The '60s

Posted: Tuesday, August 17, 1999

It started with Camelot. The president, his pretty wife, the children and country who would never know their father when he died a young man. Some say those gun shots killed our innocence. Some say things would never be the same.

It ended May 4, 1970, at Kent State when four students were shot to death during a war protest. Our own soldiers had shot our own children.

And in between election of that hopeful, dashing president and those horrible deaths was the decade -- the 1960s -- full of events that changed the world forever.

Come mothers and fathers throughout the land, Bob Dylan sang in 1963. And don't criticize what you can't understand. Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command. Your old road is rapidly agin'. Please get out of the new one if you can't lend your hand. For the times they area a changin'.

There are as many memories as emotions about the '60s. The events in sum are impossible to compartmentalize, impossible to boil down to something neat and easy and pretty, because the 1960s were anything but.

Even for those Americans, indeed most Americans, who quietly went about their business raising families and working.

"And whatever the'60s were, they weren't boring," Joan Morrison wrote in the book, "From Camelot to Kent State." "There was a heightened sense of change in both personal and national life, an almost daily pounding of events, shocks, revelations. The predictability of one's own future, or of the future itself, seemed to be eroding away, along with the reverence for traditional values and standards. The ground was trembling under our feet and no one could ignore it."

A hippie, a black civil rights protester in the South, and a soldier all share their stories of that time more than 30 years ago. They are in their 50s now. They have jobs and responsibilities and live in the world they struggled to understand. They all say that the '60s were a time worth living in.

The protester

There were telephone calls to her parents telling them to make their daughter stop participating in civil rights marches in Albany, Ga.

"A time when the racial unrest was probably at its peak, and people were questioning their own values," said Thelma Hunter Gordon. "It was a time when there was a lot of rebellion against establishment. It was a time when people were very confused about what they felt.

"It was a time that was both happy and sad. I remember there being happy, good times. Listening to music, and spending time with friends. The social part was good. I also remember it was a time that was very difficult between the races. There were a lot of privileges we didn't have. I was probably young enough that I didn't have sense enough to be frightened. When I have something to fight for, it feeds my adrenaline."

Hunter Gordon, now 55, is secretary of aging for the state of Kansas. She isn't so sure that without the changes that occurred in the 1960s a black woman would hold the position on the governor's Cabinet that she has now.

It was in between high school and college, in the early 1960s, when she would take lunch hours from her job at the hospital to march for civil rights.

"I had to keep that hush, hush," she said; she feared she would lose her job. "I tried to make sure I put on my dark glasses. They needed numbers, not faces. On more than one occasion, I had people call my parents. I was afraid for (her parents') lives. I don't remember being afraid for my life during any particular time.

"While I was marching they would call me the 'N' word a lot. I remembered what my aunt said, 'Words don't hurt you, so just keep moving."'

She recalled hearing Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. speak.

"I thought he was bigger than life itself," she said. "When he spoke, it shook my soul. I trusted him completely. He had no fear, and I think that's what taught me not to have any fear. He was ready to give up his life, so you were ready to give up yours."


Thelma Hunter Gordon donned disguises to participate in civil rights marches in the 1960s.


When he died on April 4, 1968, she said, "I felt like a part of me had died."

Hunter Gordon is proud of what she and so many others did.

"I'm very proud I had the opportunity to participate," she said. "I'm very proud I've seen some changes, even though I think we all know the changes have not been as much as we'd have liked for them to have been."

In 1969, she married widower Dr. Jacob Gordon. They moved to Lawrence in the early 1970s with his four young children. Gordon came to the University of Kansas to start the African studies program, prompted by civil unrest that scarred the campus during the 1960s and into the early '70s.

She said there were days she didn't allow her children to go to school because she was afraid for their lives.

"I don't think they really understood at that point what we were doing," Hunter Gordon said. "There was great unrest; the union burned."

Do her children appreciate now what happened during the civil rights movement?

"They understand as much as they can," she said. "We tried to protect them from the hurt and pain that we went through. We know how deep that pain can be."

Her thoughts of what this country went through in the 1960s aren't as frequent as they used to be. Time is washing away the intensity.

"The 1960s brought about many changes," Hunter Gordon said. "People become afraid to change. The '60s were the exception."

The soldier and the hippie

As a kid, Rick Burke dreamed of being a soldier, a Marine. He always knew he would be. He always knew he would fight in a war.

That's exactly what the Topeka West High School dropout did from 1966 to 1968 when he enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps. He earned his General Educational Development diploma while in the service.

"I was a corporal, the NCO in charge of a fuel dump six miles from the DMZ," Burke said. "They shot at us a lot. The North Vietnamese could use artillery to shoot at us. I was 20 years old. You bet it was scary, and you asked yourself a lot, 'What the hell am I doing here?'

"We joined the Marine Corps because we believed in things. There was a reason for us to be there. You didn't sit around and philosophize about it. You got high a lot. You talked about the anti-war stuff, and that was a world away. You were too busy covering your ass. You got high to escape."

Twenty years ago, Burke said, he wouldn't have talked about Vietnam. Five years ago, he wouldn't have said much. Now, he'll talk about some things, not others. He won't go beyond the top layer of memories, the ones that aren't as difficult.

