ready to dismiss her
candidacy like I have done on others I left the event not feeling strongly that
she has “the stomach to go down in the mud” with Trump and his crazed
supporters. It will take a less friendly environment to see how she
reacts.
Final notes: Pat and I were interviewed by NBC News
(not bad for day one of our campaign) and Friendly
Toast has good food for those of us who will be seeing more of the Seacoast
area in the next year that we thought possible. (That Friendly visit via some gift certificates I won in our last VFP
live fund-raiser so all the sweeter.)
Out In The Black Liberation Night- The Black Panthers And The Struggle For The Ten-Point Program- Eight –No More Jail Cells
Jesus, how did he, let’s leave him nameless at his request but his story is legion, legion in black ghetto America and brown Latino barrio America too ever since Mister and his damn cop justice system decided to go after drugs, small change drugs really, get caught up in the dragnet this time, just as he was starting to get things in his life under control, a little. His teenage years had been one hell after another once his father left, left rolling stone left with some woman not his mother and was down south somewhere according to his paternal grandmother and his mother had taken up, undivided attention taken up, with some Johnny Blade (not a bad guy really but not his father, no way, not a guy to talk to about his troubles since as he made plain his undivided attention was to his mother).
First thing was that first “clip” bust at thirteen (laughable when he thought about it now, some damn onyx ring, snagged under his shirt so cool he thought from over at Mister Earl’sjunk jewelry two- bit joint, a two-bit joint which had been in the neighborhood for as long as anybody could remember, even his grandmother over on Warren,now with a big old monitor cruising the premises, that he just had to have for Shara’ s Valentine present, long gone and now forgotten Shara), then a couple more small robbery, burglary things (stealthy midnight creeps through back alleys and shimmied windows in the neighborhood apartments, close to home stealing ), then dropping out of school (that too to spent time with some Shara, although that was not her name, name now not remembered), then a “go to jail or go to the army, or else” thing from the that old whitebread judge who thought he was doing him a favor, getting him out of the hard streets harms’ way when he and two other confederates (who took the time, and had been taking time ever since for one thing or another) did one too many midnight creeps.
The judge favor turned out being that he had two little purple hearts from two- tour Iraq courtesy of Saddam Hussein’s boys, or somebody nasty in Baghdad. Then back to the streets the down streets of Boston, really Roxbury, you know around Washington Street and Geneva his old home turf and its change from just a neighborhood, the ‘hood of child remembrance to something else, a free-fire zone of a different kind.
And you know too that a guy, a black guy, even a purple heart black guy, without any real education, without some serviceable skill (nothing but a damn 11-Bravo to tout, nothing), and without some luck, real luck was up against it, up against it when the cops were always looking you up and down for just walking since he got back to the “real world” (he had been eye-balled and stopped twice right after he got back from Iraq and hell he was in uniform one time and they could see the damn purple hearts). So, you know, he took up “the life” again, the life this time meaning no small time Mr. Earl cheap jack jewel clips and midnight creep robberies (kids’ stuff) but working his way up the chain in the burgeoning local drug scene.
And he was doing okay for a while until one night they, and you know who the “they” was, came smashing down the door at the safe house over on Norfolk (somebody had snitched, somebody not alive right now if you want to know) and he was taken in. He did a year at South Bay for that one. It was there that he got “religion.” No, not some damn Black Muslim thing, or god holy roller thing, jesus, no, but, you know, wise to the hard fact that if he was going to make thirty (a milestone for a young black man according to some stuff he read from some report some foundation did while he was in and reading a magazine from the library after GED classes were over one day) his life flow was going against that prospect. And so he changed, changed a little, got a job through the VA, not much of a job, but steady, a short order cook and was moving along. Then this night of all nights he decided that he wanted to see a friend, not being exactly sure why but maybe a little wobbly on that straight and narrow,from the old neighborhood, yes, bad move, the guy he visited related to the drug trade and he was just present when they came storming in. Thirty ain’t looking so good tonight…
The original "Ten Point Program" from October, 1966 was as follows:[39][40]
1. We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our black Community.
We believe that black people will not be free until we are able to determine our destiny.
2. We want full employment for our people.
We believe that the federal government is responsible and obligated to give every man employment or a guaranteed income. We believe that if the white American businessmen will not give full employment, then the means of production should be taken from the businessmen and placed in the community so that the people of the community can organize and employ all of its people and give a high standard of living.
