You Must Choose Now: A Journey Through the Sixties

You Must Choose Now: My Journey Through the Sixties

Published by Gatekeeper Press

2167 Stringtown Rd, Suite 109

Columbus, OH 43123-2989

www.GatekeeperPress.com

Copyright © 2018 by Mike Koetting

All rights reserved. Neither this book, nor any parts within it may be sold or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.

ISBN (paperback): 9781642372007

eISBN: 9781642372014

Printed in the United States of America

A journey is called that because you cannot know what you will discover on the journey, what you will do, what you will find, or what you find will do to you.

James Baldwin

And the seasons they go round and round

And the painted ponies go up and down

We’re captive on the carousel of time

We can’t return, we can only look

Behind from where we came.

Joni Mitchell, The Circle Game

Preface

September 15, 1965, was a fine fall day in St. Louis, just a little warm. I had to scramble from the parking lot to make my 9 o’clock class. It was the second session of Professor Paul Steinbicker’s political science class. Before he launched into his lecture, he announced that he was circulating a petition to support our boys in Vietnam. I didn’t think much of it. I signed when it came to me and handed it to the young woman on my left, Paula DeLucca, whom I knew a bit from other classes.

She looked at it, took a couple of desultory chews on the end of her pen, and handed it to the next person. Too many questions . . . she muttered to no one in particular. It wasn’t a thunder-flash moment. It was more a Hmmm . . . put that in the file for later inspection moment. Class went on.

Of course there was no way to realize it at the time, but that’s the moment my Sixties started. As Jill Lepore said in a New Yorker book about the Forties, All wars cleave time.

A lot of stuff happened before my Sixties ended on the patio of a Mexican restaurant in Chicago. I became an activist, I met Kurt Vonnegut, I fell in love, loves broke up, I spent a little time on the road as a hippie, bounced off Abby Hoffman, David Rubin, and the like, lived in a couple of communes, was stunned by assassinations, got my head busted by the Chicago police, and smoked a little dope.

But while those are the stories in this book, that’s not why I wrote it.

I am by training a sociologist. As such, I see the importance of everyday life in creating circumstances and context for decisions. Yet those slip so quickly from the collective memory. I recently saw an exhibit of works by Vivian Maier, a now well-known Chicago photographer. My first impression was that the photographs were from the early ’50s or even late ’40s. They were, in fact, from the ’60s, some of the years covered in this book. Already these scenes seemed further ago and more foreign than by some measure they really were. Perhaps these pages, like the Vivian Maier photographs, will describe something that seems much longer ago, and stranger. But, also like the photographs, they will leave a record of the Sixties that is less subject to the relativist ravages of memory. Many things, smaller and larger, are so much different now. And will be even more so in the future.

Often on my mind is a passage from Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night, the gist of which is that it’s impossible to really understand history because we know how it turned out. We can never really understand Valley Forge, he says, because we know how the Revolutionary War ended. Others have voiced similar sentiments, but this one stuck with me, perhaps because I was reading it literally a few miles from Concord where the Massachusetts militia took on what was regarded at the time as the best army in the world. They were reacting to circumstances of the moment, with Lord knows what intent and hopes. They couldn’t possibly have known the short-run consequences of their actions—let alone how their actions on that day would be seen, interpreted, and reinterpreted over the years.

Today we have a broad set of notions about what happened in the Sixties and how that led our society to where it is. Regardless of how one evaluates the consequences of the Sixties, we need to remember that these actions arose out of particular times, circumstances, and individuals. In his book Feelings in History, historian Ramsay MacMullen argues that historians should be more attentive to what people really thought at the time. This is not to diminish the importance of larger currents in history—Marxism runs deep in my sociology—but to see the individual actions as irrelevant or the outcomes as inevitable is too simple. Choices were made that might have been made differently. They certainly mattered in individual lives.

It wasn’t a single choice—although the question of what do about the draft forced a singular choice for me, and many young men my age. But beyond that were a series of choices. Some were small. Only a few, like the draft, were significant in themselves.

But taken together they had consequences. America would never be the same. Many of the divisions created by these choices are still being played out. Hence the title of this book, taken from the Peter, Paul, and Mary song, The Great Mandala, focuses on the choices.

Take your place on The Great Mandala

As it moves through your brief moment of time.

Win or lose now you must choose now,

And if you lose you’re only losing your life.

(Peter Yarrow, Albert Grossman & Mary Travers- Pepamar Music Corp.)

Clearly, there is no straight line between choices I made and where America is today. I was one among many and all of us were simply drops in the river of time. But I want to leave a record of the specific contexts in which we made choices and how one set of events led to another. The Sixties were a time of change. But the enormity of those changes was found in the way so many of us made choices that changed the course of our society.

I also want to document how the choices made then have continued to shape the lives of those who lived through the Sixties. I have traveled a course totally dissimilar in its specifics from anything I charted, but it has been largely consistent with the instincts that guided me then and the choices I made. Those values leave me, and many of my generation, with an enormous disappointment at the current state of America, even though we understand how our choices contributed to the current malaise in ways we couldn’t begin to imagine back then.

