August, 1967
"If you're going to San Francisco
Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair.
If you're going to San Francisco
You're gonna meet some gentle people there.
For those who come to San Francisco
Summertime will be a love-in there."
Written by John Phillips, of the Mamas and the Papas. Sung by Scott McKenzie
August 20 is high season for cantaloupes in Southern Oregon. I have grown them nearly every summer since I was 11 years old.
Cantaloupe seasons fade into a fuzzy blend, but August of 1967 remains distinct.
I don't grow melons commercially anymore. Growing cantaloupes for sale means carrying 40-pound bins of melons to the edge of a row to put into the back of a pickup truck, and then to unload them into a wash basin, then to repack melons in 44-pound boxes, sold as 40 pounds, so as to give "good weight." Then to reload boxes, bring them to market to unload them and stack the boxes so the produce people can take over. About three years ago I began getting back-aches and tingles down my arms in August of every year. It was time to stop. Now I just grow a few to eat myself, for old time's sake.
I was firmly rooted in place in August, 1967. I had two jobs and a girlfriend. But on the AM radio in the family Chrysler Newport, I could hear sounds of something new and enticing. The music was like the green light in the distance that represented hope for Gatsby in The Great Gatsby, a book we were assigned to read in Mrs. Lininger's English class my junior year in high school. He could see the light, but like Daisy, the woman he longed for, it was out of reach.
I have a framed photo of myself in the cantaloupe field taken in August, 1967. I am on the right, with my father and younger brother, David, the one holding watermelons. To the left are two cousins Mike and Doug Sage, visiting from Syracuse, New York.
I am wearing my forest-fire-fighting clothes in the photo. Five days a week, from 10:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m., I stood ready to put out forest fires in the low-elevation brush lands that dry out each summer in our Mediterranean climate. That job gave me time in the mornings to rush to the farm at daylight, pick the melons that came ripe the previous day, and get them to Mr. Blunt's fruit stand and to Thunderbird Supermarket, then be at work at 10:00. I earned about $750 every summer fighting forest fires and another $1,250 from my half of the melon crop: $2,000 saved per summer. Tuition at Harvard in 1967 was $1,760. I could earn and save a Harvard tuition and have $240 left over. In mid-August, 1967 I had four more weeks before I got on a plane to Boston.
I remember feeling I was on the brink of something, so close but still so far. There was college, of course, but there was also something big for my generation happening only 6 hours away by car. "Hippies" -- guys with long hair and beards; women who wore loose blouses and no bra -- were crowding into San Francisco. They had shed old modes of thinking, we thought. There was a new music sound I could hear that made prior-years' songs of surfing and daddy's T-Bird seem childish. Bob Dylan sang that Mr. Jones didn't know what was going on. Barry McGuire warned we were on the eve of destruction. There was a new generation of music: Jefferson Airplane, The Byrds, the Grateful Dead, Simon and Garfunkel, and Jimi Hendrix. Their music suggested change was underway. There were endless possibilities. Our generation had an anthem:
All across the nation such a strange vibration
People in motion.
There's a whole generation with a new explanationPeople in motion, people in motion.
The open-ended future lay before us. Our parent's generation had screwed up everything, we thought, but not to worry. We were going to fix everything.
Peter, you’ve captured that time beautifully. Although we certainly didn’t fix everything and in some cases created more problems. But it was a new age dawning, maybe even a bit of ‘’wokefulness”.
Those were the days, my friend
We thought they'd never end
We'd sing and dance forever and a day
We'd live the life we choose
We'd fight and never lose
For we were young and sure to have our way
La la la la...
//
Oh, my friend, we're older but no wiser
For in our hearts, the dreams are still the same
----Mary Hopkins, and many others in many languages
Peter, thank you.
May you stay (per Joan Baez) Forever Young.