After a little of reflection, I recall this photo from a Sunday afternoon in August 1967 – the infamous “Summer of Love”. It was named for the emerging hippie movement, the new access to birth control (12.5 million women worldwide), and the great music (Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Aretha Franklin). It also had a dark side with the Vietnam War ramping up, some race riots in major cities, and baseball’s first American League free agent (Ken “the Hawk” Harrelson). This photo is important to me for several reasons. Ron was on leave from the Navy (or just finishing Boot Camp) and soon to ship out on the USS Franklin D. Roosevelt. I had finished my junior year at the University of Illinois in Urbana having just switched to pre-med, and just returned from an ill-fated hitchhiking expedition to San Francisco with my fraternity buddy, Ted Bayer (more about that later). And Ken must be junior at Barrington High School, where he was BMOC (pick your own abbreviation). This picture was taken in the backyard of our house in Barrington during a Sunday afternoon family get together.
It’s memorable to me because it’s one of the few times I saw daylight in August 1967. During the school year, Ted Bayer and I discussed the possibility of spending the summer working a tramp steamer to and from Australia, and spending a few weeks in between enjoying the topless beaches “down under”. We planned to hitchhike to San Francisco where we would enlist as deck crew on a steamer. Finally, the day to leave arrived. Toward the end of June, with one small suitcase and a cardboard sign that read “STUDENT”, mom gave me a ride to the junction of route 59 and interstate 55 (then just route 66). I hitchhiked from there to Lincoln, IL where I met Ted. Over the next 2-3 days, we had perhaps 20 different rides to Oklahoma where we were finally picked up by a sailor from Norfolk heading to San Diego to see his pregnant wife and he would then return to Norfolk. He’d been driving for 36 hours and needed us to keep him awake and share the driving. He had an old '59 Chevy with no A/C and a heater that stayed on all the time. Across the Mojave Desert we were toasted and kept drinking sodas like no tomorrow - tossing the cans out the window. One can hit the car windshield behind us and we spent 6 hours in the California State Police station in Bakersfield before finally being released because they "couldn’t prove it was our can". We then made great time to L.A. and stayed overnight with Nana Jensen in Santa Monica. After a day or two in LA seeing Disneyland and other sights, we walked to Highway 1 and immediately got a ride with a guy in a Corvair Spyder heading to Yosemite. It was dark when we arrived at the park but he was going pretty fast to meet his friends before it got too late, when “Wham!” a deer ran across the road and he totaled his car. We had some bumps and bruises but no serious injuries. He waited for the Park Police to come and we just said “so long” and walked into the campgrounds. We felt a little guilty just leaving him, but.... We didn’t have a tent or sleeping bags, so I think we must have just slept on a picnic table. The next morning we caught a ride into SF and were dropped off at the Haight-Ashbury YMCA, and got a room to share. Little did we know that this was a "gay" YMCA hotel, but we figured that out pretty quickly in the communal showers that they had. SF was an amazing place that summer…lots of marijuana and lots of hippies everywhere. We looked pretty straight by comparison.
The next day we went to a steamship office to “sign on” with our passports in hand. The burly guy at the counter asked if we’d ever worked on a dock or steamer before (answer: negative), and then asked if we had a letter from our local chief of police saying that we weren’t wanted for any crimes back home (answer: negative). He said that would be mandatory. Then, he asked if we knew that we would have to work a round trip and only get off in Sydney for the unloading and loading, and then return to SF. If we jumped ship, word would go out and no one else would hire us for the return trip. Damn! Lacking of proper planning killed us…again! We spent a several days enjoying the sights in SF and then headed back towards home with tails between our legs. It took us 5 days to get back to Illinois with one major adventure with a schizophrenic guy who drove us across Utah during the night and kept stopping every 50 miles to "check his tires" and he would also check the gun he had under the seat….scary!
