Wisdom of the Aged by Craig Hattersley - HTML preview

As life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time at peril of being judged not to have lived.

—Oliver Wendell Holmes

It was the best of times. The Seventies in Austin, Texas, a fortuitous confluence of happy happenstance that led the local comedy troupe to dub the city the “retirement capital of the world—for young people.” In 1969 and again five years later, a Department of Labor study declared Austin the cheapest city of its size in the nation. You could rent a small house for $50 a month and eat on a dollar a day as the decade opened. As a result, from 1970 to 1973, the city’s pop­ulation growth of 4.5 percent a year ranked second in the nation. For a young hippie looking to escape the fog of New York City (quite literally, as a report said just living in Man­hattan was the equivalent of smoking two packs of cigarettes a day) and start afresh in a more laid-back environment, Austin proved a mercy—as it did for many others—a hippie Valhalla.

The quiet Texas city of fewer than a quarter million in­habitants appeared to be the idyllic spot for the search for escape from the end of times—the bloody riot of the Sixties, what seemed the total unraveling of a staid post-war social fabric. The University of Texas and environs provided a ­defensible perimeter, surrounded as it was by a resolutely redneck Southern populace. True, you could get an unsolicited haircut or a thorough drubbing if you ventured outside of the safe zone, and you never stopped on Guadalupe Street at Weedon’s Sunoco: A sign there declared “hippies and blacks not served.” In Texas, as elsewhere, the nascent free-form life­style and earnest pronouncements of the hippie met the weight of a festering conservative resentment to this alien life form, with its earnest quest in Eastern philosophy for Truth and the “Wisdom of the Ages.”

This quixotic search didn’t sit well with the established order, whose view of the era was tainted by the media perception of a feckless, wanton generation undone by a profligate preoccupation with “sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll.” And in truth, many partook of the Sixties only for the sex and drugs, readily accessible as they were. There are obsessives for every vice—sex, booze, drugs, dogma. (It’s like the drunk who says, “I know my limit. I just keep passing out before I get to it.”) They’re the ones who get the press.

For others, the ferment of the times gave them freedom to proclaim, as André Gide said, “I am here to live outloud!” To which the status quo responded: “Shut the fuck up.” But still others—perhaps some of the best and brightest of the gen­eration—simply dropped out to follow their muse, making candles, playing music, teaching yoga, anything but suiting up and getting in line. You’re never smarter than when you’re twenty-one. And you never again enjoy the freedom of youth that allows you to flippantly give the finger to society.

In light of advancing years, I look back fondly at the idealism and youthful zeal that fueled such irreverence. Working at the Fillmore East in the late Sixties, we held the world at our fingertips, life’s answers in the lyrics of a generation’s rowdy anthems: Mick Jagger, witness to a giant antiwar protest in London, entoning, “What can a poor boy do / Except to sing for a rock’n’roll band.” We were down with that. High-school buds Carlito, Ricky V., and I put heart and soul into grabbing a piece of that action ourselves—until reality impinged upon that dream.

The music scene in New York City would decay and the Fillmore close, and we headed for greener pastures: Austin, Texas, the new frontier. The sleepy college burg offered a more congenial atmosphere amongst like-minded individuals with their kindred laid-back mien, a place for personal examination and a new beginning. And it promised, with its stirrings of an embryonic music scene, the hope of maintaining a countercultural momentum—particularly with the opening of the Armadillo World Headquarters.

The Dillo would be part of a long meandering path to wherever. But it too promised a different reality of some kind, any kind. That remained to be seen. As Beatle George Harrison sang, “If you don’t know where you’re going / Any road will take you there.”

A new way of life, of doing things, seemed all the more an imperative given what seemed at the time the “real” world’s descent into madness in the Sixties. Foremost, of course, would be the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, while the country dug deeper into a bloody, protracted war in Vietnam. Madcaps Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew followed, then Watergate, Kent State, the My Lai massacre. The powers that be weren’t exactly covering themselves in glory.

On into the Seventies, a surreal kaleidoscope of events reeled off in numbing succession: first-daughter Tricia Nixon deciding on a rose-garden wedding with her Harvard beau; Alexander Haig saying the missing eighteen minutes on the Nixon tape was due to a “sinister force”; twenty prisoners and ten hostages dying in the Attica Prison riot, all from police fire; Martin Luther King’s mother shot to death while playing the organ in an Atlanta church; Nixon resigning, then Ford pardoning him a month later; Wilbur Mills, chairman of the powerful House Ways & Means Committee, caught cavorting in the Tidal Basin with stripper Fanne Fox; Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz saying that “blacks were interested only in good sex, loose shoes, and a warm place to defecate”; Three Mile Island nuclear plant nearly melting down.

Against a backdrop of Sixties-era depredations on the national front, those in Texas seemed pretty mild—and Austin a pretty safe place to hide away, though the local city council and constabulary didn’t think much of the counterculture. In Austin, as elsewhere, the number-one traffic violation for hippies was driving without a haircut. At the time, according to one cop, 80 percent of the Austin police force was ex-Marine, and they didn’t much cotton to all the longhairs and their protesting: When Abbie Hoffman (whose attraction to the era’s riotous lime­light led to his founding of the Yippies, for one) spoke at UT, 11,000 crammed into Gregory Gym. A 1970 antiwar protest drew 20,000, and tear gas wafted down city streets in the one year that Austin lived dangerously.

