Sunshine on my Shoulders

Memories from the 70s

I’m sitting here listening to Pandora’s Cat Stevens station. It’s my favorite station to listen to in the morning — I suppose because many of the songs span my memories from 1st grade through high school and so trigger lots of memories. This morning was no different and Take Me Home, Country Roads just blasted out of John Denver’s mouth and triggered a sort of funny memory of TV movies that we had available to us as kids.

My parents were sort of hippies. They kind of disagree but the kids in school teased me about them being hippies and I’ve come, over time, to decide that they were more hippies than not. The data points that I have are cliche but probably valid. My dad is a two time Vietnam vet. He was in Vietnam when I was 2 and 5 and such different wars he was in. He came home in ’69 and our county was a different place than the one he’d left. My dad moved from military to academia and when we moved to Newtown, PA both my parents took positions at Bucks County Community College. My dad taught Western Civilization and Middle Eastern History and my mom taught Sociology and Marriage and the Family. My mom, the child of dairy farmers, made my clothes and we largely lived off the output of our garden and my grandparents farm. In the winter, they had a coop and my father baked our bread, my mother made yogurt and we canned and froze everything that we didn’t consume. My mother had long hair. My father had long hair and a long beard. We had a VW bug and VW bus and my father rode his 5-speed Schwinn to work every day. They both ran. My dad ran marathons. I called my parents’ friends by their first names. They were democrats. Their friends were democrats and Quakers. The list is longer but this is usually the list that confirms, to me, that, yes, my parents were hippies.

What went along with having hippies for parents was an assortment of things for entertainment that few of my friends had. I played the recorder in the car and at the house to entertain my parents. And moved onto playing the flute and doing the same. I played in chamber groups with my parents’ friends and took recorder lessons from my mother’s friend who had a pet rat that ran around. We read. We read a lot. We had an old black and white TV and it really only got four channels — ABC, CBS, NBC and PBS. I wasn’t allowed to just watch TV and, in fact, didn’t watch much TV. I used to sneak color TV and things like The Mod Squad, Speed Racer, Kimba the White Lion and EMERGENCY at my neighbor’s house after school. My parents listened to classical music. But we had stacks of records that included Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Woodstock album, The Kingston Trio, Peter Paul and Mary, Elvis, Johnny Cash as well as Rimsky Korsakov and the Kent State Massacre. I spent hours spinning our vinyl drinking in the sounds from the 50s and 60s.

We tended to watch TV as a family — I remember family time with The Waltons, Little House on the Prairie, Quincy, Columbo, The Dukes of Hazzard, Charlies Angels, The Six Million Dollar Man, The Brady Bunch, The Partridge Family, Monty Python’s Flying Circus and more. I think the weirdest thing, though were the TV movies. We all watched them — there wasn’t a movie channel on those 4 channels to watch a choice of movies. I don’t really know if there was a choice of movies on the other channels we didn’t receive. But I do remember the movies and the impact that they had.

Sunshine (I still cry when I hear Sunshine on my Shoulders). Brian’s Song. The Boy in the Plastic Bubble. Dawn: Portrait of a Teenage Runaway. Go Ask Alice. Lisa Bright, Lisa Dark. A Separate Peace. Love Story. Trilogy of Terror. And the annual showings of The Wizard of Oz and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. These were the movies that were available on TV. And some of them were assigned to us to watch by our teachers. I think of TV and movies from my childhood as things that ripped your heart out, made you sob or sit quietly wiping your nose on your sleeve so that no one knew that the TV movie was making you cry. And I’m still pretty scarred from Trilogy of Terror — having only stopped checking under my bed for a crazy creature with a knife a few years ago (and will, now, having mentioned it, have to begin again).

As I end, I’m listening to Jim Croce’s I Got a Name

“Moving me down the highway, rolling me down the highway
Moving ahead so life won’t pass me by.”