Prequel to 1969

Prequel to 1969 – The Summer of Love Continued

1969 - The Summer of Love Continued is a Sequel to Bill Kelly’s Waiting on the Angels – The Long Cool Summer of ’65, a light, easy reading, episodic Roman a clef novel that takes place over the course of the summer of 1965 in Ocean City and Somers Point, New Jersey, a seasonal Jersey Shore resort then popular with the college crowd.

Waiting on the Angels – The Long Cool Sumer of ’65 Revisited

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Waiting on the Angels – The Long Cool Summer of ’65 Revisited – Text Only 

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It was also a crossroads departure point for many of the real life characters whose further adventures are chronicled in this follow up, including Conway Twitty, who went from rock & roll to country music, Bob Dylan, who went electric, taking Levon and the Hawks out of Tony Marts with him, Tedo Mambo – the first hippie rock star, Joe Walsh, Stevie Nicks, Jimi Hendrix, Dave Herman, Linda VanDevanter, Grace Kelly, Ralph “Sonny” Barger, David Brenner, Tom Snyder, Chris Mathews and a host of ordinary people who came together in a small place at the same time and made special things happen, as recounted in this still unfolding story.

They say 1967 was the “Summer of Love” – as conceived, concocted and devised by Madison Avenue Advertising executives as an overall attempt to describe, brand and profit from the huge cultural shift that radically altered society. This multi-dimensional cultural shift suddenly increased the numbers of mobile free spirits who chose to follow a “counter-culture,” - mainly young, care free, long haired, liberal baby boomers who rejected the corporate wall street profit motive and drifted off with flowers in their hair to Monterey and Heights-Asbury on the west coast, and the Village – Greenwich Village in the southside of the city – New York city. They were in search of love and happiness and discovered marijuana, hashish, LSD and other psychedelic spirits that infused a generation.

Those they called “hippies,” who were a distinct minority in 1965, were nearly a clear majority by 1969, and in America mob rules, not necessarily for the better.

Now in retrospect, it’s easy to see how it went from the cool vibes of the Monterey and Atlantic City Pop Fests and the au natural mud orgy called Woodstock to the suddenly catastrophic nightmare at Altamont, killing a dream.

Getting there was another matter. 

Prologue - The Parkway Murders

1969 – The Summer of Love Continued 

Prologue - The Parkway Murders 

Just as the Labor Day 1964 murder – political assassination of Harry Anglemeyer set the stage for the Summer of ’65, the Memorial Day 1969 weekend Parkway murders were an ominous beginning to the sequel, set four years later at the same location – in the immediate vicinity of the Somers Point Circle crossroads.

Just as many of those who spent the summer of ’65 at the Jersey Shore and then moved on to the next chapter in their lives – back to school, work, the concert trail, Vietnam, other new blood came to town, mostly blue blood, upper middle class college kids, not looking for an answer to life’s key questions, just looking for a good time, and most found it there.

Act 1 Scene 1 - The Girls Come to Town

Act 1 Scene 1 

The Girls Come to Town 

The girls couldn’t get to the Jersey Shore fast enough.

They felt like they were flying high above the Delaware river over the Walt Whitman bridge into New Jersey, the red ball of sun rising over the eastern horizon ahead of them, their brown wavy hair blowing in the wind, one bare foot sticking out of the passenger side window, and with her toes shifting the side view mirror to reflect her and then on to Susan Davis, smiling behind the wheel of her dark blue 1966 Chevy convertible, black top down.

In the passenger seat “Liz” – Elizabeth Perry unfolds a bright red scarf and lets if fly in the breeze. The girls, both 19, had just finished a semester at Monticello Junior College in Godfrey, Illinois, Liz looking forward to going back for her second year at Monticello while Davis was planning to attend Ithaca College in New York. 

They were due in Durum, South Carolina on Saturday to attend the graduation from Duke of Davis’ brother, and it being Tuesday morning they were going to spend the next few days on the beach and boardwalk at Ocean City, New Jersey – “America’s Greatest Family Resort.”

