The Summer of '66

In the summer of 1966, Lyndon Johnson was president, combat troops had been going to Vietnam for less than a year. When the news of that conflict first broke I remember going into the sun room at my parents’ house, and grabbing the globe off the top of the big console TV. What and where is this place, I wondered. Once I saw that little speck of a country on the other side of the world, my first thought was that our troops would need about two weeks to clear up whatever it was they were being sent there for. This should be quick, I thought

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King and more than 2,600 others had been arrested in Selma, Ala., during demonstrations against voter-registration rules. Malcom X had been assassinated. Bill Cosby was the first African American to headline a national TV show in “I Spy.”

The movie version of The Sound of Music with Julie Andrews had made its premier, and I had just graduated from High School.

That summer I crossed paths with The Beatles, in the air.  They flew to America with their group as I flew to England with mine.

1966 marked my tenth and last year of singing with St Paul’s Episcopal Church Choir. We were one of the best examples of the English tradition of men and boys’ choirs in the States. We planned to tour the great cathedrals of England and visit our heroes, the Kings College and St Johns College choirs in Cambridge. And that’s exactly what we did.

But even though all of that was exciting, a huge cherry on top of a ten-year stint for me, the fact was that I was 18, and society was changing rapidly. It seemed like everything new and groovy was coming out of England. So it was a perfect time to visit, for many reasons other than the choir.

Mainly, I remember the pubs, a variety of great beers, lime and lager, cutting blocks overflowing with fresh cheeses and breads.  Darts were revered as a semiprofessional sport, warm camaraderie the theme of the day. Being “Yanks” carried a degree of celebrity, we rarely paid for anything.

Piccadilly Circus was bustling with flocks of pigeons that shit on our heads and clothes as well as the birds in mini-skirts that did the same thing to our young egos. As always though, money talks, so the strip show that a few of us paid for, delivered as promised. A clear case of “be careful what you ask for.” On a makeshift stage in a small, musty basement, set up like a schoolroom with wooden chairs, toothless old men sat in the front row waiting for “Little Annie Oakley” to appear on stage in her cowboy hat and fringed skirt. She wore nothing under that fake buckskin and they knew it. Her specialty was to insert and then pop out syphilitic Ping Pong balls from between her legs and lob them into the gaping mouths of her regulars, all hopelessly drunk. She squeezed out high balls to the old farts doing their best to muster sufficient equilibrium necessary to make a catch. An enduring image for me.

Another image, tattooed onto my temporal lobes right next to Annie, is more of an English Sharks Vs Jets episode. That was a movie, the Mods Vs Rockers were the British version, but real. Rebel kids in the news everywhere, riding scooters or motorcycles depending on their particular alliance.  Rockers dressed like John Travolta in “Grease” rockers were preppy, jocks.

Three of my buddies and I had been out drinking and punting on the Thames, daring each other to stand up in that narrow, swaying, clinker-built boat.  Every attempt was met with an immediate, violent shimmy that sent ripples, Mini-Tsunamis, across both sides of the River. We survived, wet from the knees down, and retreated to a nearby Pub. There we relived the afternoon. Stories became fueled and twisted by more ales and lagers in a sticky red vinyl booth.

Curfew for the dorm where we were staying was 11PM but we never made it. That night though, we decided to make a feeble attempt to show improvement in our “attitude” and reduce the ear cancer from the man who sang bass and acted as the dorm guard. His lectures to those of us who had just graduated, graduated, his volume, frequency and frustration with our inability to get in by curfew, caused him to become a pain in the ass. We found that the more he irritated us the more we needed the solace of excessive drinking late into the night. But we were sufficiently contrite that night that we decided the throw him a bone.  We started walking back in the direction of the dorms around 10:45. That would get us in before 11, at least. Wouldn’t want to actually be on time and look like a bunch of pussys though.

Shuffling, stumbling, moving forward down a dark intersection, we were suddenly confronted by a group of young men, obvious Rockers with their leather jackets hanging casually open, like they had just been pub crawling too. Twenty of them, about our age. The lead guy looked at us and simply asked “What are you boys doing here?” That was the signal for all of them to pull out knives. Cheap Italian switchblades with ill-fitted bone handles and a prominent button spring that would fire right in your pants pocked if you accidently put pressure on it. I know, because a year before, my brother and I were wrestling on the basement floor of my parents’ house when that happened. He had my cheap Italian switchblade with ill-fitted bone handles in his hip pocket. We pressed together, it fired, and I got stabbed in my upper thigh. Right then though, looking at twenty blades, pointed our way like so many double edged razors, caught our attention.

I don’t remember how we even started to answer the question, but it didn’t matter. As soon as we said two words, the switchblades disappeared with a unison shout out from the guys surrounding us: “You’re Yanks!” They had thought we were Mods cutting through their hood. Nope, we’re Yanks. Although we had been given warm welcomes most places we went, we didn’t realize the considerable degree of good feelings about yanks until those boys kept us up very late into the night. We partied at their pub, with them buying the drinks, and acting like we were movie stars.

That was 51 years ago; the memory is as fresh as the bread we pulled apart and spread with soft cheese, warm in the company of our peers. At first, we sounded different when we spoke, but that distinction quickly vanished. We became mirror images of each other. Our packaging was different, but that night, we were blood brothers, all from the same family, enjoying the hell out of our new familiarity, being with each other, making memories.