Joel P. Rhodes - Growing Up in a Land Called Honalee: The Sixties in the Lives of American Children

Copyright 2017 by
The Curators of the University of Missouri
University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri 65211
Printed and bound in the United States of America
All rights reserved. First printing, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-8262-2127-8
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017930378

This paper meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48, 1984.

Typefaces: Cardo, Cinzel

The author thanks Peter Yarrow and Lenny Lipton for permission to quote lyrics from Puff (The Magic Dragon).

ISBN: 978-0-8262-7385-7 (electronic)

To mom,

Gonna buy five copies for my mother...

Puff, the magic dragon lived by the sea
And frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called Honalee

OH, I LOVED that rascal Puff. As a child during the Vietnam era, born in 1967, I remember so affectionately the wonderful story of his bittersweet friendship with little Jackie Paper sung as a lullaby in duet with my mother every night before bed. No other period is more intimately associated with its music as the sixties in our popular imagination and from my diminutive perspective Peter, Paul, and Marys Puff (The Magic Dragon)recorded in 1962 and number two on Billboards chart in early 1963was the absolutely essential song from that decades musical catalogue. My mother, a baby boomer herself, was single, recently divorced, and bedtime at our home meant the two of us lying on the bed singing, either by memory or along with AM radio, she in an oversized football jersey and me in hand-made, fire-retardant footie pajamas covered with tiny green mice. We sang other favorites as well, anything from the Mamas and the Papas, the Beatles Yellow Submarine (Ringo was my favorite), or Dr. Hook and the Medicine Shows The Cover of Rolling Stone, the latter of which required the deepest bass tone a five-year-old could conceivably muster to really nail the line I got a freaky ol lady name of Cocaine Katy who embroiders on my jeans. And while I remained wholly oblivious to even those overt drug references, the Kingston Trios bawdy The Tattooed Lady made me blush with such risqu lyrics as all around her hips sailed a fleet of battleships and what we liked best was upon her chest / My little home in Waikiki! Puff was always different, though, occupying a singularly elevated place in my young life, not only because of the charming fairy tale imagery and infectious folksy chorus, but something much more profound, a special something that sets it apart from other cherished tunes we all nostalgically enshrine as the soundtrack to lifes narrative. Only later when I became an historian did I come to fully appreciate why Puff resonates so deeply; as a child I had fashioned my understanding of 1960s America in large measure from Peter Yarrow and Lenny Liptons enchanting ballad.

In mapping out the features and contours of a distinctive childrens culture, historian Steven Mintz points out that since the early twentieth century, children have constructed their identities and culture out of symbols, images, and stories from the raw materials provided by popular culture. Puff (The Magic Dragon), indeed, provided many of those essential resources for imaginatively interpreting the adult world of the sixties while further socializing me in what my mother referred to as the hippy-dippy sensibilities her generation was experimenting with. And because children naturally blur any clear lines between fantasy and reality during this generational renegotiation, Puffs magical language helped to articulate a broad range of my otherwise quite confusing emotional development. While some single-minded adults mistakenly heard in the song a sly marijuana allegory, for me the lyrics nourished an enduring appreciation for mirth and whimsy along with a playful wonderment over lifes more mundane strings and sealing wax, as well as its other fancy stuff.

Being raised by a working motherwho managed a clothing boutique offering countercultural-inspired commercial fashion to middle-class womenand with an absent biological father serving in Vietnam, I knew Puff to be at once a childlike playmate, yet somehow genuinely paternal. Unselfishly, the dragon guided another only child through an imaginative world of adventure. Together they would travel on a boat with billowed sail. Jackie kept a lookout perched on Puffs gigantic tail. Living truly in at least modest comfort, my mother tried rearing me as a pacifist, based on the conclusions she came to honestly during those last awful years of the Vietnam War, but that philosophy never really took root in me, which is why I appreciated Puffs peaceful nature residing easily within such a formidable fire-breathing presence. Noble kings and princes would bow wheneer they came. Pirate ships would lower their flag when Puff roared out his name. Consider that across the world in Vietnam the awesome firepower brought to bear by the AC-47 gunship earned that particular aircraft the nickname Puff, the Magic Dragon among admiring soldiers.

Looking back, though, probably more so than anything, Puff (The Magic Dragon) was steeped in a certain melancholia over what is lost when we grow up and reluctantly leave behind the seemingly simpler and more innocent How much that wistfulness motivates my lifes work reconstructing the history of the Vietnam era I cannot truthfully say.

Clearly my deep personal connections with that time are not so very different from those of the millions of Americans for whom the sixties experience is still recognized as a fundamental part of their individual lives. The ubiquitous era remains central to our nations collective popular and political culture today, as evidenced by the ceremonial marking of each of its milestones with fiftieth-anniversary observations: John Kennedys assassination, the eruption of Beatlemania, Lyndon Johnsons War on Poverty, the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, and soon the Summer of Love, moon landing, and Woodstock. The dark specter of Vietnam tempts casual observers to see similar military quagmires in the Middle East, and candidates for even the nations highest office can still be judged by what they did, or did not do, to serve the nation in Southeast Asia during that wrenching conflict. Since Richard Nixons successful 1968 campaign demonstrated the value of framing electoral politics as a referendum on the sixties, savvy candidates keep looking to gain political advantage by associating their opponentas Republican Meg Whitman did with Democrat Jerry Brown during the 2010 California gubernatorial racewith the loaded symbolism of peace signs, George McGovern posters, and free-lovin hippies. That same obsession with countercultural craziness continues to rally the troops in our culture wars, fueling fervent jeremiads against the ceaseless erosion of traditional family values, sexual mores, and dutiful patriotism.

Yet, as a political and social historian of the Cold War years my scholarly interests extend well beyond the nostalgia, romance, or condemnation now generally associated with the sixties, focusing instead on how that decade represents a profound sea change in American politics, society, culture, and foreign policy. Arguably these exhilarating years of hope and days of rage are the most important era in twentieth-century American history. Scholarship reflects this enduring significance as the proliferation of written and media works continues to come at such a pace that to keep up is a Sisyphean task