"It's something you either live through and get over or not," he said. "I know a lot of vets who still have one foot planted in Vietnam."

After the war he came home to Topeka and then moved to Lawrence to attend KU.


While some young men fight in Vietnam, others protested the war in 1965 at the University of Kansas.

File/The Capital-Journal

"The war had gone wrong," he said. "The thinking of the'60s finally started to seep in , and I realized we were there for the wrong reason. I joined the other side. I switched sides and joined the counter-culture. I still had strong feelings of patriotism. I still loved my country, but I didn't agree with what the government was doing.

"I was pretty vulnerable. I did every drug I could get my hands on."

And while he agreed with the cause, 52-year-old Burke never demonstrated against the war.

"The hippies were a good thing," he said. "They were as good a thing as the Marines. One is the ying and one's the yang and they can't exist without each other."

Burke is now a real estate agent in Lawrence. After leaving KU, he worked in construction for 25 years.

And he misses the 1960s and the passion people had.

"A lot of people in the 1960s became aware and went out and did things," he said. "We weren't lazy. I can't explain it now. For some reason that generation became aware and participated and forced the issue.

"There was starting to be a national consciousness in the early 1960s, JFK started it and the blacks started it. Rosa Parks -- that simple act of defiance. JFK saying, 'Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.' That became a reality. That caught hold of my generation."

Among other things, the 1960s changed the way people looked at war.

"In Desert Storm, the population was concerned about losing 100 or 200 soldiers. In Vietnam, in that era, 58,000 Americans died."

Burke said people appreciate Vietnam vets out of guilt now.

"While the same people, during the war, the general populace, they held us in disregard," he said. "Now, they respect us out of guilt.

"I've always been proud that I was a Marine, and that will never change. I can love my country, but I can disagree with the government."

If someone met him now, could they tell he was a hippie in the 1960s and early 1970s?


Protesters met KU ROTC cadets in 1969.

File/The Capital-Journal

"Probably, although I'm just this heavy set middle aged, graying hair guy," Burke said. "It's my attitude. The way I talk to people. I have no qualms about speaking my mind."

The commune

The pain of World War II. The men who came home from that war to raise families and blew up in rage. Their wives who acquiesced. Their children who cowered in their self-made foxholes.

Those were the catalysts of the uproar, the changes, the pain and growth of the 1960s, said Roger Martin of Lawrence.

It was an explosion of defiance from young people, he said.

"The'60s were a time when there was a license to try anything," Martin said. "To make any kind of relationship involving from two to any number of individuals. To formulate any of the spiritual traditions that suited his or her sentiment. To sample foods from around the world. The spirit was of freedom and experimentation. That was the glorious part of it. We all believed we could construct a world from scratch.

"The experiment's effects are still being felt. Part of the experiment was recognition of fundamental unfairness to women and blacks. Those issues are still on the cultural agenda.

"And in negative experiences there's much positive to be gained."

Roger Martin, 52, arrived at KU when he was 22 years old to do graduate work after earning his undergraduate degree in English from the University of Missouri-Columbia.

"It was hopping," Martin said. "There were politicos in the classrooms questioning the relevance of Medieval English. There were people talking about the relevance of classroom studies in the face of the Vietnam War.

"There was a license to do anything or say anything."

After the Tate-LaBianca murders in August 1969, Martin recalled, someone was selling "Free Charles Manson" buttons on a street corner in Lawrence. He remembered that Chicago yippies ran a pig for president.

The point was to outrage and shock, said Martin, whose writing appears frequently in local newspapers and publications. He was one of the editors of the book, "Cows Are Freaky When They Look at You: An Oral History of the Kaw Valley Hemp Pickers."

In the late 1960s, Martin and a woman decided to start a commune outside of Lawrence, where Clinton Lake is now. Martin and his friend went to a dime store and bought fake wedding rings before renting from the property owner.

"We just moved a bunch of hippies in," Martin said. "It was an intentional commune with brutal encounter sessions every Monday night to clear the air."

The residents were constantly changing, he said. There was a big barn and lots of dances and they were basically left alone.

It was called Clinton Farm, and although it remained until the lake was constructed in the mid-1970s, Martin moved out much sooner.

Although he believes communal living is a good idea, the counter-culture's idea was doomed from the beginning, he said.

"It was just that we were too young," he said. "If we hadn't come with so much damage from our families, in those constricted and insecure circumstances. It did a lot of harm."

For a commune to work, the residents must be comfortable with communication. They should be grown-ups and have eliminated their own demons.

There were numerous communes in the area during the 1960s and 1970s. The Wellman Road hippies in Jefferson County were well known. One couple lived in a teepee. There was also a commune near LeCompton.

The 1960s were a glorious, tense experiment. Part of it worked, and part didn't, Martin said.

"In every experiment there's so many people who are sacrificed," Martin said. "People who pushed too far. Some people who experimented with drugs went too far. So they died.

"I see young people today being frank with parents in a way they weren't before the '60s. People don't bite their tongues as often. This may be sheer optimism and lunacy, but it gave us the right to have one's own ideas.

"Assertiveness that existed is really pretty much one of the legacies of that era. There's a lot more resistance to the glorification of war. Things just weren't spoken of after World War II. The 1960s came along and it encouraged a 180-degree turn from reticence."

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