Ahhh..... the sixties. All things being equal - I doubt there ever was or ever will be another decade like it. It was a time of "change". Almost everything changed: foods, drugs, fashion, race relations, morals, and of course, music. Often referred to as the decade of "Peace and Love", I personally remember very little of either. It started out a bit on the jittery side, when in 1960, Hurricane "Donna" tore through Florida, directly over Auburndale, then continued up the east coast killing 50 people in her wake. Also, the Cold War with the Soviets had escalated to the point that the general feeling was we would blow each other off the face of the earth at any minute (unless we hid beneath our school desks - which we were assured would shield us from harm). It was also the year of the first televised presidential debate with JFK debating Richard Nixon, setting the stage for the first election based as much on "looks" as agenda. During the pre-Beatle 60s, clothes were generally pretty drab and mostly designed to make the the older folks look good. Beehive hair-dos were very much in vogue for the ladies and basic crew cuts and flat-top hair cuts were still common with the men and boys. Gas was about 30 cents a gallon and "service" was still included in the purchase. You could send a first-class letter for 4 cents and a loaf of Merita Bread was about 21 cents. The highly charged, black influenced "rock and roll" of the 50s had mellowed somewhat and more and more middle of the road, very white, elevator singers were permeating the airwaves. This uneasy calm was primed to explode and when it did, it would turn everything we had ever come to know about the American way of life on it's head. In the meantime - I was a teenager and I was learning to play the guitar - so none of that other stuff actually mattered.
The end of the
fifties had left me nursing a bad case
of music fever that would infect not only my teenage years,
but also the rest of my life. I started the 1960's as a thirteen
year old wad of raging hormones searching for some kind of identity
and feeling a great need to be accepted by my peers and society in
general. Although I was an "A" student (usually), I was
a bit of a nurd, very shy, and suffered from generally poor communication
skills. The only time I felt really comfortable in a crowd, was when
I had that guitar to hide behind.
When I started high school in 1960, there was
not enough classroom space on the Auburndale High School campus
for all of the freshman class, so some of us were relegated to
having home-room (and most of our classes) in a portable classroom
located on the back-side of a phys-ed field across the street from
the junior high school campus (the two schools were only separated
by a few hundred feet of orange grove). Needless to say -- this
did very little for my already ailing self-esteem.
By the 1961-62 school year (my 10th
grade year), I had worked my way up to first chair clarinet in
the Auburndale High School Band, one seat after the solo chair
position that was held by Jimmy Thompson, an extremely talented
senior-classman. In April, 1962, the high school band (now with
72 members) traveled by train to Washington D.C., to march in
the Cherry Blossom Festival parade. It was a whirlwind tour, but what a treat for a 15 year-old to see our country's capital and her historical icons. In the '62-63 school year, I would inherit the solo
chair
clarinet position by default - but promptly lose it to a
young lady by the name of Mardene Williams who was an excellent
player
and willing to put in the extra work and practice necessary to
win a challenge for that position. My extra work and practice
was always going into playing the guitar. There was a lot of respect
for
the AHS band during the early sixties and I've always taken great
pride in having been a part of it, although I would be ousted
from the high school band during my senior year because because
of conflicts
between it and the rock and roll band I was playing in. I decided I would rather "rock" than learn, so I dropped out of the High School Band. I often wish I had stuck it out -- but such is hindsight.
