The Message in 2007

Truth and individual freedom. Freedom of expression. Creativity, love and respect for all things. Freedom for an individual to make a choice – sexually, spiritually and socially. The right to be different and still belong. Honor in refusing to fight without judging those who did. Our right to make a difference. Our right to think independently. Our willingness to share with others.

– from website for 40th summer of love reunion in San Francisco

I finally realized what your question meant:  “What did you take away from that time?”  Although I did not get this stuff from “The Strip”, per se, I did get it from the cultural transformation of which “The Strip” was a manifestation – one that was easily accessible to an eager and impressionable teenager.  So I would say that “The Strip” was one of the things that enabled me to interact with and draw more from “the era” than I otherwise would have been able to.

 An open mind.

Readiness to question assumptions and conventional wisdom.

Respect for and tolerance of the views, choices, cultures and lifestyles of others.

Refusal to judge others by what they wear, what they drive, or what they own.

Readiness to defend an individual’s freedom to be whoever he/she wants to be.

A never-ending quest for who I am and who I want to be.

Love for democracy and freedom of expression and the press.

Anguish and anger at the wrongs in the world, and a dedication to fight against and help fix them.

Mistrust of institutions and leaders (e.g., government/political, corporate, church) with large vested interests, and an abhorrence for extreme nationalism and absolutist religion.

Abhorrence for war and militarism and a powerful desire for peace.

Powerful curiosity about and fascination with the unconventional, the strange and different, the offbeat and edgy, and an eclectic taste in music and art.

Preference for ‘intangible’ values over monetary gain.

Courtesy of Bill Mankin’s brain.

Every small town had a group of creative kids that, try as they might, could not take delight in praising the emporer’s new clothes. In my town we named our group Lambda Sigma Delta. (Get it?)

High school sororities and fraternities dogmatically controlled the teenage society of our town.  They were the football players and their rah-rahs who felt high school football was the center of the universe and Heaven was involved with the Dawgs or Bear Bryant. Anyone not so athletically inclined was fair game for abuse since they were obviously of an inferior species that did not live football. Social organizations had emerged that were thinly veiled efforts to rub it in to anyone not a member that they were losers.  Two small town-snob, pseudo-debutante clubs prevailed.  The college Greek system run wild at a petty level.

Many kids in my area came from families that could not afford the accoutrements to buy their non-athletic child acceptance in these groups. Thus many people were caused great pain upon suddenly learning in the tenth grade that they weren’t good enough for some reason and had been blackballed.  Girls excluded from both clubs were devastated.

Every yearbook each High School sorority put in a big picture of all their members dressed as Southern Belles arrayed on the manicured lawn of some antebellum style home that most resembled a mansion and wasn’t a funeral home.  Beneath the big picture was a picture of the club officers, the most socially successful.  The listing of officers immortalized the social pecking order for the year.

At this memorable Happening party the a plan was created as a kind of performance art for the less than socially acceptable among us.  Create our own sorority, since they said the guys all looked like girls, and name it Lambda Sigma Delta as a satiric jab to the prevailing society in school.

We could buy an “ad” to picture our entire group and immortalize the out group. The title would say, “Lambda Sigma Delta – We love you!”  We decided to get a bunch of freaks of both sexes dressed in wild costumes on the porch of a ramshackle shack that needed one good push to settle back into the weed covered ground.  Our names would be listed.  We had a small reproduction of the same picture with bizarre official-sounding titles, mostly in-jokes, made up for all members.  One I remember was Theron O. Odlaug’s keeper.  Mr. Odlaug had written the manual we used in Advanced Biology to dissect a fetal pig.

Ads cost money. We got an understanding teacher as sponsor, and registered as a school club. We could then automatically qualify for a space at the Tiftarea County Fair and automatically win an honorarium if we completed our exhibit.

So there among the spaces set apart by chicken wire was our abomination among the champion hogs and jellies and the “Candy Stripers Salute to Progress”. We had built a swing in the middle of a large space and covered it and the ground beneath with real, artificial, and paper flowers of every hue. In the background were large letters in a style that has come to be called psychedelized. They said, ” We Love You! Lambda Sigma Delta”. Very colorful and unusual, but positive. How horrible!

They didn’t get it.  We outraged the local American Legion County Fair. People threatened to never come to the fair again or to remove their livestock or preserves from judging or to even withdraw their own exhibit.

Apparently we were somehow more dangerous to the community morals than the semi-hidden gamblers and the hootchi-koo and moonshine being somewhat discretely consumed at night in the fair.   Brown butcher paper was strung to hide our disgrace from a view and we were warned we had two hours to remove this outrage.

The ignorance motivating our community leaders dismayed, but did not surprise us; they were fighting a rear guard action against civil rights and now had white kids acting crazy, too!

