July 28, 2022: Going Down Memory Lane

Daily Diary, , Day 696:

On Facebook this week, two things happened that sent me down memory lane. First, people started sharing links to Joni Mitchell’s appearance at the Newport Folk Festival this past week, mentioning her appearance there in 1969.

The second was a photograph (see below) that popped up that Andrea, a childhood friend, had shared on Facebook several years ago. The photo is of me (standing on the right) and Andrea (standing on the left) and two of her friends taken in the summer of 1969 when she and I left Washington D.C. to travel to Newport Rhode Island to attend a festival.

At first, I thought it had been the Newport Folk Festival I attended, although I didn’t remember if I had heard Joni Mitchell. However, one of the articles mentioned that this Festival occurred a day before the Moon walk, which was July 20. This was a problem, because I definitely knew I was in Washington DC for that event. So, I did more research and discovered that earlier in July there had been a Newport Jazz Festival that had experimented with rock and roll acts, including Blood, Sweat and Tears.

That rang a bell, as did the overflow crowd that presaged Woodstock, which occurred later in the summer. This Fesitval was July 3-6, so over the July 4th holiday, and that definitely matched my memory that we made the trip because both of us were free to leave town for a few days.

That, in turn, brought on a load of memories of from that summer.

I was 19, just completed my sophomore year at Oberlin College, and I had decided I did not want to spend the summer back at home in Pittsburgh, as I had the previous summer. I think my vehemence about this startled my parents, because I am not, by nature very adventurous. Never have been. I grew up in a quiet suburb, went to college in a tiny farm town that was less than 2 hours away from my home and where I had an older cousin attending as well, and I have only been out of the country once in my entire life.

So, the decision to spend the summer in Washington D. C. was beyond adverturous for me, and I had a ball.

My purpose in going to D. C. was to take two classes at Howard University, one of the preeminent historically black colleges. Oberlin, despite being among the first colleges in the nation to let students of color attend in 1835, offered nothing in the history of Blacks. At Howard I was going to be able to take a class in the history of Africa and another class on the history of racism in urban cities.

In addition, Andrea, one of my oldest friends, was also going to be in D.C. as a summer intern. This meant that, while during the week I would live in a Howard dormitory, I could spend my weekends with her where she was renting a large house in Georgetown with a number of other students with summer internships. (I slept on the floor in a downstairs closet--unless someone was away for the weekend--then I got a bed.) Ah, youth!

Both experiences were equally eye-opening to me, but talk about extremes. I spent my weekdays on a campus in one of the more impoverished areas of the city, attending classes, eating in a cafeteria, and sleeping in a dorm where I was the only white person around. Beyond the fascination with what I was learning in my classes, my most vivid memories at Howard included sitting in a dorm room with a number of other girls, all of us wearing nothing but our slips because it was so hot, gossiping, and watching a group of young men who were in the cafeteria, practicing their syncopated moves as back-up singers for some band.

Then on Fridays I would take a bus across town to Georgetown, one of the most exclusive neighborhoods in the city, and spent my days with privileged white students who were working with Senators and Representatives. There were parties, where I had my first gin and tonic, volleyball games with Peace Corp workers on the National Mall, watching the moon walk in the fancy home of some diplomat that a friend of a friend was house-sitting, and then there was that trip to Newport to attend the Festival.

I don’t even remember how we got up to Rd Island. I do remember the day of the Festival not being able to park nearby and walking alongside thousands of others to get to the venue. I don’t even remember if we had tickets, but I think not. I suspect we were among the those who sat on the hill outside and we were probably there for the Friday evening concert and maybe Saturday afternoon, before heading back to D. C. and the rest of my fun summer.

Good times, good memories.