Harvard Square - 1967

Let me tell you about Harvard Square, the Harvard Square that was.

The Men of Harvard Square.

First there were the men of that spring and Summer of 1967. I don't remember all of it, the names of all the men. There was David and J.R. There was the guy who sold marijuana to the kids at Holyoke Center; there was the guy I met at the Cinemateque in Boston and we pretended we were in our own private Andy Warhol movie.

There was Vernon. Vernon was a tall man, lanky, maybe he had a beard. He was married to a woman who was bent at the middle; half her body went to the side, as if she had no waist, just a hinge. And not much of a torso between her hips and her head, long hair hanging down. I don't remember her name. I don't remember how I met them.

The funny thing about all these people I met, spent time with, in Harvard Square, in their apartments, on the streets, down by the river, smoking dope down by the river, in the park, the funny thing none of them knew each other. I even went back and asked (via Facebook, how else?) the ones i could find, David and J.R. if they had known each other then. They had not, or if they did, they did not remember either.

David was a bear of a man, who lived in a spacious airy Harvard Square apartment with his mom and Dad.  And his mom was Maggie of Maggie and the Beautiful Machine - an exercise program on public tv. She was gorgeous and fit; she was friends with the likes of the Chambers Brothers, and when they were in town, playing the Club 47, she held before and after parties in the spacious Harvard Square digs.

David's father was an M.I.T. professor; also a big bear of a man.  Maggie did her own thing, and I could not imagine anyone in the circles I had left behind, Methuen, the church, the Greeks, having a mother anything like her.

J.R. was small. His father was said to have been a colleague of Timothy Leary at Harvard working on L.S.D.

None of these men were romantic interests. Except I did have a little thing for Vernon. I told someone in the Vernon crowd that, "I have a thing for Vernon." They said, "Not good. Vernon is in love with his wife."

Ok, that was that for romance.

Besides I was too busy fantasizing about my "beautiful man" of the Coop, he of the mellifluous voice ordering books over the phone.

The buildings of Harvard Square. 

The Coop of course, go in the front door where they sold the clothes with the Harvard insignia on them, and ordinary clothes too, mostly of the preppy variety. Then you could go out the back door across Church Street and re-enter the store there, upstairs to textbooks where Jane and I and Mr. Lister held sway, up through the record department to get there, the escalator, with never ending theme of "A Man and a Woman" playing below and me in my little information box with my phone above.

Holyoke Center, the modern building on Mass Ave. where the kids from the suburbs hung out and bought dope from the guy who sold dope and sometimes snuck behind a pillar to smoke and sometimes asked for "spare change."

Brigham's and Bailey's (which Jane declared had the better sundaes) and of course Dunkin' Donuts.

Elsie's the delicatessen, and the hofbrau where Billy and I took the folk singers, Sandy And Jeannie Darlington, in high school, and some other famous sandwich shop.  Around the corner, Brattle St, with the Brattle Theater which always showed Casablanca or so it seemed, and even now shows Casablanca, downstairs the scented candle shop and everything smelling of scented candles, a warren of little shops and the Casablanca bar and other exotic seeming shops. Design Research with modern designs and, I guess, research, and Merimekko, with their bright simple designs, which Jane always wore. Hers were mostly in a purple or mauve tone.

The Cambridge Adult School where I took creative writing in the evenings and my teacher whose name was Ken thought I was a pretty bad writer, and maybe I was. (I wrote pretty much the same way then that I do now. More about that later.) A pharmacy, and down the street the Old Burying Ground where people have been buried since forever, many Revolutionary soldiers, local luminaries and of course Harvard Presidents.

And the Out of Town Ticket Agency, that used to be in the middle of the street, then they ruined Harvard Square. Then the ticket agency closed.
 

Harvard Yard.

You cannot "Pahk Youh Cah in Hahvahd Yahd."  You have to park in the street and walk. Harvard is everywhere, and it's also a big enclosed area, with administration buildings, classrooms and dorms. A Library, a museum. Harvard Yard.

And then there is Radcliffe.

Folk Music and Me -a High School Romance

Folk Music

Everybody in my high school crowd was into folk music. We played guitars, and sang Bob Dylan tunes and Peter Paul and Mary tunes and Joan Baez tunes and my boyfriend Billy was obsessed with Tom Rush, who lived in Cambridge, so was close enough to go see a lot. We both liked Tom Rush, but he was in love with him, like a total crush. I was more in love with Cambridge itself and the Club 47 where we went to see Tom Rush, and later, Joni Mitchell, who was from Canada and a compete unknown, until Tom Rush brought her to the US, after introducing her songs to the Club 47 crowd over the past year. The Club 47 was dimly lit, with a tiny stage and really teeny tiny little tables with candles in old Chianti bottles, so the place always smelled of wax. We drank grenadine, a red drink made of pomegranates, which was the thing to drink while listening to folk music. They didn’t serve alcohol in the Club 47; at least not that I can remember, but then I was a Christian teenager from a dying mill town and what did I know?

My Birthday Surprise

On my birthday one year, Billy said he had a surprise for me; we were going somewhere for a great surprise. So excited, we headed off to the east and I tried to imagine what my surprise would be; this was great. Billy even brought clean clothes home from the shoe factory where he was working for the summer; all the kids worked in the factory during the summer between high school and college, so they’d have some money to start off with; and he changed in my kitchen.

We finally reached the destination, a cool looking club in the home of the Ipswich clam, Ipswich. I was sure we were seeing some famous act, Bob Dylan, or Pete Seeger, or maybe Peter Paul and Mary. One summer night we had gone to Canobie Lake Park, a really seedy amusement park in New Hampshire, and were thrilled to be entertained by Sonny and Cher singing I Got You Babe. My expectations were high.

So when we stood outside the ticket window of the small, out of the way club, and I saw that the headliner for the night was Tom Rush, I completely lost it. And not in a good way.

“Tom Rush is my birthday surprise!?” I hissed not under my breath at all, as we moved up the line toward the ticket window. “This isn’t any kind of surprise; we see Tom Rush all the time.” I whined. I stomped my feet. I was disappointed. Billy was embarrassed that his girlfriend was pitching a fit in front of the fans. I had never heard of “groupies" in those days, but that’s what Billy was, and he thought I was too, but I wasn’t. Tom Rush was all right and Joni Mitchell was even better, but not a birthday surprise. 

I can’t remember if we stayed for the show or not, but we didn’t stay together as a couple past the first trimester of college.

Hosting the Folkies

 

However this story is about something else, another time Billy and I went to a concert, a show, at the Club 47, where we usually saw Tom Rush or Joni Mitchell, or both together, the first time we saw Joni Mitchell, it was both together. This time we knew that Sandy and Jeanie Darlington were coming and we for some reason - what reason? who knows? That’s just something you say when you can’t remember what could have possessed you to do such a reckless thing - for some reason, we wrote to them and said we’d like to take them to dinner before the show. And they replied. They accepted the dinner invitation, so we had to do it; two high school students, going to dinner with big time folk musicians! We took them to some kind of hofbrau type place in Harvard Square, where the food was hearty and cheap, and Germanic if I recall. 

We tried to act cool and look older. And they were totally gracious, pretending they went to dinner with high school age fans all the time, acting like we knew what and who they were talking about, as they discussed their act and the other musicians who'd influenced them, asking us who we liked. They even let us pay for dinner without making the usual adult fuss or giving each other knowing looks over the bill.

Other than those details, which are seared on my brain, I don't remember a thing about the meal; or the concert afterward. This was my first encounter with famous people.

Except of course for Brian Jones. But that must wait for the next chapter.