Fred and I had earlier appeared before the school board to ask about refining the length of hair acceptable in the school dress code. We had help from the ACLU and had prepared a well- reasoned and logical case, which we presented. Then the father of a friend slid back in his chair and said, “Tell me boys, what is your present affiliation with The American Nazi Party?”  Hair touching your collar makes you a Nazi?!

Despite their anger, being a registered school club that had actually completed an exhibit, we automatically received an honorable mention and $25 for bringing this shame on the fair. This was the down payment for the ad.  Sympathetic kids on the yearbook staff had told us the yearbook would come out and we would all be gone then the books would be closed as every year.

Now our ad was in the yearbook.  When it came out, no one got it or the name; they wanted us expelled as communists. But somehow all the Senior pictures were correct except Fred’s was missing and mine had the name switched with a girl. We were told social leaders had done it since our page was already at the printers. Ten years later at a reunion I had people tell me they were still glad they had ripped that page out of their annuals at the time.

Our most heinous crime, for which there were murmurs to have us all expelled, was collecting wild flower bouquets and giving them to all the faculty members with little cards saying ” We Love you! Lambda Sigma Delta”. Shades of Stranger in A Strange Land!  Teachers complained that this Love-thing was getting out of hand. Seemingly they preferred the prevailing attitude that any teacher not a coach must be a loser or a homo or something, to people appreciating what they were trying to do. Even today, as a teacher myself, I really can’t figure that one out…

People were sure we were on drugs but most failed to even decipher the initials of our group, which we proudly wore in the form of Greek letters like a fraternity. Yet the name only signified a searching of attitudes; we mostly did not even smoke cigarettes, were one of the few groups that were mostly non-drinkers, and Gabi was yet to be offered the first joint I had ever heard of.

But in Atlanta Pixie had heard about Morning Glory seeds and had told Tommy. A chemist had told her they contained the same natural alkaloids that made up L.S.D.; real Flower Power.  The summer before I started college she and Tommy decided to buy several packages of Morning Glories with spacey sounding names. (Now they coat the seeds in poison so you can’t do this without planting the seeds and waiting a season to collect more, but then you have them for ever, and the flowers.)

They ground the seeds into a powder and drank it in a milk shake. Gabi and I watched over them.  At first I got really scared that all my worst fears would be realized when they both began to complain of terrible stomach cramps. They began to look pale and sickly. I was worried they might die; until they threw up. I figured it was out of them now like getting your stomach pumped. They both began to smile beatifically.  We walked around with them as they giggled a lot and said strange things. It was weird but kind of a let down from the weird things I had had expected from what we had heard and read about L.S.D.  They had made it sound like the whole world should see your hallucinations or something!

It took Philip K. Dick to bring that scenario to fruition.

2010 lambdas –

  RIP Ronnie Chambley 7-15-2014

My Generation, The Baby Boomers, is the best-documented generation in history. We are the visible evidence of the outburst of Loving, an affirmation of living, which greeted the end of darkness and inhumanity of WWII. We, the Baby Boomers, are our parents saying yes to life. Our stories are varied, yet a thread of commonality runs through them all. A thread that seems to show a force at work on us; the tidal pull of a third wave building.

My Generation has changed the face of our culture with its every permutation, if only by sheer numbers. We are the generation of Rock N’ Roll, the Love generation of Vietnam, the generation of Disco, the Computer generation; and who knows what changes we will go through before we become the largest geriatric population the world has ever known. And with all the piercings and tattoos, there are going to be some UNIQUE old folks.

Too much of history becomes sanitized until we have a feeling of inadequacy to stand our lives against the giants that lived during former ages. From the pasteurized accounts of their times, we perceive them as purer than ourselves.  We picture everyone alive during the Revolutionary War period as being a brave patriot consumed with a desire for Independence; we tend to lose the Loyalists, profiteers, and indifferents.

Or worse a period or a people undergoes a form of cultural censorship that decides to delete certain “unpleasant ” details to keep from giving an “inaccurate” picture, i.e. one that would be embarrassing in later ages that did not share similar cultural norms.  We know Sir Isaac Newton the scientist and mathematician, but we don’t teach about his works in alchemy any more. We tend to picture all ages as being our own with minor changes in costume, only somehow more elevated from the human condition while maintaining our prejudices and attitudes.

   God cannot alter the past but historians can.   –Samuel Butler

  Truth exists; only falsehood has to be invented.  –Georges Braque

 Unfailingly, humans pity their ancestors for being so ignorant and forget that their descendants will pity them for the same thing.  – Edward Harrison

  Seeing is deceiving.  It’s eating that’s believing.  –James Thurber

Great changes happened when My Generation came onto the stage in force; yet already as I peruse the information on the generation that generated the Information Age, little I see fits the story of the changes as I knew them.  My proposal is to tell the story of a small sliver of My Generation as it was experienced by myself. Make of it what you will.