When it came to a fork in the road, as Yogie Berra would say, they took it, veering away from the Black Horse Pike and onto the Atlantic City Expressway toll road, Susan beeping the car horn twice as they both began singing, “Expressway to your heart,” a then popular song often heard on the radio.

After a round of loud laughs and giggles and a moment of silence Davis turned the radio on to hear static, so she tuned the dial until she got a clear station: “Michel Schurman – with your WOND news at the Jersey Shore,” who then gave them a well received weather report – “clear, sunny and mild.”

A few minutes later they passed the Hap Farley Service Plaza without stopping, and then a few miles before Atlantic City they took the Garden State Parkway South across Patcong Creek, bay waters that glistened in the rising sun, and past mile marker 32 – 32 miles from Cape May, on the opposite side of the four lane, woods and tree lined Parkway – the spot where they would meet their tragic fate in a few days time.

Getting off at the Somers Point – Ocean City Exit they head down MacArthur Boulevard, they hedge around the Crossroads Circle – if it was a clock - coming in at six o’clock and passing the diner, Your Father’s Mustache at three, and the Circle Liquor Store at two and going out at noon, shooting over the causeway bridge above Rainbow Channel, the top of which gives them a clear view of the vast Great Egg Bay. They inhale the first scent of salt air and squint at the rising sun that silhouettes the outline of the Ocean City skyline, their next destination.

Over the second causeway draw bridge they ride through town, past the gas stations, drive-ins and diners, catching the lights past the Chatterbox, Post Office, Watsons and the Bus Station and pull to the curb in front of a row of houses just before the chain link fence of the empty parking lot.

While Susan raised the black canvas top and locked the car, Liz pumps a few nickels into the parking meter and they head up to the wooden boards, their heals clicking and soft, flower print dresses flurrying in the wind, concealing their bathing suits underneath.

Heading past a row of glass telephone booths on one side and movie posters on the other they pass under the theater marquee before stopping to look up and down the nearly deserted boardwalk, only a few bicycles, strollers and a lone fast walker.

First hearing and then glancing over to the lone hippie playing guitar on Shriver’s Pavilion, they twerel and dance across the boards to his off beat tune, descend the steps to the right of the Pavilion, kick off their shoes and feel the cool sand seep through their toes. Then they run across the beach, past the deserted white Lifeguard stand with red lettering that reads: 9^th Street, they pull their dresses up to their knees and wade into the gently breaking surf.

Looking around to take things into perspective, they are in the cool shade as the sun slowly rises above the Music Pier to the north side. The long, flat ocean horizon is lined with three distinct boats – a sailboat under sail, an anchored and bobbing fishing boat with lines outstanding and Russian fishing freighter far at sea. A lone fisherman cast his surf pole at the end of the rock jetty, and all seems well in the world.

Smiling at each other without saying a word they walk back to the boardwalk where they find most of the stores are closed, so holding their shoes in their hands they walk daintily back across the boards, past the row of phone booths and back down the street to their car.

While Susan puts another nickel in the meter, Liz glanced at the hand painted wood sign next to a mailbox that read: Syben Guest House - Rooms for Rent – 712 Ninth Street. It was one of four, old cedar sided rooming houses that lined the south side of the street between the boardwalk parking lot and the bus station. Watson’s restaurant on the corner and the post office anchored the small but quaint neighborhood at the end of the line.

The door at 712 opened and out comes an older lady in an apron with a broom in hand who begins to sweep the steps before looking up, noticing and smiling at the two girls on the sidewalk.

It wasn’t long before her husband Walter Syben was carrying two suitcases of luggage into the front door of Syben Guest House, where Mrs. Syben was having the girls sign the guest book: Susan Davis – Camp Hill, Pa. - Elizabeth Perry – Excelsior – Minnesota.

“You girls can park your car in the driveway next to the house and get it off the meter,” said Walter Syben, carrying the luggage up the stairs to a second floor bedroom, “and you have a room with a view.”

A part time Pennsylvania farmer, Walter Syben had purchased the main street rooming house in 1965 for less than $20,000 and enjoyed working the summer tourist season at the shore before returning to his farm for the winter, in his view the best of two worlds.

