Susan Gibbs Record Reporter
Published: May 14, 2010
In May 1967 Carol Weiss of Stanardsville had no idea that she was about to enter the time-zone that would go down in history as The Summer of Love.
The young girl from a quiet Mississippi River-side town was facing the end of her sophomore year at University of Iowa with no plans for her summer vacation.
“My sorority sister, Teresa, and I had friends whose homes were located near Newport Beach, California and Newport, Rhode Island,” she smiled. “Why not make our way to one of them and from there find a job for the summer?”
Weiss had been too young to participate in the Equal Rights movement, which had begun in 1955.
Since then acts of nonviolent protest and civil disobedience had produced crisis situations between activists and government authorities. Federal, state and local governments, businesses and communities had often been forced to respond to boycotts, sit-ins and marches, and a wide range of other nonviolent activities.
Some schools in Virginia had been closed in the late 1950s when integration laws were passed, but had soon been reopened. That integration, according to Charles Morton of Stanardsville, was “not a big deal” – at least not in Greene County.
“It was a small community. We all knew each other. We had all hunted together,” Morton said.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 had been passed, as had the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Black Power Movement was emerging, enlarging the Civil Rights Movement to include freedom from oppression from white Americans and racial dignity, but, like most of their generation, Weiss and her friend were not into political activism.
They had no idea that the Summer of Love would also go down in history as The Long, Hot Summer – when race riots in such places as Detroit and Newark would go down in history as some of the most violent in United States history.
“We flipped a coin: heads it was California, tails it was Rhode Island,” Weiss said. “It came up heads. We found two other students planning to drive a large sedan to California, went to the student union and borrowed $50, packed two suitcases each and the day the semester ended the four of us were off – listening to the Mamas and Papas singing “California Dreamin’” the whole way!”
Weiss and her friend were not the only ones heading to California that spring.
In October of the previous year the Love Pageant Rally—held in the panhandle of Golden Gate Park to protest the to protest the banning of LSD by the California legislature—had attracted several thousand people. But more than 30,000 had attended the Human Be-In held at the same location in January of ’67, and confirmed there existed a viable hippie scene.
Outlaws had gathered in the nearby Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco – a run-down turn-of-the-20th-century neighborhood. College and high school students had streamed into the Haight for spring break that year, and that summer it would become known as the center of America’s counterculture.
But Weiss and her friend did not end up in the Haight, nor did they end up in Monterey.
Near dawn two days after they’d left Iowa, Weiss and company started following the other cars on the highway – all of which, she said, had surfboards strapped to their roofs.
“We were soon standing barefoot in the sand gazing at the huge beautiful blue Pacific Ocean. The giant waves were, as the surfers liked to say, so groovy!”
They’d ended up near a little town called Laguna Beach.
“Snuggled into the Laguna Hills facing the ocean, the small town offered all of the new age kinds of stores that would proliferate across the United States that summer: natural food stores, candle shops, incense stores, bead shops, crystal shops, psychedelic music, tie-dyed clothing and well, I guess we called them “head” shops,” said Weiss. “The people we met around the town were just as eclectic. Artists, actors, surfers, families, soldiers on R & R from Viet Nam, and every single one of them wearing leather “flip flop” sandals. But what you noticed most was the hair; long, beautiful hair. It was a total revelation to these two corn-fed girls wearing penny loafers.”
Weiss and her friend got jobs waitressing, and spent their spare time on the beach, visiting art galleries, and listening to music.
“Hippie was a new word that summer and I remember discussions on the beach about whether it was cool to be a hippie or not,” she said. “I never put myself in that category, but slowly, as my restaurant tips allowed, I succumbed to the new fashion: brighter colors, shorter skirts, flowers in my hair, frayed jeans and sandals. And then one evening Teresa and I threw our penny loafers out beyond the ocean breakers. I never wore loafers again.”
Weiss described Laguna Beach as an artists mecca and the music that year as an overwhelming creative outpouring.
“The Beatles’ were playing from every doorway that summer. The Doors were lighting everyone’s fire. Cream, Jefferson Airplane, and the Who were mixed up with the rest of the British Invasion and the Beach Boys. It was hard to fight the feeling that, as Bob Dylan sang, ‘Times they are a changing’.”
But, she also recalled, the Summer of Love was not fun for all: “Bombs were exploding on the other side of the Pacific Ocean in Viet Nam,” Weiss said. “At the beach I could spot the soldiers on leave. It wasn’t just their haircuts that gave them away, nor was it the occasional big scar or injury you might notice. It was that sad, glassy, far away look in their eyes. The kind of look that made you keep your distance because you knew you didn’t have a clue about how to relate to them.”
Jim Watson of Stanardsville felt that distance as well.
Watson, a retired Virginia State Trooper, now a sergeant with the Greene County Sheriff’s Office, joined the United States Marine Corps in 1969.
He was fresh out of William Monroe High School and “it was routine in our time to serve,” Watson said. “I was in a graduating class of 45. Maybe 10 or so guys enlisted in the service … in the National Guard, the Navy Reserve and some in the Air Force.”
Watson would serve his country in one that had been a hotbed since before he was born.
Colonized by France in the mid-nineteenth century, Vietnam had been seized by Japan in 1940 for use as a base from which attacks against the rest of Indochina and India could be launched. Some North Vietnamese, or Viet Minh, led by Ho Chi Minh, wanted full independence when the Allies defeated the Japanese in 1945, but France wanted Vietnam, along with its neighbors Laos and Cambodia, back.
Viet Minh occupied Hanoi and proclaimed a provisional government. France sent its forces in, and the United States had entered the conflict in 1962.
Soon after, construction was begun on the Ho Chi Minh trail—a 1,500-mile complex network of dirt paths and gravel roads running through the jungle and over mountain passes from North Vietnam to South Vietnam through Laos and Cambodia meant to provide logistical support to the Vietminh and the North Vietnamese Army.
The trail would funnel a constant stream of soldiers and supplies into the highlands of South Vietnam for two decades. The United States would fly three million sorties and drop nearly eight million tons of bombs, four times the tonnage dropped during all of World War II, in the largest display of firepower in the history of warfare. Those sorties met with little success as 500 American jets would be lost attacking the trail alone.
Back home, the anti-war movement had inspired the participation hundreds of thousands of Americans in anti-war demonstrations all over the country. Several protesters would set fire to themselves. American flags and draft cards would be burned, anti-war music would top the charts and teachers would take out full page ads against the war in The New York Times.
History has indicated that many returning Vietnam veterans where met with hostility, that they were even spat upon. But Watson, who did not speak about his experiences during the war, reports no such animosity upon his return to his home town.
He does, however say, “When I got off the plane in California nobody paid any attention.” And when he arrived in Greene County: “There was no welcome home.”
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