the Patti Duke Show

This week I had an earworm that I couldn’t get rid of. Hence the topic for today’s blog. I find myself singing the theme song of the Patti Duke Show on the way to work, at work, on the elevator, in the bathroom, walking to the pizza joint on Warren Street. “While Cathy adores the minuet, the Parlez vous and Crepe Suzette, our Patti like to see the sights a girl can see from Brooklyn Heights. What a wild duet…still they’re cousins, identical cousins all the way. They laugh alike they talk alike at times they even talk alike. You can lose your mind" ….

Uncle Bill once said that television is written for ten year olds. (This from someone who thought Pepino the Italian Mouse was the height of couture). And being ten at the time, I agreed with him.

Truthfully, I enjoyed junk like the Patti Duke Show. I could understand the plot. I could relate to the little brother. Although when the question came up in biology class, we were assured that the presence of identical cousins was a scientific impossibility.

Those ABC situation comedies. There was I’m Dickens, He’s Fenster, Guestward Ho, Bewitched, Gidget and most importantly the Patti Duke Show. But television, even shows written about teenagers like Gidget, were sort of boring at the time. At least compared to the excitement of AM radio.

Editor's note: Steve Post, the legendary announcer on WBAI, is doing a weekly radio show this month on WNYC. Click here to access the podcast.

Bunny Lake is Missing

In recent years, aging baby boomers are able to revisit (or perhaps visit for the first time) movies originally made in the sixties, but not widely shown at the time. For example, Bunny Lake is Missing, one of the weirdest yet most sixtieish movies of the sixties, was mostly known to us through the Mad Magazine parody. Another Otto Preminger movie that features Jackie Gleason taking LSD, "Skidoo", was largely unknown to most people in the sixties. Thanks to the Internet, dvd's and cable tv, artifacts of the sixties are in many cases more available now than when they were in the sixties.

A high school kid would hear the name Andy Warhol occasionally, but his movies rarely made it across the Hudson River when they were new. One of the scariest thoughts I have ever had was, "Can you imagine if they had the Internet in the sixties?". For being a kid, even a hip intellectual kid in the sixties, you only knew about things as rumours or long after they happened. Brian Jones dying I only found out about two days later, and that was because the disc jockey at WKBW casually mentioned it before playing "Honky Tonk Women". That John Lennon said the Beatles were more popular than Christ comment took weeks to reach my ears.

When the mainstream media did portray the sixties scene, it was always with beautiful blonde hippie girls with rich fathers and tall sculptured young male hippies with long hair and dirty clothes. Beatnicks were represented by Maynard G. Krebs in the classic sit com the Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. The Monkees were the cleaned up version of actual rock bands and their shenanigans. Perhaps that's what made things so fascinating to kids at the time was that information was harder to come by. Except for the Mommas and the Poppas. Every kid knew all the details of their lusty lives.

Go

The adolescents in the sixties consisted largely of two types until the hip era showed its ugly head. One type was exemplified by the tough girl who used "go" as a verb. That is "go"as a synonym for say. Not "now that it is time for my confirmation it is time to go my Hail Mary". Rather in the sense that teenagers describe verbal conversations involving parents, teachers, sisters, boy friends and others. Usually described in homeroom class by young teenage girls who had to run into class before the bell rang before they finished their cigarettes.

So my mother goes, "So you're going out again without finishing your homework".
And then my father goes, "You should be getting better grades".
Then my brother goes, "I aced that class when I took it two years ago".
And then I go, "Yeah but I didn't have my ass in my shirt like you did."
And then my mother goes....

Then there was her boyfriend, the underlying cause of the conflict in the preceding vignette. He was good at sports but couldn't get into varsity because his grades were too low. On weekends he managed to obtain beer from New York, where the drinking age was eighteen. He was best avoided in the rush from class to class. He couldn't, however, be avoided in gym class, which were arranged in an apparently arbitrary manner.



Of course, every school also had its "goody two shoes". This type was in the Honor Society, the Key Club, and practiced for his one varsity sport, perhaps tennis. These young people would go to good schools and be your bosses when you got older. They would generally be successful at the game of life, though multiple marriages would reduce their net worth.

The rougher boys had cars that they worked on. The "goody two shoes" had to borrow the family car.


With the social upheavals beginning in the mid sixties, a new crowd of hip intellectuals emerged in high school. Bound for good colleges like the "goody two shoes" and occasionally using go as a synonym for say (to show their street creds) they got good grades but were not trusted by their teachers. They were too hip for their own good. In tenth grade, I was basically a "goody two shoes" but had aspirations to join the hip intellectual crowd.

the Voting Age Coalition

The Philosophy Club in high school was more than just a discussion group. They sponsored Smuff, a food drive for Biafra, and were the Hackensack sponsors of the Voting Age Coalition. The Voting Age Coalition was a state-wide effort to decrease the voting age to 18 in New Jersey. It led to a ballot question in the November 1999 election in New Jersey.

