1973—A MARVELOUS SUMMER: THE BEST EVER
Reader: It has been 50 years since my experiences of turning 21. It is interesting to see the changes in culture and society since then. No one would dare hitchhike today and people seem to be more than ever fearful of one another, except me! It’s all politics baby, divide and conquer and all that bad stuff.
I had a serious bad bout with the law firm I had been working for as a secretary. One of the new lawyers who was a Marine in Vietnam, attempted to rape me after the firm’s Christmas office party when he was supposed to drive me home. I fought him off for at least an hour and finally won by putting my hands over my crotch and shouting, “You’re not going to like it!” Consequently, three months later I was fired from that job. The tension in the office was fierce and I didn’t know my rights. To ease my mental anguish and pain I decided to get away and relax in New Orleans for a couple of weeks. My boyfriend’s brother lived on Royal Street in the French Quarter.
It was Sally Swope that introduced me to Darius at Houlihans on Bourbon Street where she waitressed that June. Sally had a way with men that I admired: witty, flirtatious and provocative. I felt inexperienced and awkward compared to her. But when she introduced me to Darius something clicked in our conversation. Darius was a soft spoken, easy going adventurer from New York City whose parents had moved to Queens from Greece after the fall-out of their travel agency through government regulations from a military coup. He had a handsome bearded face with curly brown shoulder length hair and blue eyes with a twinkle in them. That night we decided to hitchhike together to California. Being from Los Angeles, I had grown up taking family camping vacations up and down the coast and knew of some beatific places to see. Being away from home for almost two years now, living in St. Louis, I was beginning to get homesick, not for my parents and LA, but for the ocean. Water has always been my element, especially in hot summers.
The next morning, Billy gave me a backpack and with about $300 between us, we headed to Interstate 10 West to California.
Our first ride was with three tall black men in a big car. The driver popped the trunk and we put our backpacks in the back. Darius and I shared the back seat with one of the guys. Small talk was had and soon I realized this wasn’t the smartest move, being female and all. I began to get scared, blood draining from my face, and shot a look to Darius. “Look,” he said to the driver, “Can you stop and let us out here. My girlfriend isn’t feeling well…maybe she needs to go back to see a doctor or a hospital…”. They pulled over, we got our stuff out of the trunk and I felt a sigh of relief. I wanted to be trusting but I preferred to be safe.
Next we got a short ride to Houston just as the sun was setting. We were let out before the overpass into the city. Why not spend the night under this bridge? We began to look for a flat space off the road a bit. Suddenly a car stopped ahead of us, backed up along side us, and a woman said we were going to get arrested if we slept there. “Get in,” she said. “Y’all can stay with me.” First, she took us to a bar/disco where the music was quite good and we danced and frolicked. We didn’t see her for awhile and then she showed up and took us back to her motel. That’s when she told us she was a hooker. She lit up a joint and told us the story of one of her clients: a judge. He would get naked on all fours, she would insert a long peacock feather in his ass, exclaiming, “Pretty peacock, pretty peacock.” She said if she laughed she would not get paid.
There was an extra bed in her room. We slept well that night and our host left us at the Interstate the next day.
Getting out of Huston was a bitch. The city must span at least 30 miles along Interstate 10. People were only going short distances. After about five 4-mile rides, we got one way out into the desert of west Texas. It was so hot I remember standing in no other shade than a road sign! Then a white van pulled up with student hippies from Minnesota. They said we could get a ride if we filled out their survey about hitchhiking. We agreed, so they put us in back with papers and pen. We were still in Texas, however, when they let us out.
We were in a one-horse town with gas station and store a mile to the left. Nothing but flat desert, small cactus and tumble weeds spread out for miles in every direction. The sun was setting and we decided to walk out into the desert to pitch tent. A dog was constantly barking from one of the houses in town. I was spooked and said maybe we should sleep on top of our sleeping bags. Town folk can see us walking out here. If someone comes out for us, we can see them. That’s when Darius and I had our first argument. I told him we should look out for ourselves more, especially since he had me along with him. Let’s (1) be observant to whom we are getting into a car with, and (2) find a place to sleep before it gets dark. So we laid there on top of our sleeping bags in the flat sandy desert and looked up at all the stars. The dog still barked in the background. Darius told me some of his adventures—that he even spent the night on a bench in Central Park. Needless to say, I didn’t sleep too well that night and I wondered why Darius hadn’t put the moves on me yet. He told me it was his practice to take things slowly. I kind of liked that. He was different from most men I had met.
