Turn, Turn, Turn

Turn! Turn! Turn!

From There, To Were, To Here

1967 to 1974

A Journey

By Marc Koller

Copyright © 2019 by Marc Koller

Smashwords Edition

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. Please do not participate in or encourage the piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

To everything (turn, turn, turn)

There is a season (turn, turn, turn)

And a time to every purpose, under heaven.

A time to be born, a time to die

A time to plant, a time to reap

A time to kill, a time to heal

A time to laugh, a time to weep.

Released by The Byrds: October 1, 1965

Written by Pete Seeger in the 1950s. Lyrics adapted from the first eight verses of the third chapter of the biblical Book of Ecclesiastes.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter One: 1967

Fall 1967

Chapter Two: 1968

Spring 1968

Summer 1968

Fall 1968

Chapter Three: 1969

Summer 1969

Fall 1969

Chapter Four: 1970

Spring 1970

Summer 1970

Fall 1970

Chapter Five: 1971

Winter 1971

Spring 1971

Summer 1971

Fall 1971

Chapter Six: 1972

Spring 1972

Summer 1972

Winter 1972

Chapter Seven: 1973

Spring 1973

Summer 1973

Chapter Eight: 1974

Chapter Nine: What did I learn?

Chapter Ten: Epilogue

Introduction

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

Charles Dickens (1812 - 1870), A Tale of Two Cities

Charlie Dickens had it right.

Xmas eve 1967. I stood alone in the closed art gallery facing a painting that I had seen several times during my childhood visits. I did my first oil painting when I was 6 years old. My mother was an exceptionally talented lady, who opened my creative side at an early age.

The picture was a jungle scene, sort of a Henri Rousseau kind of painting, bright colors with a parrot sitting on a branch.

And then it got really strange. As the LSD took hold of my consciousness, the parrot in the picture got off the branch it was sitting on, looked straight at me and flew into the painting; when it did; I became Alice, going thru the looking glass into the painting. OK now this was hallucinating. As I followed the flight of the parrot, whatever reality I was in was real for me and I was totally captivated. It was a purely joyful and totally consuming experience. There was no fear, no concern about where I was or what I was doing, only joy and wonder. I am not sure how long I was in the picture, but after some period a hand touched my shoulder and boom, I was back. I had graduated from High School five months earlier.

This story is about the journey to here, going beyond this night and the journey back.

During the early stage of writing, I happened to read Graham Nash’s’ book Wild Tales. Now I am not in any way comparing my experiences to those of a major music superstar. Yes, he knew McCartney when they were kids, had a love affair with Joni Mitchell and knew just about every major rock star of the sixties. But what about the rest of us? Although I didn’t have sex with a rock legend, and didn’t get to record songs at Abbey Road, or tour with the Stones, I have had, and I think many of us have had a ride that was in our own way just as exciting, stimulating, engaging and even as sexy as his. I couldn’t compete with the quantity of drugs or the amount of money he ran thru. The names of my friends and the people I encountered weren’t Lennon, Hendrix and Mama Cass, but they are no less as real or as personal.

I don’t think I am any different than so many others, it’s just that where I was, what I experienced and who I have provided me a unique perspective of what was happening at that time.

My decision to share my story was in part of the result of an experience I had as a youth regarding my parents When I was about seven, I found a box in our garage filled with every letter they had written to each other while my dad was in Europe during World War II. There were hundreds of them. Years later when we moved to our next house for some reason, they threw the box out and all the letters with it. Perhaps they were too personal and of course they knew what they had written.

I always regretted not having those letters. In fact, I never read even one of them. Maybe it was just gossip, but I wish I knew. Theirs was a story that certainly thousands if not millions of people shared. I wanted to know and still want to know what they said to sustain themselves. We all know at least something about World War II, but what about the people that lived it.

My parents never spoke much, it at all, about their life before I was born. I never really got to know how they came to be the people they were. Perhaps if I knew more, I could have understood why my father never showed me any affection, or why my mother was so overprotective. For me this is sort of like that. I was one of millions of boomers who went thru the turbulence of the late sixties and early seventies, just as I did. Sharing my experience might in a small way enlighten a generation that might want to understand what we went thru. For those of us that lived it, maybe recalling and seeing how one person traversed the time might rekindle thoughts and maybe even bring back a good memory or two.