I got to be a leader of this group and was in fact the Hackensack coordinator. I remember well the meeting we had in the auditorium of the high school. It was well attended and we teamed up people to distribute materials in their neighborhoods. One female student indicated she could distribute literature around Summit Avenue and Beach Street. I had just met someone else from the same neighborhood. I described the second lady.

"I remember her", I said in a loud voice, "she was real small and she had black hair and she had these thick glasses". Suddenly she appeared. She had frizzy hair. She met her partner to be for the leaflet distribution. She looked at her and said "bless you".

That fall Richard M. Nixon came to Hackensack High School to support Cahill's run for election as governor. Even though I had a paid job working for Meyner, I played "Hail to the Chief" along with the rest of the high school band, for Nixon and his daughter Christie. They told us to put our "Vote yes on 18" signs down.

Cahill won and the initiative was defeated. The frizzy haired young lady had a lost but not defeated party after the election. The party was held in her mother's garden apartment. The hostess laid out like a corpse on the windowsill. Eventually she came back to life. We talked. She asked me if I was happy or was it a front. We discussed colleges. We both had applied to Temple University in Philadelphia. For me it was my backup. She was planning to go there. She wanted to major in psychology.

We exchanged phone numbers and the family telephone rang like blazes after that. I was invited to watch the sun rise over the George Washington bridge. I was invited to go to New York to pick up underground newspapers for distribution in New Jersey.

We became a crowd, two black kids, a Jewish kid, two Irish girls and dear old me. We marched all over Hackensack after school. One day we walked into a delicatessen. The frizzy headed girl bought us all tongue. I never liked a food that could taste me as I was tasting it.

The group showed up at my parent's house on Christmas eve. They admired the Christmas tree and the witty thing my mother had put up on the toilet bowl with Santa covering his eyes.

The classic Christmas conflict showed it's head. Parents believed that Christmas eve should be spent with family. Kids believed that Christmas eve should be spent with friends. They believed that there was enough family time on the 25th. I had my first Christmas fight with my parents. I was now growing up. My older brother was a veteran of such conflicts.

Later that night, I ended up watching "A Christmas Carol" at the frizzy haired girl's apartment, along with a few members of the hip intellectual crowd. A few days later, I made out with the frizzy haired girl. No she had straight hair by this time.

And so the sixties ended for me. I was in a crowd. I was politically active and I had applications out for several colleges. I was a happy camper that Christmas.

The brave men of the Green Berets

He became an instant celebrity, hero, and record star. Then he had the fall from fame which so often accompanies meteoric rises. The Wikipedia entry tells the story. I first remember him when he was on the Ed Sullivan Show. He sang, what else, "the Ballad of the Green Berets". My father commented that there were marks on the stage telling him where to move after every verse.


The record was a tremendous hit, number one on all the charts, and, for a while, Americans prided themselves on living in a country where Green Berets died for us and were featured in John Wayne movies.

Then that summer, the song off the record charts but not out of our hearts, I heard that Staff Seargent Barry Sadler was singing (for free, no less) at the Bergen Mall. There I sat and watched the show. He was asked to sing "A Team" the follow up record, but he declined, saying he didn't remember how it went.


The next day I was back at the YMCA learning how to swim. I told my new swim-mates about seeing Barry Sadler. They were very impressed. The summer of 1966 was noteworthy for seeing Staff Seargent Barry Sadler sing and Peter Chu to swim at the YMCA.

New York again

A few months ago, I did a blog about New York. It was about how our parents, who had moved to Long Island, New Jersey, and Westchester, felt about New York. New York used to be nice but it changed was the general idea. But the kids, the baby boomers of said parents, were attracted by New York. They liked walking around Times Square and midtown. They loved the Village, East and West. It was the land of freedom, sex, the counterculture, and drugs. Young suburbanite baby boomers drove their parents crazy by their desire to hang out in the city.

Parents:

"You can hang around there if you want to. I don't see the attraction in being in a place dominated by drug crazed Negroes but if you want to, that's okay. Just get out of there (at night being replaced by) by midnight. That's when the cops all leave and it's a free for all."

Youth:

"Mom, it's not that bad. How am I supposed to learn about things if I can't go to the city (whine)"

Among the hip intellectual crowd in Hackensack, a working knowledge of the city was de regure. You were supposed to know the subways. You were supposed to know the hip places to hang out near Saint Mark's Place. You were supposed to know about falafaels.

Editor's note: My blog has been discovered, albeit in a small way, by Kelly Heyboer's column, Best Blogs of New Jersey. The thing I did on underground newspapers made the list in September. Now I can wear sunglasses inside and go to Starbucks. I'm so happy.

Women in the sixties

Men in the sixties thought of women as those sweet accompaniment's to their idealistic lives. The cute things that would be by their side as they worked their career paths and for the bohemian crowd, those sweet lays looking with adoring eyes at their male heroes. Heroes fighting for civil rights, heroes fighting against hypocrisy, heroes fighting against the Vietnam war.

Women, emboldened by the civil rights movement aimed at Blacks, developed their own movement. Women had their own objectives in the sixties.

Caucasian men marched into the seventies saddened and no longer fashionable. "A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle", women said. In the sixties, Caucasian men marched in like lions and marched out like lambs.