Our next ride was a God send. A marine picked us up and was going to Camp Pendleton, San Diego. This was nearly 700 miles! He said he needed the company and didn’t want to sleep at the wheel. We played word games along the way and made up a story with a word from every letter of the alphabet. I remember, “A balloon came down everywhere from…”. The marine let us share his hotel room in Havasu City where we went site seeing at the London Bridge the next day.
When I was eight years old my father took my two brothers and I camping at Black Meadows, right along the Colorado River and Lake Havasu. It was a precious place then: wild and natural without many buildings. Dad showed us how to shoot his rifle in the outback and he shot and killed a rabbit that we cooked on the fire that night. There was good fishing there as well. The reservoir at Parker Dam up the road is where a pumping station delivers water through pipes to Los Angeles.
So here I was, twelve years later traveling toward a lake I used to play in and around as a child. Only this time the London Bridge was covering the lower part of it.
Missouri-born tycoon and industrialist Robert McCulloch purchased thousands of acres of land in 1963 near Arizona’s Lake Havasu. He founded the community of Lake Havasu City and had designs on making it a tourist oasis. When the London Bridge went for sale because it was literally sinking into the River Thames, McCulloch purchased it for two and a half million. It took three years to dismantle, ship and rebuild the London Bridge in the Arizona desert—that and seven million more dollars. The bridge has been there since 1971.
Darius and I walked across it that morning. The sun was rising over the lake, desert hills in the background. London Bridge isn’t very fancy. The lamps on it are nice. Rumor has it McCulloch thought he was buying the Tower Bridge in London, which is a little more extravagant. It was interesting however to go back to a place I had known as a child to see how it has changed.
We arrived in San Diego lickity split and I could not wait to go swimming in the ocean. We had no bathing suits so we had to find remote areas or nude beaches. We soon found ourselves at Black’s Beach. From that moment on swimming in the raw became my number one delight. We camped there a couple of nights, down the cliffs and into that secluded cove. I remember, like in a scene from a movie, walking into the ocean naked with a gallon of wine, finger in the hole and bottle croaked in my elbow, thinking this is the life! Young, oblivious and not a care in the world. A few days later we would see the foreshadowing flip side of that life.
Billie and is brother Jimme from St. Louis had relatives living in a Leisure World in Laguna Beach. When I telephoned, Aunt Madeline arranged to meet us and take us out to lunch. She arrived wearing a glamorous white wide-brimmed sun hat and red lipstick driving a Cadillac convertible. You could tell she was starved for company. She was absolutely charming and I imagined she was a real beauty in her youth. A secretary in Chicago, Aunt Madeline married a hot shot businessman with loads of money. But now that he was retired, her husband, Dick stayed home all the time drinking. After lunch, we drove through the gates of Leisure World. They had their own little one-bedroom house that was posh and quite comfortable. Uncle Dick stayed in the bedroom the whole time we were there. That evening we sat in the living room and the three of us laughed and told stories of our lives. Aunt M liked classical music and I remember all of us grooving on this one composer and she turned up the volume. Uncle Dick had a fit and came storming out of the bedroom and screamed at Madeline to turn it down. I felt so sorry for her. She was relatively young and seemed stuck in a drunken relationship. The next morning Uncle Dick grabbed a bottle of vodka from the freezer and started guzzling it right there in the kitchen. Suddenly, he fell to the floor and Madeline and Darius managed to get him back to bed.
The three of us went to the Safari Park that day and saw the giraffes, lions and tigers roaming about from rolled up Cadillac windows. That was quite an adventure to see the animals in their habitat rather than behind bars in a zoo.
