1967 — The Summer of Love

1967 -- The Summer of Love 967 was known as The Summer of Love. It was also just about the peak year for the Vietnam War, with in excess of 500,000 American troops in-country. The war dominated global headlines and created the student-led anti-war protests. A spin-off effect was the growth of the hippie culture and all its manifestations. Young people heading to San Francisco, the rise of Haight-Ashbury, the widespread drug culture and the advent of Free Love. One other consequence of the war was that American corporations couldn’t hire enough graduates because of the pervasive draft, so they came to Irish universities to recruit! I got job offers from GE, from Westinghouse and from Boeing, whose misguided hook was, “You’ll like Seattle. It’s just like Dublin—it rains all the time.” I must have left them with the impression that I was committed to joining them, and I think at the back of my mind when I flew to NY, it was with the ultimate goal of ending up in Seattle.

But first there was the summer to enjoy after the rigors of the final university exams. Arriving in JFK I remember being blown away by my first impressions of New York and wanting to hold onto the mental images, because once they were absorbed, they would no longer surprise me. But for now, the massive skyscrapers and the wastefully empty lots, the traffic with the huge cars and the buzz were stunning for a kid from Ireland. One of the possible reasons for coming to North America that summer was the World Expo, which Montreal was hosting,. The concept that Jim Sheehy put forward was that we could enjoy the Expo and then get summer jobs in Canada. Hmm… (Shades of Colum Murphy’s fantasy Istanbul trip four years earlier).

Somewhat more likely for someone who graduated as a Civil Engineer. Anyway, off we went to Montreal. With little money, we stayed in a student hostel. The Expo actually was a stunner, particularly the pavilions of the US (a Geodesic Dome designed by Buckminster Fuller) and the Soviet Union (sort of enormous Brutalist architecture). We must have stayed in Montreal for about 3 weeks but eventually it became obvious that we weren’t going to get work in Quebec. But one of the events that gained worldwide attention while we were there was a speech France’s President de Gaulle gave in the main square of Montreal advocating a “Free Quebec” with the infamous phrase “Vive le Québec libre”. The Canadian Anglos were outraged.

We decided we needed to migrate to Anglophone Canada if we were to have any hope of getting paid employment, so Toronto became the choice. The only problem for me was that I didn’t have the money to get a train ticket. Sheehy must have come to the US with more than me. Somehow or other, in the student hostel, a nice Chinese girl named Diane Kwan loaned me the money. And although I never saw her again, I hasten to add that I did, somehow, repay the loan.

Toronto became headquarters for the rest of the Summer. Both Sheehy and I did frequent job interviews without any immediate relief. And with no money, we were forced to take weekly boarding house room rentals and then flit on Fridays when the rent was due. In the greater scheme of things, this may have been a good thing because it turned out, from one of the IQ tests I took, that IBM wanted to hire me, but the offer never caught up with me. If I had taken the job I might have stayed in Canada and my life would have gone down a very different road. As it was, we ended up in a rooming house where two nice girls lived. They seem to have looked after us for a while, and though I can’t remember her name, one of the girls subsequently came to Dublin and I think stayed with us in 110.

Somewhere along the way, Sheehy decided he would visit some relatives in Detroit. He had barely driven back across the bridge from Detroit to Windsor, Ontario, when the Detroit race riots broke out. The scale of the riot was incredibly shocking, with 43 killed and 1,200 injured. Troops from the 82nd and 101st Airborne were sent into Detroit to enforce a sullen peace. By this time, Sheehy had managed to get himself a job and before he started, we went with the girls to Niagara Falls. They coached us to say we came from “Toronna” if US Immigration asked. They didn’t.

With Sheehy becoming “respectable” I felt I had to move out. I hitched down to Southern Ontario where I heard one could make good money harvesting tobacco. The environs resembled nothing so much as the Texas town in The Last Picture Show; dry, arid, and dusty with down-and-outs (like me) wandering the streets. We workers were put up in shacks on straw mattresses, and picking only the lowest leaves on the tobacco plants was the most backbreaking work I’ve ever done. After about 10 days of this I think I’d had enough. Anyway, the cops arrested me for D&D or vagrancy or maybe all of the above. Got to spend a comfortable, restful night in jail and then sent on my way. Interestingly, I had had a similar experience in Cambridge, UK one pea season where I got to spend a useful, sheltered night in jail, again on vagrancy charges.

Hitchhiking back to Toronto, I hooked up with a nice kid who invited me to come and stay with his parents. I was very impressed with the detached 4 bedroom house with a three-car garage that his parents had. I was even more surprised when I found that his father was a plumber! Very different from the economic stratification I was familiar with in Ireland where at that time plumbers would have struggled. Though maybe my father was on to something. He used to say to my mother: “I don’t know what’s the use of sending that fella (me) to university. He’d be better off being a plumber”.

After a restorative couple of days with my new friend, I set out back to Toronto. Somehow or other I got a laboring job on a road construction crew, once I had joined the Teamsters union. For the first few days I was separated from the rest of the crew, but I could hear them talking in broad Kerry accents, so I thought “this’ll be OK. A little home company”. Boy, was I surprised when I learned they were from Newfoundland! The Newfie accent is absolutely, clearly, southwest Ireland!

Despite there being no cell phones and having no fixed address I somehow learned at the end of August (through Sheehy?) that the University wanted me to come back to work for a master’s degree, and I think they would provide a modest stipend.

Compared to my Canadian summer experiences, and my inability to go transcontinent to Seattle, the idea of a nice, comfortable year back in Dublin was a winner. And so I went home. I was amused to hear from my mother that some time earlier in the summer a moving truck sent by Boeing had pulled up outside our house at 110 to ship my personal effects to Seattle. My mother sent them away saying: “”Personal effects, is it? Sure everything that fella owns, he carries on his back!” And so, just like with IBM, I missed out on another alternate life pathway with Boeing, and luckily I wasn’t one of those poor souls (including two classmates from UCD), who, some years later (1971!),after a significant business downturn, were told , “Will the last person to leave Seattle, please turn out the lights!”

Sheehy stayed in Canada. He got married to a girl from Guyana which I think caused something of a stir when he brought her home to Co. Meath to meet the relations! Next, he lived in Montreal and had two children. Maybe 30 years or so later, having never been in contact, completely accidentally, I met him and his family in Lagos, Nigeria! He was also into sailing in a local sailing club. Crazy, huh?

Finally, I met him again in Dublin in 2007 after a 40th reunion of the engineering class. In the photo opposite, that’s him seated in front of me, while his wife Marie is to my left. He retired to a community somewhere near Tampa, FL. Unfortunately we’re not in contact.

And so in September 1967, I flew back to Dublin and to the newly preferable life as a student. America had been amazing. The summer’s adventures had been memorable, and I had survived some scrapes—mainly caused by a total lack of money. What could I have been thinking?