3. We want an end to the robbery by the white man of our black Community.
We believe that this racist government has robbed us and now we are demanding the overdue debt of forty acres and two mules. Forty acres and two mules was promised 100 years ago as restitution for slave labor and mass murder of black people. We will accept the payment as currency which will be distributed to our many communities. The Germans are now aiding the Jews in Israel for the genocide of the Jewish people. The Germans murdered six million Jews. The American racist has taken part in the slaughter of over 50 million black people; therefore, we feel that this is a modest demand that we make.
4. We want decent housing, fit for shelter of human beings.
We believe that if the white landlords will not give decent housing to our black community, then the housing and the land should be made into cooperatives so that our community, with government aid, can build and make decent housing for its people.
5. We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in the present-day society.
We believe in an educational system that will give to our people a knowledge of self. If a man does not have knowledge of himself and his position in society and the world, then he has little chance to relate to anything else.
6. We want all black men to be exempt from military service.
We believe that black people should not be forced to fight in the military service to defend a racist government that does not protect us. We will not fight and kill other people of color in the world who, like black people, are being victimized by the white racist government of America. We will protect ourselves from the force and violence of the racist police and the racist military, by whatever means necessary.
7. We want an immediate end to POLICE BRUTALITY and MURDER of black people.
We believe we can end police brutality in our black community by organizing black self-defense groups that are dedicated to defending our black community from racist police oppression and brutality. The Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States gives a right to bear arms. We therefore believe that all black people should arm themselves for self defense.
8. We want freedom for all black men held in federal, state, county and city prisons and jails.
We believe that all black people should be released from the many jails and prisons because they have not received a fair and impartial trial.
9. We want all black people when brought to trial to be tried in court by a jury of their peer group or people from their black communities, as defined by the Constitution of the United States.
We believe that the courts should follow the United States Constitution so that black people will receive fair trials. The 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution gives a man a right to be tried by his peer group. A peer is a person from a similar economic, social, religious, geographical, environmental, historical and racial background. To do this the court will be forced to select a jury from the black community from which the black defendant came. We have been, and are being tried by all-white juries that have no understanding of the "average reasoning man" of the black community.
10. We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace. And as our major political objective, a United Nations-supervised plebiscite to be held throughout the black colony in which only black colonial subjects will be allowed to participate for the purpose of determining the will of black people as to their national destiny.
When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self- evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly, all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But, when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariable the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.
February Is Black History Month “I pick up my life And take it with me And I put it down in Chicago, Detroit, Buffalo, Scranton, Any place that is North and East, And not Dixie. “I pick up my life And take it on the train To Los Angeles, Bakersfield Seattle, Oakland, Salt Lake— Any place that is North and West, And not South. “I am fed up With Jim Crow laws, People who are cruel And afraid, Who lynch and run, Who are scared of me And me of them. “I pick up my life And take it away On a one-way ticket— Gone up North, Gone out West, Gone!”
Happy Birthday Frederick Douglass-
A New Biography
Click on link to hear a
serious biographer of Frederick Douglass the revolutionary abolitionist who broke
with the William Lloyd Garrison-wing of the movement when the times called for remorseless
military fighting against the entrenched slave-holders and their allies. This from
Christopher Lydon’s Open Source program
on NPR.
This is what you need to
know about Frederick Douglass and the anti-slavery, the revolutionary abolitionist
fight. He was the man, the shining q star black man who led the fight for black
men to join the Union Army and not just either be treated as freaking contraband
or worse, as projected in early in the war by the Lincoln administration the return
of fugitive slaves to “loyal” slave-owners. Led the fight to not only seek an
emancipation proclamation as part of the struggle but a remorseless and probably
long struggle to crush slavery and slaver-owners and their hanger-on militarily.
Had been ticketed at a desperate moment in 1864 to recreate a John Brown scenario
if they logjam between North and South in Virginia had not been broken. Yes, a
bright shining northern star black man.
Click on the headline to link to a NPR On Point Radio program about the 150th anniversary of the start of the American Civil War.
Markin comment:
My part of the headline makes my point clearly enough here.
