Summer of 1969

Hippie Group Walking on a Countryside Road¹

At the end of one of the most tumultuous and divisive decades in history, the summer of 1969, fifty years ago, has been called amazing, transformative, and historic. It was the time of counter culture, flower power and the sexual revolution – of baby boomers and the rejection or redefinition of traditional values.  In the later part of a period where America “tuned in, turned on, dropped out, grew up, woke up, blew up,”¹ 1969 saw, among other things,

• the first manned landing on the moon,
• the Manson family infamous murders of 8 people,
• Senator Ted Kennedy’s accident on Chappaquiddick Island and the death of Mary Jo Kopechne,
• the Woodstock music festival,
• President Nixon’s battle with a growing anti-war movement while the undeclared war in Vietnam and neighboring countries continued to rage,
• a first time reduction in forces there with the withdrawal of 25,000 troops, and
• in New York, the installation of the first ATM machine.

Except for that ATM in Rockville Center, New York, I remember all of them.

It was the summer before my senior year in high school.  My mom, step-dad, sister, and I lived in a small, very dilapidated house in Beaumont Place,  just outside and northeast of the city limits of Houston, Texas. Hot and sweltering,³ daily high temperatures were usually in the upper 90s as was humidity, often reaching 100% – and we didn’t have air conditioning!

That summer of ‘69 was so different in many ways from the world of today.

Our one telephone wasn’t really ours. It was actually the property of the local phone company, in our case, Southwestern Bell, part of the AT&T monopoly of phone systems in the United States and Canada.  Local calls were free, but any outside our immediate area – long distance calls – added charges to the monthly bill.  Cellular phones hadn’t been developed yet, though they had been proposed nearly 20 years earlier.  Federal regulations severely limited the radio frequencies that portable phone communications could use, so there was little motivation to develop the technology.

We only received the three local network stations on our single small color television. Cable TV wasn’t available for us and development  of consumer satellite TV had only just been proposed.⁴ Video recorders weren’t yet practical for the home market. Systems for playing games on televisions had yet to be developed, though a patent was filed that summer that would be part of the Magnavox Odyssey.⁵

During that long ago summer , we watched a lot of television – prime time shows in the evening, of course, but also daytime game shows, old reruns – Andy Griffith, I Love Lucy, etc. – and even soaps.⁶ And, of course, the news, where we saw reporting on the Apollo 11 mission, the continuing tragedy of the monster “police action” in southeast Asia, and the horrors that the Manson “family” committed in California. Like so many, we watched the live broadcast of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the surface of the moon.

So far as music, all we had was radio.  I don’t recall a phonograph or cassette tape player and we certainly didn’t have one of the 8-track tape players that were all the rage then.

Popular songs that summer included:

• Get Back (Beatles),
• In the Year 2525 (Zager and Evans),
• Aquarius/Let the Sunshine in (The 5th Dimension),
• Honky Tonk Women (The Rolling Stones),
• Sugar, Sugar (“The Archies”⁷),
• Crystal Blue Persuasion (Tommy James & The Shondells),
• My Cherie Amour (Stevie Wonder),
• Spinning Wheel (Blood, Sweat & Tears),
• Bad Moon Rising (Credence Clearwater Revival),
• Sweet Caroline (Neil Diamond),
• One (Three Dog Night),
• Good Morning Starshine (Oliver),
• In the Ghetto (Elvis Presley)

At 17 years old in ‘69, I was a smoker; had been since the year before when I got hooked using cigarettes to light 4th-of-July fireworks.  At that time, “tobacco firms were the single largest product advertisers on television”⁸ and their ads were just as extensive in print media.

Beaumont Place was not at all “racially” diverse in 1969.  A lower income unincorporated neighborhood 2 miles northeast of the Houston city limit, education was provided by Sheldon Independent School District (SISD).  In the 60s Texas oil economy, the population of Houston and the surrounding Harris County communities boomed.  The 1970 census would show the county to be made up of about 70% Anglos, 20% blacks, 10% Hispanics, and a negligible percentage of  Asians/other. Sheldon district, at nearly one tenth the area of Houston, was virtually 100% Anglo, with no black students and a very small number of Hispanics and Asians.

Transportation opportunities were pretty limited. We had one vehicle, a 1961 Plymouth station wagon not quite on its last legs, mainly used by my step-dad to get to and from work. The nearest metro bus stop was 6 miles away.  I did a lot of walking, mainly to and from Arthur’s, a small grocery store just a few blocks from home, where I had a part-time job at $1.30 an hour.⁹

I had some vague ideas about my future.

I always knew I was destined for college, though I didn’t have a clue how I would be able to afford it.  With all the body bags coming back from the Southeast Asia conflict, I had no interest in the military.  However, universal male draft was the law and the military decision might be made for me unless I had a  student deferment.

I wanted more out of life than what we had in that rundown Beaumont Place house, was more interested in a conventional middle class life than counter culture and flower power.  Dropping out was not an option for me in this Age of Aquarius.¹⁰   Somehow, I knew, I was going to have get an education or work experience that could lead to some sort of career.

Before all that, though, I had another year of high school to get through.

A lot has changed in 50 years.

I left Texas the last week of 1971 and have only been back to Harris County five times – twice in 1972 and then once each in 1973, 1986, and 2016.

