Big Chill Redux

I recently watched this excellent movie for the umpteenth time. The tsunami of memories flooded through me like with a flood of images that made me wonder at their intensity. These are my recollections as excerpted from " A PIece of the Banner."

It was the era when the Viet Nam War was ramping up. A number of the older guys were being drafted into the army for service. We would escort them on their last night in town to the Buffalo Central Rail Terminal on Paderewski Drive, for their early morning train trip to Fort Dix, New Jersey and induction into the Army. Carloads of us would enter the terminal in a loud and unruly state escorting the draftee off to his service with a much-remembered sendoff and bequeathing him a considerable hangover the next day.

Several of those smiling young lads like Bobbie Smith and Tim Nightingale never came back to us. They left their life force in the far jungles of Viet Nam with only a memory to remind us of their passage. Some, like Barney Dyson, came home and died of complications from a chemical defoliant used in Viet Nam called Agent Orange. Others like Billie Coniglio came back missing limbs. Many were traumatized by that awful experience. Pete Danieu has a quarter inch of the bridge of his nose missing courtesy of a Viet Cong bullet that almost took him to the great beyond. Timmy McGuire made it home with six bullets from an AK 47 stitched from his ankle to his shoulder, courtesy of an NVA grunt that he sent to whatever Buddhist notion of the afterlife the man held. When Timmy was airlifted back to the United States, Danny Burke, Bill Terheart and I picked up his sister and father and drove the ten-hour drive to the US Army Hospital at Fort Devens, Massachusetts to welcome him home. Tim was weak from his wounds but predictably feisty as always.

“The fucking gook shot me six times from ankle to shoulder before I blew his fucking brains out,” he said almost defiantly.

It was a few years of rehabilitation before Timmy was well enough to join the Erie County Sheriff’s Department and lead a life again. Most of the other guys from the neighborhood did the same and just put that awful experience behind them. Few ever talked about it again. They settled in to raise families and work their jobs like their dads had before them.

It was also the time when a cultural tidal wave from Britain erupted into the American psyche. The Beatles, a rock band from Liverpool England, exploded into our consciousness after a 1963 performance on the televised Ed Sullivan variety show. Their clean-cut good looks and soft melodies enraptured America’s youth like no other performers before them. Even Elvis Presley, big hit hero of the 50’s, didn’t have their impact. The mop haired lads from Liverpool sang ballad after ballad that sold millions of copies. They started out with sweet airs like I Want to Hold Your Hand, and Help. They then progressed musically to more nostalgic Yesterday, and Hey Jude. Later in the 60’s they rode in with the new age tide. Songs like Norwegian Wood, Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band, and Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds gave us a new perspective on music and the imagination. With these songs they helped usher in the “psychedelic age” that was sweeping across the landscape of America’s youth. An obscure street corner in San Francisco, Haight and Ashbury Streets became the mega center for a new movement called “hippies” outfitted with tie dyed tee shirts, bell-bottom pants, long hair and marijuana smoking as a rite of passage.

Having myself lived through this era, I am not even sure I knew that it was happening all around me even when it was. Buffalo was not then exactly the epicenter for new age thinking. Later on a phrase developed that I think I agree with in reference to this era.

“If you remember the sixties, you probably weren’t there.”

I do remember the first “Afro,” that I saw. An Afro is a stylized and stiffly coiffed mop of hair better suited for the hair texture of African Americans. It was being sported by a fellow college student from New York City, which was in itself was an exotic place for me at the time. He happened to be white, but wore his hair in a huge Afro. It was a novelty for me back in the late 60’s. New hairstyles and new clothes like bell-bottom pants and tie dyed shirts, came along with the entire culture of recreational drugs. They arrived seemingly everywhere, even to conservative, rural communities like Geneseo, N.Y.

In decades past, films had been made like Reefer Madness, purporting the dire evils of pot smoking and the horrible effects the drug had on users. This was laughed at now as millions of college students lit up while listening to loud as possible renditions of Jimmy Hendrix and the Doors. Gracie Slick and the Jefferson Airplane belted out White Rabbit as a theme song for the new culture. Loud and rhythmic rock music bleated into the new era much to the chagrin of the older generation who couldn’t quite figure out what this puzzling new wave of kids were all about.