When All Hell Broke Out And The Army Half-Mutinied In The Heat Of The Vietnam War-One Generation of ’68 Story On The 50th Anniversary Of His Induction-And Maybe A Cautionary Tale-For The Army
By Frank Jackman
Some anniversaries like say the start of the French, American and Russian revolutions are world-historic events and should be given a nod to every five of ten years in a big way complete with updates on where they stand in the up and down of human history. (I remember being somewhat shocked when Zhou-En-Lai the old Communist foreign minister under Mao who never was on the losing side of a faction fight remarking that the lessons of the French Revolution had not run their course in his time-today either.) Same with specific events related to decisive political events like the establishment (and demise) of the leftist historic Paris Commune of 1871 which gets commemorated in this publication every year hence such awkward designations as 144th and so on. Then there is the purely personal political events commemoration like the one mentioned in the headline to this piece-the also decisive 50th anniversary of my induction into the U.S. Army in January 1969 which in its own way has reverberated unto this day. (Strictly private personal events like birthdays, weddings, and new relationships are found in appropriate places in stories written for this and other publications by me and others some who like myself were “present at the creation” in 1974 when this whole business got started.)
I was, frankly, not going to make any effort to commemorate this personal event since the story has been told several times by various writers here who know what happened, and what by the same token, had happened to them in that unhappy youth time which ravaged this country to the core and we have been fighting a rearguard action ever since for not winning back then when the world was young and we were knee-deep in seeking a newer world. That cohort of writers among those who I grew up with in the desperately poor Acre section of North Adamsville took different routes than I although we wound up in the same place after the dust was cleared-forevermore hostile to wars, and rumors of war which have plagued our existences since then.
The initial impetus for deciding to “tell all” about that military experience had been oddly in the response by several readers to a recent film review of the 2018 film The Post where I mentioned in passing my own way of opposing the Vietnam War when it counted as did heroic whistle-blower Dan Ellsberg in “leaking” what became The Pentagon Papers to the public via the major newspapers. The gist of what these readers said is that they were unaware of my experience (a few related their own experiences at the time monotonously familiar) and that I should tell my story on my own hook, as a cautionary tale if nothing else.
That readership urging would not have been enough though if on an assignment for another publication I had not landed in San Francisco to follow up on that story (and where I am writing this piece). As is not unusual these days San Francisco for me and other old time Acre corner boys like Alex James is flooded with memories of the late Pete Markin, another of the cohort I grew up with, who couldn’t go the distance, who fell down for a lot of reasons including sheer hubris and wound up with a couple of slugs in his head done in not so sunny Sonora, in Mexico when some outlandish drug deal which was going to put him on easy street went very wrong under circumstances which are still shrouded in mystery. Just the way the bastard would have liked it. I was not thinking so much of Pete’s military service where he was fatefully in more ways than one drafted, also inducted into the U.S. Army about a year before I was but the halcyon days of the Summer of Love, 1967 which he was the first to partake in and dragged the rest of us, most of us I think except Brad Webber, out here to the Western end of the world, to the place where everything goes to the China Seas.
I won’t go into detail on that 1967 experience, or on what amounted to Markin’s fateful decision to drop out of college to see what was happening out here which in turn led to that induction notice because I have, and others as well, especially when Allan Jackson, also one of the Markinp-dragged crowd was the site manager before being pushed out by the younger writers. The only thing I will say is that Pete was really a prophet when he somehow sensed early in the 1960s when the rest of us were worried about getting a car, getting laid, getting dough all mixed together he kept harping that a new breeze was coming-and then it came. Too bad the silly bastard that we still shed tears over every time we mention his name couldn’t have gotten out of his own way. Yeah, the silly beautiful bastard who has left us here to mourn him fifty years later.
Talking to the guys I am still in touch from back in the Acre as well as the few who write here on occasion, I have been taken aback by how much that whole period of the Vietnam War affected every guy who came of military age. I have mentioned the Acre already and the way the war devastated a lot of us. And not just in the Acre but our generation, our baby-boomer generation, what Sam Lowell was the first in our group to call the Generation of ’68 and that sticks out as the right way to put the matter now with some pride. Most of the stories though from the Acre are like Johnny Blade’s, Sergeant John Richard Rizzo, 1946-1967 whose name is forever on the North Adamsville town hall memorial and down in black granite in Washington. Johnny could hardly wait to get into the Army, wait to get at the commies the government was always talking about who needed some killing and win himself some glory.
Johnny along with the recently departed Jimmy Higgins, who we are still shedding a few tears for our long last youth over, was the “muscle” for our corner boy corner in front of Tonio’s Pizza Parlor a valuable asset when trouble was around. Johnny Blade got all he asked for in Vietnam, and then some. Laid his head down, fell down in the rice paddies of the Mekong Delta for no good reason. After I did what I did in the Army which will be described below it took a long time and the intervention of our old corner boy leader Frankie Riley to get Johnny’s parents to even talk to me, to stop disowning and disrespecting me in the neighborhood even after I long ago left the place.
