On The Road In The 1970's: Conclusion

Not long after I reached the breakdown lane between the exit and entrance of the Interstate highway that crossed the middle of Pennsylvania and took you into New Jersey, a car stopped soon after I stuck out my thumb.

The driver, a white guy, without a beard and with short hair--whom most women would have still then considered good-looking--who wasn't wearing a suit or tie, pushed the front passenger door of his compact car open and motioned for me to hop in with my knapsack.  He looked like he was around a little over 30 years of age.

After we began to converse with each other, he mentioned to me that he was a vacationing off-duty police officer, who was now returning from wherever he had spent his vacation; and that he was now driving all the way back into New Jersey and north of the Lincoln Tunnel. So I then happily realized that this was the ride that would enable me to reach the end of my journey back  to theeast coast by the early evening.

The white police officer wasn't a wannabee hippie-freak or a particularly disillusioned cop, But he also wasn't particularly right-wing politically or some guy who seemed to be into being a police officer because he enjoyed bullying, controlling or brutalizing people (such as young black men, etc.).

He apparently just worked for some small suburban or rural town or county's police department. In a place where "being a cop" pretty much just then meant only having to give speeding or parking tickets to drivers, being more like a social worker on the street or acting as a traffic director; rather than having to use your club or gun against local area civilians or arrest many people. And it seemed like he was just working as a police officer because it was a well-paying, easy job without much personal risk for him; or it could be that someone in the older generation of his family had been some kind of a cop?

Perhaps because he was now divorced, though, this apolitical, off-duty white poliice officer of the 1970's did not seem like a jovial or a loquacious kind of fellow. And my impression was that the main reason he picked me up. was that, as a cop, he was used to driving around as part of a two-person "team;" and that he also felt it would be less boring to drive across Pennsylvania with somebody to converse with that day than it would be to drive across the state all alone, listening to the car radio to music or verbal chatter that he had no interest in.

Another reason he may have picked me up was because--like the white guy who had picked me up when I was on the road leaving Los Angeles, he likely had hitched himself when he was in the U.S. military, years before. And picking me up was, for him also, seen as a way of returning the gift of the free rides that he may have received from some other drivers years before, when he was traveling on leave, to or from the U.S. military base he was stationed on.

In the car, I told him about some of my experiences on the road back from California. And he seemed to find it interesting that I had reached where he picked me up in Pennsylvania in so few days by hitching alone. And, naturally, a lot of our conversation in his car was spent discussing my vision about how a leisure-oriented society in the U.S. could be easily created in the 1970's.

While the white police officer in his early 30's who picked me up understood that U.S. society needed to be transformed--and, until it was transformed, the quality of life the USA would continue to deteriorate, compared to how it had been for most people in the placed he had lived within the affluent U.S. society during the 1950's and early 1960's--he was skeptical that much could change in the USA, at least during the Seventies.

Neither of us, however, foresaw that, by the 1980's, so many U.S. factories in the Midwest and Northeast would be shutting down. Or that the kind of economic affluence that so many white working-class people had enjoyed during the 1950's and early 1960's would vanish. And that by the 1980's, most white working-class people, along with most African-American working-class people, would again begin to experience a decline in their real income, living standards and chances of any more upward mobility under the U.S. economic system.

So many years later, I no longer can recall much else of what we discussed before finally reaching the road to the Lincoln Tunnel in New Jersey in the early evening. Perhaps because of his divorce, I have a vague recollection that--although not being particularly anti-feminist, male chauvinist or misogynist--the off-duty white police officer felt that many U.S. women were too self-centered. And, perhaps because he was a cop, I do recall that he was a skillful driver who drove slightly above the speed limit until we reached the road to the Lincoln Tunnel--where he dropped me off during the last period of the evening  rush hour.

Within 15 minutes, a beardless white guy in his early 20's, with long brown hair, who looked like a hippie-freak, stopped his VW van in front of me as I stood on the breakdown lane alongside the road in New Jersey which takes you eventually into the Lincoln Tunnel.

And after I hopped in the van's front passenger seat with my large knapsack, I discovered that, besides being a hippie-freak like me, he was also, like me, a musician. And, in addition, like me, he had grown up in Queens.

