What was your life like in the 60's?

My family moved back to the SF Bay Area in 1965. I was ten, but my older brother and suster were in high school, and my brother was facing the draft.

The summer of 1967 we started seeing what were called hippies in San Francsico, mostly in the Haight. My mother’s favorite way to drive into SF took us by Golden Gate Park and through the edge of the Haight to get downtown. It was quite remarkable to see all the yung people about.

And, we knew people taht went to the Be-In, and a friend’s brother went to an Acid Test. It was all a lot of fun and being wild and lvoing everyone.

But the “hippy scene” was not the same as the anti-war movement or the free speech movement or any protest demonstrations. Hippies in the Hiaght were, if anything, apolitical.

And nobody had really heard of SDS until the anti-draft movement started to ramp up in late 1967. And that was in reaction to seeing footage from Vietnam on the nightly news, and Walter Cronkite announcing body counts each week, and LBJ escalating the war. The US added 100,000 troops into Vietnam in 1967, and that started to meet resistance for a war that had no real meaning or justification.

One thing that rarely gets mention, but I feel is critical to understanding the late 60s is that the generation born after the start of WWII, the ones of the famous “generation gap”, were raised by families deeply affected by Post Tramatic Stress from the war. That left millions of kids with fathers that were emotionally absent. Listen to Simon and Garfunlkels’ Dangling Conversation or listen to the description of middle class life in Carly Simon’s That’s the Way I Heard It Should Be

Gasoline – 28 cents/gallon – no unleaded
phone calls – phone booths cost a nickel
long distance phone calls – a dollar or more per minute
stamps 4 cents, extra for air mail
no interstate highways, only US roads and a couple of turnpikes
black and white TV
no cable tv
no personal computers or anything like that
segregation, blacks forced to go to separate schools from whites in the south
worries about being drafted and going to Vietnam to fight for a stupid war

I was a child in the 60’s, and of course I wanted to be a hippie. We mimicked them. We walked around saying things like, “Let’s make like a banana and split, ” and “Let’s make like a tree and leave.” We said things like, “That’s a bad scene, man.”
Round Ringo glasses were all the rage.
I don’t think my parents approved of the hippies. In those days were were expected to conform, no questions asked.
Um. I remember JFK’s funeral. I was 5. I do not remember where I was when I got the news that the president had been shot. I came running in from outside to see the funeral. My younger sister came running in behind me. We had a pneumatic hinge on the door, where it would slowly, slowly close then, at the very end, it would SNAP!! Yeah. My sister had her little finger right there when it snapped. Cut the tip off. JFK’s funeral is a mix of horses and blood and screaming.
Milk was delivered to our door in glass quart bottles. Same sister dropped one, it broke, and she stepped on it. Bloody milk everywhere.
We were allowed to do whatever as kids. As the oldest I was expected to keep an eye out on the younger. At one point we lived in Florida. We had a salt water canal as part of our back yard. It raised and lowered with the tide. I was 6 and my younger sister was 3 and Mom just turned us lose. We didn’t know how to swim. My sister fell off the sea wall once. OMG. The guilt I felt.
Our neighbors had an indoor pool. There were no saftty features to keep us from the pool. I pulled my sister out of that pool at least twice.

Thank you guys!! This is perfect! Y’all are awesome!!!

I remember Woodstock.

I went to Woodstock and parked in farmer Max Yasgu’s lower pasture on the dirty road up to the venue.

What’s a phone booth?

@Patty_Melt – it was a 4 foot by 4 foot structure which Clark Kent used when he needed to quickly change into his Superman garb.

Ah.
Thanks.

Which was ridiculous of him because it’s glass all the way around.

Hippies were in.

I was a very young child in the 1960s and I remember liking the Beatles along with a generous dose of Bubblegum Rock—which was probably a holdover from the 1950s.

It was still possible to be rich or a snob—it was not politically incorrect, I went to an upper middle class day school. But even WE were allowed occasional submerging into Hippie and Black Pop Music culture.

The first and maybe subsequent moon landings made us feel we were progressing and approaching new horizons,

I remember the Garbage Strike and when Dr. Martin Luther King was asassinated. My father and his friends helped bring the NAACP to Memphis colleges but even we were afraid of the riots when Dr. King was shot. Businesses closed down to secure public safety.

What I remember more about the times were actually the Folk Music revival which was in the late 1960s but was more who I was in the early 1970s.

Elements from the 1960s lasted through the 1970s up until the American Bicentenniel (1976). By 1977, Disco, Personal Computers and Star Wars slayed the 1960s and thrust us into the modern computer / videogenic era,

I remember my Dad called us 3 girls down stairs to watch the moon landing….just like in that scene from Apollo 13.

I remember my dad vehemently hated them damn long hair hippie freaks.
I didn’t understand why.
I wanted to grow up, strap on a backpack, and hike the country, doing jobs along the way, and at least once chain myself to something for a good cause.
I too was little during the 60s.
I had long hair and bangs and short skirts and knee high stockings and orange pop beads. They were called pop beads, because each bead was made to pop together with the others.
They can be bought on eBay now, but they are like twenty dollars for a dozen, or something like that.
My dad watched Hee Haw, my Mom was into Elvis movies.

I had the Avon little girl set, apricot themed, lip balm, perfume, and power loaded in a bunny. It’s tail was the powder puff.

Long haired hippy type pinko fags!

“Sign said long haired freaky people need not apply. So I tucked my hair up under my hat and went in to ask him why. He said, “You look like a fine upstanding young man, I think you’ll do!” So I took off my hat and said, “Imagine that! Me, working for you!?”