It is hard even now to overestimate how strong the ethos of the Cold War Red Scare night which gripped the childhoods and neighborhoods of the Generation of ’68 brethren. The Acre and as far as I can tell most neighborhoods in most cities we similarly smitten. We believed in whatever it was our government, mostly when it counted the WWII hero Grandpa Ike, POSTUS during the coldest periods of that freeze. Bought into some murky variation of the need to kill every Red under the bed, to turn in every mommy if she was a commie to keep the Russkies from our humble doors. To keep the satanic beasts from letting us breath the fresh air of so-called democracy and loveless capitalism. Even though we were literally the poorest of the poor with Markin’s family, no, I stand corrected Jimmy Higgin’s family down at the Bottoms section of the Acre near the river at the very bottom in a tiny shack of a house with five brothers and how they moved in the place after a recent visit for his funeral I don’t know.
This in the “golden age of the working man” we hear about now in retrospect, but it never came down to us, no way. Still we believed what we believed about whatever the civics and history books said and whatever our leaders worked out over us. If you don’t believe me ask your parents, grandparents but I hope not great-grandparents what it was like come air raid drill time during the present at the creation nuclear weapons time when we all huddled, worthlessly when you think about it, under desks, trash cans whatever would “protect” us from the blast. Yeah, we had powerful enemies and no quarter was to be given, none asked for either.
This is the set-up for us, for the corner boys from Tonio’s Pizza Parlor and a million other locations like 125th Street in Harlem, the working-class quarters of Toledo in Ohio, the wide swarths of the barrios of East LA, along the decimated and dishonored Hopi trail of tears out where the states are square. The guys, maybe not the smartest guys or the most well-read but at least not unpatriotic as we knew the term then. When the deal went down, whatever our sympathies, whatever we had intended to do- we went. My case was only slightly more problematic since I had a girlfriend who was adamantly and fervently against the war while I was more lukewarm in my opposition and needed the wake-up call of induction before I figured where I stood. I was in 1968 more interested in the real chance once Lyndon Johnson abandoned the field to get beautiful newer world ruthless Irish Bobby Kennedy elected POSTUS and I could proceed with my childhood dream of being a maker and shaker in the political world, what I would later call bourgeois politics but then my “meal ticket” out of that poverty I knew only too well.
Things did not work out that way in that endlessly action-packed year where decisions had to be made on the fly or you would get left in the dust. Sure, when that notice came to take my physical and then the notice to report for induction I had my doubts, had small, very small thoughts of not going like a lot of guys, the draft resisters but I couldn’t quite get there then. Besides, truth be told, where was I to get any support for such a bold step. Not from home, not from the blessed Acre, and not from the now mostly already in the military corner boys who were far from ready to bring down the government if necessary-then. Certainly not in the ethos of the neighborhood with a few guys, including Johnny Blade having already laid down their heads in some godforsaken jungle or rice paddy.
Certainly not in my family filled with veterans including my Marine Corps father having done their duty when called if they hadn’t volunteered out of hand like my father did come Pearl Harbor. It would be many years and much estrangement before my father, and by extension my mother, would finally see for me what I did was right-and honorable even if he, they believed in the war well pass anybody except may Senator Henry Jackson and AF of L-CIO President George Meany. So I went, went one cold winter morning in January very early and dark up to the Boston Army Base for induction.
Inducted and sent not as expected to Fort Dix in New Jersey where all the other corner boys did their basic training but to Fort Jackson down in South Carolina and from there to Fort Gordon in the red clay of Augusta, Georgia home of the Masters golf championship and ex-POSTUS Grandpa Ike’s favorite course, or at least that is where they let him play. That distance from home and some resources would make things harder in the end but let’s back up. Back up to that trip down to Fort Jackson where I stayed for about three days, three days when I realized two things, the obvious one that I had made a mistake by allowing myself to be inducted and there was no way I was going to Vietnam which even then had my name written in blood on it.
Being in the South being far away from any support system, or advise I went through the basic training and then when I was given AIT as my military career assignment, AIT meaning Advanced Infantry Training down in Alabama I knew the die was cast, that I was up shit’s creek. Guys were being so chewed up and spit out in Vietnam that every AIT guy knew exactly where he was going once the training was completed. Vietnam just then was the only place in need of such services. Fortunately, as I would learn later when I met guys in the stockade, my orders allowed me thirty days leave before reporting to Fort Lewis out in Washington for transport to Vietnam. Some guys were ordered immediately to Vietnam with not much time to do anything but kiss their asses good-bye, that is what one guy said. He had been sent under guard to Fort Lewis and left there only to go AWOL and a bunch of other stuff once he was released on the base. He went a different route for the same reason and would up as I in the same place-the only virtuous place in the military-the stockade.
