Book Introduction [Excerpts]

Thu, 21 Sep 2017 16:47:32 -0400

This is a true story about coming of age in America in the ’60s, about the loss of innocence and earnestness and a belief that the better angels of our nature would help us shape a “newer world” in the words of Robert F. Kennedy.
The story takes place in Bloomington, Indiana, my [Greg’s] hometown, but it could have happened, and with slight variations surely did, anyplace in America where the baby boom generation was finding its way.
We were all buffeted by the same centrifugal forces of societal change. We were subject to the same avalanche of seismic events. We were listening to the same music.
It was, as Simon and Garfunkel sang without irony, “A time of innocence.” An innocence so pure—an afterglow of the elysian Eisenhower ’50s—as to be untranslatable to later generations growing up too fast in more brutish times.
The central events of this story unfold from the summer of 1967 to the summer of 1968, the fulcrum of the ’60s, when America swung from the Summer of Love to an early winter of sorrow and crushed hopes.
This is not the story of those in the spotlit vanguard who tripped out on acid in Haight-Ashbury, marched on the Pentagon, occupied university buildings, sat in the path of Dow Chemical recruiters, were bloodied in the streets of Chicago and the jungles of Vietnam—the iconic images that came to define “The Sixties” as we know it.
This is about the rest of us who never went to the barricades, who watched from the sidelines. We were no less transformed than our brothers and sisters in the arena, but we were disguised to our elders, and perhaps to ourselves, as agents of the status quo.
You can find us in yearbook photos of the Class of ’68, suspended in time. Smiling, untroubled faces of girls with flip hair styles and close-cropped boys in coats and ties and not a whisker of facial hair. You see no hint of the turmoil unfolding outside the frames of these still-life portraits.
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~**~
In his last Gothic photo (“Mr. Charles Walls - English, journalism, News Bureau and Optimist advisor”) he was 23 but could be mistaken for one of the seniors. Slim, porcelain-skinned, clear-eyed, he radiates a choir-boy wholesomeness.Only neatly combed bangs, a la early Beatles, sideburns creeping below the earlobes betray the iconoclast at work. His techniques, never before seen at BHS, pushed his students to think in bold colors outside the lines of their sheltered lives.Chuck played Simon and Garfunkel records in class and assigned essays analyzing the lyrics. He reserved time for students to write in a daily journal. He used books considered subversive, telling students to hide their copies of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest or Brave New World inside the covers of a textbook if an administrator walked in.
He broke up the military rows of desks in his classroom and arranged them in egalitarian semi-circles. Every day students arrived to a provocative new quote on the blackboard meant to unsettle and inspire. He gave extra credit for seeing movies like The Graduate and Dr. Zhivago. While overseeing The Optimist, the student newspaper, Chuck opened the pages to politics, debate over Vietnam, arts reviews, radical essays, short stories and haiku. He was an unabashed romantic who often began his florid, highly personal yearbook inscriptions with quoted lines of poetry and song lyrics.
“What a time it was...a time of innocence...a time of confidences,” he prefaced one note.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
Students were entranced by Chuck, thrilled by his illicit intellect and challenging of norms, flattered that he spoke to them, almost conspiratorially, as equals. “We were in on the ruse,” said one. “He had us at hello.” But there was unease, too.
To the daughter of an Indiana University professor, “He was like a changeling, not quite adolescent and not quite adult. It was almost like he was a new breed of person. He clearly was searching for meaning, even more than we were, which made him a strange person to know as an adolescent. It’s like he wasn’t jelled. I think that’s what made him so attractive to us. We could see the struggle and the search for meaning. We understood the pain.”
Seasons change with the scenery
Weaving time in a tapestry
Won’t you stop and remember me
At any convenient time?

“The world has changed so incredibly since 1966, as has my life,” Chuck wrote. “One of the many differences on my consciousness has been knowing you. Too many thoughts come to mind, some of which border on the trite level of prose. Next week I will rejoice at our escape and then regret leaving a small circle of friends. But as Grace Slick advises, ‘You’ll be inside of my mind’ on future days of splendour. Can you imagine us years from today? [signed] Chuck Walls.

