First Draft Follies: "Kids," Beer, and the 1960s, Part 3

Part One --- Part Two --- Part Three --- Part Four

Part Five --- Part Six --- Part Seven --- Part Eight 

Welcome to First Draft Follies, an ongoing series here at the blog. This edition is a true folly and a prime example of why my first drafts are so damn long: I research what is intended to be a minor point, become fascinated by this minor point, and next thing I know, I've written an embarrassing amount of completely extraneous text.

The material is presented "as is" from the first draft of the manuscript that became the book Ambitious Brew. In a few places I added one or two words in brackets -- [like this] -- for clarification. The excerpt is long, so I'm breaking it into manageable bits and posting those bits over the next few days.

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So began the 1960s, perhaps the greatest confluence of education, affluence, information, and experience in the nation’s history. The decade crackled with the energy of millions of young Americans bent on leaving their mark.

A few weeks after the Fort Lauderdale riot, a small group of black and white men and women, mostly college students, boarded a bus in Washington, D. C. and set off on a near-fatal journey to the deep south to register black voters. Their buses were attacked and burned. One freedom rider was set on fire. Most were beaten and many jailed. The freedom riders’ paths had been paved a year earlier when hundreds of men and women, black and white and mostly young, staged sit-ins at segregated lunch counters, wade-ins at segregated beaches and swimming pools, and pray-ins and study-ins at segregated churches and libraries.

In the spring of ‘62, several dozen students gathered at a camp on the shore of Lake Huron in eastern Michigan and drafted a political statement that they hoped would change, if not the world, at least the United States.

"We are people of this generation," the statement began, "bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit. When we were kids the United States was the wealthiest and strongest country in the world . . . Many of us began maturing in complacency. As we grew, however, our comfort was penetrated by events too troubling to dismiss."

The Port Huron Statement went on to condemn American foreign policy, racism, McCarthyism, capitalism, automation, colonialism, and the military-industrial complex -- and inspired dozens of anti-war, anti-nuclear marches.

Beer inspired marches of another kind during the Fourth of July weekend in 1965. Police and National Guard troops battled thousands of (mostly drunk) young rioters in Ohio, New York, and Iowa. At Arnolds Park, Iowa, one of that state’s most popular summer resorts, five hundred pro-party agitators, "some too drunk to stand up," took to the streets after the bars closed at one a. m.. (*6)

"Hey, punk, we’re going to take over this place," someone yelled, and the chase was on. Revelers threw bottles, chunks of concrete, and anything else they could lay hands on, as police fought back with fire hoses and tear gas. (*7)

From Greenwich Village to Hibbing, Minnesota; from Chicago to Denver and beyond, kids flocked to coffee shops to hear guitar-strumming "folk singers." On the music charts, shoo-bop and doo-wop gave way to youthful angst in the form of "The Sound of Silence” (“Hello darkness my old friend”) and “Eve of Destruction” ("You’re old enough to kill but not for votin'").

Some kids joined communes and organized an alternative America. At Drop City in southern Colorado, the inhabitants built geodesic domes out of scrap material and new lives out of their imaginations. Drop City, said one founders, "was full of vitality . . . ." She and her fellow droppers "had the sense that anything was possible, that the potential was unlimited." (*8)

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SOURCES:

*6: "650 Youths Seized as Resort Melees Erupt in 4 States," New York Times, July 5, 1965, 1.

*7: Ibid.

*8: Quoted in Timothy Miller, The 60s Communes: Hippies and Beyond (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999), 33.

Must-Read On the (Possible) Future of the Economy

The lead essay in this week's New York Times Magazine is worth reading (assuming you've got 20 minutes to spare). It's certainly causing me to re-think my stance on Whither The Economy.

The author, David Leonhardt, focuses on the economy, but he inadvertently makes another point worth noting: Scholarship, research, and "higher education" matter. Leonha

rdt refers to and relies on the research of several intellectuals (aka “academics”) and treats their work with respect. That's refreshing. Americans have a long tradition of anti-intellecualism, but in the recent decades, it seems as though that strain as become more pronounced. State legislatures don’t want to fund “higher” education, and deride what seems, to them, to be inane, useless research.