We spent only a couple of nights on the couch and floor of Aunt Madeline’s. Next we hitched to Covina, California where my parents lived. I hadn’t seen them since I moved to the St. Louis area in 1971. They had sold their house in West Covina where we had grown up in our teenage years (brother John and Stepsister Vicky) and had moved back to the first house my dad bought in 1945. I think he paid as little as $5,000 for it. This house was close to the foothills of Azusa Canyon, Angeles State Park and the San Gabriel Mountains. On a clear day you could see the mountains straight east off Covina Blvd. In the winter, Mount Baldy stood out, especially when it snowed. Before contractors built what was called tract housing, the land there was all orange orchards. All the houses on our block were designed the same, just turned around in different directions. The lots were big and the backyards long. Our backyard was so long, we had the first half with planted grass, shrubs and a fish pond brother Steve built. The second half of the backyard was dirt and stickers with a huge swing dad built, and a prodigious and bountiful apricot and peach tree. I note here that in case you don’t know, the land in Los Angeles is desert. If you don’t water the grass, trees and bushes, they all die. Once watered, however, the land is very fertile.
I lived in this house from the age of 6-10. Cypress Elementary was just at the top of our block and across the street. My younger brother John and I would walk to school together. Older brother Steve was nine years older and a teenager so I hardly saw much of him. Our mother had passed from Huntington’s Disease when I was eight years old and so I was the little mama of the house and learned how to cook. Dad gave me the ingredients for spaghetti sauce once over the phone once when he was going to be late coming home. I chopped up the vegetables and garlic and it was superb!
It was probably Jeanine’s idea to remodel the house in Covina. She had a real knack for design and furniture decoration. So when Darius and I arrived to visit dad and step mom, two small bedrooms were being made into one master bedroom and an extra bedroom was added in the back. We didn’t stay long. Step sister Vicki had divorced her husband and was living there temporarily. I felt we were in the way with the construction still going on. Our family has never been very close. We had every thing we needed but overall our lifestyle was under the thumb of an authoritarian stepmother who had me grounded most of the time. Dad just kept the peace and slipped off to Baja California, Mexico whenever he could. He liked fishing down there.
The redwoods in Big Sur are glorious. There is something magical and enchanting about the place. It is so lush with green you can’t even see the sky. I wanted to come back to the State Park there where our family camped when I was in high school. One good thing about Jeanine was that she was good at organizing and making reservations in state parks up and down the California coast. We three kids each had our own pup tent; ma and pop slept in the trailer. I remember dad driving into the entrance of the State Park and we saw a long-haired bearded man hitching rides along side of the road. Dad turned around, glared and said to me, “And I don’t want you hanging around any long haired hippies!”
I did meet someone however. He was a college student from Washington State who was driving all the way to Mexico down Highway 1. In the pretext of taking a shower, I sauntered over to his campsite further down the lane. He wanted to climb up the cliff on the other side of the creek to watch the sun set. I went with him. It was innocent enough but when I got back to my camp, Jeanine cursed at me for going off and I was once again grounded. I swear, she thought I was having sex with every boy I met. One time she even called me promiscuous. I had to look the word up!
So here I was five years later in the magical red wood forests of Big Sur on my own, free with nature and with friend Darius, who was even as adventurous as me. We went upstream of that creek where the boulders got bigger, where there were coves, watering holes and rock ledges. Darius was climbing up once such ledge and got stuck. He was naked and didn’t know how to get down. He screamed at me, “I can’t get down!” And gave a hysterical laugh imagining helicopters coming to rescue him naked. Eventually he figured how to get down and we were good. Whew!
Next was San Francisco. I turned 21 on July 22, and it was beautifully memorable that day, almost like snippets in a movie. We must of stayed at a youth hostel. That I am not sure of. But we did go to Macy’s and it was my first time at a Macy’s. Darius bought me a formal long length rayon pleated dress. It was navy blue with orange, purple, blue and white Japanese flowers; long sleeves with white cuffs and a white collar. I even modeled it for him after I tried it on in the dressing room. I twirled around and the pleats opened up. I remember feeling so happy and pretty in this dress. Next we bought a bottle of champagne. We couldn’t afford to go out to dinner but instead drank champagne on the fire escape of Ghirardelli Square.
We hitchhiked to Lake Tahoe a couple of days later. We were on the south shore and I remember being in Safeway supermarket, eating ice cream in the store before paying for it; buying some bread and salami. We met a hippie about our age who said we could crash on the floor of his trailer just down the road. He was a nice enough guy who worked construction in the neighborhood. He had a decent record collection and I remember listening to Cat Steven’s Tea for the Tillerman. We smoked some pot and got into the lyrics of Father and Son on that album. It was poignant. I think Darius and I had our first sexual relations about this time as well. It’s funny, but I don’t think sex was that important to either of us. We were such free spirits. I had a few ties with the Ant Farm in St. Louis and he was going back to New York, then to M.I.T. in Boston. We were friends without commitments. Maybe that’s what made our relationship so easy going: we had no expectations or preconceived notions of one another.