Leaving their suitcases unopened on the twin beds, the girls took two keys, as Mrs. Syben explained, one for the front door and the other to their room. They would’t each need a set they explained, because they would be constantly together. Then they moved the car into the driveway, locked it, and headed for the boardwalk. There they would each take a phone booth, call home collect to let their parents know they arrived save and sound.

Then, as they say, they would “hit the beach, the boards and the bars,” in that order. 

Next up: Act 1 Scene 2 – Prom Night – The Morning After

   

Act 1 Scene 2 - Prom Night - The Next Morning

Act 1 Scene 2 - Act I Scene 2 – Prom Night – The Next Morning

Still in the black tuxedos, their ties hanging lose around their open shirts, we were four high school seniors heading to the Jersey Shore after dropping off our dates.

We were  headed to Ocean City, New Jersey, where my parents had recently bought a house, and traveling  via the back roads through Berlin where Mark would stop by his house to pick up some clothes. The house is dark, everyone’s asleep, so it was a quick in and out for Mark Jorden. Then it was back on the road, Jerry Montgomery driving, as usual, since he was the first to get his license and a car, so he just assumed that role.

Bob Katchnick was asleep on the other side of the back seat from me as we headed down the pike – the Black Horse Pike towards the shore, then taking the back roads past the old deer hunter’s roadhouse with the carved wood sign that read DOAKS. Past the deserted plastics factory, Donny’s Mays Landing Inn, across the creek and a sharp right takes you along Somers Point road that hugs the river.

Sunshine Park, the first nudist colony in America is probably the biggest landmark on the Somers Point-Mays Landing Road, but there are a few old, colonial era houses and a Catawba where a family died of suspicious circumstances, possibly murdered a century ago. Then there’s Jack’s Grove all night café under the trees before the marina and bridge to Somers Point.

With the golf course on the left and Kennedy Park on the Highbanks and bay on the right, you sneak up to the Somers Point Circle from the south at nine o’clock on the dial and pass Your Father’s Mustache, the Crab Trap and Circle Liquor before heading over the Ocean City causeway bridge.

While the Point Diner on the circle just across from Your Father’s Mustache is the most popular all night cafes, there were two other diners, one relatively new one on the south side of Ninth Street and Bill Brown’s Diner just off the alley behind the Italian joint at West Avenue.

Bill Brown, they say, was a Camden guy, like we were, so that’s where we pulled in and parked in the small lot next to the diner. It was still dark, the sun wasn’t up yet, but the bright neon lights of the diner made Katchnick squint as he work up when the car stopped moving.

Bob was strikingly Troy Donahoe handsome but shy, thoughtful and quiet. His younger sister was beautiful hippie and his best friend Bob Lodge was a tall, lanky artist who saw something funny in everything. The two Bobs.

Jerry liked to laugh too, and they all laughed at me and Mark when we talked politics.

That’s how we met, as the year before I was a volunteer for Gene McCarthy, the anti-Vietnam war candidate, whose showing in New Hampshire forced LBJ to resign from the race, leaving the door open for RFK to get killed and the riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, that I was a part of.

If Chicago radicalized me against the political system, I don’t known what radicalized Mark, but he went from basketball team jock at a prestigious prep school to CCHS – Camden Catholic High School, giving up sports all together and earning a scholarship to NYU – the hippest college on the East Coast in the heart of Greenwich Village in the City – New York City.

Unlike the other two diners that were really busy at this time, Bill Brown’s was half empty even though it was a small place – six stools on each side of two counter and three booths on each side of the door, each with a flipping juke box that cost a dime a song – three for a quarter, playing three tunes while listening to the hit songs others have played including "Hot Fun in the Summertime," "Grazing in the Grass" and "Wedding Bell Blues." 

The talk at the table was not about music, or college, but what they were going to do that summer. I knew what I was going to do – work at Mack & Manco’s pizza joint on the boardwalk at 9^th Street, and offered to try to get hem jobs too, but they all wanted to do something else.