I’m an escapee from academia, and I know that university campuses shelter more than a bit of bullshit. But the "pure" research being carried out in university laboratories and libraries is fundamental to human progress, whether social, political, moral, or economic. Nearly every aspect of life in “modern” society stems from the work of someone thinking hard about an intellectual problem, whether that person is an engineer, a physicist, an economist, or a philosopher. (Or, okay, a historian...)

When you hear an expert yapping away about this, that, and the other, chances are his or her opinions and ideas are based on primary research: Information and analyses developed by collecting raw data, creating and studying equations, watching the stars, or rummaging through old newspapers and diaries.

Paul Krugman, for example, now writes for a "popular" audience, but he won the Nobel for his academic "pure" research. The textbooks your kids read in school are “popular” translations of decades of hard research carried out by thousands of scholars.

So it’s good to see substantive scholarship being treated with respect. We need the scholarship, and the scholarship deserves our respect.

First Draft Follies: "Kids," Beer, and the 1960s, Part 2

Part One --- Part Two --- Part Three --- Part Four

Part Five --- Part Six --- Part Seven --- Part Eight 

Welcome to First Draft Follies, an ongoing series here at the blog. This edition is a true folly and a prime example of why my first drafts are so damn long: I research what is intended to be a minor point, become fascinated by this minor point, and next thing I know, I've written an embarrassing amount of completely extraneous text.

The material is presented "as is" from the first draft of the manuscript that became the book Ambitious Brew. In a few places I added one or two words in brackets -- [like this] -- for clarification. The excerpt is long, so I'm breaking it into manageable bits and posting those bits over the next few days.

___________________________________

On Sunday night, March 26, the dam of youthful resentment burst. As twilight dissolved into darkness, a gang of boys stumbled out of the Elbo Room and disappointed, perhaps, at not finding Yvette Mimieux and Connie Francis where the boys were, rocked a car and overturned it. Someone tossed firecrackers into the crowd.

The commotion attracted more kids. Auto traffic came to a standstill as people lay down in the street, threw rocks, shouted insults at the cops, and chanted "We want beer. We want beer." (*3)

The crowd had become a mob of ten thousand by the time the sheriff’s department, the highway patrol, and police from seven towns converged on the scene. They and arrested forty-four kids and eventually subdued the beast.

But not for long. Monday night, the mob reappeared. "What do they expect us to do?" shrugged one student. "We . . . didn’t come here to sit in the hotel room and play bridge." (*4) That night the police arrested more than two hundred kids, among them 22-year-old George Dalluge, a senior at Mankato State in Minnesota. George was to have graduated in May, but that plan fell by the wayside after he shinnied up a street light and led the crowd in a stirring rendition of the national anthem and "Hang Down Your Head, Tom Dooley."

His display of athleticism (he was a physical education major) landed him seventy days in the Fort Lauderdale jail; he would be there when his classmates back in Mankato marched across a stage to pick up their diplomas. "'I was stupid,'" Dalluge conceded after the fact. (*5)

The first wave of legal-aged "war babies" had arrived. News to warm the hearts of beer barons everywhere, especially because the Fort Lauderdale rowdies, most of them born in the early forties, represented but the first surge of a larger tsunami: the millions of post-war babies who had pushed the nation’s birth rate to historic high levels.

Still, the Fort Lauderdale riots left the barons scratching their heads in puzzlement. What was it with these kids? Rioting over beach bans and beer? Throwing bottles at the police? What kind of sense did that make? And their attire! Girls wearing what amounted to underwear in public. Boys dressed only in shorts and loafers, no socks, no shirts. Youthful pranks were one thing, but this was outright rebellion.

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Sources:

*3: "'All We Want Is Jade Beach,'" Miami Herald, March 28, 1961, street edition, 1-B.

*4: Ibid.

*5: "'It Was Stupid Thing,' Says Student in Jail," Miami Herald, March 29, 1961, p. 1.

Pot, Bongs, Phelps, and Smokes

The whole Michael-Phelps-With-A-Bong thing got right by me (I was busy with and then missing King Willem), but when I caught up with it, yeah....... well. Big eye-roll.

The only thing "regrettable" is that he got caught on camera. This is perhaps the best -- and smartest -- collection of commentary on the episode.

And while we're on the subject of dumbass laws (which, yes, we were ....), this also got by me: a nice essay by Jacob Grier in Doublethink.

