the decline and fall of a hippie. While I was in the old hometown, an old friend from high-school days mentioned a name that rang a bell, even though I had not heard it for a third of a century.
I grew up during the hippie era, the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. Just as with all other small towns, our town produced its fair number of hippies, usually natives who went away to college, returning occasionally to amuse and disgust us with their flowery apparel, blue-bottoms, stringy long hair, BOBBY IN ‘68 and McGOVERN IN ‘72 bumper-stickers visible amid the peace-symbols and paisley-stickers decorating their automobiles.
But they were just there to visit their parents and friends for a few days, after which they went back to college or the commune or the highways or getting high on other people’s money.
There was however one full-time permanent resident hippie, a trust-fund kiddie. He was already an adult by the time I knew of him, but in the manner of the Bostonian Drunkard’s grandfather not quite trusting his grandson to be competent, the parents had set up the fund to be administered by an older daughter of theirs, who did not live in town.
This guy was kept on a short leash, but that didn’t stop him from having the hippie sort of life, getting high on dope and hash and psychedelic drugs, or from being the local spokesman for the Trotskyite socialist pacifist anti-Vietnam peaceful-coexistence no-nukes hate-America left.
In fact, when looking back, he was a combination of the wiley50, kentuck, taverner, and socialist_in_TN primitives, all rolled into one. He was the one who introduced the Communist
Daily Worker to the Sandhills, in various restaurants and cafes, leaving copies mixed in with all the other daily newspapers.
People actually read it, yes, but in the manner one reads the comic-strips in the funnie papers, chuckling and chortling over the depiction of events as seen through socialist eyes.
In the manner of the left, being a pacifist peaceful-coexistentist did not preclude him, personally, from violence. He carried around with him a sheathed knife that seemed large enough to eviscerate a whale. I dunno if he ever used it, but he always had it.
My only close encounter with him happened when I was 11 years old. A friend of mine and I were riding our bicycles on a hot summer afternoon, and stopped in the parking-lot of the town’s 24-hour diner so as to get some water. As we were setting down our bicycles, the local hippie approached me, pulling that knife out of its sheath.
I looked at him blankly. I knew who he was, but had no idea why he wished to show me the knife.
Being polite, I inspected it, hoping to find something nice to say about it, but really, knives weren’t my thing. He was talking to me, but of course I had no idea what that was about.
But suddenly my friend, who had heard him, yelled, and the hometown hippie abruptly ran away.
The two of we boys walked into the diner, and my friend had a conversation with the cashier. Then a great hub-bub, everybody else getting all excited and bent out of shape. While I nonchalantly sat at the counter drinking down a big glass of iced-water, both the city police and county sheriff were summoned.
I was looked at, but not questioned, as I couldn’t possibly have known what was going on. Everybody took a statement from my friend instead.
Mine had not been the first unpleasant experience with this guy, and this was yet another straw on the camel’s back, which included ostensible threats to others (including Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew), and those pesky known-but-not-proven drug offenses.
The local hippie was picked up and questioned, and apparently was about to be charged (with what, I never knew) six weeks or two months later, when his older sister dashed back to town, and using her influence, got him packed away to a high-security nuthouse instead, where he remained for some years.
It was during the Carter malaise that he was “mainstreamed†back into society, but I myself never saw him again.
Or even thought of him.
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The above photograph is of him, taken in 1996 when he was 48 years old, and charged with sexual assault on a child…..and is from the Nebraska registry of sex offenders. One wonders what his DU screen-name is.