Around the same time, sitting in a Madison Avenue advertising office in New York City, two young men in jeans and t-shirts talked with a group of men in suits and ties, convincing them to match their multi-million dollar investment in a music festival to be held late that summer near Woodstock in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York, an even that would affect everyone in some way or another, especially the four of us sitting in a booth in Bill Brown’s Diner in Ocean City, New Jersey at five o’clock in the morning on the day after the prom.

Next: Act 1 Scene 3 - Flashback - from Somers Point to Woodstock 

Act 1 Scene 3 - From Somers Point to Woodstock

Small Town Talk

by Rick Danko and Bobby Charles.

It's all small town talk, you know how people are   

They can't stand to see, someone else               

Doing what they want to    

                        

 And it's small town talk, they tell alot of lies    

 Make some people crazy                              

 Never realize that they're sinkin                   

 We're all the same people, tryin to live together   

 And we're tryin to make something work              

 Now who are we to judge one another?                

 No ... that could cause alot of hurt ...

 You can't believe everything you hear                

 And only half of what you see                       

 And if you're going to believe in anyone            

 Oh - you gotta believe in me                        

                                                     

 And it's small town talk, you know how people are   

 They can't stand to see, someone else               

 Doing what they want to                             

 And it's small town talk, it's a well known fact    

 You don't ever know how one might react             

To what you're thinkin ...                            

Act 1 Scene 3 – Flashback to Labor Day 1965

From Somers Point to Woodstock

Of those who left town on Labor Day 1965, taking different directions from the Somers Point Circle, none were less sure of their destination than Levon & the Hawks, as they took a good paying job backing Bob Dylan, first at Forest Hills, the New York.

The concert at the Forest Hills tennis stadium, adapted for use as a folk concert venue, was the second time Dylan “went electric,” the first being at the Newport Folk Festival.

Philly Steve, who rode his bike as one of the 99 Percenters, ran the Guitar Workshop on Sansom Street in Philadelphia with his twin brother, and put together the program for the first few Philadelphia Folk Festivals as well as the Newport Folk Festival, where the feud over Dylan “going electric” spilled out in violence.

Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman and Alan Lomax, who recorded the old blues artists for the Library of Congress, ended up wrestling on the ground, and the folk purists sensitivities were just as aroused at Forest Hills, where the boos were long and loud as Levon set up his drums and Robbie Robertson and Dylan plugged in their guitars, but generally subsided into applause and cheers as Dylan ripped into his then just released and popular hit, “Like a Rolling Stone.”

Dylan then took the show on the road, to England but Levon got tired of the booing and left the tour and was replaced on drums by Mikey Jones of the Monkeys.

Even though “Like a Rollins Stone” never made number one on the pop charts, kept in the runners up number two slot by the Beatles, his growing popularity and cult following made it difficult for him to be seen in public, and he even had a hard time walking around his Greenwich Village neighborhood.

So his manager Albert Grossman sent him to his rural upstate retreat at Woodstock in the Catskill mountains. Known as a Bohemian artist’s colony for over a century, Woodstock already had its share of eccentrics so Dylan would not stand out, and he enjoyed riding his motorcycle into town and playing chess with the locals on a table set up on the sidewalk in front of the Espresso Café on main street in the quaint but small down town.

Then one day, July 29 1966, with his wife Sarah following him in her car, Dylan wiped out on his bike, crashing his motorcycle in an accident that would have major consequences for a lot of people.

With Dylan recuperating at Grossman’s house in Woodstock, the rest of the Hawks slowly made their way from the city to the country, as according to the contract that took them out of Tony Marts in Somers Point they were booked and were to be paid to be Dylan’s band whether they performed or not.

First Rick Danko and Richard Manuel took the drive up the Hudson River and after getting lost a few times, found Woodstock and visited Dylan in recovery, and then took a look around town, and liked what they saw.

From the Espresso Café they found a local bar and over a few drinks they decided to stick around awhile. After discounting taking a room or apartment downtown with the hippies and artists, that had the feel of a Western cowboy town, they drove down curving two lane blacktop until they came to something they liked better – a vacant and for rent pink split level house in Saugerties, an even smaller village outside of Woodstock proper.

 Filling it with furniture bought at garage sales, they began to get to know some of their neighbors, and learned which ones smoked weed and invited them over, and before long Garth and Robbie made their way to Woodstock and they set up their equipment in the basement side room of the split level house that became a magnet for their creative juices.