Despite the heavy Jersey-NYC traffic, we made good time as he drove towards the Lincoln Tunnel, through the Lincoln Tunnel and Midtown Manhattan and across the East River and onto the Long Island Expressway in Queens; where he eventually dropped me off at some bus stop--before he continued to drive east to the neighborhood in Queens where he lived.

Because we were both into music, we pretty much conversed the whole time I was in the car with him. And although I was into folk music and he was just into rock music--and not at all into using music to protest against the wrongs of U.S. society like I was--before he dropped me off, he wrote his name and phone number and address down on a slip of paper. And he invited me to come jam with him and his band sometime.

I actually did stop by at his house in Queens a few weeks later and jammed a bit with him and his band. But, because he was more into making rock band music than into singing lyrics of songs like I was, he didin't seem to want to attempt to work with me, as some kind of back-up band leader of a rock band that accompanied the lyrics to all the songs I had by then written.

His musical goal was more about just rehearsing with his rock band enough so that he could earn money as a musician whose band played cover songs of pop rock hit songs in clubs, where people danced with each other. Whereas my goal, at that time, was still pretty much just using music to encourage revolutionary left activism and radicalize U.S. working-class political consciousness--by getting the folk songs and lyrics I had written onto some vinyl record album distributed by a label like Vanguard Records or Elektra.

Thus ended my first coast-to-coast journey on the road in the 1970's. There would be two other coast-to-coast trips on the road hitching later in the decade with the woman I loved. But the first journey was the only coast-to-coast bus ride and coust-to-coast hitchhike on the road that I did alone in my life--many decades before the "Age of Uber" arrived..

And my first coast-to-coast hitchhike on the road took place not too many years before, as in the 1950's, U.S. drivers again became more frightened to pick-up hitchhikers. It also took place not too many years before U.S. hitchhikers began to find that a lot more of the drivers who did offer you a free ride on the road had some kind of predatory or ulterior motive.

Perhaps as a result of the way the post-late 1970's U.S. corporate mass media and Corporate Hollywood film industry programming had manipulated and perhaps dstorted some of these neurotic drivers' minds, sub-conscious or values?

 

On The Road In The 1970's: Part 88

 When I reached the first academic building I saw on Clarion College's campus, the entrance door to the building was locked up. So I sat down on the steps in front of the academic building, placed my large knapsack next to me, and began to think about where I should hide outside on the campus for the night--before one of the local town cops might notice me and order me off-campus or out-of-town or arrest me for loitering, vagrancy, trespassing or some kind of phony trumped-up drug possession-related charge, perhaps?

Luckily, however, while I was sitting on the front steps of the locked academic building on the then-deserted campus in the very late evening, a culturally straight-looking, lone white male student with short hair appeared. And, after glancing at me sitting on the steps while walking by me a few yards, he then turned around and asked, in a curious, friendly Midwestern accent:  "Don't you have a place inside to spend the night?"

"I was hoping to get into this building. But the door is locked," I replied.

The young white guy, who looked like he was around 18 or 19 years-old, then laughed and said:  "I know where there's an unlocked back door that gets you into the stairs and up to some classrooms, if you follow me."

"Far out!" I replied as I stood up while picking up my knapsack.

As we walked to the unlocked back door, the white young guy, who was around 6 feet tall, not built like an athlete but neither overweight nor thin (like me), and dressed more in a mod student style than a hippie student style, mentioned that the reason he was on the then-deserted campus at this late evening hour was because he was being initiated into one of Clarion College's male fraternities.

In order to be accepted as a full number of his college fraternity, he was required by his new fraternity brothers to prove hiss fitness for fraternity membership by sneaking into the classroom buildings late at night and writing the fraternity's Greek letters name on the blackboards in some of the classrooms.

And he was in the middle of carrying out that mission that his fraternity brothers had ordered when, after stumbling across me, he seemed to get a flash in his mind that helping a slightly older generational baby-boomer brother on the street while on his fraternity mission also reflected what the true spirit of male fraternity was about.

Once inside the academic building and up the stairs a few flights, the white frat student then led me into one of the empty classrooms at the end of the hall. And, before writing the Greek letters on the blackboard, advised me:  "Just stay here for the night and no one will probably notice you. As long as you're out of here before classes start here in the morning."

