1967 Continued - High School

The year of the Summer of Love was the same year I took a paper route, and became a freshman in high school.

Having a paper route had a number of secondary implications. All of the paper boys smoked and had bicycles with banana seats. We explored the storm drains and could navigate more than a mile underground all the way from Manoa Stream to a manhole cover within half a block of my house. Having a paper route also meant I had more independence. Since it was the morning paper and I needed to wake up before dawn, I slept in a converted workshop space off of the garage so as not to awaken the rest of the family. It also meant I had a little money and could come and go as I pleased. It was also the year the shit hit the fan both societally and in my family life.

We got a new Chaplain at school, and he was a bit of a romantic revolutionary. Although he had been at the top of his class at divinity school, he idolized the courage and convictions of Daniel Berrigan protesting the Vietnam War. The Chaplain's Discussion Group turned from bible study to something that would sometimes resemble an encounter group and at other times resemble multimedia immersions. (These were slide shows and movies running simultaneously with music and commentary in the background.) It was the same year I went to Catechism class and got confirmed as an Episcopalian.

I had a scholarship job in the audiovisual center and as a consequence discovered and managed to watch a substantial amount of the films in the library.

There was a picnic table under a tree in the quad and taking a cue from Arlo Guthrie's song, Alice's Restaurant, my non-conformist friends and I affectionately dubbed it the Group W Bench. Between classes we could be found there, trading guitar licks and trying to get around to doing our homework.

All of this fueled what I could refer to as a romantic notion of the hippie counter-culture. At the tender young age of 14 I romanticized everything about it; marijuana and LSD, the revolutionary fervor, the clothing, the movies and the jargon. I hadn't the chance to experience it for myself at that point, but I was hungry for it, and so were my friends. On the home front, my stepfather was growing progressively more abusive and consequently I felt justified and even self-righteous about breaking rules.

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Next Installment: 1967 Revolutionary Romance Part I