1967: A SUMMER OF LOVE, AND THE LONG, HOT SUMMER

Descending into dreamland, your thoughts drift. A cascade of images filter through the fading contraceptive semi-conscious veil. Is that you wearing flowers in your hair? Maybe you whiff the scent of a seductive fragrance. Possibly a trace from your gleaming yellow floral adornment, or pungence wafting from snugly rolled paper aglow in all its intoxicating glory. Inhale deeply now to trap every wisp of this heady time warp. Where is this trip taking you?

In a purplish swirling flash you are beamed to San Francisco. To Haight-Ashbury. It’s 1967. What was in that little pill your comrade gave you? You’re acting funny and you don’t why. A haze is all around as you gaily glide through Haight during the Summer of Love. Maybe you can kiss the sky, or at least bundle with your intimate new mates. Many are just like you. To butcher a phrase from Timothy Leary: they are turned on, tuned in, and dropping out. The district is ground zero for the counterculture. Hippie heaven. Yes, love was in the air. Shed those inhibitions. Copulate to your heart’s content. Do your own thing. One-hundred-thousand bohemians packed in the euphoric nirvana can’t be wrong. All youth qualified for the orgy of elation and excess.

If the Bay Area wasn’t on the docket, buy a ticket, motion pictures could cue a heartbeat flutter. In The Graduate, a lovesick Dustin Hoffman finally snatched his bride (Katherine Ross), but only after bedding her bewitching mother (alluring Anne Bancroft). Illicit love and West Coast ecstasy; Berkeley style. Sometimes romance can be a tangled web. Maybe the English had a better idea. To Sir, With Love didn’t follow the usual formula, students loved their teacher, Sidney Poitier. Not in the carnal sense of course. It was an affair of admiration and respect. Sir had standards. A surefire prescription for a short career today.

Even the villains shared in the passion. Bonnie and Clyde loved each other and relished robbing banks too. The latter led to their downfall. A demise captured in a grisly finale that represented a watershed in the industry by pushing blood splatter past the censor grade. The hemorrhage continued. Apparently violence and carnage worked. Sometimes twelve-fold. The Dirty Dozen featured an all-star cast led by Lee Marvin in a World War II massacre mission. Sprinkle in a grain of gravitas as it was loosely based on an actual event. It engrossed the audience and was one of the top grossing films of the year. Superstar Paul Newman added to his aura when he took a bullet for moviegoers in his portrayal of a rebellious inmate shackled to a chain gang in Cool Hand Luke. A nod of tribute to the anti-hero. A rifle shot from a guard extinguished Luke’s body in the taut climax. But his free spirit endured. A metaphor for the sixties? The studios kept cranking out the crowd pleasers. In The Heat of the Night featured Poitier at the top of his game again. Alongside Rod Steiger (who won the Oscar for Best Actor), the daring film spoke to deep-seated bigotry in the South. It captured five Oscars and is considered a landmark in tackling racial relations via cinema.

1967 was certainly a banner year for movies as you never knew what would pop up next, and that was also true when a bride and groom cemented their relationship in holy wedlock. Sometimes would-be blissful unions encountered troublesome interference. Race mixing and love inflamed some heads. As a legacy of longstanding white supremacist traditions, anti-miscegenation laws were still on the books in Southern states. The 1924 Virginia Racial Integrity Act prohibited marriage between “whites” and ” coloreds”. Mildred Jeter (black) and Richard Loving (white) were sentenced to a year in prison for violating the statute. The honorable Supreme Court of Virginia unsurprisingly upheld the conviction. Would the United States Supreme Court be amenable to a reversal? A surprising outcome awaited. In the 60s the highest court in the land under Chief Justice Earl Warren consisted of more enlightened members than the bulk of current immoderate right-wing ideologues. Warren et al showered the Lovings with affection by unanimously vacating the prior decisions and declared all race-based restrictions on matrimony unconstitutional. The decree had profound impact. People wept. Others raced to wed and Loving Day is celebrated on June 12 in honor of the ruling. It also established precedent for legitimizing same-sex bonding. Although that was much longer in coming.

Justice does experience delays. In April, Muhammad Ali refused induction into the military and was summarily stripped of his Heavyweight title and primary source of income for three and half years. An all-white jury who heard his case delivered a damaging blow to the Black Achilles. He was declared guilty. Perhaps their decision had an underlying racial motivation. After the usual appeals sojourn, Ali was acquitted by the Supreme Court, not as many believe, on religious grounds, but because of a prior administrative error. Justice Thurgood Marshall, himself a warrior in due process battles for decades, and the first black to be appointed to the Supreme Court bench in August of ’67, had recused himself from the Ali 1971 hearing because of prior involvement. Still, the verdict was unanimous.

Elsewhere there was less peaceful resolution to racial tumult. Detroit experienced the worst riot in the U.S. since the 1863 Civil War New York City draft uproar. For five days the streets were aflame and it required the intervention of the Michigan National Guard, and the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions to squelch the mayhem. The casualty rate was significant, 43 died and nearly 1200 were injured. Two-thousand buildings were destroyed and 7200 people were arrested. It was just one incident in the Long Hot, Summer where civil unrest bubbled over in Atlanta, Boston, Buffalo, Milwaukee, Newark, and Rochester (reprise of ’64). Even Tampa participated in the tempest after a white police officer shot an unarmed black teen in the back. The young man subsequently died. The officer was acquitted. Imagine that.