I didn’t know it at the time, but I was somewhat lucky that my number came up in 1969 rather than say 1966, 1967 since the anti-war movement in its radical activist end had expanded from supporting and making counselling available for draft-resisters to include military resisters as the war dragged on with no end in sight despite grand illusion lies by high military commanders that there was some kind of light at the end of the tunnel-and there was when the North Vietnamese pulled the hammer down in, well, 1975 long after what happened to the Acre corner boys happened. Between the citizen soldiers, the rough and tumble eyes at least half opened draftees less and less eager to go to the quagmire as the reports came back to the neighborhood, or as the funeral trains got longer who were being impressed into the military and guys who had come back disillusioned or fucked-up the Army was getting less and less reliable. The anti-war movement began to see that you needed to get to the GIs if the war was going to stop. The government, certainly the Nixon government, was not going to stop the damn thing, not with “peace with honor” their eternal mantra.
That shift helped me personally for when I got back to North Adamsville I immediately contacted the Quakers at the Friends Meeting House in Cambridge. Well not immediately since I still had enough corner boy in me to check up with whoever was around and have a few drinks to drown my sorrows, and theirs. Also, that pesky anti-war girlfriend turned out to have, and I quote, a new-found respect for me now that I had “gotten religion,” my term, on the war. Was ready to do something and so was very, well very and let’s leave it at that. No, let’s leave it at a variation of the famous photograph of three fetching young women, women dressed for the times with the slogan “girls say yes, to guys who say no-to the draft. So yes, not exactly immediately.)
Funny, being in the heavily student Boston area a hotbed of anti-war sentiment where you could go to an anti-war march, rally or something any day of the week I was not sure where to go, who to see, and my girlfriend while an activist was not sure either. By something like a default I turned to the Quakers since I knew they were historically anti-war and had a vague notion picked up from one of the ubiquitous anti-war posters plastered in Harvard Square that they were offering military counselling to distressed G.I.s., to my situation.
I do not remember all the details of the first meeting with the counsellor (who was not a Quaker but knew enough about military procedure to be of great service to me and others). Here is the outline of the plan he suggested as to options (“suggested” an important word since other terms might have led to serious legal, and political, repercussions) which should be enough to satisfy those who want to know my military service story. Since I had orders to go to Fort Lewis and wanted to stay in the Boston area to get help and be with connections that mattered, I had to go AWOL, absent without leave, a military crime treated lightly or seriously depending on the length of absence and other factors. Go AWOL for at least thirty days, better given Army bureaucracy, hell, any bureaucracy, in order to be “dropped from the rolls” out in Fort Lewis. Meaning I was essentially a free agent, free for a minute from those orders hanging over me. Then I was to turn myself in for punishment and reassignment. That turning in place by design Fort Devens about forty miles west of Boston and so a good place to work out my plans from.
After turning myself in I was, beyond whatever paperwork and punishment would accrue from the AWOL charge, to put in paper work for a conscientious objector discharge. That a hard dollar once you were in the military and not based just then on some historic religion training like with Peace Quakers or Mennonites but not impossible. 1969, ,and going forward also turned out to lucky for me since various federal lower court decisions and even an important Supreme Court one which basically set the same standard for military COs as civilian were beginning to force the military to be more serious about such applications. I put in the application although I was too sanguine to expect much since a number of guys who I had met at Devens in the same boat as I were being turned down. As I was, having based my argument on a slight Catholic/ethical axis not what the tight-assed Army standard would regard as a CO. Turned down despite, and this would be important later, being declared by all the line of interrogators to be “sincere” in my beliefs. That negative result meant I was to prepare myself for a reissue of orders to Fort Lewis and then to Vietnam.
Here is where the Quakers, and I will always love Quakers whatever theological differences we have, came to the rescue-they provided me with a lawyer, a lawyer who was building a reputation for getting military guys out of one kind of trouble or another, a new category of lawyer, a civilian lawyer going up against the Army justice system. (Rather than depend on some Army JAG, Army lawyer, who was strictly a company man.) Although it was a close thing, a very close thing since there were those in the Army at Devens, lifers who hated me and wanted to take me to Fort Lewis under armed guard that lawyer was able to get a Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) from a federal judge in Boston which kept me under that court’s jurisdiction while the merits of the case were being heard. Whee! (Those lifers were literally searching the fort for me to handcuff me and sweep me away the very day the TRO was issued before it took effect.)