We don’t always get to choose our path as much as act in response to a situation, often without knowing or even caring about what the outcome might be. In the 1969 draft lottery I didn’t choose to have been given number 307, it chose me. Had it been a 37, so many different choices would have had to have been made that I would never have considered or thought possible if not for the arbitrary drawing of a lottery number. Did I choose to drop out of college, or was the choice presented to me?

There was an undeniably rare and exceptionally unique historical significance about being a teenager and young man during the late 60s and early seventies. The time and circumstance afforded me an opportunity to be involved, to experience and to absorb a range of events, emotions, and life’s lessons, which were unique to this time, and likely may never be present again.

The intensity of the time and the freedom to explore seemed almost without end. You could stick your thumb out on the highway and meet wonderful people who would take you in without fear and with genuine warmth. It was about peace and love. But it was also about tragedy, and a nation torn apart. We were a generation struggling to find our place amidst turmoil and uncertainty. Almost no one could hide from the events that were taking place during this time.

I grew up watching Leave it to Beaver and watched the first men go into space. We were expecting, at least I was, to be driving flying cars, going to the moon and all while mom was home baking cookies.

What we got was much different. What I learned as a child was the fear of a nuclear holocaust, to be afraid of the red menace and was told it was better to be dead than red. These were some of the events that surrounded my youth.

In 1962, I saw the head of the Soviet Union bang his shoe at the U.N., declaring to the world that he would bury us. They sent nuclear weapons to Cuba to destroy America. I did duck and cover drills in school. Along with the other kids, we huddled under our desks as the alarm went off. People were building fallout shelters. It was heavy stuff for a twelve-year-old.

Then in 1963 when it seemed we were saved, our president the symbol of the great life was killed. I watched the funeral for days on TV and saw and shared the sadness of a nation.

Despite the fear and tragedies, the mid-sixties were also a time of safety and families. The shows like Ozzie and Harriet and Father Knows Best made us feel safe and secure in our middle-class lives. At the same time, these years saw the beginning of the counterculture, with free love, communes, the proliferation of and unrestrained access to mind altering drugs, psychedelic music, acid rock, the Dead, and Woodstock. There was peace, love and rock and roll. There was also the rise of the Black Panthers, the Weathermen Underground, Patty Hearst and the Symbionese Liberation Army, violent war protests, bad acid, speed, the Kent State Shootings and the assassination of a King and another Kennedy.

The world was moving in multiple directions. The reality of the world beyond my safe little suburban home would ultimately come crashing head long into my transition to adulthood. Events were driving the opposite emotions, from safety and security to anger, fear, paranoia, and threats of extreme violence. What added to it all was the sheer number of baby boomers from every part of the country and from all backgrounds and walks of life that engaged, participated, revolted and shared in the experience.

All in all, it was a very chaotic time, filled with mixed emotions, uncertainty of the future, and distrust of anyone over 30. There was an escalating war against communism and an explosion of a counterculture bent on building a future based on leaving the status quo behind.

For me, this period began in 1967, the summer of love, and ended in 1974, the year I got married, which was one year after the withdrawal of American troops from Viet Nam. It wouldn’t be long after this that Patty Hearst would eventually marry her bodyguard. Tom Hayden, one of the Chicago Seven would marry Jane Fonda, and another of the Chicago Seven would start Studio 54, and finally Nixon would be gone.

Looking back now, I know how lucky I was to have gotten to know many seemingly ordinary but exceptional people, to delve into some of life’s mysteries that presented themselves to me. I was able to touch the flame and be burned but not be disfigured, but clearly changed forever. I met and experienced a great love of my life, one that I didn’t understand and still miss to this day. I also experienced and felt the sadness of a tragic loss. And eventually I found a life. As I think about what was most important during these years, my two biggest questions remain; how I was unable to understand and be with the person that should have been the love that I so desperately wanted, and why I was unable to save my best friend.

Chapter One: 1967

Let me take you back to the start of 1967.