The next day we went skinny dipping in Lake Tahoe. It was at a pebble beach with no one around; condos on either side along the shore. We took off our clothes and shoes and put them in a pile. The water was cold and clear. Later I found out why the water was so cold. Lake Tahoe is fed from underground springs and it is bottomless. No one knows how deep it is. How precious is that!
Darius and I swam out to a raft and found a couple boys playing there. They were diving down and collecting construction donut bits. After sunning ourselves awhile, we starting swimming back to our clothes and noticed a police officer standing by them. Darius swam to the right and in front of one condo where he solicited a towel from a woman who lived there and was on her deck. Darius then proceeded to walk over to where the policeman stood by our clothes and they started talking up a storm. In the meantime I am swimming franticly and treading water to stay warm. Finally the gig was up, the officer yelled, “Janet, you can come out of the water now!” So I emerged, naked in all my freckled glory. The officer turned out to be a nice guy. He wasn’t going to give us a ticket and told us that people swim in the raw up the road by the bluff and boulders around the bend.
Yellowstone Park was a breeze and I barely remember being there. I do remember being in Cheyenne, Wyoming. We slept in a field of weeds across from a motel. The next morning we woke up bitten by mosquitos and as dirty as can be. We crossed the road to the motel and asked a nice lady at the desk if we could use one of the showers in a vacant room. She was the owner’s wife and said to wait until her husband leaves and come back in about a half an hour. This woman set us up so nice, I sent her a thank you post card from St. Louis when I got back to the Ant Farm. To this day I have never seen such a big shower. It was the whole length of the bathroom wall with ceramic tiles and the best big spray nozzle. We felt so good and grateful after that. Her kindness and generosity just made our day.
Most of the people we met on the road were kind I remember. Maybe it was the karma Darius and I exuded combined with the innocence and trust of our generation. Whatever it was, we were fearless and innovative because we had to be. We charmed our way into people’s lives, shared our stories and learned from theirs. This was five years after Woodstock and our generation felt a lot of promise for the future. Eisenhower warned us about the Military Industrial Complex and because we were aware and the draft was eliminated, how dare we start any more wars! Little did we know what horrors were brewing and would spew out in the 80s.
We ended up in the beautiful mountains of Colorado on the last legs of our trip. We camped up the hill from Green Mountain Reservoir and made a little lean-to from a sheet of tin we found cast on the ground. I remember heating up our last packet of instant soup mixed with water in Darius’s camping pan over a can of Sterno. The next day we went skinny dipping in the lake. It was beautiful. Fifteen minutes later people started screaming at us from the shore. They told us to get out—that was their drinking water!
The next day we got a ride to Denver from there. We were just outside the city limits with our thumbs out, when a car pulled over fast and the hippie driver said, “Get in!” “See that tower up ahead? If police see you hitch-hiking here they will arrest you. No questions asked.” Whew, that was a close call! I noticed ‘No Hitchhiking’ signs after that around Denver. The driver told us stories of people he knew of that got arrested. It wasn’t pretty. The police in Denver were known to be brutal.
We made it to St. Louis in no time. We were hungry and broke. It was good to be back at the Ant Farm and to have the comforts of home and see friends again. Darius stayed with us for a couple days, then he left for New York City. There were eight people living there with me at the time in our big old ornate cedar shaked commune on Rock Hill Road. We all chipped in cooking and cleaning and it was a nice arrangement. Having a car and living alone was too expensive for the small wages I was making in the 70s. I was glad to find the Ant Farm.
To this day the summer of 1973 holds momentous memories for me. The scenes I tried to capture here are ones that have crossed my mind for fifty years. I was 21, fresh, adventurous brave and invincible. I also didn’t watch the news. There were serial killers on the loose in those years. However, I truly felt that the aura Darius and I spread was more of love and curiosity than that of fear, so it seemed people trusted us and we trusted them.
Five years later when I left the Ant Farm and went to Europe for the first time, it was not to travel by Euro-Rail, but to hitchhike. That’s how much that daring, adventurous and intimate means of travel affected me.
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