Patrick Edmondson 1996

By JP Burns (JP)     =================

The scene opens in a dimly lit, smoky coffeehouse, populated by pale, gaunt figures in black turtlenecks, goatee’s, and berets. The sound of bongo drums droning in the background, keeping the beat as the lone figure on stage hisses a poem of revolution and woe.

“You’re one cool cat, daddy-o.” Maynard Krebs would have said.

This is the scene many of us think of when we hear the word beatnik or bohemian, or when we refer to coffeehouse poetry. These are the prominent images of the beatnik stereotype, however, as it seems to be with all stereotypes, the image is incorrect, and the generation that gave birth to this stereotype is sadly misunderstood. To understand the reality of the counter-culture we must first try to define it and identify its progenitors, a task, which is often difficult when speaking of social movements.

There has always been a group of people with little interest in the trappings of accepted society; those who have no interest in keeping up with the Jones’s, climbing the corporate ladder, or generally participating in ‘the rat race’. A group whose disillusionment with contemporary society has set them apart in some fashion: the bohemian lifestyle so to speak.

What is bohemian exactly? I’m not sure anyone can adequately define it although one can trace the use of the term back to the gypsies who were believed to have originated from a country called ‘Bohemia’. The term itself has taken on the connotation of a lifestyle of hedonism, non-conformity, and the literary/artistic avant-garde. While discussing the essence of the bohemian lifestyle Robert Duncan wrote: “In a Bohemian household you have immediacy to all the arts so that you are going to have some aspect of music, poetry, painting, and also the decoration of things at the same level.” That access to the arts in all their forms coupled with the resistance to the norms of society provides the essence of the counter-culture lifestyle.

The Beat Generation is a bit easier to define, in spite of its maligned stereotype. The term ‘Beat’ was coined by Poet/Author Jack Kerouac in 1948 during a conversation with novelist John Clellon Holmes, it was meant to describe himself and his friends (Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, William S. Burroughs, Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso and Michael McClure); a group of post World War II intellectuals who could not fit into the expected roles of society: corporate robots, or ‘spit and polish’ soldiers.

The phrase ‘Beat Generation’ was meant to echo Ernest Hemingway’s description of his own crowd as the ‘Lost Generation’.

He used the term ‘beat’ in much the same fashion that it is commonly used today, as in the terms “beaten down”, or “I’m totally beat”. The connection here is one of disappointment, defeat, disillusionment, and resignation. The phrase ‘Beat Generation’ was meant to echo Ernest Hemingway’s description of his own crowd (which came of age during the First World War), as the ‘Lost Generation’.

Jack Kerouac expanded his ‘definition’ of the Beat Generation to include a second meaning: ‘beatific’ or sacred and holy. Kerouac explained that by describing his generation as beat he was trying to capture the secret holiness of the downtrodden. He reflected this idea of holiness when writing of ‘the saintly hobos’ in ‘On the Road’, published in September 1957.

In her paper “The Beat Generation,” Amanda Erickson described the ‘Beat Generation’:

“The Beat Generation was born out of post-war disillusionment and restlessness. They were a generation of young people struggling to come to terms with the chaos and uncertainties that were a part of their upbringing. Their movement, if it can accurately be called that, manifested itself in literature and poetry, which threw off the traditional, classical format to become a character in and of itself. The Beats attempted to express themselves in a way that was extremely personal and extremely in-your-face. They addressed issues that were taboo at the time, most notably homosexuality and drug use, writing largely for and to each other, sharing life experiences and crying out against an establishment that harbored little space for individuality and protest.”

In 1958, after the Beat ‘movement’ had influenced multitudes of alienated young men and women to migrate to the North Beach area of San Francisco, Herb Caen wrote a column for the San Francisco Chronicle in which he coined the term ‘Beatnik’. While there is speculation on the original meaning of ‘nik’, Caen insists that it was actually borrowed from the satellite ‘Sputnik, (meaning traveling companion)’ which had just been launched by the Soviet Union, striking fear into the hearts of many Communist-fearing Americans. On April 2, 1958, Caen wrote:

“Look magazine, preparing a picture spread on S.F.’s Beat Generation (oh, no, not AGAIN!), hosted a party in a North Beach house for 50 Beatniks, and by the time word got around the sour grapevine, over 250 bearded cats and kits were on hand, slopping up Mike Cowles’ free booze. They’re only Beat, y’know, when it comes to work.”

Caen’s article not only gave the Beats an unwanted name, it also gave them an unwanted stereotype; one-room pads, sandals, goatee’s, bongo’s and berets… it wasn’t too long after that when the first Beat Generation exploitation movies and TV beatniks came out. Soon, every teenager wanted to be a beatnik.

[Under influences from the Civil Rights Movement, I believe,]  The Beat coffehouses began to feature folk music, which started the Folk Movement. Then Bob Dylan fell under Beatle influence and changed it to Folk Rock. Folkies starting to rock created what we think of as sixties bands; and the Beat goes on..