This behavior didn’t sit well with city elders. After a 1969 protest, Wray Weddell wrote in the city’s conservative newspaper, “On KOKE, country music deejay Arleigh Duff, calling the marchers ‘Hanoi’s Little Helpers,’ mixed patriotic music with the country Top 40.” The Austin Citizen, after an incident at the Chuck Wagon closed the campus hippie hangout to non-students, quoted assistant district attorney Herman Gotcher as saying that longhair radicals “use that place to fornicate their desires.” Dallas took notice of the hubbub and passed a law forbidding “lagging” or “sauntering.” After a 1971 protest at the LBJ Library in Austin, a Mrs. Logan Gray was quoted as saying, “We could sleep a lot better at night if we could kill them all [the protesters].” Her husband, who sported greasepaint on his knuckles, had to be separated from a protester done up in whiteface so the demonstrator could be arrested.

The university area, at least, provided strength in numbers, much to the consternation of UT officials, who did everything they could to muffle the madness. In 1969, they barred a play, Now the Revolution, from campus because of nudity. It went on with no nudity, but was shut down again because of “fire laws.” The next month, two employees of the UT Academic Center were fired for sporting long sideburns. That summer, the university made it illegal to enter the East Mall Fountain—to “maintain safety standards”—and banned the alternative publication, The Rag, from campus. But the cancer was spreading. In 1966, a third of UT coeds signed up for sorority rush; by ’69 it had dropped to 17 percent. In early 1971, UT students, in a futile-yet-defiant gesture, voted 6,226 to 966 to dump UT regents chair Frank Erwin Jr., whose dictatorial rule inflamed passions.

Fortunately, at the time, city leaders had other fish to fry. In 1970 Austin began desegregation of its schools, at the same time school board president Roy Butler’s opposition to forced busing was said to be “unyielding.” That ­obviously took some working out. (If things got a little tense, there was always the Sixth Street porno theater, which was showing Hippie Orgy and Psychedelic Sex.)

And bidness, of course, was still bidness. R. L. Hancock, an Austin utility official, announced in 1972 that the city should buy into the $289 million South Texas Nuclear Project, which, he said, would crank out electric in 1980 (said in the day’s parlance to be “too cheap to meter”). By then, however, the cost topped $2.8 billion, and construction ultimately dragged on until 1989—with a final cost of $5.5 billion.

Statewide, Texas government of the time masqueraded as Democratic, but with a decidedly conservative bent—nearly as hidebound as New York’s. In one infamous incident, black activist Lee Otis Johnson drew a thirty-year prison sentence in 1968 for passing a “marijuana cigarette” to an undercover police officer in Houston. Those who thought the punishment didn’t fit the crime distilled their outrage into a chant—“Free Lee Otis!”—heard on campuses around the state. In 1970, protesters disrupted a speech by the governor, Preston Smith, at the University of Houston with it. Smith, one in a series of potted plants occupying the governor’s office, asked a reporter, “What in the world do they have against beans?” When the reporter explained what the crowd shouted, Smith said, “I thought they were saying frijoles.”

Against this backdrop, expatriate hippies burrowed in to the Texas Hill Country city and slowly acclimated to the harsh environment—some quite literally, as few jobs at the time allowed for long hair and many a hippie ended up working in construction to get by (a tough go during the long brutal summer). This led to a breed of longhair with hard bark on them. But it also produced over time a grudging acceptance in blue-collar circles, as well as a sort of solidarity within a hip ­community otherwise beset by animosity all around. We were all in the same cobbled-together boat.

And the camaraderie held the community together and eventually allowed it to flourish, even as other scenes began to fracture. In succeeding decades, the Texas capital has certainly changed (gotten too big for its britches in some ways), but there remains the old imperative to “Keep Austin Weird,” a bumpersticker that still sells well today. Through pandemic and the steady drumbeat of an illiberal orthodoxy nationwide, the music scene remains, vestige of a bygone era—and hope for a better day.

Still, conservative revisionism works to beat down any attempt to celebrate the hip attempt at counterculture so as to relegate it to a footnote in history. In 2017 right-wing blow-by and wannabe king-maker Steve Bannon maintained that hippies were to blame for the 2008 economic collapse. Excuse me? Someone please tell this douchebag that that ship sailed decades ago. History might not be such a harsh judge of our deeds and actions, particularly given the plight today of the middle class.

It’s been a slow turn of the screw through the decades, masking the grinding reassertion of control of monied interests in asserting predominance in politics and society, a gradual turning back of the clock to pre-FDR days. Where once a single bread-winner could support a family, buy a house, save for college, and look forward to a secure retirement, decades later a household with two full-time salaries makes less money in real dollars than the idyllic homestead of the past. And the specter of bankruptcy and homelessness haunts a majority for whom financial security is jeopardized by mischance or a single medical catastrophe.

In retrospect, what we struggled with then, during the big hippie schism, served only as a prelude to what we now face in a society hardened—by design. But the inexorable grind of time, necessity, and economics hasn’t yet jaded me; the feeling still remains. In the words of Robert Frost, “They would not find me changed from him they knew / Only more sure of all I thought was true.”