Eventually even Levon came back to the fold after a brief sojourn home to Arkansas and Ontario, where he checked in with Colonel Kutlets who told him of how the rest of the Hawks were now holed up in Woodstock, waiting for Dylan to recuperate from his motorcycle accident.

“Where’s Woodstock?” Levon said incredulously.

But he found it, and rejoined the rest of the Hawks. Both Robbie Robertson and Garth Hudson found other places to live nearby but kept their musical equipment in the basement of the pink split level in West Saugerties they began to refer to as “Big Pink.”

And the townspeople, mainly hip artists and writers, began to refer to them simply as “The Band.”

After getting everything settled down in their new Woodstock environs, Rick and Richard got into their car, and just as they drove around and found Big Pink, they took off south on Route 9, without a destination, stopping occasionally for gas, a diner meal and a drink at every bar they passed.

By the time they got near to Atlantic City they were pretty soused and instead of going to Kentucky Avenue to see some old friends performing there, they decided to revisit Somers Point and see some of their friends from last summer.

First stop was Bay Avenue, past Tony Marts to the first of the four similar houses across the street from the Clam Bar, where they had shacked up for six weeks with Ophelia the hippie queen and her daughter, a Tony Marts dancer.

They knocked on the door, but when no one answered, they asked a neighbor who said that Ophelia and her daughter had left, left town, maybe went to Florida or California – they talked about going to California.

Rick and Richard, after a night in a motel room with some girls they picked up at the Anchorage, drove back up Route 9 North to Woodstock, stopping in every bar along the way.

Back at Big Pink, where Levon had set up his drums and Garth his organs, they plugged in their guitars and began to jam, fine tuning some of the songs they started last summer while playing the Tony Marts gig, including Garth’s “Chest Fever,” Richard’s “Ophelia,” and Rick’s “Small-town Talk,” that some people believe is about Woodstock, but others think it stems from Rick’s time in Somers Point where he broke the house rules by dating and living with one of the dancers.

Dylan’s wounds eventually healed and after hearing much about the jams in the basement of Big Pink, Dylan began to stop by, bringing some booze and weed – for medicinal purposes only, to jam with the band. It was very therapeutic for all of them, and they began to produce some very interesting pieces, all of which was recorded on Garth’s reel to reel recorder parked next to his B3 organ.

“Quinn the Eskimo” and other good if not great songs are on those tapes, but it’s not just the music, it’s the talk and banter between songs, and story-telling, like Dylan saying how he once  went to East Orange New Jersey to visit Woody (Guthrie) in the hospital, and stopped by the Checkmate Coffee House, where he paid for his coffee with a chess piece – and got a rook and two pawns as change, and everyone would break up laughing before someone would start the first strands of a new song they were working on.

Then someone, it’s not clearly who got a copy of one of the Big Pink basement tapes and cut a two record set they sold underground via head shops, an all white double album that from the outside looked very much like the Beatle’s white album, but was very much different, not only in tone but content.

Then, thanks to the efforts of Albert Grossman, the Hawks officially changed their name to The Band and got to record and release their own album – Music from Big Pink that included an oil painting by Bob Dylan on the front and a photo of Big Pink on the back.

By 1969 it was common knowledge that Bob Dylan and The Band were holed up at Woodstock, New York, and other musicians joined them – Todd Rungrin, Van Morrison and Paul Butterfield among them, but the sudden influx of vagabond hippies looking for Dylan to give them the answers, put of the local Woodstock townspeople as well as Dylan himself. Dylan once returned to his home from Big Pink to find strangers in his house, even his bedroom, looking for something he didn’t have and didn’t want.

Ophelia

Boards on the window, mail by the door
What would anybody leave so quickly for?
Ophelia - Where have you gone?

The old neighborhood just ain't the same
Nobody knows just what became of
Ophelia - tell me, what went wrong?

Was it somethin' that somebody said?

Mama, I know we broke the rules
Was somebody up against the law?
Honey, you know I'd die for you

Ashes of laughter, the coast is clear
Why do the best things always disappear
Like Ophelia - please darken my door

Was it somethin' that somebody said?