"Thanks for being a fraternity brother for me," I called after him as he quickly left the classroom to chalk up his fraternity's Greek letters on other classroom blackboards on that floor of the building.

Although the classroom floor was hard, I did manage to fall asleep for three or four hours during the night. But by the time the sun was rising, I was awake and read to leave the classroom, walk down the stairway, exit through the backdoor and get back on the road --before anyone else had arrived on Clarion College's campus.

On The Road In The 1970's: Part 87

 Being in a campus town, I only had to wait a few minutes on the road that led to the Interstate Highway entrance, before a young white woman hippie-freak, driving on her way to her day job, stopped her car and gave me and my large knapsack a short lift to the entrance of the highway that led south to the Ohio Turnpike. And less than ten minutes after she dropped me off, a van, with a guy driving, who was a long-haired hippie-freak-looking student, and two passengers, another long-haired guy who was a hippie-freak-looking student and a woman who was also a hippie-freak-looking student, offered me a ride.

All three were students at Clarion College in Clarion, Pennsylvania, who had been visiting the campus town I spent the night before in, during the previous week. And all three of the hippie-freak-looking students were already high from smoking the weed by the time they invited me to join them for free in the van on their trip back east.

Since they quickly shared a joint with me in the van, after I boarded it, and the cassette tape player in the van was playing rock music loudly during the whole time it took to reach Clarion College in Clarion, Pennsylvania by the late evening, I can't recall conversing with the three of them much during the hours of riding east in the van with them.

So my only recollection of what happened on this van ride into Ohio, and then east on Interstate 80 into Pennsylvania, is just listening while stoned to rock music as the van moved east on the Ohio Turnpike at more than 65 mph and onto Interstate 80  into Pennsylvania.

What i do remember, though, is arriving at the off-campus apartment they shared in Clarion, Pennsylvania in the late evening. And then quickly sensing that, from their point of view, the ride I htiched from them didn't include any offer for me to crash in their offcampus pad for the night.

So, after we all entered the pad they shared, still all stoned, but feeling an immediate vibe coming from the others in the living room that I was supposed to spend the night elsewhere in Clarion, I quickly snuck out of their apartment and disappeared from their scene, without them even noticing that I was leaving. They also likely didn't notice me disappearing from their apartment because they hadn't really all conversed much with me during our stoned drive to Clarion, Pennsylvania. So they still were not yet even award of my name and it hadn't really registered in their minds that I might be included in their scene for the night after arriving in Clarion.

No knowing anyone in Clarion and needing a place to hide away from any cops in the town during the night while I slept, I eventually headed for one of the buildings on Clarion College's campus. 

On The Road In The 1970's: Part 86

 When I reached the house of the last address I then had for the womanfriend who lived in this campus town, however, I was told by one of the women, who still lived there, that my womanfriend had moved out of the house earlier that month. And had gone out of the campus town to visit her parents.

So I then started to walk around town and around the campus during the rest of the day, hoping to bump into somebody else I knew in that town, who might provide a place for me to crash for the night--before I continued hitching on the road back to New York City the next morning. Because--despite still having some of the money the father of the hippie freak had given me on Broad Ripple Avenue in Indianapolis the previous day--I still didn't have enough money to pay for a room for the night at some motel in the campus town.

But I did not bump into anyone I had previously known on the campus during the rest of the daytime; and, by the early evening, most of what I had been given by the hippie freak's father on Broad Ripple Avenue had now been used by me to feed myself. So I sat down for awhile on a sidwalk in the town and said "Spare change? Spare change?" for awhile--like a few of the other white hippie freak youths in the town were also doing.

But the only money I was able to panhandle came from a hip-looking African-American man in his late 30's, who looked like he had some low-level supervisory job related to the building maintenance department at the local university, who handed me a dollar bill as he was walking out of a local restaurant with some white friends, with whom he had just eaten dinner.

So, after about a half hour of panhandling, I headed back to the university's campus to hang out there in the evening. And I assumed that I would end up just spending the warm Fall night on its grass outside--unless a campus security guard noticed me on the grass and ordered to get off the campus, despite me looking like I might be one of the hippie freak university students, if I couldn't produce some okind of student I.D. card.