Like everyone, my story is both unique and typical. The details of my story are different from those of others, even other white college students. Certain unique opportunities came my way. But perhaps my journey was more typical than the vivid images that leap to mind when thinking of the Sixties. I lived in the Midwest, attended a commuter college, and in many ways slogged through those years. I was deeply political, but probably spent just as much energy trying to figure out how I was going to support myself. I was concerned about social issues, but I worked hard at school, attended classes, got my degrees, and never thought that American society, for all its real faults, was totally corrupt. There were many more people who passed through the Sixties like I did than like those who made the cover of Life magazine. We were not the vanguard of change. But we were part of it. Perhaps only as foot soldiers in the political and cultural struggles of the Sixties, but we were also proud to own what happened. It would be a mistake to think we were simply sucked along in the excitement, as critics suggested, to dismiss the choices we made. Naturally, trends beyond our control influenced what we did. But we wrestled with what was going on and made deliberate choices about our lives. Those choices have continued not only to shape our lives, but to shape the contours of American society.

All that being said, there is something awkward in writing about choices, the net effect of which were so enormously favorable to me. I believe the times justified the choices and I hope my descriptions illustrate that. But fortune so favored those choices, it’s hard not to look back and wonder whether these descriptions are perhaps too self-serving. I have thought long and hard about this, when they happened and again in writing this book. I want to believe they are not. But you can decide for yourself.

I can only write the story of my choices and the context in which I made them. This is that story.

****

A couple of notes on the book itself. First, I would note my use of the phrase the Sixties references not the decade between 1960 and 1970, but the time roughly between the Gulf of Tonkin resolution (in August 1964) and Nixon’s resignation (in August 1974).

The book itself is not, primarily, a critical analysis of the Sixties. For the most part, it is simply a chronological recounting of what I did in the Sixties. That was the easiest way to tell the story. Some of that is pretty routine stuff that happens to everyone; some of it was utterly specific to me. In that sense, it is a typical coming of age story. But embedded within most of what I have written are intimations of the changes that were taking place around us. I hope the two-way connection between those larger changes and my choices comes through.

Wherever possible, I have relied on the written record of what actually happened. I had a file cabinet of letters, articles, journals and various snatches of writing from the time. At several points in the book there are long passages from things I wrote then. Ultimately, a lot of what is written here relies on memory, However, as one of Alan Hollinghurst’s characters notes, memories are only memories of memories. I have tried to substantiate from things I did write then—or what can be otherwise validated. I’ve found that some of things I remembered clearly probably did not actually happen and that other things happened at a different time. And some things I didn’t remember at all were apparently of some import at the time.

Moreover, the fact that I wrote something down then doesn’t make it true in a totally objective sense. But it limits the range of distortion. In any event, this is my story and I am sticking to it. (Although I have changed names and other irrelevant details in order that no one be any more embarrassed than they deserve.)

One other note. I planned to start each chapter with a couple of lines from the music of the time. I picked out lyrics that were both chronologically and substantively relevant to the events in that chapter and were relatively widely known, although in a few spots, I grabbed some things from folk artists who were less familiar than some of the rock kings. Consistent with pretty much everything else about me, I was much more of a folk kind of guy than a rock and roll kind of guy. (The degree of how much my demographic has faded was driven home to me a few years ago when Sirius replaced its folk music channel with Korea Today.)

But, as it turns out, getting permission to use lyrics is really a huge pain—and gets expensive very quickly as well. So that idea got left. I think it’s unfortunate. These lyrics are important to the story. Every generation feels deep nostalgia for the music that populated its coming-of-age stories. Some of the music of the Sixties was as schlocky as any other era. But an important part of this music was different. In a very real way gave us a script for a life that we were inventing for ourselves, a life that was inherently different from the roles our parents had modeled for us. For more on what music I did and did not use, see the last section of the book, Acknowledgements.

One of the pieces of music that did make it through the obstacle course was from Simon and Garfunkel’s Bookends album. It is so relevant, I couldn’t leave it out.

Time it was

And what a time it was, it was

A time of innocence

A time of confidences

Long ago, it must be

I have a photograph

Preserve your memories

They’re all that’s left you

(Paul Simon Music)

Chapter

one

(1965–66)

The Last of the Old Order

It wasn’t surprising that I would not arrive at the Sixties until September 1965, a little late. I was at St. Louis University, a Catholic university just a couple of miles from St. Louis University High, where I had gone to high school. Although there was no direct connection, each year about half of the U High graduates headed down the road to St. Louis U, which at that time was mostly a commuter college. St. Louis in those days had a large Catholic population, and high school attendance was heavily dependent on a test given to all Catholic grade school eighth-graders the previous February. Boys with the highest scores typically headed to St. Louis U High. The result was an intense, possibly unhealthy, concentration of very high achievers in one all-boys high school. A plausible urban legend was that in 1964, the year I graduated, we had the second largest number of National Merit Letter of Commendation winners of any high school in America.

