Summer of Love

In the full, humid heat of an Indiana July in 1967, my parents packed the family into our light blue station wagon for a road trip headed west. I was thirteen years old. In those days, smoking was acceptable everywhere, even on long-distance car trips, but there was no air conditioning, so the windows were open to make up for it and all we had to do was dodge the burning ashes as they flew out the front windows and back into the rear ones.

Since there were no DVD/CD players, video games, or even reliable radio reception for miles at a time, we took along story books, comic books, crossword puzzles, and notebooks for journaling. We sang songs like “Tell Me Why,” and “Ezekiel Cried Dem Dry Bones.”

We played word games: Twenty Questions and a game called Hink Pink. In Hink Pink, you think of a noun and a modifier that rhyme, provide a definition as the hint, and players guess what the hink pink is. If the rhyming words have multiple syllables (and certainly all the syllables must rhyme), then you provide this hint when you describe your hink pink at the beginning of the game. You might say: “I have a hink pink that is an “obese rodent.” And the solution would be: fat rat. If you, perchance, had a multi-syllabic puzzle you might say, “I have a hinky pinky that means “crazy horse,” and the answer would be “silly filly.” Or a hinkety pinkety that is a “complimentary sparse distribution,” the answer being: flattering smattering. Or a hinketity pinketity that…but I leave this last one as an exercise for the reader. (If you have a really good hink pink that must be shared, leave it in a comment below.)

Thus we somehow managed to amuse ourselves for entire days of travel and restrain from driving each other insane to some degree, although this is easier for me to say because I squirreled myself as far away as possible in the rearmost compartment of the light blue station wagon, and the three siblings including my manic brother and two younger sisters were confined together in the middle seat. (In another example of how we did things differently back then, we never wore seatbelts; if we had been rear-ended I would have been mooshed like a little sardine.) But we managed to avoid for the most part the dreaded moment when my father would slow down and yell, “Don’t make me stop this car!”

Toward evening the kids would start begging for the ultimate treat, a motel with a Swimming Pool. No reservations were made ahead of time so often our exhausted father, faced with motels that had orange neon “no vacancy” signs or were so exceedingly seedy that we couldn’t stomach them, or did not have swimming pools, would drive much farther than planned to get us to the tiny motel room next to the big pool. After checking in, the next move was always cannonballs into the pool to work off all the unexpended energy from a long day of travel.

We passed through Reno on our way to the West Coast, with its exotically dressed ladies and noisy casinos that did not allow minors inside. My father was skilled at winning motel money in poker games. As another example of “things you wouldn’t do nowadays,” Dad handed me a twenty and told me to take the kids and find something to eat while he and Mom gambled for awhile. So I did that, and then the kids and I got distracted by a more accessible area with nickel slots, and not knowing that this was off limits for minors, I pumped a nickel into the nearest one. Suddenly, lights were flashing, bells were ringing and an alarmed woman was hustling the four of us out of the area. My chastened mother came to claim my winnings of about $40 in nickels, which to me back then seemed like quite a bit of dough.

We finally made it all the way to Fisherman’s Wharf in San Franciso, where people that some called hippies were thronging in large numbers, wearing colorful tie-died clothing, peace symbols and headbands, burning lots of incense and other stuff. Guys had hair as long, if not longer, than mine, which was down to my waist back then. People were handing out subversive literature, with ideas I had never, ever heard before and shocking pictures of sexual activity that caused my Mom to blush and pull the papers out of my hand, discarding them with amused horror. There were colorful posters with imagery that was said to be psychedelic, and something called flower power. We had arrived just in time for the Summer of Love. On Fisherman’s Wharf I put my nickels to good use and bought myself a dark brown leather hat with a floppy brim, which my father immediately dubbed my “Go to Hell Hat” for reasons I didn’t fully understand. I wore this hat constantly for the rest of the trip.

As we drove down The Big Sur, Highway 1 was lined with hundreds of hippies, all hitchhiking. In yet another example of things you would never do nowadays, my Dad picked up one of these hitchhikers and peppered him with friendly questions about how he had come to be on the road, where he was headed, what he believes. There was discussion of the need for peace and love, there was concern for something called the draft, and about a war that was raging in a place called Vietnam. The fellow was very good-natured and forthcoming with these questions, and thanked us politely as we dropped him off near the campground that was his destination.

That trip West was quite an adventure, and as we were passing through Terre Haute on the final stretch of our travels back home to our little conservative God-fearing rural Indiana hometown of Ellettsville, I had an epiphany, inspired by pondering the many strange hypocrisies and contradictions of a small town where most folks go to church every Sunday but full blown vandalism in the form of soaped windows, TP’ed trees and corn thrown against picture windows occurs every October 31st.

As a result of the ephiphany I actually made up a song, lyrics and music, wholly out of thin air, with guitar accompaniement. That autumn I won second prize singing this song at the annual Fall Festival. It was quite a hit because it was about sports, based on a cheer we used to do at ballgames. It is one of three songs I ever composed, and its lyrics are now immortalized in this blog as follows:

Ellettsville

I come from E-double-L-E-double-T-S-V-I-double-L-E.
A riot every Halloween and a church on every street.
I said E-double-L-E-double-T-S-V-I-double-L-E.
Our high school ain’t got long-haired kids
And we don’t take LSD.

Well I was born in Hoosier town
I lived there many a year.
I went to their schools and their basketball games
And I learned all their cheers.
But just one cheer stands out so clear
It’ll always be with me.
It’s E-double-L-E-double-T-S-V-I-double-L-E.

Well it’s football in the early fall
And winter brings basketball.
In summer there is baseball
For the guys who ain’t heavy or tall.
But through it all I can hear that call,
It’ll always be with me.
It’s E-double-L-E-double-T-S-V-I-double-L-E.

I said, E-double-L-E-double-T-S-V-I-double-L-E.
A riot every Halloween and a church on every street.
I said E-double-L-E-double-T-S-V-I-double-L-E.
Our high school ain’t got long-haired kids
And we don’t take LSD.

There is a game played overseas
Without a ball or goal.
And guys who go to play that game
Are playin’ with their souls.
I’ve often wondered how the hometown boys
Will bring home victory
Without that cheer to pull them through
Without their parents tried and true
To yell E-double-L-E-double-T-S-V-I-double-L-E.

I said, E-double-L-E-double-T-S-V-I-double-L-E.
A riot every Halloween and a church on every street.
I said E-double-L-E-double-T-S-V-I-double-L-E.
Our high school ain’t got long-haired kids
And we never faced defeat.
Ellettsville...Ellettsville.