Thousands of the new era kids took weed to war with them. Scenes from the movie Apocalypse Now, showing motor patrol boats cruising along the Mekong River with loud rock music blaring from them and sailor’s blowing weed became a new emblem for the younger generation. It was a mix of music, different, drug-induced behavior and an “in your face” defiance of an older and more staid generation that was unlike anything that had ever exploded onto the American scene. Musically the era came to its denouement with a rock concert in a farmer’s field not far outside of New York City. “Woodstock,” as it was later dubbed, drew hundreds of thousands of young music fans to listen to scores of rock groups while they lit up, tuned in and epitomized the “generation of love” as they were calling it. In later years millions would claim they attended the concert, but that’s okay. It was something that we all identified with at the time.

After Woodstock, the age of the hippies started slowly dying. The progression of drug abuse and wild living was taking its toll on the younger generation. Rock stars Jim Morrison, Janice Joplin and a parade of others including an improbably comedic star from the hit TV show Saturday Night Live, John Belushi, all fell victim to over use of drugs. Some of the evils of the old Reefer Madness movie were indeed coming true. A softer version of the new age of “Disco” was on its way, introduced with movie star John Travoilta’s portrayal of Ricky Minero in the epic film Saturday Night Fever. The 1960’s was a decade long cultural whirlwind that made the nation dizzy as it progressed through these years. Music, war, drugs and wild behavior were emblematic of a nation unsure of itself and confused about lots of things that it had once held onto as gospel.

It was the middle sixties when I first arrived in the quiet, rural community of Geneseo, New York, to attend the State University College of New York at Geneseo. An aptitude for taking tests had won me a New York State Regents Scholarship. That had enticed SUNY Geneseo to take me in as a promising student. It just goes to show that good scores on tests aren’t always reliable predicates for determining academic performance.

         I knew no one in the student population and was apprehensive as to what I might find there. The four-hour bus ride through the verdant countryside seemed to take me further and further away from the concrete sidewalks of urban Buffalo. Batavia, Rochester and points in between passed by the bus window in an unceremonious array. I had left the pleasant womb of South Buffalo with all of the friends and families that wrapped me in a familiar and comfortable embrace. And I was beginning to wonder what I was getting myself into. Though Geneseo lies only seventy miles from Buffalo in distance, it was for me something similar to entering another plane of existence.

         The Trailways bus dropped me off at the corner newsstand in “downtown Geneseo.” I saw the small copper bear sitting atop a fountain in the center of Route #39 and wondered what story lay behind that strange apparition. I was to discover the significance of the bear to the town later, when two good friends actually abducted the bear one night and made off into the night with the bear in their car trunk. They did that is until the State Police apprehended them some miles down the road. Luckily for them, all charges were dropped when the bear was properly restored to its ancestral focal point on top of the fountain. The local citizenry were not much amused by the antics of its “college kids.”

          From the corner, I lugged three bags down the long and winding series of hills to a three-story brick dormitory named Erie. All of the surrounding dorms had been named after WNY counties, like Wyoming, Steuben, Niagara and Genesee. Erie was the cloistered abode where I would make my home for the next two years. Most of the other newly arrived students were in the same boat. They didn’t know anyone either. My roommate was from suburban Syracuse. He later said when he first met me that I looked like a “hick.” Unperturbed, I reminded him pointedly that when we first met I had been wearing bass weejun loafers, blue cord slacks with a cavalry belt, and a button down aero shirt, while he had been wearing “sneakers, jeans and a tee shirt.”  Such is the stuff of lofty college debates formulated. We all settled into the Erie Dormitory and got acquainted with the rest of the budding scholars who roomed there.

         As the year progressed I got to know and befriend many people from all across the state. To date, I had never traveled outside of Western New York and Southern Ontario. Now I was rubbing elbows with kids from far away New York City and Long Island, then exotic places to me. They turned out to be pretty much just like me. The New York City kids were sometimes even more insular than I was. Several reported stopping their cars along rural Route #39 to get out and look at a cow or a horse standing in a field on the way in to Geneseo. Cows and horses were exotic creatures to those bred in the concrete canyons of New York City.

         We approached our studies as most freshmen do. That is to say that some of us were total goof-offs and did as little as possible those first few semesters. Euchre and pinochle games ran on all day at the old College Union in Blake Hall. We dutifully attended our assigned classes and then carried on a rather active social life for the rest of the day. I was working five nights a week helping the college janitorial staff in order to meet expenses, so my days were full and moved quickly. The ranks of budding young scholars thinned considerably after the first two semesters due to poor grades. Those unfortunates were immediately drafted into the big green machine and sent overseas.

