Hippie Chick by Ilene English

Ilene English’s memoir, Hippie Chick: Coming of Age in the ‘60s (She Writes Press, 344 pp. $16.95, paper; $8.69, Kindle), is a book I very much enjoyed reading as someone whose entire teen years fell within that decade. I also believe that many people not yet born during that time would find this book an interesting, enlightening look at the most significant decade in post-World War II American history.

English was born in 1945, the youngest of six children, into a family operating a luncheonette in Irvington, New Jersey. Growing up in “a household filled with tension,” English flew cross-country to live in San Francisco with an older sister and her husband shortly after her mother died. She was just sixteen.

Still a teenager, she felt destined to live a life inspired by books, beginning with the classic children’s novel, Pollyana. Before long, English writes, she had been fitted with a diaphragm, lived with three male roommates, began smoking marijuana, and lost her virginity. She later moved with a girlfriend to a place on Haight Street, got pregnant, lost her job because of her pregnancy, and had an abortion. She was eighteen years old.

San Francisco was becoming a city where it almost felt like you could overdose on life, she writes. The city “had taken me in like family. It felt so right to be there.” English began going out with black men to jazz clubs, even smoking pot one night with Dizzy Gillespie. On the pill and practicing what once was called “free love,” she dabbled in LSD while hanging out in Haight-Ashbury and Golden Gate Park.  Soon she went into analysis with a Freudian therapist. She experienced the beginning of “The Sixties” as we would come to know and remember that time period.

In 1966 English became interested in astrology and older men while commiserating with her brother who was in the Army and hoping not to be sent to Vietnam. She moved to Hawaii where she enjoyed taking college classes and new boyfriends. On a visit to San Francisco, probably in 1968, Janis Joplin sang “Happy Birthday” to her. English didn’t know Joplin, she says, but “we were both free spirits and yet both always looking for love.”

Back in Hawaii she became fascinated by stories friends told her about the big antiwar demonstrations in Berkeley. She remembers seeing American troops walking the streets of Waikiki while on R&R from Vietnam and recalls that “the blank stare in their eyes frightened me.” In 1969 she tried magic mushrooms and managed to make it to a concert by Jim Morrison and The Doors, which, she writes, was “both fascinating and shocking.”

Eileen English & daughter, circa 1980

At this point, we’re half way through the book, which continues into the Eighties. English then leaves Hawaii, and spends the next phases of her life on the West Coast of the U.S. where she gets married, has a child, and watches love come and go more than once.

This is a devastatingly honest memoir, bolstered at the end with updates about all the main people and places English mentions in the book.

The author’s website is hippiechickmemoir.com

–Bill Mc Cloud

Sticking It to the Man Edited by Iain McIntyre and Andrew Nette

Sticking it to the Man: Revolution and Counterculture in Pulp and Popular Fiction, 1950 to 1980 (PM Press, 336 pp., $29.95, paper) is a large-format, coffee-table book richly illustrated with color photos of book covers. Those images give more than a fair idea of what the mass market paperbacks of the time were like. The book’s editors Iain McIntyre and Andrew Nette, both of whom are Australian authors, sprinkle references to the Vietnam War are throughout this book.

The chapter Nette wrote, “Blowback,” is the mother lode. The subtitle is, “Late 1960s and ‘70’s Pulp and Popular Fiction about the Vietnam War,” and its ten pages are rich in illustrations and information about the mass market paperbacks dealing the war. The chapter also includes bibliographic information on Vietnam War novels that academic bibliographies managed to miss. The Vietnam War novels of Australia were a special revelation to me. I’m going to have to hunt them down and read them.

The sections of the book dealing with John Shaft, the African-American detective created by Ernest R. Tidyman and made famous in the 1971 movie directed by Gordon Parks, are especially good—and detailed.  I had no idea so many books were devoted to Shaft, who became a larger-than-life filmic Blacksploitation figure—let alone the number of Shaft films and television shows. I learned that John Shaft had been wounded in the Vietnam War, a state of affairs that was a common feature of 1970s fictional detectives.

Novels by women are well-covered in the book. Most are authors I had never encountered, even though I’ve been claiming to be an expert on novels of this era for many years.  Reading this book has made me a much more well-qualified bibliographer than I was before. I’ll have to obtain The Love Bombers by Gloria D. Miklowitz. Running away to join a cult is the subject of this Young Adult book—something I was worried about happening to my children.

Chester Himes created the Harlem Detective series with characters “Coffin Ed” Johnson and “Grave Digger” Jones, two of the toughest cops to ever wear badges. These books, including Cotton Comes to Harlem (1965), were also made into Blaxploitation movies. Many pages of this book are devoted to Himes, with illustrations of lurid and colorful book jackets.

Fictional vigilantes of the seventies, lesbian detectives, Yippies, and gay detectives also are referenced in this seriously all-inclusive book. In fact, I can’t think of any prominent movements of that era the editors left out.

I was relieved to find Iceberg Slim’s pimp novels were thoroughly covered. Iceberg Slim (1918-1992) was one of my favorites for light reading in the seventies

This book is a perfect gift for a bibliographer (or anyone else) who thinks he’s seen and read it all. I highly recommend it.

–David Willson

Revolution and Renaissance by Daniel Forbes Hauser

When did “The Sixties” as known in American collective memory begin? When did that era end? Rarely does the socio-cultural phenomena that define a generation fit neatly into a proscribed ten-year period. A black-and-white photo of John F. Kennedy and the Whiz Kids in early 1961 does not evoke “The Sixties” the way the violence of the 1968 Tet Offensive or the 1969 peace of Woodstock do.