Accordingly, most of my classmates could have gone to college anywhere. But the gravitation pull of the Catholic ghetto was simply too strong and the overwhelming majority chose Catholic colleges.

I was no different. The only colleges I considered were Catholic schools. I was disappointed when neither Boston College nor Georgetown offered enough scholarship money to be practical. My family was decidedly middle-class, in a way that seems much rarer now. We always felt comfortable. But at the same time I was clearly conscious of limits, and from an early age expected to earn some of my own money—particularly if I wanted something unusual. Our family could have afforded to send me away to some other, smaller Catholic schools I considered, but in the end, I decided that I would get a better education at St. Louis U and still spend less because I would be living at home.

I planned to major in English. Back in high school, the serious students divided into two groups: the math/science guys and the English/history guys. I was in the latter. My role models were my advanced placement English teachers, and my plan for college was to major in English, minor in theater, and subsequently teach high school English.

It didn’t work out that way.

The first deflection hit even before I arrived on campus. One of the guys at my summer job was editor of the St. Louis University student newspaper, the University News. He asked me and my buddy Bob if we would help him put out the Freshman Edition of the paper since the upper-classmen wouldn’t be back on campus until the following week. We had no particular experience, but with the hubris of the young we agreed. Before we knew it, the U News became an integral part of our college life.

The newspaper worked for me. I didn’t write particularly well, but I didn’t labor over what I had to write. It was intuitively clear to me how to frame a story—what was a good lead, how much detail was needed, and what couldn’t be left out. Nor did I have any trouble talking to people to get information or getting them to talk back to me. It was also the case that fitting into the organizational structure of the paper—such as it was—came easy. I was Sports Editor by the middle of my freshman year.

Bob and I started hanging out at the U News Office. We played a lot of bridge. JoAnne, one of the other freshman reporters, got a coffee pot from Goodwill. None of us actually drank coffee at that point, but it seemed like something that should happen in a newspaper office. Before long we were as addicted to coffee as to our bridge games. Years later, JoAnne observed that the U News was our fraternity/sorority, the place from which we faced the bigger institution, and, indeed, confronted the larger world.

The Gulf of Tonkin resolution had passed just before we started college, and, by March 1965, American combat troops were starting into Vietnam. But we didn’t really notice. Vietnam made the school newspaper only twice that year, under the headlines Students Fail to Understand Vietnam Crisis and Only 100 Persons Attend Teach-In on Viet Nam. Civil Rights made more news as the University sent a contingent to the march on Montgomery, but it was not a sustained issue, either. In other words, the first year of college wasn’t that different from high school. And it probably wasn’t that different from any of the previous twenty years at St. Louis U.

But at the beginning of my second year, from the U News sprang the second major deflector of my plans in the form of the United State Student Press Association. All of us working on the paper were volunteers, except for Dennis Wynne, the advertising manager. He actually got paid a commission for the number of ads he sold. And the number of ads sold each week determined the number of pages we printed. Mostly that was fine, but some weeks he would sell more ads than we had good stories. We subscribed to the United States Student Press Association (USPPA) for those weeks. USSPA sent out a weekly packet of stories culled from various college newspapers around the country. In 1964–65, they tended toward the anodyne, for instance Students on Many Campuses Use Bikes to Get Around. We would use these stories to fill the space to accommodate Dennis Wynne’s ads.

Looking back, there were hints at the tsunami that was about to come. One story, ostensibly about students being involved in the 1964 presidential election, turned out to be more about how a get-out-the-vote rally in Ann Arbor morphed into demands for educational reform, with more than 100 protestors marching to the University President’s house. It continued, But President Harlan Hatcher was in Washington. His wife received the demonstrators and invited them to the regularly scheduled monthly tea the next month.

USPPA, however, had bigger aspirations than just the weekly packets. One day at the beginning of my sophomore year, about the time Professor Steinbicker passed out his petition, I was making a vague effort to establish some order in the Augean Stables shambles that were the U News office. I stumbled on a letter from USPPA that was thinner than the weekly packet of clippings and had been languishing in a stack of used copy. Curious, I opened it. It said that USPPA had received a grant to help make college newspapers more relevant and that each member paper could nominate someone to attend a conference in Chicago. And they would cover all the costs.

I’m sure I had nothing more in mind than a vague ambition to be more involved and more important, but it was something I knew immediately I wanted to do.

I wasn’t a freshman anymore and I was an editor—but a junior one—so it seemed wise to proceed delicately. Over the next week, I asked the more senior editors if they were interested, because if they were, they had to act immediately. They told me to go ahead and nominate myself.

Part of the application was to include an article I had written. I chose an article that led with a reference to Bob Dylan’s Times They Are A-Changin’ In truth it was not about anything of more than very