That lifer hatred was not just happenstance. You see once I got “religion” I no longer feared what would happen to me, no longer was a soldier, was an anti-war fire-eater. Once the Army breaks its hold on you, that fear of the stockade that very basic training sergeant warned you against anything was possible. One day before that TRO took effect and while I was waiting for something to move on my case I decided to join a Quaker-organized anti-war rally outside the front gate at Fort Devens. In uniform and during duty hours. Result: Special Court-Martial-the max, six months. Since my case was working its way slowly through the federal court system, I actually served that six months minus some good time.
Once I got out of the stockade on that charge I decided to continue my personal resistance and refused to wear the uniform. Result: Special Court-Martial-the max, six months. Toward the end of that second six months (plus pre-trial time in the stockade this time) that writ of habeas corpus came through and a few weeks later I was discharged, honorably discharged if you can believe that since the judge had decided the Army had screwed up not granting my CO application. Otherwise, who knows I might still be doing an endless series of six month sentences. Tough, yes, tough for lots of reasons, political and personal. But know this I would probably not fifty years later still be fighting the good fight against the endless wars of our times if I hadn’t had that baptism of fire. That can be the cautionary tale if you like.
The Monkees were a passing phase in the act of growing up,
some catchy moment music and a zany if odd-ball television program based on
that momentary popularity. Like I say a passing fancy but it always hard to
take news of the passing of a member of the Generation of ’68 when you are in
that cohort yourself. RIP Peter Tork RIP-Si Lannon
The Monkees were a passing phase in the act of growing up,
some catchy moment music and a zany if odd-ball television program based on
that momentary popularity. Like I say a passing fancy but it always hard to
take news of the passing of a member of the Generation of ’68 when you are in
that cohort yourself. RIP Peter Tork RIP-Si Lannon
The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-In The Time Of The Be-Bop Baby Boom Jail Break-Out-The Cats Are Still Rocking
A YouTube film clip of the Falcons performing You're So Fine.
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
Everybody knew, everybody who got within fifty feet of him, distance enough for him to bellow out some 1950s song, knew that Jimmy Jenkins had been on some kind of childhood nostalgia kick back in 2012 when he went wild or as he said more soberly at the time, “I have recently been on a tear in reviewing individual CDs in an extensive commercial Rock ‘n’ Roll series and have kicked out the jams doing that deed.” Done so for a purpose to be described now. Well, hell, you already know if you knew Jimmy back in the day, back when that rock and roll music was just coming off the presses as fast a discretionary spending teenagers could get their hands on the latest be all and end all number, or like I did when I met him about twenty years ago when he was married to my sister Jenny, his third and hers to so there was no crying about what to expect, or not expect out of that institution, that it had to be about some woman.
A lot of the nostalgia gag, given that Jimmy had just turned seventy at the time, and frankly should have been past such childish things had been a result of running into Melinda Loring, an old classmate and one time dream flame in high school, Hampton Falls High up in New Hampshire, although nothing had come of it then. Nothing had come of it after he, having been properly warned off after inquiring of some guys at school about whether she had a boyfriend or not, important information to avoid the fatal faux pas of making a “move” on somebody who was “taken” that she was “unapproachable,” had moved on. There are books that could be written, and maybe they have already, about the subtle and not so subtle codes in that old time mating ritual but I think Jimmy had it about right to move on rather than test the waters and become the tittle at some Monday morning before school girls’ locker room talkfest where such an indiscretion would have been the kiss of death for him for the rest of his high school time. See too Melinda confirmed that information when he ran into her at some class reunion thing or I think he said it was the class celebrating all those who had survived three score and ten having gained some wisdom from two broken marriages. Get this though and you may not find it in any code book but maybe just the book of getting on in life she said that she was not “unapproachable” to Jimmy now.
And so they had had a short affair, a few month thing not exactly fling but not exactly forever, an affair that just didn’t have the will power to survive on both parts, her with her incessant need to plan in detail their every move for the next three years and he by an incessant need after his own three failed marriages to keep running away from the serious commitment that she craved. However during the high life of the affair Jimmy felt that he needed to go back and retrace their musical times, felt as was his wont that he had to trace every blessed song (and bellow them out as well) from their youth in order to impress her with his sincerity. See that was his style, his way to work the woman scene back then and it worked, worked on girls who were as nerdy as him but not genuine foxes like Melinda (and looking at an old high school yearbook photograph, no, not the silly class picture where everybody looked like they had just done five to ten for armed robbery at the state pen, even the girls, but one of her as an officer some club, the Glee Club I think, confirms that “fox” designation).