I finally arrived home July 20 having earned no money for tuition to go back to school. I got my old job back on the loading dock at a factory in Elk Grove Village ($125 per week), but this would not be enough, so I got a second job at the 24 hour gas station in Barringtom working the 11-7 shift. So for the next 6 weeks, I pumped gas from 11 pm to 7 am, quickly had breakfast and drove to Elk Grove where I worked in the 100 degree loading dock until 4 pm at which time I would drag myself home, eat a quick bite of dinner and sleep until 10:30! Ugh!!
So this photo is one of the few really good memories of Barrington that summer…..not a summer of love for me, but certainly a summer of high adventure and lessons in the art of planning ahead.
It’s memorable to me because it’s one of the few times I saw daylight in August 1967. During the school year, Ted Bayer and I discussed the possibility of spending the summer working a tramp steamer to and from Australia, and spending a few weeks in between enjoying the topless beaches “down under”. We planned to hitchhike to San Francisco where we would enlist as deck crew on a steamer. Finally, the day to leave arrived. Toward the end of June, with one small suitcase and a cardboard sign that read “STUDENT”, mom gave me a ride to the junction of route 59 and interstate 55 (then just route 66). I hitchhiked from there to Lincoln, IL where I met Ted. Over the next 2-3 days, we had perhaps 20 different rides to Oklahoma where we were finally picked up by a sailor from Norfolk heading to San Diego to see his pregnant wife and he would then return to Norfolk. He’d been driving for 36 hours and needed us to keep him awake and share the driving. He had an old '59 Chevy with no A/C and a heater that stayed on all the time. Across the Mojave Desert we were toasted and kept drinking sodas like no tomorrow - tossing the cans out the window. One can hit the car windshield behind us and we spent 6 hours in the California State Police station in Bakersfield before finally being released because they "couldn’t prove it was our can". We then made great time to L.A. and stayed overnight with Nana Jensen in Santa Monica. After a day or two in LA seeing Disneyland and other sights, we walked to Highway 1 and immediately got a ride with a guy in a Corvair Spyder heading to Yosemite. It was dark when we arrived at the park but he was going pretty fast to meet his friends before it got too late, when “Wham!” a deer ran across the road and he totaled his car. We had some bumps and bruises but no serious injuries. He waited for the Park Police to come and we just said “so long” and walked into the campgrounds. We felt a little guilty just leaving him, but.... We didn’t have a tent or sleeping bags, so I think we must have just slept on a picnic table. The next morning we caught a ride into SF and were dropped off at the Haight-Ashbury YMCA, and got a room to share. Little did we know that this was a "gay" YMCA hotel, but we figured that out pretty quickly in the communal showers that they had. SF was an amazing place that summer…lots of marijuana and lots of hippies everywhere. We looked pretty straight by comparison.
The next day we went to a steamship office to “sign on” with our passports in hand. The burly guy at the counter asked if we’d ever worked on a dock or steamer before (answer: negative), and then asked if we had a letter from our local chief of police saying that we weren’t wanted for any crimes back home (answer: negative). He said that would be mandatory. Then, he asked if we knew that we would have to work a round trip and only get off in Sydney for the unloading and loading, and then return to SF. If we jumped ship, word would go out and no one else would hire us for the return trip. Damn! Lacking of proper planning killed us…again! We spent a several days enjoying the sights in SF and then headed back towards home with tails between our legs. It took us 5 days to get back to Illinois with one major adventure with a schizophrenic guy who drove us across Utah during the night and kept stopping every 50 miles to "check his tires" and he would also check the gun he had under the seat….scary!
I finally arrived home July 20 having earned no money for tuition to go back to school. I got my old job back on the loading dock at a factory in Elk Grove Village ($125 per week), but this would not be enough, so I got a second job at the 24 hour gas station in Barringtom working the 11-7 shift. So for the next 6 weeks, I pumped gas from 11 pm to 7 am, quickly had breakfast and drove to Elk Grove where I worked in the 100 degree loading dock until 4 pm at which time I would drag myself home, eat a quick bite of dinner and sleep until 10:30! Ugh!!
So this photo is one of the few really good memories of Barrington that summer…..not a summer of love for me, but certainly a summer of high adventure and lessons in the art of planning ahead.
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