Surprisingly, though, while I was still hanging out with my large knapsack next to me on the campus, when there were still a lot of students walking around and hanging out there at around 11 p.m., a short, thin,culturally straight-looking grad student with a beard--whom I had never met before--stopped in front of me and asked if I needed a place to crash for the night.

And after I said that I did need a place to crash, the grad student invited me to crash at the off-campus house where he lived and shared with a few other male grad student rommates.

It turned out he was a grad student at the university's law school, who was apparently more into sleeping with other men around his own age than into sleeping with women around his own age, like I then was. So although--when he asked me if I needed a place to crash--I hadn't realized his invitation to crash was apparently based on his interest in spending the night sleeping with me. But after we shared a few joints in his house, it turned out that I ended up in bed with him during the night, during which he came before we both fell asleep.

And after we both awoke in the morning, he left to go to his morning law school class; while I left to get back on the road and try to hitch a ride from the campus town in Michigan, that would take me to the Ohio Turnpike and back east towards New York City.

On The Road In The 1970's: Part 85

 Standing in the breakdown lane on the Interstate Highway near its Muncie, Indiana entrance, I did not have to wait too long before a white guy in his 20's, who had short brown hair and a mustache and was dressed in a suit and tie, stopped his car in front of me and opened his car's passsenger sidedoor.

And soon after I jumped into the front passenger seat of the car and told him that I was hitching into Michigan, he smiled and replied: "Looks like you're in luck, since I'm going all the way up to Detroit."

The culturally-straight-looking guy was friendly and seemed to have picked me up to break up his boredom of having to drive all alone in his car for most of the time it would take him to reach Detroit.

During the course of our conversing on the road up to Michigan, the culturally-straight-looking guy, while laughing, mentioned that he worked for the FBI and had just busted a student who was a big marijuana dealer in one of the college campus towns in Indiana; but that he, himself, actually liked the way hippie freaks like me were able to live. And once he served his time working for the FBI, which had paid his college tuition, he would likely move to some youth ghetto in some campus town himself, and then live like a hippie-freak for a few years, rather than quickly trying to find some new 9-to-5 government job or job in the corporate business world.

I can't recall much else about what we talked about before the FBI undercover agent eventually dropped me off at the Interstate Highway exit in Michigan, from which I was able to walk with my knapsack into the campus town; and eventually take a brief nap on the town's university campus for a few hours, before walking around and seeing if an old white womanfriend of mine, also in her early 20's, who lived there was at home.

On The Road In The 1970's: Part 84

After leaving the Central Public Library in Indianapolis, when it closed for the evening, I then walked downtown in the direction of Washington Street, which was also U.S. Highway 40, and, carrying my knapsack, began to walk east towards its intersection to the Interstate Highway which would connect to the Interstate 69 or other highway that led northeast through Indiana and up into Michigan.

After walking east for a few hours in the dark, a long-haired white hippie-freak in his 20's, who looked about the same age as me, passed me and then stopped the car he was driving, opened the passenger side door and asked me, with a smile on his face, as I approached the passenger door: "Which way are you heading?"

"The highway towards Michigan," I replied.

Sill smiling, the long-haired white freak then said: "Hop in! I can take you up that direction towards Anderson."

Like me, the long-haired white hippie driver giving me the ride was also unemployed. And, while we shared a joint in the car and listened to the rock music he was playing on his car's tape deck, we conversed with each other for most of the ride, in the early morning darkness.

"They just seem to want to hire the young chicks around here these days, whenever the companies are hiring," the young white freak driver said in the car at one point, with a laugh. And, still chuckling, he added: "That's what women's lib in Indiana means now. But at least being on unemployment for awhile is still more fun than being stuck everyday on the asssembly line, I guess."

 "Yeah. Wage-slavery under capitalism is a real drag for anybody who's hip to the System," I replied. "And being unemployed myself now gave me the freedom to go out to California and then hitch back towards the East like I'm doing."

So many decades later, I no longer recall much else of what we talked about, although I think he pretty much agreed with my rap that the computers and the automation should be used in the 1970's to create an economy in which everybody would only have to work 15 hours a week for 35 hours pay. But by the time he dropped me off by a breakdown lane near an exit on the Interstate around Anderson, the sun was beginning to rise as we said goodbye to each other, with stoned smiles on both our faces before he drove away.