College was a new experience for most of us. There wasn’t any hectoring by well meaning teachers demanding that your assignments be turned in on time. Here, you were given the assignments for the semester and you were on your own. If you studied and turned in most required work, you got by. If you were disorganized or inclined to be a major goof-off, you were soon a candidate for the draft.

We discovered that college professors are a decidedly different breed of cat. Most had no formal training in presenting their material. A good high school or elementary teacher was much better prepared to present subject matter. All of these men and women who taught at the college level were well educated. Some were veritable scholars in their field. But like mining for silver or other ores buried deep in the ground, you often had to dig for what valuable material was available. To be fair they sometimes felt like they were tossing pearls before swine. I guess it was a learning experience for all of us.

I do credit the faculty for my first official involvement with the Democratic Party. This was after all Geneseo. It is rural, blue-blooded horse country and agricultural in nature. It is a profile of classic  “Republican Country.” Democrats were an alien species except to the college crowd. One of my Poli-Sci professors had organized a Democratic caucus that met in the Geneseo Village Hall. Twelve intrepid souls met somewhat irregularly while the portly and cigar-chomping village Republican mayor stood in the back of the hall observing. Whether he felt a proprietary interest in all things political in his feudal fiefdom or was just plain curious as to what a Democrat was and how they thought, we never figured out.

Bobby Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, Gene McCarthy and others began to ramp up the collegiate interest in effecting change through the political process. The academic involvement would increase and multiply for the next forty years until legions of committed college students would help elect Barack Obama to the presidency in the far distant future.

In retrospect, most of the ideas we formulated in college came to fruition, many years later. Quality faculty helped inculcate these ideas into our consciousness. Their intellect and the ideas they instilled in their charges are the most important value of any college experience. Bricks and mortars are sexy. Ideas are more long lasting and valued.

Much of the more prosaic educational process took place in the college dorms and cafeterias where any subject was up for review, sometimes viewed through the amber lens of a 12 ounce beer bottle. Woe to the luckless soul who presented a thinly researched argument. The ridicule could be considerable. It made one aware of the idea that before engaging one’s mouth, one needed to use the brain and think things over first. This was a novel concept for most of us. We had been exposed to people all of our lives that opined on every subject under the sun. Usually the less an individual knew about something, the more he asserted his expertise on the subject. I was to find this a standard operating procedure in politics and government years later.

         Even conversations in the bars became impromptu forums for debate. Sports, politics, female anatomy and all manner of topics received the endless appraisal of students who soon became masters of “shooting the shit.” Naturally this casual form of dialogue carried over into our written assignments. Patient teaching staff gently reminded us that the use of established facts and the proper attribution of sources made for much more powerful arguments than “somebody said,” or “I heard this someplace.” Maybe an education was helping in the transformation of parochial rascals into thinking and rational beings? Nah! Not yet anyway. That transformation usually occurred during the senior year of college. That’s when the fear of having to go out and actually make a living, or join the military, sobered all of us into a clearer and more rational pattern of problem solving. The real idealists and dreamers just kept going on to higher and higher levels of graduate school to avoid the painful assumption of their roles in the “real world.” Some lucky few ended up teaching college and avoided forever the ice water bath awakening of living in the real world.

After the first year of life in our new existence, some of us joined fraternities and sororities for more interesting social experiences. I never really thought about the oddity of all of our shenanigans until years later when I watched and laughed through the movie Animal House. Though written about another university in the northeast, it captured much of what we lived through in the Delta Kappa Tau Fraternity in that crappy old house at 22 Wadsworth Street. The movie said it better than I ever could.

I had moved into this creaky menagerie of college buddies in my junior year. We had the same number of “unique and colorful characters” as the movie did. Marathon poker games, keg parties and watching hours on end of televised Star Trek reruns filled in most of our days.

As goofy and outlandish as some of my fraternity brothers were, most went on to fine careers in education, law, medicine and public service after college. There is a unique quality of people from this era that is hard to categorize but has elements of individuality and strength of character that I much admire.

         I was managing the fraternity house in my senior year. I remember boiling all of the silverware every few months to avoid poisoning my roomers with nasty bugs from improper washing of eating utensils. Cleanliness was never high on our agenda at the Delta Kappa house. We did have a lot of fun however.

                                     (to be continued )