Honey, you know we broke the rules
Was somebody up against the law?
Honey, you know I'd die for you

They got your number, scared and runnin'
But I'm still waitin' for the second comin'
Of Ophelia - come back home

Next: Act 1 Scene 4 - The Girl's Last Good Time 

Act 1 Scene 4 - The Girl's Last Good Time

Act 1 Scene 4 

The Girl's Last Good Time

For Susan and Liz the first stop was the beach, the same 9^th Street beach they visited early that morning, only to find it now quite crowded, even though the lifeguards won’t go on duty until Friday, when they are scheduled to leave.

Walking alongside the black rock jetty they spread a blanket and towels out near where Linda and the nurses and the mayor’s daughters would normally be if they were there, then taking off their flower print skirts they lay out in the sun in their bathing suits.

After noon they put on their shoes and leaving their skirts behind, walk up to the boardwalk and get slice of pizza from the Mack & Manco counter and eat it while walking north down the boardwalk. Past Shriver’s candy store, Monroe’s books, the Orange Juice stand, Moorlyn theater and another Mack & Manco’s they go in The Birdcage headshop, attracted by some shell necklesses.

There the incense is burning and they are greeted by posters of Brando on a bike, Marilyn with her dress flying and one advertising The Atlantic City Pop Festival in August.

Danny, short, with long but balding black hair smiles from behind the counter and pulls a tray of necklaces out and puts it on the counter in front of the girls, who begin to rummage through them.

Danny, who also owns a head shop in Philadelphia on Sansom street between the Guitar Workshop and the Electric Factory concert venue, stocks both stores with the same hip items, and has an eye for beautiful young girls, and offers them a job for the summer selling the jewelry. They both laugh, but decline the offer saying they have other plans, but they each buy a necklass, blouse and skirt and an Ocean City, N.J. shirt.

After stopping in an arcade and taking four small black and white head shot photos of themselves smiling and making faces, they go back to their blankets and meet some boys who have set up their beach chairs, blanket and blaring radio next to them.

Realizing they were getting too much sun, they packed up their belongings and left the beach early, saying goodbye to their new friends, an headed back to their room to take a shower in an old, lion’s claw bathtub with a shower curtain around it, and try on their new blouses and skirts before hitting the Point.

Although the drinking age was 21 and they were only 19, they knew that wasn’t a problem, as Susan had her older sister’s drivers license that didn’t have her picture on it, and they knew that if they dressed and acted sophisticated there wouldn’t be a problem, and there wasn’t.

It was late in the afternoon when they went around the Somers Point Circle and down Shore Road where they made a right onto Delaware Avenue and parked, with their car top still up.

At the red mahogany bar at Gregory’s they ordered some cool iced screwdrivers, and looked at the menu, ordering a dozen clams on the half shell and bowels of snapper soup from the bartender Vince Renich, the former bar back and bartender from Bay Shores. When Bay Shores closed on Labor Day 1965, Vince followed the crowd of other bartenders, waiteresses and musicians to Florida, where he got a job bartending at one of the beachside hotels.

But the following year, after getting married and the birth of his son Vince, Jr., Rennich decided he needed a steady, permanent job, and after Charles Carney quit, he took the job of his former mentor. And Vince didn’t like having to shuck the clams any more than Charles, but he did it with a shrug, and talked to the girls as he did it in front of them.

It being a weekday before the Memorial Day holiday weekend, business was slow, only a few of the Tight End Fishing Club down the other end of the long rectangle bar, when a young man comes in the front door and sits down at the bar across from the girls.

Although they were busy eating, they noticed the well dressed and handsome guy in the button down shirt and open collar, who orders a draft beer and asks Vince if Gregory Gregory was around.

“No,” Vince said, “he’s off fishing with his uncle, but he’ll probably be back later on and throw their catch out at the other end of the bar by the kitchen.”

“Tell him Ted from Temple stopped by to say hello like he asked,” the young man said to Vince, before explaining that Gregory had come to Temple as a prospective student and Ted had showed him around campus. Gregory had told him about the bar in Somers Point and all the beautiful girls on the beach, which made the girls giggle, look at each other and laugh as they were listening in. 