Overview

Wed, 20 Sep 2017 00:00:00 -0400

Chapter One: [Excerpt]

Tue, 19 Sep 2017 14:43:47 -0400

Lucy Darby awoke on a July morning in 1967 in Oxford, England, fully intent on reporting for class in the final week of a foreign-study program at the university. Then she got a better offer—to play hooky. It came from her chaperone, Chuck Walls, a 22-year-old English teacher at her high school in Bloomington, Indiana.
Chuck gathered a half dozen students, all free spirits and authority-snubbers he figured would be up for going AWOL from the Oxford reservation. Among them were Jim Sutton, brooding son of an Indiana University administrator and an early druggie; Scott Kragie, a cool-hand kid from Chicago who introduced the radical idea of wearing dark socks with loafers to Binford Junior High; Jana Kellar, whose creepy short story about an unborn child Walls published in the school paper; and Darby, a cheeky blonde with an irreverent streak who was never at home as a rah-rah varsity cheerleader.
“He said, ‘You want to see a trial? It just happens to be...Mick Jagger,’ and we all went, ‘Oh, get out of here!’”
And so they did. Chuck and his merry band of escapees slipped away without a word to the other Bloomington High kids or his co-chaperone, Virginia Elkin, head of the English department who was shepherding half the BHS delegation. Elkin was 54, dowdy, with short bobbed hair, silver-frame glasses and a steely demeanor that made her look even older, “Sixty, 70, 80, 100 years old” to Rick Smith, one of her charges.

PULSE Shooting & 60s Gay Life [Excerpt]

Mon, 18 Sep 2017 14:55:40 -0400

Blog by Candy Dawson
The horrific attack on young gays and Latinos at Pulse Nightclub occurred just three miles down the road from our home in Orlando. We were in the process of moving to Lakeland and drove over from there just hours after the carnage ended. It was supposed to be our first open house after putting our home on the market. I picked up the last Orlando Sentinel in the rack at a convenience store staffed by a young Latina. As I paid her for that paper with this picture
and headline staring up at us, we looked at each other and tears streamed down our cheeks. My eyes are brimming even now as I write this.
There would be no open house that day nor the next or even the next weekend as the entire city mourned.
I visited the Pulse makeshift memorial yesterday. It’s been 50 years since 1967 when Chuck Walls, the main character in our book and his former roommate, Alan Thomas were SO closeted that they didn’t even know that each other was gay until years later. I wish Chuck had lived long enough to Come Out with PRIDE. Perhaps the sections in our book looking at gay life in the sixties as told by those who lived it, will help a tiny bit as we continue the struggle for Equality.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
Excerpt From The Book
The book revolves around Chuck,
Tony (Chuck’s student) and Myriam
When Chuck Walls met Myriam Champigny in the late ’60s, it was a convergence of alien worlds. Local high school teachers and French wives of existential poets didn’t run in the same circles. The lines of social demarcation were bright red and rigid: town and gown, blue collar and tweed, catfish and caviar, Grand Ole Opry and high opry.
The ’60s changed that in university communities like Bloomington, ripe (in Leonard Cohen’s phrase) with “the spiritual thirst” for a new world. Political tumult over Vietnam, revolutions in sex, drugs and music, and the incipient liberation of blacks, women and gays all flowed together in a tide eroding the boundaries between gender, race, class and culture.
........
Myriam had a magnetic personality “that you were madly attracted to,” said Thomas, who had his first gay sexual encounter in her home. “If you were doing a portrait to illustrate effervescence, you would not show a glass of Alka-Seltzer, you would show Myriam,” said [friend, Ann] McGarrell. “She had that gift of being silly.”
.....
It was difficult for anyone of any orientation with a beating heart and libido not to fall for Myriam. Chuck’s attraction to Myriam was more complex. It seemed to spring from a deeper place, a starved region of his psyche as a closeted gay man. Myriam satisfied a need in him more gnawing and urgent than sex: unconditional acceptance.
She had done the same for Thomas. One night over wine he confided to her that he might be gay. “Of course you’re gay,” Myriam said. “What is the big issue here?”
“She was so nonjudgmental,” said Thomas. “She instilled freedom in people. She brought them alive. I knew people who were so into being an intellectual, being hot shit. You’d introduce them to Myriam and two weeks later they would be out flying a kite. I mean that literally. She would say, ‘Why are you so uptight? You’ve got to live your life...have a good time.’ She would break the chains and bonds to allow you to be you.”
~*~*~
Standing Tall at the Makeshift Pulse Memorial

And the vision that was planted in my brain...still remains...”

Mon, 4 Sep 2017 15:21:53 -0400

Blog by Candy

1966, First Day, English Class

Without a word, Mr. Walls took a vinyl record from its cardboard sleeve, positioned the center hole over the turntable and gently dropped it. Simon and Garfunkel’s “Sound of Silence” spun slowly on the turntable. He lifted the needle and placed it on the edge of the shiny LP. Music and soft words filled the air in perfect harmony.

Hello darkness, my old friend; I've come to talk with you again /Because a vision softly creeping/ left its seeds while I was sleeping/ And the vision that was planted in my brain, still remains /Within the sound ...of silence

The assignment was simple.
Listen, really listen.
Reflect on the lyrics.
Write what it means to you.
Share in class tomorrow.

Over two school years, impressionable young minds absorbed books with ideas they never could have imagined; saw movies their parents never sanctioned; wrote songs and poetry and…changed...forever