With all the commotion the boomers needed music as a narcotic to ease the pain. Let’s resume your swoon as you ” Picture yourself in a boat on a river.” Ahh, you absorb a wave of psychedelic glitter of ” tangerine trees and marmalade skies.” And those diamonds in the sky are so sparkling. The Beatles have clearly struck the mother lode again. This time with Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which would become among the most critically acclaimed albums in rock history. Score that as a major achievement for studio mastery, but it was back to the West Coast for the live fireworks. The Monterey Pop Festival in June was the main event on the year’s musical calendar and it brought the counterculture into the mainstream. Hendrix was there and beginning his ascent into rock stardom. The feisty Janis bawled and strutted her hour upon the stage, and so did the immortal Otis Redding who gave an intense, arousing version of I’ve Been Loving You Too Long. Monterey was later regarded as a tune-up for Woodstock. But the crowning triumph of the 60s Generation was two years and a continent away. At the time Monterey stood as a sensation in its own right.

All the spectacle was very exciting for sure, but even the most stout of the frisky youngsters needed a respite. Lighting up the incense and snuggling up for a relaxing read was often a nice diversion. The baby boomers incurred the disdain of stiff-necked, sexual and mental dullards in later years. Maybe they received an F for orthodoxy, however the offspring of the Greatest Generation were cerebrally facile. They could cope with provocative material such as William Manchester’s The Death of a President, released in November. The author was an admirer of President John F. Kennedy and the book was an account of the beloved leader’s lamentable assassination in Dallas. Jacqueline Kennedy commissioned the work and the former First Lady obliged Manchester with multiple interviews for the content, as did a host of others. One who did decline was Maria Oswald, the assassin’s widow. Perhaps she suspected it might present her husband Lee in a less than flattering light. Regardless, before it could be released, Manchester managed to antagonize everybody. Instead of he said, she said; it was he quoted what she (Jackie) shouldn’t have said. The Kennedys didn’t like it, LBJ and his staff didn’t like it. The public loved it. The sales ticker hit the million mark in a short time. What good is history if it doesn’t have bickering and a dash of scandal as part of the package? It even mentioned that Jackie smoked cigarettes. Who would have thought? Camelot going up in smoke. Certain revisions were made, then Manchester sped off to the hospital to enjoy his well-deserved nervous breakdown.

It was definitely not a good year for the Irish, why even the seemingly invincible Boston Celtics lost to the Philadelphia 76ers in the NBA finals. Chamberlain had his revenge on Russell at last. There was a reprieve for the fine folks and exemplary fans in Boston though. After years of futility on the baseball diamond, the Red Sox finally made it to the World Series. There they would fall prey to the St. Louis Cardinals, or more specifically to pitcher Bob Gibson. The hurler was an otherworldly figure: glaring, scowling, ferocious, indomitable. He was recovering from a broken leg which seemed to affect his temperament. He appeared more ornery than usual, and he broke the Boston hearts allowing only 3 runs in 3 games. He won the Most Valuable Player Award. One report even claimed Gibson smiled. Tom Landry never smiled. His Fundamentalist God didn’t permit joy. Grief would come to the stone-faced coach and his Dallas Cowboys on the last day of 1967 on the last play of the NFL Championship. The determined Packer quarterback Bart Starr nudged the ball in from the one yard line as players scrambled for traction on the frozen turf of Lambeau Field in Green Bay. In football lore, the contest has been dubbed the ” Ice Bowl” because of the glacial conditions where the recorded wind chill was – 48 F. It has made for a great conversation piece over a hot cup of coffee ever since.

A chill descended as the Summer of Love and the Long, Hot Summer wound into fall, then winter. In November the UN Security Council passed Resolution 242, declaring that Israel must return the land it seized in the 6-Day War earlier in the year. Israel refused, and the morass of competing interests made the Middle East an enduring political and diplomatic minefield for succeeding generations. That same month in an audacious act, Senator Eugene McCarthy announced he would challenge sitting president Lyndon Johnson for the Democratic nomination in 1968. McCarthy signaled intent to run on an anti-Vietnam War platform. LBJ felt secure, his commander of the American forces in Vietnam, William Westmoreland, assured him ” There is light at the end of the tunnel.” Military triumph was inevitable. U.S. forces were nearing their peak of half a million and engaging in their bloodiest exchanges in the conflict. There was growing skepticism about government claims, maybe McCarthy was onto something. Probably not. You don’t know because your slumber is interrupted. Tap, tap, tap. A big furry orange creature with big green eyes fix their piercing stare: somewhere a food bowl is empty. Reverie surrenders to the mundane. But somewhere in the recesses of your mental canvas the hum of an organ purrs. Did you really skip the light fandango? Perhaps another dream session awaits, perhaps another odyssey of love, and and perhaps even less hate in 68.