And so the affair, or whatever it was in each of their minds, might not have lasted but his CD review work has a certain lasting quality that he insisted that I read. See I knew guys like Jimmy in high school, nerdy guys who had to know every blessed thing about some subject or they felt stupid or incomplete but you had better as your shrink about that, and being the same age roughly knew the music (unlike my sister Jenny who was ten years younger and so knew “acid rock” and later stuff) and so I became something of a sounding board as he “discovered” each new selection. Oh yeah, and in case you don’t remember I would have been a guy who warned Jimmy off of Melinda back in the day, and that little affair they had as well except I was in California then, and so he said I “owed” him. In the interest of full disclosure, and Jimmy knows this opinion of mine so I am not telling tales out of school. See I too was a guy who was interested in a girl, Diana Nelson, and another classmate had warned me off her as “unapproachable” except I did not move on and faced a few Monday morning before school girls’ locker room bashings (again showing how important intelligence is to have before making some fatal blushing move).
Jimmy told me a lot of his reviews had been driven by the artwork which graced the covers of each CD, both to stir ancient memories and reflect that precise moment in time, the youth time of the now very, very mature (nice sliding over the age issue, right?) baby-boomer generation who lived and died by the music. And who fit in, or did not fit in as the case may, to the themes of those artwork scenes. The series basically went from about 1955 to 1965 the time now called the age of classic rock and roll. One year, the year I want to hone in on, 1959, Jimmy found the artwork a case of the latter, of the not fitting in.
He said (actually he showed me the cover after he described the thing since I just had to see it) on this cover, a summer scene (always a nice touch since that was the time when we had least at the feel of our generational breakout), two blondish surfer guys, surf boards in tow, were checking out the scene. A term back then, maybe now too, meaning only one thing in summer, hell, in any season, meaning checking out the frails (a localism that got started as far as Jimmy knew by his corner boy, Frankie Kelly, who had about twenty different names for girls, so many that he and the other corner boys could not keep up).
The two blonde surfers, although not all male surfers were blonde even though I think all their girlfriends were out there in sunny California, were just the front. Just the frosting, okay. The important scene although not pictured (except a little background fluff to inform you that you are at the beach, the summer youth beach and no other, the place where oldsters, even old hipsters in the black night le tout for a day of sun are not welcome here, and certainly not the tortuous family beach scene with its lotions, luggage, lawn chairs, and tacky hot dogs and tepid hamburgers, longings, longings to be elsewhere in early teen brains), can only mean checking out the babes, girls, chicks, or whatever you called them in that primitive time before we called them sister, and woman. No question that this whole scene is nothing but a California come hinter scene. One thinks ahead to warm night breezes and souped-up cars traveling the boulevard (also not pictured) looking, and looking hard like we all did, and not just in cool breeze California for the heart of Saturday night.
No way that it has the look of Eastern pale-face beaches, family or youth. This is nothing but early days California dreamin’ cool hot days and cooler hot nights with those dreamed bikini girls. These surfers, if that is what they are calling themselves are, no question “beach bums,” inventing themselves in classic Hollywood-driven Californiastyle, little did we know in the frigid East unless we had relatives or friends there that whole sub-cultures, or what would be called sub-cultures by the hoary academics who wanted to explain everything, of surfers, hot-rodders, outlaw bikers valley boys, and later girls, out there waiting for the winds to blow eastward. No way that they are serious surfer guys, certainly not Tom Wolfe’s Pump House LaJolla gang where those surfers lived for the perfect wave, and nothing else better get in the way. For such activity though for avoiding becoming a prune waiting on those perfect waves needed rubberized surf suits complete with all necessary gear. In short these guys are “faux” surfers. Whether that was enough to draw the attention of those shes they are checking out Jimmy said he would leave to the reader’s imagination.
And what caused Jimmy not to fit into that scene other that the fact that he was not blonde, had not known until he actually when out there in the mid-1960s that surfers as a culture even existed, and as we know had been rebuffed before he started by a fetching girl who probably, no definitely, in summer was one of those bikini-clad frails. Eastern version. Believe it or not Jimmy was afraid, or at least half afraid, of the ocean even though he had grown up (as had I) a stone’s throw from the ocean all his growing up times. I had actually gone many times to the beach with him when he was married to Jenny (and we were talking not always coterminous) and had forgotten that I had never seen him go in the water. There was a reason for him not going into the water, although he said that he would go in when the spirit moved him or he was hot, just not over his head.