“I’ll tell him,” Vince said, as the girls finished their drinks and meal, paid their fare and moved on, down Delaware Avenue to the Anchorage, then to Tony Marts and Bay Shores before heading back to the rooming house and letting themselves in the front door, surprised to find the owners still up watching television in the living room.

The next day was the same routine, pretty much, except they ate a cheesesteak at Joe Del’s next to Mack & Manco’s for lunch, and each called home from the pay phones on the boardwalk at the end of 9^th Street.

At some point Susan made a quick turn and with a beep of a horn and screech of tires, there was a small clank that dented the fender of a VW bus with Arizona tags and manned by two young hippie guys.

They were both sorry, and blamed each other, but Susan insisted on seeing the local insurance man to file a claim, as she did. As he filled out the papers the insurance man looked out the window and could see the dark blue Chevy convertible, top down, another young girl leaning against it, and two long hair boys standing next to a VW bus parked alongside.

Deciding not to tell their parents about the fender bender until they got home, Susan and Liz also decided to splurge a bit and get a more expensive seafood diner at one of the first class restaurants at the Point. Then they hit the bars, but instead of going back to their room at 2 am when the Point bars closed, they went on to the Dunes and continued dancing until dawn.

Sleeping on the beach all day, it set their biological clocks off a bit, so after the Anchorage, Tony Marts, Bay Shores and Dunes routine on Thursday, they decided to return to their rooming house at 4 in the morning and pack it in.

This time they woke up the Mr. and Mrs. Syben, returned them the keys, and carrying their own suit cases down the steps. Explaining they wanted to “beat the traffic,” they hugged the Mrs. Sybe and promised to return again before the end of the summer and to write – send them some post cards from South Carolina.

Back across the causeway they went around the Somers Point Circle to the Point Diner, where they settled into a booth and looking around saw many of the kids they had been drinking and dancing with at the bars earlier that night.

After pumping some dimes and quarters into the juke box in their booth, and eating breakfast, they downed their last drop of orange juice and coffee and asked for their bill, but were told that the two young men at the counter had picked up their check.

Outside, as the girls put the top down and got in their car, they were seen by an off duty policeman, moonlighting as a security guard at the Jolly Roger bar across the street. He watched as the two girls pulled out of the parking lot and stopped at the circle to pick up a young man who was apparently hitch hiking, possibly with his arm in a sling. He was a clean cut guy, short hair and well dressed, and not a hippie.

The dark blue Chevy convertible pulled off the circle and headed west on MacArthur Boulevard towards the Garden State Parkway.

It was 5 am Friday morning of Memorial Day weekend, 1969. 

Act 1 Scene 5 - The Festivals as Planned

Act 1 Scene 5 -

The Festivals as Planned

Most of the people at the Jersey Shore went about their business and good times for that 1969 Memorial Day weekend, but back in the city teams of men would be making plans for a series of music festivals set for that August, three months later.

After the 1965 Newport Folk Fest, the 1967 Monterey Pop Fest was the key catalyst for the three big festivals planned for the summer of 1969 – the Atlantic City Pop Festival, Woodstock and Altamont, California.

Newport, then the home of the America’s Cup sailboat regatta and where John F. Kennedy got married, was where the rich and famous took their vacations, so the Newport Jazz and Folk Festivals were fairly reserved events, until 1965, when Dylan turned things upside down by plugging in his guitar and “going electric.”

So by 1969 the idea of producing  major popular music festivals had matured to the point where there was major financial backing but little grounded experience, so the producers had to figure it out. The Philadelphia Electric Factory duo of Larry Magid and Jerry Spivak and Jerry’s brothers Herb and Allen knew the concert promotion ropes, and with the Atlantic City Race Track venue, had an enclosed and controlled area where they put on the most organized of the three festivals that summer, one that would precede Woodstock by a few weeks and boasted many of the same acts.

