Where Have All the Flower Children Gone?

6. Friends and Peers: Where Have All the Flower Children Gone?

Friends and Peers Where Have All the Flower Children Gone? Introduction What a blast of cold water: These seemingly nondescript middleaged males were yesterday’s whippet-thin, long-haired, pot-smoking, blue-jeaned, goddamn hippie freaks. The anecdote on the previous page provides a partial answer to the question, Where have all the flower children gone? An even shorter response might be nowhere and everywhere. One doesn’t have to look far to find someone who either came of age during the 1960s or was somehow involved in that era. That hardly makes everyone who lived back then “flower children ,” but the purpose here is to quantify and somehow define those masses of young, idealistic faces pictured at Woodstock and college demonstrations around the United States. The most personal in the book, this chapter tracks the fate of the author’s friends and peers,who in a sense are Everyman and woman of the Baby Boom era. Others who had stakes in the ’60s are mentioned as well, and the story of one woman, Myra Aronson, is also described. Many are middle class: They have families, jobs, children, and grandchildren . Not only are their thoughts and observations chronicled in interviews, but they are informally classified based on dozens of conversations and research by the author. Rather than providing the 6 241 Where Have All the Flower Children Gone? 242 extreme examples cited elsewhere in the book, these are the people next door, in line in the grocery store, grumbling about gas prices and the war in the Middle East. Many claim they never voted for George W. Bush, although they are supposed to be among the largest demographic in the United States. Yet, on the other hand, they are almost impossible to find. It is hard to visualize the graying, prosperous-looking man in the golf cart at the country club or the overweight, aging couple making their way slowly through the buffet line as fresh-faced youths who once stood on the college commons chanting, “Hell no, we won’t go!” But they very may well have been. Perhaps this chapter will also serve as a reminder to today’s youth that the “flower children” generation, while complaining bitterly about their own parents, didn’t do much to improve things. There is the situation in the Middle East and the deterioration of our natural Where have the flower children gone? In this photo, one passed away, another has been out of the country for decades, and the other two are lost from memory . Photo by Paul Schoenfeld. Image Not Available Where Have All the Flower Children Gone? 243 environment, not to mention the continuing unrest, corruption, and poverty in some Third World countries. Perhaps, in the final analysis, this chapter will serve as an object lesson to generations coming up. Although you may start out with the best of intentions, if you want to effect positive change, you need to stick with the program. One Flower Child’s Destiny Myra Joy Aronson is a product of the new world order. Born on December 9, 1950, to Dr. Abraham and Evelyn Aronson, she had a nomadic childhood. She spent her early years in Elgin, Illinois, went to grade school in Madison, Wisconsin, high school in St. Louis, and college at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, where, like many of the friends and peers discussed in this chapter, she became politically and socially aware, although Miami was hardly the most volatile of U.S. or even Ohio campuses. Although only about 5 feet 1 inch and a size two,Myra had presence and definite opinions. A photograph from the April 15, 1970, Miami Student shows her being dragged out of the campus ROTC building by two Ohio State Troopers for resisting arrest during a takeover by student protesters. Rather than being a smirk, her half-smile is tacit acknowledgment that she is bigger than the huge guys who have hold of each arm, and perhaps also that the flash of the camera meant she was going to be on front page of the next day (she was). The following year, her junior, was spent abroad in France, further refining her love of all things Francophile, from wine to clothes to the language, which influenced her taste throughout her adult life. In 1973, after completing some graduate course work, Myra and her college boyfriend, Matthew Kiernan, who was involved in...