Sorting Through Memories From the Summer of Love

As a virgin in the Summer of Love, I’m not the best source on exactly what went on back then. Most nights, I was home before 10. On the other hand, had 1967 been the Summer of Working as a Seasonal Assistant in the Post Office, I could tell you everything you need to know.

Despite my limited role in that now-celebrated season, I’m still sentimental about its impending 30th anniversary. Maybe it’s because while thousands of others my age were converging on San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district with flowers in their hair, I was a disgruntled 17-year-old postal worker memorizing ZIP Codes.

I was there and yet I wasn’t.

That’s the way it is with a lot of baby boomer “moments” that we now relive so grandly. To hear tell, everybody went to Haight-Ashbury in 1967. Everybody went to Woodstock. Everybody egged an ROTC building. Everybody dropped acid.

The fact that a lot of us were sorting mail gets lost.

I remember exactly where I was when I first heard “San Francisco,” the song that became the teen anthem for the summer. I was riding home from a high school baseball game that spring and the song came on the radio. I remember liking it right away, but the instruction that “if you’re going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair” surely would have been lost on me.

But as this anniversary summer approaches, I wonder how many others who were teenagers in 1967 now see that summer as a demarcation point in their lives.

I had just graduated from high school in Omaha and needed a job. College loomed in September. The prospect of me telling my parents I was heading out to San Francisco would have resulted in big laughs, not to mention me going to my room without any supper for about two weeks.

I exaggerate only slightly. At 17, independence wasn’t a concept to which I’d been introduced. My big road trip that summer was to hop a Greyhound bus with a high school buddy and catch some baseball games in St. Louis. When I returned, the mail bin at the post office beckoned.

That summer, 1967, opposition to the Vietnam War was percolating. As much as I now connect with my generation’s protests, at the time I harbored no deep-seated thoughts on the subject. I don’t remember talking to friends about the war, nor ever hearing anyone mention it in school. I liked the same music the hippies did, but politics left me noncommittal at best.

All that summer, I worked at the post office, checked the baseball box scores and stayed cocooned for one final season.

In Nebraska, the season changes in the fall, and that year so did everything else. I went off to college 50 miles away and it seemed like 50 light years. Everything seemed different. I turned 18 and got a draft notice. I hopped another Greyhound bus, this one at 6 in the morning, and came back to Omaha for a pre-induction physical. The student newspaper on campus published a daily drumbeat of anti-war sentiment. Professors talked about the war. Guest speakers on campus decried it.

By the end of that freshman year, two guys I’d known in high school had been killed in Vietnam. A student deferment protected me from the draft, but the buddy who went with me to St. Louis for those frivolous baseball games--he was just another small-town Nebraska boy--dropped out of college and incurred the anger of his townspeople by claiming conscientious-objector status.

It was a long school year.

Looking back now, it’s weird to picture myself at the start of the Summer of ’67 compared with the start of the Summer of ’68. I began the first summer goofing around. I began the next one lying on the living room sofa for hours because Robert Kennedy had been assassinated at the end of the school year. Just a few weeks before I’d almost been squashed in the crowd when he visited campus while campaigning for the May primary. Two months before Kennedy was killed, Martin Luther King had been murdered and American cities erupted in violence.

I went from knowing nothing one summer to feeling like I knew way too much the next.

We baby boomers make too much of these anniversary moments. The Summer of Love sounds like the ultimate contrivance.

But by my own accident of birth, it’s a summer that means something to me.

A friend sent me a story recently that pointed out that “Summer of Love” has been copyrighted by a music promotion company in San Francisco. The company was afraid someone else might claim it.

It made references to that summer seem so petty, so mundane.

These days, that’s not the way I think of it at all.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by writing to him at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or calling (714) 966-7821.