In Revolution and Renaissance: 1965 to 1975 (History Publishing Co., 430 pp. $33.99) Daniel Forbes Hauser examines this period through the prism of his hometown of Boulder, Colorado. Reflecting on the turbulence of this decade, Hauser analyzes this period of profound cultural transformation by examining the unprecedented confluence of the war in Vietnam, the Civil Rights movement, and—most significantly—the coming of age of the Baby Boomers.

Richie Furay of Buffalo Springfield contributes the foreword to the book, which is organized by a chapter per annum, with each chapter containing the author’s reflections on a year’s seminal events, interviews, and personal musings. It is regrettable that given the expansive nature of the material covered, the book does not have end notes. The book is loosely centered on Boulder as Hauser introduces two contrasting protagonists: Mark, a poor kid from the wrong side of town who would serve in Vietnam, and Tom, the Asian-American son of a University of Colorado physics professor awhose brother would become a member of the Weather Underground.

Hauser’s goal, he says, is to create an expeditious and entertaining book, and in that regard he has succeeded. That his engaging and breezy commentary can intermittently be glib can be forgiven given the context, though Hauser falls into the trap of placing his and his cohort’s memories as “America’s” or as the “general public’s.” These gross generalizations can diminish his perspective and erode his thesis.

There are some minor historical errors. Contrary to popular myth, for example, the vast majority of troops in World War II were draftees, not volunteers; Walter Cronkite did not say the Vietnam War was “unwinnable” in 1968, (he said it was a “stalemate”); and it was a South Vietnamese (not an American) plane that accidentally bombed the village that led to famous “Napalm girl” photograph. Hauser writes about the movie MASH in his section on 1967, hyperbolically stating it “helped destroy any last vestiges for America’s will to win in Southeast Asia.” But the novel was published in 1968, and the movie released in 1970. Though the subtext of the film and the later television series was the Vietnam War, contrary to Hauser’s recollection the setting was the Korea War.

Other mistakes can be more jarring: Hauser transposes the Medal of Honor for any military decoration and writes that John Kerry threw his Medal of Honor in a river. He also mistakenly writes that the 1973 Paris Peace Accords called for the reunification of Vietnam, and in writing about the period American military engagements of the 1950s and early 1960s he egregiously omits to mention that 37,000 Americans were killed and 95,000 wounded in the Korean War.

Hauser ties his tome together with the bizarre story of Renner Forbes, the Marshall of a small town outside of Boulder called Nederland. In 1971, Forbes murdered and placed the body of a local hippie, Guy “Deputy Dog” Gaughnor, in an abandoned mine shaft. In ill health, Forbes confessed to the murder in 1997, and died in 2000. If this tale was not sufficiently sensational, in 2016 a former friend of Deputy Dog, in a futile act of vengeance, tried to blow up the Nederland Police Department.

The book would have been strengthened by more insights and commentary about Mark (the Vietnam War veteran) and Tom (the physics professor’s son), and more analysis of the Deputy Dog story. Still, Revolution and Renaissance it is an enjoyable and fast-paced trot through a most revolutionary decade.

The book’s website is revolutionandrenaissance.com

–Daniel R. Hart

Arrow Moon by James V. Ventresco

James V. Ventresco’s Arrow Moon: Reflections of the Sixties (CreateSpace, 288 pp., $11.50, paper) follows four college friends as they deal with the challenges of the sixties. Ventresco is enlisted in the Army to avoid being drafted. He served in Vietnam and received the Bronze Star, an Army Commendation Medal, and a Combat Infantryman Badge.

The four main characters seem to be there for every important event of the 1960s. And if they are not actually present, it is made clear that the events had a mighty impact on them. Probably the event that is presented most stirringly, and one that most of them experienced, is the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

Matt Santorri seems destined for Vietnam, but the book quits before he gets there. I’d like to read a sequel in which he makes it to the war zone.

Dave, his slacker friend in college, never applies himself to his studies, so I thought he might get grabbed by the draft, but no such luck. He has bad eyes, and his trigger finger is damaged in Chicago by the police in the park.

AJ spends the novel busy making money selling rolling papers and marijuana. He already has served in the military, so he is home free as far as the Vietnam War is concerned.  Johnny, the boy from Texas, seems also headed for Vietnam at the end of the book.

Many of the minor characters have served in the Vietnam War or actually are there during the length of the book, so the novel has an important Vietnam War component. The war lurks on every page.

One character, for example, remarks, “he was sure the big capitalists and bankers were doing everything they could to keep the war going.”  Another says: “I’m really getting worried about that fucking Vietnam War.” He has reason to worry.

Iwo Jima gets a mention from a priest at the funeral of a Korean War veteran. The priest served as a chaplain during World War II and spent time with the Marines on Iwo.  “If Christ has wanted to remind us that there was a hell, Iwo Jima was his way of showing it,” he says. “Today we are sending our sons to Vietnam to fight godless communism. At what cost?”

I enjoyed this novel, but I believe it could have benefited from a few thousand more commas—not to mention more glue in the binding. By the time I finished it, I had a bundle of loose pages.

That being said, it is an enjoyable primer to the main events of the sixties and the impact they had on young men. I was a young man during that period, and most of the things covered in the book resonated with me.  If you missed the sixties, this would be a great place to start catching up.

—David Willson