The year began like most during my public education. I was in the middle of my senior year and in less than six months with any luck I would graduate from High School. I simply needed to survive and not fail my classes. At the start of the school year, I was four foot 11 inches tall and praying that I wouldn’t stop growing before I was five feet tall. I had never shaved, never kissed a woman, and my only goal in life was to leave home and everyone that I knew, go to college, meet a woman and somehow enter the world of normal people. To be blunt, I was a small, scared little boy who somehow was unable to fit into the normal social and academic world as a High School senior.

I guess you could say that I was highly intelligent (according to my IQ), albeit insulated from much of the world. I was a middle-class white kid from Long Island, with a rather a-typical Jewish mother.

At the time of graduation, like many young graduates, I had no idea what lay ahead. The country was just waking up to the horror of the Vietnam War. It had only been four years since JFKs assignation and his vision of putting a man on the moon had not yet become reality. I was in no way thinking about what was about to unfold. All I wanted was to be done with the silent pain of my public-school existence.

My freedom and the journey started with graduating High School in 1967. Unbeknownst to me this was the summer of love in San Francisco. My senior year was of no importance. It was filled with wasted months like most that I suffered thru during my years of public education. Passing from one day to the next I learned nothing of any consequence, I was just trying to survive to the day when I would never have to go back. And I never have.

When I graduated, I was as you might have guessed, the smallest male in my class, as I was every year. I was fortunate to have passed five feet tall a few months before graduation. For a long time, I thought that perhaps I was a midget despite the doctors’ assurances that I was simply on the far end of the normal curve for puberty. I am not sure, but I am guessing there might have been some womans that were shorter than I was, and I know there was one boy that had lived thru polio who was slightly shorter than me, but I don’t count him.

I was not only the youngest and the smallest in my class, but I was also a scared of just about any encounter with other students, teachers or god forbid, womans. All of this pretty much kept me out of what would have been considered normal social settings. My time in school was spent mostly getting drunk and trying to be invisible or at least to avoid situations where I would be picked on and where I was clearly not wanted. There are many sad stories I could talk about the quiet misery of Junior and Senior High School, but I know most people can imagine what it would be like to be the smallest and youngest with no chance of ever catching up or being part of the mainstream. If you have ever seen movies with a kid who gets stuffed into a locker, or tossed into the woman’s locker room, who might have a good sense of what I went through.

What I learned was that if you started to cry, bullies would stop picking on you, teachers would stop yelling at you and even my parents would feel bad for me and not dish out appropriate punishment when I invariably screwed up in some way. I don’t think I learned this skill as a deliberate ploy, but it was uncontrollable, and I suppose unconsciously it had its’ purpose.

My young age was due in large part to skipping first grade. I remember the moment when the principal came into my first-grade class and asked if anyone knew how many children there were in the class. I raised my hand and told him that there were thirty kids. How do you know this? he asked. I responded, There are six rows and 5 in each row. That was that and since I was also reading, the decision was made that first grade was going to be a waste of time for me. So, after IQ testing with a child psychologist, my parents and the school authorities felt I was too smart to hang out with the other six years old’s and I was moved into second grade in the middle of the year.

Since my birthday was close to the cut off age, this added to the age gap. Here I was just turned six years old in second grade with kids who would be turning eight that year. I was also tiny, and since I had just been in kindergarten the year before, I was given the dubious title of professor egg head and was often referred to as a kindergarten baby by my new classmates. Not much fun being younger, smaller and thought to be smarter than the kids in my class. Of course, the situation went downhill from there.

What I figured out during the torture of public school was that if I was going to have any sort of life, I pretty much had to learn to be alone. I spent a lot of time playing by myself and doing things that were pretty much of my own choosing, and outside of the normal activities. For instance, by age 12 I became a somewhat serious bridge player. I learned to play while spending a few summers at a Jewish country club. For a few years while my parents were both working, we were members of a country club made up of Long Island Jewish families. It was during the summers when I was 10 to 12 years old. Maybe the best time I have ever had. Lots of kids, and none from my school. The moms were there during the week playing Maj Jong and bridge all day while we all got to just be kids. Sadly, when my dad’s business went sour, we couldn’t afford it. But at least I had three great summers, and I learned to play bridge.