Because there were few cars or trucks yet driving on the Interstate highway so early in the morning and the cars or trucks driving by me at this time did not offer me a ride, I had to wait in the breakdown lane by the highway exit for awhile.

Eventually, though, a car stopped in front of ma after the morning sun had completely risen and I quickly trotted towards the car with my knapsack and hopped in.

The driver was a friendly white guy in his twenties who was then clean-shaven and without long-hair. But he apparently had been a long-haired hippie freak before he had to get a haircut and shave his beard off, in order to get hired for his night-shift job at the automobile factory that he was then returning home from. So he apparently saw me as someone who, by being on the road hitching, was on the philosophical trip similar to the philosophical trip he had been on, before his need for some money forced him to get his night-shift factory job in the automobile manufacturing plant.

The short-haired, clean-shaven guy lived in a rented second-floor apartment in a 1950's built house on the outskirts of Muncie and was friendly. And he pretty much agreed with my rap in the car about our generation having outgrown the materialistic, work ethic-oriented society that the culturally straight work-freak businessmen still wanted to trap us into adjusting to--instead of allowing our generation to create a leisure-oriented society in the USA.

And because he didn't live too far from the Interstate exit near Muncie, rather than just dropping me off on the Interstate breakdown lane near his exit, he invited me to have breakfast with him in his apartment. And then, after he cooked some scrambled eggs for us both to eat while we chatted, and I continued to describe how I had managed to reach Indiana from Los Angeles in so few days despite having to hitchhike back east, he drove the short distance from where he lived back to the Interstate highway later that morning--giving me a lift back to the breakdown lane near the highway exit, where he then dropped me, and my large knapsack, off.

On The Road In The 1970's: Part 83

To pass the time inside Downtown Indianapolis's main central public library building, until it closed in the evening and I would then start walking further downtown to Washington Street and east on U.S. 40, until I hitched a ride, I ended up spending three or four hours reading through parts of a hard-cover library edition of Kirkpatrick Sale's early 1970's-published book, SDS; which, before I noticed it on one of the library's shelves, I hadn't realized had been written.

Reading Kirkpatrick Sale's SDS book at this point in the 1970's, some years after former Columbia-Barnard SDS Vice-Chair Ted Gold's and National SDS's disintegration, and during a 1970's historical period when most of the white New Left Movement organizers I had known from the 1960's were either then underground or had apparently sold-out politically in some way and drifted back into a white upper middle-class careerist life style, felt like I was reading about ancient history, in many ways.

And it reminded me how differently the 1970's in the USA had turned out politically from how most Columbia-Barnard Students For A Democratic Society [SDS] hard-core organizers, who were members of the "Generation of 1968," had thought, during the months after the April-May 1968 Columbia Student Revolt, the 1970's in the USA was going to turn out politically.

Most of the SDS activists who were the most active in either late 1960's National SDS Movement circles or within 1966-1969 Columbia-Barnard inner leadership circles were not interviewed by Kirkpatrick Sale before he wrote his SDS book (usually because they were either underground, no longer active politically or keeping a low 1970's political profile). So his book's reference to Columbia-Barnard SDS's November 1966 to June 1969 internal political history reflects less accurately Columbia SDS's internal history than does my 1980's and early 1990's-written Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories manuscript. And his SDS book's perspective on National SDS's late 1960's history is more politically distorted than the later-written historical narrative contained in books like Dan Berger's Outlaws of America.

But Kirkpatrick Sale did a great job of examining as thoroughly as possible all the internal organizational documents that National SDS, some SDS regional offices and many SDS campus chapters generated during the 1960's and all the corporate media, underground press, student newspaper and previously-written books that contained references to SDS. In addition, he described accurately in great detail the 1960's historical and U.S. Movement context in which 1960's SDS was able to attract 100,000 members across the USA.

So Kirkpatrick Sale's SDS book is probably still, overall, the best book about 1960's white New Left Movement and SDS history that was ever published, despite the fact that Kirkpatrick Sale, himself, had not been a participant in any SDS activism during the 1960's.