When we weren't playing music, we were cruisin'. During the early sixties, almost everyone hung out (or cruised the parking lot) at Jack & Betty's Drive-In on Highway 17 near the corner of Havendale Boulevard in Winter Haven (about where Mid-Florida Credit Union is now located). They had a good greasy hamburger and if your taste ran more toward a slaw-burger, you could run across the highway to the "Bluebird Cafe". Always on the lookout for girls, we spent many hours just sittin' and waitin'. They just never seemed to come seek us out. But we did listen to some great R&B late nights on WLAC radio out of Nashville. Depending on whose car we were in - we would often manage to end up in a drag race on some desolate piece of road just out of town. In 1963, Daddy bought a three speed, Pontiac Tempest LeMans with a 326 horsepower V-8 engine. It's a wonder we didn't kill ourselves. It ran like a scalded dog and keepin' it on the ground was the hard part. Not many cars could keep up with it. As the decade wore on, fast food joints would start to take their toll on the traditional full service drive-in restaurants. Soon Jack and Betty's was giving way to Dog & Suds (root beer and hot dogs) , Burger Queen (broasted chicken), Burger King (whoppers) and Biff-Burger (who knows), all of which started out as drive-ins but slowly evolved into a sort of fast food hybrid. Then in 1963 the death blow was delivered...... McDonalds made it's appearance on the corner of 6th Street and Lake Howard Drive in Winter Haven (it's still there). "Over 100,000 Sold" at 15 cents each. It was an open-air, walk-up establishment (no drive-thru back then) and they made their own french fries. You could watch them put a peeled potato in the gizmo and pull down the lever and french fries popped out the bottom. But, it was never quite the same cruisin' the McDonalds Parking lot. Not enough room to manuever and they got kinda ticked if we just hung out, got noisy, or didn't buy anything. Another era was coming to an end.
It was a Friday afternoon in November, 1963 (my Senior year), during my fifth period "Library Science" class under the tutelage of school librarian, Mrs. Elizabeth Corley, that the normal quiet of the library was interrupted by a breaking news report being piped into the school P. A. system. The radio was broadcasting that President John F. Kennedy had been shot during a parade in Dallas, Texas and had died. At first I was a bit confused, not sure if this was real or just some tasteless prank. But when I looked into the normally austere eyes of the seasoned educator sitting next me at the table and saw that look of uneasy concern mixed with just a touch of fear, I knew it must be true. That would be the first of three assassinations the decade would bring. Robert Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King would also fall to the bullets of extremist minds spurred on by who knows what kind of wacked out philosophies or dark conspiracies.
By the time I graduated in 1964, The Beatles had been getting a lot of radio play and had announced plans for their first U.S. tour. At that time, I was playing with Ron & the Starfires, a band I had started working with during the preceding year. The Starfires managed to generate a pretty good income for a single boy living at home and, with the ensuing Beatlemania, we would enjoy great success for several years to come. On the downside, I had become quite friendly with alcohol and I was using it with reckless abandon during the mid-60s. On the upside, I did manage to stay away from all of the other illicit drugs that were so popular and easily available during that era.
In 1968, I married Barbara Suzanne "San" Chase, an 18 year-old cutie from Winter Haven, and we moved out on our own. At first we lived in a mobile home in "Sun Acres" on Auburndale's southwest side and later got a new FHA home on Owens Circle on the northeast side of town. 1968 was also the year that I was offered the opportunity to play guitar with "We The People", a group based in the Winter Park/Orlando area that had been signed to RCA records but had never really got the big break-out hit. In the hope that I would make more money I decided to give them a shot. The band was really good - but the commute was trying and expensive. The big bucks never materialized and we were never enough ahead to move to the Orlando area.
We had our first child, Craig, in October of 1969. Toward the end of 1969, I left "We The People" because I just couldn't make enough money to make it work. I found myself, the father of an infant son with a wife who was (almost) pregnant with our second child and-- I had no job. A reoccurring theme that would continue to surface from time to time.
By the end of the sixties, the U.S. was embroiled in a very unpopular war, I had been drafted and turned down because I had braces on my teeth :-), race relations were severely strained, drug use was at an all time high, Interstate 4 had finally been completed (connecting the Tampa, Lakeland, Orlando, and Daytona Beach metropolitan areas), and the Disney company had bought more than 43 square miles of Central Florida real estate (and no one even noticed).
The sixties was a
decade that some cherish, some wish had never happened, and that
some - for whatever reason - can't seem to remember large chunks
of. I, for one, am just thankful that, although through no fault of my own, I managed to survive it.
Carl's Scrapbook: The 1960s