Reason: when Jimmy was about eight or nine he had almost drowned when he lived on the other side of town, down at the treacherous Snug Harbor Beach. That summer shortly after school got out he had been out swimming on a decent day, not a threatening day at all, and had lazily drifted out with the tide. While there he grabbed on to a floating log, a telephone pole, and drifted some more until he realized that he was pretty far out for a kid who was not a good swimmer. Typical kid’s move though as he started back for shore he let go of the log as he swan back. Swimming for a while and getting tired he knew he could not make it back and started to go down. Somehow his older brother, Sam, saw what was happening and called for help to the swimming instructor who was stationed at the beach that day. She went out and saved him before he went down for the third time. When she got him ashore and revived him he thanked her an scurried off totally embarrassed. And also made his brother swear not to tell their mother. So that was why he was cold to that 1959 cover art. Why he could not relate to the surfers, beach bums or whatever they were trying to pull off.
Oh yeah, get this, the woman who saved him was Melinda Loring’s mother and Melinda had been on the beach that day sitting with her mother since she was too young to be left at home. She had watched the whole episode, and vividly remembered that her mother was both shaken and elated. Shaken since Jimmy was very close to drowning and elated because she had acted coolly and saved a life, her first save. The way Jimmy found out about that connection was when he mentioned that he had gone to Snug Harbor Elementary School and Melinda thought back th the times when she would accompany her mother to the beach which was near the school.Melinda had mentioned in an e-mail about her mother saving an eight or nine year old boy at the beach and that was that. One of the things Jimmy said to Melinda before they started dating, while they were still feeling each other out about getting together, was that they might as well get together since they had already “met.” Melinda laughed and agreed. During their short time together both thought for a while that the “meeting” at the beach when they were eight or nine meant that their thing was “written in the stars.” It was not but Jimmy said don’t blame the sea for that.
As for the music that Jimmy was crazy for Melinda to know about, the 1959 music that backs up this cover art that didn’t quite fit well that didn’t fit either, really. As Jimmy said we were clearly in a trough as anybody who had heard the shift in musical tone on the transistor radio that provide the source of most of our music and formed our tastes knew. The golden age of rock with the likes of Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis, and Chuck Berry was fading, fading fast into what Jimmy said when he described the music scene back then could only be called “bubble gum” music. (Strangely or maybe not, Melinda told Jimmy she liked the Fabian -Bobby Vee – Bobby Darin-Everly Brothers stuff that dominated that year and a few years after which may have been an omen but maybe Jimmy was just exhibiting sour grapes about the affair and not a fair evaluation of what these guys were doing except they were “pretty” to the girls who grabbed their fan magazines).
Jimmy said sure he listened to it (and so did I), listened to it hard on his old transistor radio (as did I), mainly because that was all that was presented to us. It would be a while until the folk, folk rock, British invasion, and free expression rock (aka “acid” rock) engulfed us. Jimmy said the bulk of this CDs contents attested to our marking time. There were, however, some stick-outs there that have withstood the test of time. They include: La Bamba, Ritchie Valens; Dance With Me, The Drifters; You’re So Fine (great harmony),The Falcons; Tallahassee Lassie (a favorite then at the local school dances by a New England boy who made good), Freddy Cannon; Mr. Blue (another great harmony song and the one, or one of the ones, anyway that you hoped, hoped to distraction that they would play for the last dance), The Fleetwoods; and, Lonely Teardrops, Jackie Wilson (a much underrated singer, then and now, including by this writer after not hearing that voice for a while). So that was Jimmy take on the music year 1959.
Oh yeah I would be remiss if I didn’t mention this. After a recent trip to the Southern California coast I can inform you that those two faux surfer guys are still out there and still checking out the scene. Although that scene for them now is solely the eternal search for the perfect wave complete with full rubberized suit and gear. Forget the girls part.Moreover their days as cover art material have taken a turn for the worst, No artist would now, or at least I hope no artist would, care to rush up and draw them. For now these brothers have lost a step, or seven, lost a fair amount of that beautiful bongo blonde hair, and have added, added believe me, very definite paunches to bulge out those surfer suits all out of shape. Ah, such are the travails of the baby-boomer generation. Good luck though, brothers.
