Too Young: The Sixties
by Emily Kretschmer
Too young to know my sister well, I was twelve when she was seventeen in 1966. She ironed her natural blonde hair even though it was already silky and straight, and she wore pale blue eye shadow, which our parents seemed to think made her look too wild. Once, for a Sadie Hawkins dance at high school (girls invited boys to that), my sister dyed her hair an ash gray color. She wore a black turtleneck and beret that made her look like a real beatnik. She was the closest thing to a real beatnik I had ever seen.
We lived in a small Minnesota town distinguished by the trivial fact that it was there John Denver found his wife Annie. Annie’s father owned the private supper club across the river. It was the kind of place to which people brought liquor bottles in paper bags and kept them in private lockers for use with set-ups they purchased. Annie used her influence to get the not-yet famous Denver to play a concert at our high school prom when I was a ninth grade prom server. My sister was gone by then.
My sister was into folk music. She had, since the start of her babysitting career, managed to mostly save her earnings, and combined with the money she earned detassling corn and with that from confirmation and birthdays, she bought a Silvertone (Sears brand) acoustic guitar and electronic organ. She also owned a few records by the Beatles, the Byrds, and the Lovin’ Spoonful. Her most prized album boasted a picture of Joan Baez on the cover. She learned those Baez songs on that so-so guitar, though she was neither a great guitarist nor singer. I learned from my sister not only that there was such a thing as folk music, but that a mystique surrounded a teenage girl learning to be a folk singer. It was like my sister was blessed with a pair of spiritual antennae that received signals from a world outside the seventy mile radius that circumscribed and defined our lives.
After she left for college in Minneapolis, my sister came home to visit on occasional weekends, but she wrote me letters. She had two roommates in the dorm, one who was to die for and who attracted boys. She wrote me about the boys they met and said I could come to visit her in the dorm. My sister had a compassionate side and a social conscience; she was planning to become a social worker. I was fourteen at the time, and there was a war going on in Vietnam. Back home I marched in a protest we got out of school for, listened to Bob Dylan, and smoked grass once or twice because some of my friends did. And right about here my memory gets a little foggy.
It was several days before Christmas, 1968. My sister had been working a part-time job on campus during break. It had been snowing. Or, it was more like a common blizzard on an uncommon night. A middle-aged woman drove up an off-ramp too fast to stop on the icy pavement, and realizing that she could not stop in time to avoid hitting the approaching VW bug, the woman sped up. That’s what she told someone later. I got all this second hand. When the telephone rang it was my father who answered. My parents took off immediately for Minneapolis where they saw my sister before telling the doctor to take her off life support. They said that the doctor told them her brain was so severely damaged that any possibility of recovery was beyond hope.
I watched the movie Easy Rider again last night. I didn’t see that movie when it was first released in 1969, but I think I saw it sometime later. In the flick Peter Fonda (Wyatt) and Dennis Hopper (Billy) play long-haired pot-smoking dudes who ride really cool motorcycles from L.A. across Colorado to New Orleans for Mardi Gras. They are clearly also on a spiritual quest. Billy is gruff and cynical in contrast to the quiet and elegant Wyatt, who is a flagship for love of his country and his fellow human being (his helmet and cycle actually sport the US flag which by implication in the movie might have provoked some of their trouble in the “confederate” south). Wyatt is all peace and harmony and trusts about anybody once he’s sized a person up. Billy trusts hardly anyone. In the end all that doesn't really matter though because the shotgun shots that blow the two soul searchers away are spawned by a knee jerk reaction from an apparently ignorant and hateful local who acts on his impulse to kill these men who are radically different.
In retrospect, the shooting spree scene in Easy Rider looks somehow prophetic. A year later, on May 4, 1970, twenty-eight Ohio National Guardsmen carrying M-1 military rifles would fire between sixty-one and sixty-seven shots at a crowd of students, some of whom were protesting the recent incursion into Cambodia, some of whom were by-standers, on the campus of Kent State University. Four students died; five others were wounded.
I was more or less fifteen when the decade of the sixties turned into the decade of the seventies. That turning seems now to have signaled the end of innocence for coming-of-age children with flowers in their hair. “Make love, not war,” they all had said. I still believe that. My sister was nineteen when she died, and because she had liked to wear that pale blue eye shadow my parents had the undertaker put blue on her eyelids for her wake.