After opening the original Electric Factory in an old tire warehouse at 22^nd and Arch Street on February 2, 1968, they knew most of the acts personally from having previously booked them. Magid had previously worked as a booking agent in New York city and his alcohol free club open to all ages, laid down the anchor for a new hip Philadelphia neighborhood on the west side of center city near the end of Sansom Street, where Danny Davis had his head shop that complimented the Birdcage on the Ocean City boardwalk.

Steve, a 99 Percenter biker in 1965 and his twin brother Elliot had the Guitar Workshop nearby, and it was Steve who produced the program for the first few Philadelphia Folk Festivals.

Just around the corner Rittenhouse Square was the fashionable high rise neighborhood park where the hippies gathered in Philly like they did at Height-Asbury in San Francisco and Greenwich Village in New York City. And it was on one of the higher floors of a skyscraper that overlooked Rittenhouse Square where the WMMR radio DJs could look out their window to see the Square, and where Dave Herman the radio man had convinced the owners and producers to let him play popular 33 1/3 albums for a few hours on Sunday nights during his Marconi Experiment radio show.

Herman’s time slot got so popular with young people that they eventually flipped the Easy Listening Elevator Music programming to the AOR – Album Oriented Rock format the Herman introduced and they kept it even after Herman left the station for WNEW in New York, where he did the same thing in the bigger market.

While Magid and Spivak organized the Atlantic City Pop Fest, the Woodstock promoters, whose posters already promoted the upstate New York Arts and Music Festival, had a hard time convincing the Woodstock town council of the benefits of their project.

Woodstock had already seen a marked increase in the hippie tourists arriving daily in search of Dylan and the answers to the questions he couldn’t and wouldn’t provide, so they certainly weren’t going to permit thousands, tens of thousands, or the estimates of hundreds of thousands of hippies descending on their quaint, little village, so they turned down the promoter’s request for a permit, with the support of most of the locals, including Dylan.

In looking for alternative sites for their festival they approached Max Yasker, a farmer who they promised to compensate handsomely to allow them to build a stage at the base of a huge hill that Yasker had farmed, and got the Bethel, New York town council to approve the deal, with the conditions that they provide the portable toilets and necessary security for the event.

In California the promoters settled on Altamont auto speedway as a controlled arena for their outdoor event, and included many of the acts that would be featured at Atlantic City and Woodstock, but topped them off by booking the Rolling Stones, that weren’t included in either of the other festivals.

While they had more time to organize Altamont, and the Woodstock guys were having trouble building a stage and having a fence built, they printed and sold tickets, but struggled to get the show organized.

Magid and the Spivak brothers were on top of their event, and in the end the Atlantic City Pop Fest was belatedly recognized as probably the best of the three music festivals that summer, but the masses of hundreds of thousands of young kids coming together at one place at the same time created such chaos, especially at Woodstock, and the catastrophe at Altamont would prevent any such large scale festival from taking place again for a long time.

But still in the beginning of the summer planning stages, the chaos and catastrophe still had to play out, and nobody knew what would happen or how it would go, though everyone knew it was going to be big and festive, and the music would be great.

Next: Act 1 Scene 7 - The Girls Go Missing 

That 1969 Memorial Day weekend - as the newspapers reported two coeds missing, another news report was published in the Press of Atlantic City that read:

Study Maps Explosion of Violence – By Jean M. White – Special to the Press and The Washington Post 

WASHINGTON – The 1960s have exploded into one of the most turbulent eras of violence prone American people, a presidential task force reported Thursday.

The multi-million word research study – as long as seven or eight novels – exhaustively surveys “Violence in American: Historical and Comparative Perspectives.”

The authors underscore that Americans have always been a violent and even “rather bloody-minded” people, almost echoing in scholarly observations the “violence-is-as-American as cherry-pie” phrase of Negro militant H. Rap Brown.

But they also point out that recent violence has appeared in several forms “unprecedented” in American history – political assassinations, university unrest, and anti-war protest. The study also notes the recent spiral in the rates of violent crime and the turn toward black aggression in the long conflict between the races.

The research report was released Thursday on the first anniversary of the assassination of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy. That act led to the appointment of the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence.

The historical and comparative analysis of American violence is one of seven task force studies that will form the basis --- …..