1960s

June 2, 1964

 

June 2, 1964

Transplanted Midwestern sisters in Santa Clara Valley
Transplanted Midwestern sisters in Santa Clara Valley

I’m guessing the end of the year picnic at Blackberry Farm was to celebrate our graduation from 6th grade.  (When did Blackberry Farm vanish from Santa Clara? And what about Frontier Village, another hot spot from yesteryear?) The diary entry suggests Blackberry Farm featured a swimming pool but not much else. Does anybody else remember? Please comment  if you do! As I realize every time I do one of these diary blogs,  if I didn’t write it down, I have zero chance of remembering it.

Frontier Village2

Politically, this entry is an embarrassment but in my defense I was thirteen and I voted for whoever my parents voted for. In their defense, they started out conservative Midwesterners who gradually became more liberal over the years – although I’d be stretching the truth to call them lefties. The hot dog refers to a Rockefeller fundraiser in the Santa Clara Valley, with free hot dogs as the draw. Free dinner for a family of five? Count us in!

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Rocky64

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My parents, being relatively open-minded, changed with the times as we all did – but I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t have predicted that our suburban orchard town would become Silicon Valley or that America would elect a black president and gay marriage would be legal. That’s not to infer they weren’t fine with these changes, they applauded them – I’m just reminding myself that the world we knew in 1964 might as well be another planet on an alien galaxy.

 

May 20. 1966

 

May 20, 1966

I was fifteen, caught between the tail end of childhood and looming adolescence (becoming boy crazy). Sharing adventures with Vania and other girlfriends would soon give way to pining by the phone waiting for some cruel or clueless guy to call.

I was still deeply attached to my childhood nuclear family, as likely to spend my Friday nights with them as with my friends. It was family swim night at the local Y and for a time the five of us went every week. I can still smell the humid locker rooms and the chlorinated pool; it seemed primal and thrilling to swim after dark.

%22Worldliness%22

The last two sentences describe a state of mind – or heart – that I called “worldliness’” for lack of a better word. Between the ages of 12 and 16, I physically ached from an overload of emotions I had no way to process. Too much beauty in a sunset or the loneliness of the solitary liquid amber treeLiquid Amber Tree outside my window brought me to tears. I miss those tumultuous emotions. That fragile moment on the cusp of adolescence is too brief!

 

May 13, 1966

 

5-13-1966

 

Sandy_edited-1Kathy

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Catholic priest created the Wutzit Club to keep teen-agers off the streets. In 1966, it was on Newhall Street. It was open Wednesday, Friday and Saturday nights and featured a ballroom, stage, game room, television lounge and snack bar.  Dances were strictly chaperoned and a dress code was enforced. No alcohol – and nobody 21 or older – was allowed. Live mostly local bands performed; Buckingham and Nicks played there in ’68, before Stevie Nicks and Lindsay Buckingham joined Fleetwood Mac. Dues (admission) was fifty cents – a small price to pay for the chance to meet the love of your life.

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Wutzit Card Back

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For people like me and my friends, who weren’t part of the Wilcox High “In Crowd,” the Wutzit offered an opportunity to meet non-Wilcox guys who didn’t know we were dorks.  Males massed on the right side of the room. Girls milled on the left and waited for some brave boy to cross the great divide and ask us to dance. Our popularity – which in those days meant success – depended on how many times we danced.  Higher mathematics were not required in my case since it is hard to miscalculate one (1).

Truth at seventeen

At the Wutzit, beauty got you asked to dance. (I suspect being under 5’9” helped but I can’t prove it.)  While it’s true other values – intelligence and persistence – are rewarded in the real world, it’s equally true that real life tends to be easier for those born beautiful.

Today, girls don’t need to wait by the wall. No social stigma attaches if they dance alone or with their friends. I applaud their freedom but can’t help wondering if underlying values changed too.  I hope I’m wrong but I suspect more than a few millennials dancing alone still relate to the words Janis Ian wrote in 1975.%22The valentines....%22

May 10, 1969





May 10 1969

 

S&K_edited-2K&S_edited-1

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’m not sure if I’m revealing myself (and – guilting my best friend Sandy Hegwood Walker by association) as a typical high-spirited high-school girl or a pathological liar. In our defense, we didn’t distort the truth for an unfair advantage – we just couldn’t resist any opportunity to try on a new identity. An only child, Sandy’s fantasy life and active imagination meshed perfectly with mine. We were naturals when it came to playing off each other and improvising.  We had our own secret language for awhile, but that was kids stuff. When we matured, so to speak, pretending to be aspiring rock stars was one of our favorite gambits. When we really got it going, we could go into elaborate detail about our set list and who sang lead on what song. I’m surprised we never got around to printing up band cards. (But what if somebody wanted to book us?)

