1967's So-Called "Summer of Love"

The August/September edition of AARP's glossy magazine has a cover with a fancy and colorful Peter Max drawing on it: it is a tribute to the "Summer of Love" back in 1967...50 years ago.  I'm not sure that's what folks were calling it back then: the label seems to be one of those retroactive captions placed on a historical moment...and it's not in the least bit accurate...

The late Scott McKenzie released his iconic hit single San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair) in May of 1967 and it was a big summertime hit, setting the stage for the counterculture movement that was concentrated in that west coast city.  I remember seeing in late June a BBC production called Our World that showed live various things going on all over the planet...one of the features was the Beatles recording their hit single All You Need is Love.  Around this time so-called "mind-expanding" drugs like LSD became very popular in some circles, and art imitated the psychedelic...hence the Peter Max kind of spaced-out imagery.  The new generation was going to change everything...after all, the oldsters were giving them war, poverty, injustice, pollution, and racism.  And how was this great change to come about? Why, by tuning in (to drugs, I suppose) and dropping out (meaning disengaging from the very society they wanted to change).  I never bought into any of this, but I did come away with a lot of great music from this strange time.  And no, I didn't ever see this as a "summer of love"...maybe a couple of examples will explain why not...

On July 2, 1967, in what is officially called Operation Buffalo, the Vietnamese Demilitarized Zone saw the worst one-day casualty day for the U.S. Marines in the Vietnam War with 84 dead and 190 others wounded after being ambushed by the North Vietnamese regular forces.  Looking at 1967 as a whole, 11,153 Americans were killed in the war, up more than 5,000 from 1966...the following year the total would go up another 5,000.  It definitely was no "summer of love" in this part of the world...

Another term for this period in our history is quite different from the way some nostalgia buffs portray it: "The Long Hot Summer" refers to the numerous race riots that broke out in the summer of 1967 across the country, with the worst being in Newark and Detroit.  There were numerous reasons for their outbreak, but I see a great similarity between then and the general situation now: profiling and brutality from the police, a sense among many blacks of isolation and discrimination from the fruits of the greater American society, and a feeling of hopelessness when it comes to opportunities for economic betterment for themselves and their families.  After all, the civil rights victories of the previous 13 years hadn't done anything for their lives...and now where are we, a half-century later?

And where was I during the so-called "Summer of Love"?  I was ten and a half years old and on vacation between the fifth and sixth grades at Davie's Nova Elementary School.  I spent much of my time at the nearby Boulevard Heights Elementary School (which I attended for grades 1-3) since they had a good summer recreation program going on there, including many games, the school's library...and many good pine trees to climb.  For me personally, the summer of '67 was neither a war, that long hot summer (although it was long and hot), nor a summer of love...it was the Summer of Tree Climbing.  I got to be pretty good at it, too, and tended to climb higher (and take more chances) than most everyone else.  I also became bold at jumping down from heights...not just from trees, but also from the tops of buildings.  Looking back on it, I wonder how I managed to survive that summer or at least avoid broken bones.  During the first few weeks after school resumed, I came down badly with the flu, unusual for this time of year...my temperature shot up to over 105 and when I finally recovered, I was even thinner than I normally was (a classmate innocently asked me if I had polio)...I call it the "Late Summer of Sickness"...

So yeah, we can all get caught up with putting labels on different periods...and sometimes it can get a little extreme and distorted.  My take on the Summer of Love that AARP and others are promoting is that it was a commercially hyped gimmick designed to sell culture and fashion through a feel-good sensibility that masked the despair and hopelessness that the country was slipping into from a never-ending war and civil unrest...