The house we lived in that summer of 1969 has long been gone.  Arthur’s store, shuttered for many years, was also torn down in the last few years.¹¹

Sheldon school district is now the fastest growing district in the ten county Greater Houston metropolitan area.¹²  As of 2016, the ethnic mix in C.E. King High School was about 67% Hispanic, 26% black, and 7% white. From about 450 in grades 9 to 12 in 1969, the school’s enrollment was relatively stable from about 1990 to 2004 at under 1200 students, but has since grown to over 2100 students with 142 teachers.¹³

A huge change over the last 50 years has been how households are connected to the outside world.  AT&T’s telephone monopoly was broken up January 1, 1984 following a ten year anti-trust legal battle and less than 2 years after  commercial cellular phone service was authorized by the Federal Communications Commission in 1982.  Now, instead of a landline phone like we had in 1969, half of all households in the U.S. don’t have one, instead relying on cellphones.  Smartphones are found in more than 84% of homes and 80% have at least one laptop or desktop computer. A third of U.S. households have three or more smartphones.  Unlimited nationwide calling is standard for most cellular phone plans, but long-distance calling charges are still imposed on landline phone calls outside of one’s local calling area.¹⁴

Personal entertainment, too, has changed enormously beyond the basic TVs and AM/FM radios of 1969.  Cable and satellite providers deliver a wide variety of programming to home televisions that are of physical sizes unimagined in 1969.  Video rental stores, which didn’t even exist in 1969, have been supplanted  by streaming services that deliver TV series and movies on demand whenever viewers choose rather than at a scheduled broadcast time. Libraries of books and music can be contained on small devices that can fit in a pocket or purse.  And all of this is without talking much about that wonder of the modern world, the Internet, a modest form of which was achieved in 1969 with ARPANET, the interconnection of four university computers developed under the direction of the U.S. Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA).¹⁵

Having started smoking when I was 16, I was finally, after many, many attempts, able to stop in 1982,  just after I turned 30. Since Congress banned the airing of cigarette advertising in 1971, along with other measures designed to curtail tobacco usage, cigarette smoking by adults has steadily dropped.  In 1965, 42.4% of U.S. adults smoked.  By 2014, the rate had dropped to 16.8%.  “Public health officials are hoping to to drive that rate below 12 percent by 2020.”¹⁶

Still living in Beaumont Place after high school, transportation difficulties continued after I enrolled at the University of Houston. I eventually stopped attending classes part way through my second semester in the spring of 1971.¹⁷  The Vietnam war was still in progress as was the draft.  The order of calling men for induction in the service had been changed in 1969 from the “draft the oldest man first” method to a lottery. The lottery that applied to me was drawn on August 5, 1971.  My number was in the mid 200s, so it was very unlikely that I would be drafted.  I wasn’t going to need that college military draft deferral.

Late in 1971, while job hunting, I happened to see military recruiter offices in a shopping center in Baytown.  With the war still in progress, I had no interest in anything that might involve being on the ground in a war zone, so the only recruiter offices I stopped in were Air Force and Navy. The Navy guy had a brochure for a program that sounded interesting – nuclear power – and sea duty billets on submarines.

I had found a way to get work experience that did lead to a career.

1. Photo credit: william87 /Canva Pro
2. 1969, The Year Everything Changed – by Rob Kirkpatrick, page xvii, Skyhorse Publishing Inc., Jan 24, 2011 (accessed June 4, 2019)
3. August 1969 – Weather Underground (accessed May 29, 2019)
4. Direct broadcast from satellite to home TV – Popular Science, September 1969 , page 22 (accessed June 2, 2019)
5. Computer history-1969 – Computer Hope (accessed June 5, 2019)
6. Soap opera – A soap opera is an ongoing drama serial on television or radio, featuring the lives of many characters and their familial, platonic and intimate relationships. The term soap opera originated from radio dramas being sponsored by soap manufacturers. (Wikipedia; accessed June 4, 2019)
7. “Sugar, Sugar” is one of 16 animated music segments created to be shown on “The Archie Comedy Hour” on CBS-TV in 1969. The single was released in 1969, backed with “Melody Hill,” and quickly rose to the #1 spot on the Billboard Hot 100, where it remained for 4 weeks, giving The Archies their first gold record (“Jingle Jangle” was their second gold record), and becoming the #1 song for 1969 according to Billboard magazine.
8. Congress bans airing cigarette ads, April 1, 1970 – Politico, April 1, 2018 (accessed June 4, 2019)
9. Not a very motivated worker, I didn’t get as many hours as some of the other employees.
10. “…most published materials on the subject state that the Age of Aquarius arrived in the 20th century.” – Wikipedia (accessed June 6, 2019)
11. I’ve looked at both locations on Google Street View several times over the last ten years or more.  For most of that time, the spot where the house sat was and empty lot, but it has since been developed.  The building that once housed the store was demolished more recently, leaving an overgrown empty lot.
12. Sheldon Independent School District – Wikipedia (accessed June 7, 2019)
13. C E King High School – Public School Review (accessed June 7, 2019)
14. Is the Concept of Long Distance Still Relevant? – Colin Berkshire, TalkingPointz, October 1, 2013 (accessed June 8, 2019)
15. ARPANET – SearchNetworking – TechTarget (accessed June 7, 2019) “ARPANET was the network that became the basis for the Internet. Based on a concept first published in 1967, ARPANET was developed under the direction of the U.S. Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA).
16. Who still smokes in the United States — in seven simple charts – November 12, 2015 by Brady Dennis, Washington Post (paywalled) (Accessed June 7, 2019)
17. I finished a bachelors years later, after I had spent nearly 9 years in the Navy and had subsequently gone to work in a related civilian field.