This fantasy sounded so cool Sandy and I struggled through a few guitar lessons  before we realized our talents were better suited to shopping for dramatic stage costumes, not learning to play an instrument. Years of piano lessons, during which I fell progressively further behind my younger sisters, had alerted me keyboards might not be my forte. My next hint I might be musically challenged came when our church choir director eliminated my half of an upcoming duet with the lame excuse a Natalie Nilsen solo served the music better. I told myself she just didn’t want to show preferential treatment to the pastor’s daughter but I was devastated. While I didn’t want to “toot my own horn,” I didn’t want to hide my light under a bushel either.

I took my case to my father. “I have a beautiful voice, don’t I?” I asked.

He paused and said, “Kathleen, we all have different gifts.”

Even I couldn’t spin this response. So what if I’d never be a real life rock’n’roll icon? Thanks to Sandy’s and my living theater, I knew how it felt to strut the stage and blast away on my Stratocaster. Just to prove that sometimes fantasies do come true, Sandy’s parents bought her a drum kit which she housed in a black light room. It didn’t get much better than that.

If you’re worried about all the gullible people we deceived, rest easy – I don’t think we fooled anyone.

 

May 8, 1968

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May 8 1968

Girls Swimming

I’m not sure today’s millennials could survive the sixties high school experience. While searching for a photo of the frigid Wilcox High swimming pool, I unearthed an impressive array of “Mermen” shots – but this was the sole illustration of girls in the water. (I’m so disappointed I couldn’t show you the hideous dark green maillots we wore.)  In fact, this was the only photo I found depicting girls in any athletic endeavor. Based on my Wilcox yearbooks, athletics and team sports were a “Men Only” preserve – not that my consciousness was high enough to perceive this slight at the time. Until I sought a photo for this blog, I never noticed the omission. Although Friedan’s Feminine Mystique was  published in 1963, feminism wasn’t on my radar.

In addition to an outdoor pool in the dead of winter, the class of ’69 was the last to be subjected to a dress code – which meant girls wore dresses every day. If your hem failed to skim the floor when a teacher ordered you to kneel, you were sent home to change. Once a year – on “Grub Day” – girls were allowed to wear pants to school. The top photo of me with the rest of the Literary Magazine staff illustrates typical Wilcox style. For the epitome of high school fashion, see the photo below of the pair my class voted “Best Dressed”.

Best Dressed

High school has loomed large in my writing career and I will revisit aspects of my experience in future diary-blogs. If you recognize yourself in a photo, please tag it!

Class Picture

 

If I knew then – May 3, 1966

 

Diary May 3, 1966_edited-1

When I was fifteen, a year was an eternity – long enough for me to become “a completely different person”.  I’ve always had a morbid inclination to nostalgia. Upon turning ten years old, my diary entry lamented the fact my age would never be a single digit again.  In this entry, I mournfully reflect on where I was less than eleven months ago – “Gone forever, now.” (Or was this a premonition? True Fact: Jefferson Jr. High is literally gone forever, now, razed to build office buildings.)

Time accelerated as I aged. I wish years still crawled like they did when I was fifteen but instead they fly. Preferring Paul McCartney to Mark Lindsay is no longer grounds to dissolve a friendship.

One thing remains the same – my fascination (some might use the word obsession) with the past. Why else would I blog about old diary entries?

It was a thrill to connect with a few other people (Rebecca Dormire LaRussa and Robin Rutan Russell) who lived through the momentous election of 1964 (not Goldwater-Kennedy, the Jefferson Junior High election for student body officers.) This could never happen without Facebook; the fact that it happened so easily, with my very first diary-blog, reassures me this effort is worth it. With luck, I’ll connect with other people whose paths crossed mine. (Hopefully, these diary entries won’t hurt anyone’s feelings. I could be a catty little bitch in the privacy of my diary.)

 

If I Knew Then…. 4/30/64

IF I KNEW THEN… April 30, 1964

On this day in 1964, I was a seventh grade dork, running for Class Secretary.

April 30 1964

 

No vote

 Although I knew that I would lose, I hoped for a miracle. Alas, it was not to be. When the ballots were tallied, Robin was the new Class Secretary and I was the unpopular loser. All of my construction-paper campaign posters, the hours devoted to honing my speech, came to naught. My life would be forever tainted by this humiliating loss.

Another moment in time I didn't think I would survive.
Another moment in time I didn’t think I would survive.

