Flashing Back - Coming of Age in the American 1960s

In the 1960s, young Americans were on a search for more than that which was presented to them by the establishment. Their parents grew up with the privations of the Great Depression to then be presented with World War II. Born into the booming postwar economy, the counterculture generation was raised in a spiritual wasteland of materialism concocted by Madison Avenue and puked at them by television. While lip service was always given to American freedoms, it, American society of the 1950s was under the surface a rigid, lockstep, gray flannel suit, broomstick shoved straight up the ass culture of strict conformity. Parents, teachers and preachers told boomers what to believe and what - not how - to think. The emergence of rock and roll as a musical art form in the middle 50s was the first crack in the American cultural. Characterized by authorities as a communist conspiracy, rock and roll was in fact a capitalist dream come true. It made money, and lots of it. A youth culture, something not seen before in America, coalesced around it. In the mid 60s the Beatles widened this cultural gap by making it cool for men to have long hair. The CIA bought up the world's supply of LSD in 1952 and tested it on human subjects, essentially releasing it into the general population giving rise to the counterculture. Sociological mutations heretofore unseen and unimagined spilled out of it. Rejecting what they saw as the empty materialism of their parents, they sought contact with spirit, the essence of God that exists within all sentient beings. The word "hippie" was coined by the media. Among ourselves we were "freaks." We appeared freaky to "straight" people, the non-freaks, so we owned it. Long hair, facial hair of all description, outrageous colorful clothing, beads and jewelry of all kinds, and of course, rock music, signaled our separation from the "plastic" culture, the mainstream culture, the culture of death that was sending American boys off to die in an endless war. Bob Dylan penned the line "I'm gonna grow my hair down to my feet so strange I'm gonna look like a walking mountain range ((c) Bob Dylan, "I Shall Be Free No. 10"). Freak culture lasted for a few years and then it disappeared. Bits and pieces of it live on, integrated into the mainstream culture. It was one hell of a ride while it lasted. I was a good Catholic boy, an altar boy, Boy Scout, and second prize winner of the American Legion Post 138 "Americanism Today and Tomorrow" essay contest in seventh grade. I went from being a working class Pennsylvania kid to a long-haired misfit adrift with my peers in a sea of social, political and spiritual alienation. I defied the government and my father's wishes when I successfully resisted the Vietnam draft. Embarking on a spiritual journey, I explored altered states of consciousness through psychedelic drugs. My father used to catch a lot of shit for me being the first visible hippie-freak in Smethport, Pennsylvania, population 1,300 in 1968. At 43, he was young to have a kid my age compared to his peers. I was older than their kids when I went weird. They would blather on within earshot with "...my kids gonna do this and my kid's gonna do that and - " At that point my father - never one to suffer through anybody's bullshit - would interrupt with "Let me tell you something right now. You don't have the faintest goddamned idea what your kids are going to do! None at all." This book is my story as well as the story of our generation: where we went, who we met, what we saw, what we did, and how it has affected our lives. It is told in an uncensored and profane manner, sometimes tender, sometimes brutal, just like life.