Reflection at the dawn of modern America: Gerald Murphy’s story

"Keep your silly ways or throw them out the window. . .
Sex and drugs and rock and roll
Sex and drugs and rock and roll
Is very good indeed."
     Ian Dury, Dury and the Blockheads, 1977

There have been Great Awakenings in the past, periods understood as transformative religious revivals. 

We had a Great Awakening of our own. 

People born at the front end of the Baby Boom generation are old enough to have seen the world in the pre-dawn era and then experienced the changes in our culture that took place in the late 1960s.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964, the birth control pill, the Vietnam War, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Baby Boom itself combined to change America. We experienced a revolution in law and culture. Our culture digested that revolution, along with its inevitable pushback. Jimmy Carter expressed the do-good, love-your-neighbor liberal side of the counter-revolution. Ronald Reagan reaffirmed patriotism and American goodness. We are experiencing a new version now, angrier, less tolerant, more Old Testament in its religion, especially in red states, among the self-identified evangelical Christians, in rural communities, and among working people of all races. 

Gerald Murphy was there at the beginning. He was the eighth of nine children. He is the young man in the lower left of this photograph.

Then he went to California. 

He taught English to high school students. He is retired and lives in Medford, Oregon. He writes plays performed by schools, churches, and community groups. 

A reflection by Gerald Murphy

Gerald and wife Nicole

My neighborhood in Philly was called Germantown, although I met very few people of German descent there. Mostly I lived around Irish and Italian Catholics and Blacks. The Catholic kids all went to Cardinal Dougherty High, at that time the largest Catholic high school in the country with over 6,000 students. After I graduated in 1963, I went to nearby LaSalle College for one semester, but jumped at the chance to move to Burlingame, California when my recently-married sister offered me a spot on her sofa. The draft loomed over everyone my age, but I was safe if I stayed in college. I signed up immediately at the local junior college, grew my hair long, and met my wife Nicole Jones in an English class. Two years later we moved in together and sometimes failed to take proper precautions, with passion overtaking common sense.

After that semester, she moved back to her family in Ashland, Oregon, while I hitchhiked back to my family in Philly, taking a clerical job with the Pennsylvania Railroad. My parents, especially my mother, were disgusted by all the changes in me, and not just the long hair. My politics always skewed left, but now I was very vocal with my right-wing siblings, especially my oldest brother. Soon after I started work, Nicole informed me from Ashland that the rabbit had died.* At the same time, the local draft board informed me that I was 1A for Vietnam. We decided to marry and solve both problems. She came to Philly and we tied the knot at a local justice of the peace. Of course, any marriage outside the Church was seen as illegitimate. Also, my wife was raised a Methodist, and we all know about those devil-worshipping Protestants. Everyone we knew assumed our wedded bliss would be short-lived. Three kids and 58 years later, we are still together, but I still haven't learned to put down the toilet seat.

Of course, this isn’t everything that happened to me in these times. I didn’t mention, for instance, that the Catholic grade school I attended gave me the award for religion in 8th grade, a fact made all the more ironic because even then I already had serious doubts about the existence of God. It wasn’t something I could admit to my deeply devout parents, but when I moved to California in 1964, my atheism drew yawns from my peers. It seemed no one on the West Coast believed in the Almighty. He had been replaced by sex, drugs and rock and roll.

When I returned to Philly two years after my California experience, I felt like I was traveling back in time. The Beatles, the Mamas and the Papas, and the Grateful Dead weren’t there yet. Instead Pat Boone, Lesley Gore and Gene Pitney still ruled the air waves. I had taken LSD in California. In Philly, only jazz musicians dared smoke pot.

Of course, Philly and the rest of the country did catch up with California. And it wasn’t just rock and roll and drugs. Civil rights and riots turned every big city into a possible battle zone. Negroes became Blacks. Girls became women. The Pill meant you could have sex anytime you wanted it. Revolution was in the air. Every young person I knew believed we were witnessing the beginning of an era of profound change.

And they were right. We just didn’t realize that revolutions almost always bring on a reaction. We didn’t realize that many people yearned for the very world we wanted to leave behind, a world of right-wing reactionaries, religious and racial bigotry, and the reunion of church and state. We had no idea our country might one day even choose autocracy over democracy.

And our good times are all gone,
And I’m bound for moving on.
I’ll look for you if I’m ever back this way.
     Ian Tyson, Four Strong Winds, sung by Ian and Sylvia. Released in U.S. in 1964

*Prior to the mid-1960s, the test for pregnancy was to inject a bit of the woman's urine into a laboratory animal, a female rabbit. The after a few days the rabbit was killed and dissected. If the rabbit's ovaries were enlarged, the woman was pregnant. If not, she was not. This test was phased out during this era. "The rabbit died" was code/slang in the 1930s through the 1960s as an indirect euphemism to mean a positive result for pregnancy.

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