But guess what? If I listed my top hundred terrible, tragic experiences, this crushing defeat wouldn’t make it. It might not make the top two hundred. The ache in my gut and crying jags didn’t last a week. In less than a month, it just didn’t matter that I wasn’t elected 8th grade Class Secretary.  While it’s true I never campaigned for anything again, that’s not much of a loss – for me or mankind. The day it happened it hurt like hell, but it just wasn’t important in the overall scheme of my life.

I have been blessed with so much in my life.
I have been blessed with so much in my life.

I’ll try to remember this next time I lose something I desperately want and can’t live without. The truth is, I will survive. I’m still here. And before I know it, it just won’t matter.

My Top Secret Diary

This will be my format for upcoming blog posts. Once or twice a week, I’ll post a diary entry from between 1964 and the present, a photo if I can find one, and my thoughts on what it all meant given the benefit of hindsight. Diary selections will correspond to the date the blog is posted, but will not be chronological. I have thousands of hand-written diary entries – I might as well use them for something.

 

 

51 YEARS BETWEEN CHAD & JEREMY CONCERTS



Clippings

My diary entry for February 21, 1965 (the two clippings above were pasted into the diary.) In my defense, I was only 13 years old.

Diary 2-21-1965

Not only was I overly fond of exclamation points, in ’65 my life was a long seriously bad hair day. (See 8th grade school picture below, taken on what I then believed to be a good hair day.)  

School Picture

But I digress. Last night – slightly more than 51 years after their performance at the Hyatt Music Theater, I saw Chad and Jeremy at McCabe’s guitar store in Santa Monica – a considerably smaller and calmer venue.  No one fainted during their highly entertaining show which included renditions of two of my favorite Chad and Jeremy songs – “A Summer Song” and “Distant Shores”.  Here they are on stage. Sorry about the bad photo – our cell phones were supposed to be off.

C&J Concert

Even though we saw the second show, which started at 10 PM and didn’t end until midnight, they stuck around afterwards to talk to fans and sign autographs. I got one too.

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C&JConcert3

Music is the closest I’ll get to time travel. When familiar – usually melancholy – chords cast their spell, 51 years dissolve. Contrary to the title of Chad and Jeremy’s first USA hit, yesterday is never gone. Long buried memories and feelings spring to life. My world-weary adult self morphs into the yearning dork I used to be. How much of a dork? Another diary entry from 1965.

Diary 1965_edited-1

As angst-ridden as I was at 13, I miss the passionate highs and lows. Where did all that intensity go?

I didn’t scream deliriously at last night’s show like I did in 1965, but I remembered how it felt. Exhilarating. 1965 was a very good year.

song

As long as there’s music, I don’t have to say goodbye to anything.  If a band you used to love passes anywhere near your town, it’s definitely worth the trip.

 

Feeling Fat? Don a Poncho!

Kathy in Poncho

Sadly, I felt fat A LOT because this brown and white poncho is featured in numerous photos from the mid-sixties (b/w photos) until the mid-seventies (the sole color photograph, with college boyfriend Tom, in suede jacket.) Truth is, I might still have that old wool poncho, although I haven’t worn it in a decade (which is not to say that I haven’t felt fat. Just not fat enough to don the poncho.) As you can see, it conveniently conceals the entire mid-section and – at the time – I truly believed it epitomized hip.  Is the poncho due for a fashion comeback?


Kathy-Tom-Poncho

It’s Not Too Late to be a Model in my Sixties Fashion Gallery!

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As part of a reference/research project for my novel, I’m assembling a gallery of sixties fashions. Rather than reproduce the same old iconic sixties fashion shots we’ve all seen a million times, I want to feature real life baby boomers in the real sixties ensembles we all actually wore. I’m not too proud to post my own humiliating fashion faux pas, so why not join me? I’ll post your name and any comments you offer with your photo if you like, or you can be anonymous. You can send sixties photos of yourself to me at my domain – kathleenrowell.com (where you can also view the galleries as they grow) or you can email them to kathleenkrowell@aol.com.  MALE AND FEMALE FASHION PHOTOS WANTED!!!

 

I’ve broken the gallery into three sections – early sixties (roughly up until the Beatles), mid-sixties (Beatlemania until ’68-69), and late sixties, which in my opinion extends until 1973 fashion-wise, so please note where you think your fashion photo should fall (if you don’t, I’ll take my best guess). Right now, almost all the photos in the gallery are of yours truly, so please save me from my narcissism and send some of yourself in your sixties glory. (And truthfully, is there a baby boomer alive who doesn’t wish that you looked as good now as you did then? Show off your former self! Release your inner model!) Thanks in advance to any and all responders.