I don't smoke anymore but god damnit it pisses me off when governments tell business owners they can't allow smokers anymore. (Which my city council did here in Ames some years back. I never had any problem with places where lots of people smoked.

Or, rather, I solved the problem: I just didn't GO to them. Problem solved....)

As I said to the city council when it contemplated this ordinance, which it did on grounds of "public health": What's next? Someone's gonna complain that they're allergic to grass and so you're gonna pave over all the public parks so that he/she won't suffer the "health" consequences of living in a town with grass?

And Speaking of Drinking and Recession and Whatever . . .

A few days back, I mentioned that Jeff Alworth at Beervana had asked his readers how the recession had affected their drinking habits. His final results are here.

But then Jeff started wondering about the price of beer (it's what we like about Jeff; his mind never stops...) and that led to this and this. Make sure to read the comments.

And then Patrick Emerson, our man-on-the-economics-beat, weighed in with this. (I'm still hoping Patrick will re-think the black background....) Fascinating, all of it.

First Draft Follies: "Kids," Beer, and the 1960s, Part 1

Part One --- Part Two --- Part Three --- Part Four

Part Five --- Part Six --- Part Seven --- Part Eight 

Welcome to First Draft Follies, an ongoing series here at the blog. This edition is a true folly and a prime example of why my first drafts are so damn long: I research what is intended to be a minor point, become fascinated by this minor point, and next thing I know, I've written an embarrassing amount of completely extraneous text.

The material is presented "as is" from the first draft of the manuscript that became the book Ambitious Brew. In a few places I added one or two words in brackets -- [like this] -- for clarification. The excerpt is long, so I'm breaking it into manageable bits and posting those bits over the next few days.

The time is the early 1960s.

__________________________________________

There had been trouble off and on all week: one kid threw rocks through the windows of a beach shop. A group of rowdies yanked a palm out of its pot and tossed it into the swimming pool at a "swank hotel." Some guys snatched five swimsuits off a clothes line rigged up by Ohio State coeds staying at a motel on Federal Highway. (*1) "Collegiate pranks" were par for the course in late March at Fort Lauderdale, a mecca for college students during spring break. (*2)

But this year, 1961, the city’s police force found the pranks to be a bit more destructive than normal, and the students more numerous than expected.

But whose fault was that? The cops should have known that this year’s horde would be huge, thanks to "Where the Boys Are," a hit movie that premiered in late 1960 and was still running in theaters when spring break rolled around in March. The film, which starred George Hamilton, Yvette Mimieux, and Connie Francis, told the story of four coeds on spring break in Fort Lauderdale, and the romances, broken hearts, tragedy, and happy ending that unfolded at the Elbo Room, on Atlantic Boulevard, and of course, on the beach.

Anyone in his or her right mind should have realized that the movie would bring the kids. And it had. Thousands jammed the sidewalks and spilled out into "Function Junction," the intersection of Atlantic and Las Olas, where boys, who outnumbered girls by about five to one, hopped into female-filled convertibles trolling the scene.

It was as if a collection of aliens had united for a grand convention and were, like conventioneers everywhere, hellbent on having fun.

Back home, they passed as clones of Wally Cleaver or Betty and Bud Anderson, polite youths who wore saddle shoes and letter jackets or dresses plumped full by petticoats. So disguised, they endured a humdrum existence surrounded by eye-rollingly dull old fogies who didn’t understand them. The aliens communed at night when they tuned their radios to the local music station, seeking each other and the solace of rock and roll.

That was home. This was Florida, where they shrugged off the shackles of teachers and parents and frolicked in the company of their own kind. Cast off their dull but necessary disguises and reveled in their natural state of Bermuda shorts, skimpy swimsuits, and sunburned noses.

By day, kids sprawled and crawled the beaches, the boys eying the girls in their bikinis, the girls taking their pick of boys in loafers and plaid shorts. By night, they packed the Elbo Room or twisted hip-to-hip at the Student Prince and Omar’s Tent.

The only flaw in this Camelot-by-the-Sea was that the city father shut the beaches at sunset and banned beer there day or night.

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*1: "Pranks Replace Beach Parties: Collegiate Night-Owls 'Hooting,'" Miami Herald, March 23, 1961, 2-B.

*2: Ibid.