I spent many nights at duplicate bridge clubs with my mother, a life master bridge player and a great lady. Since my father traveled a great deal, I went out with her as her partner playing in bridge clubs with mostly old ladies. There were always good snacks, and no one picked on me, plus I really enjoyed the mental part of bridge. I believe I could have been an exceptionally good player but lacked the discipline to study it and lacked the competitive drive. For god sake I was a kid, and it was mostly old ladies. In seventh grade I played with my Math teacher a few times.

I did have a few friends, but only two close friends. One was Barbara Ellman, who I knew literally from the day I was born. She however lived a few hundred miles from where I eventually settled with my parents. Her parents and mine shared a farm in upstate New York where I was born. She remains one of the closest friends I have in this world, even though I rarely ever see her. The other friend was Robby Sussman. There is much more to come about Robby and Barbara.

High School

My public education had no real purpose to it, at least after 6th grade. It didn’t take much brains or much work to get passing grades; you show up, do the minimum amount of work, take tests and you pass. Funny but that was also pretty much what my first years of college were like. To say I was not a great student is being kind. I never studied as far as I can remember, I passed classes I enjoyed with ease, the rest I did almost nothing but managed to squeak through most of them, except French which I failed twice but managed to pass twice. In order to complete a Regents Diploma in New York I needed to have two years of a foreign language, so I squeaked out two semesters of French.

In 7th grade I was forced to take Latin. I enjoyed some of the stuff but failed it miserably. I think suffering thru that class helped me as I struggled with passing French. Anything that required memorization was not going to work for me. I am sure that today I would have been diagnosed with some sort of disorder. Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder sounds like it might have been me. It does explain in some ways my life and my inability to stick with things.

As a result of my approach to education and my learning style as it was, I wound up with a pile of C’s and D’s an occasional F, with a small number of A’s mixed in. My GPA didn’t look particularly good to colleges. The only classes in High School I enjoyed were art, mechanical drawing and Geometry. In New York State, there were certain standard tests that were required to get a Regents Diploma. I had a great time with Geometry; in fact, I got 100 on the Geometry Regents. What I loved about geometry was how much sense it made. Every shape had 360 degrees; the square of the hypotenuse was always going to be equal to the square of the sum of the other two sides. It was fun for me, everything made sense, and it was all orderly; as opposed to Biology, French or much of anything else. In some way it seems that my early fascination with geometry continued into all parts of my life experiences.

When I got into a subject, and it wasn’t often, I was as smart as anyone. I guess I always knew that I was smart enough to do well in any class. I was just so bored with most of it. It didn’t seem to matter if there was any connection to the subject we were supposed to be learning and to any potential meaning in my life. I could never understand, nor did anyone try to help me understand, what positive effect learning the names of the internal parts of a single celled amoeba was going to have on my future.

Sadly of course we weren’t allowed to just do the classes you liked, and since I had no discipline, I did the minimum required, or less in the classes that bored me, and in the ones I liked, I did very well. Studying was never part of my skill set. It didn’t really matter much to me what happened. My goals if I had any in High School were to survive and to never come back.

I have never attended any reunions, nor do I have any interest whatsoever in anyone that I ever knew in my four years of torture.

My saving grace was that I got surprisingly good scores on the SATs. The standard test scores didn’t include not doing homework or not studying for a test in a subject that you didn’t give a crap about. My SAT scores were 520 in the English part and 685 in the math, not great, just over 1200 combined.

I loved sports and was always coordinated, but my size kept me out of just about everything. I did play soccer because it was the only sport that didn’t have cuts, because at that time not very many kids were into soccer. I played on the JV squad in my sophomore and junior years. As a senior I wasn’t allowed to play on the JV team, so I was the Manager for the Varsity. Baseball was my passion. I tried out for the freshman team but was clearly out of my league. The other kids were getting big and strong, while I was small, weak and slow. Ah so it goes.

Anyhow, I wound up being 367th out of a class of 675, barely top 50%. But with decent SAT scores and passing all the regents’ exams, I had options for college.

The