They keep talking on TV about unidentified flying objects and will alien beings someday land here?
Well, I have news for them: They already landed. Many years ago.
The other day I was perusing my 1965 St. Cloud Tech “Techoes” yearbook, looking up some old classmates whose names I’d forgotten.
Suddenly I was astonished by what I was seeing: page after page of aliens! Our parents must have landed too, because when I was a teenager I was convinced – sometimes – that my geeky uncool parents must have fallen here from another world.
There, in the yearbook, I saw photos of female classmates, many of whom wore their hair all poofed up in what looked like beehives on top of their heads. In the hallways, with lockers clanging-banging, the girls would use cans of hair spray to keep their beehives from tipping over. Some girls sported (in a kind of indented nest in the front of the beehives) little itty-bitty velvet bows. Were those bows really tiny radar receptors that received messages from their home planets?
Some wore pointy “cat’s-eye” glasses with rhinestones in the upper corners. Receptors? Transmitters?
And they often wore tight skirts – so tight that when they walked down hallways it was more of a waddling alien scoot because the too-tight skirts restricted full-leg strides.
The boys too – most of them – had distinctive other-wordly aspects. The “greasers,” as they were called, their hair greasy with Vaseline, combed their hair up into a tsunami wave in the front with a few unruly slick strands dangling down on foreheads. They were aping the hair-doo of Elvis Presley who most certainly came from Planet Rock.
Other boys, mostly bookish nerds, sported “heines” – very short-cut hair that made their brainy egg heads look even eggier. The popular dudes and star athletes – from Planet Suave – sported crew cuts and often wore sports coats and neckties.
Then there were the “gang” members. One gang was the “Jutes,” the other was the “Maos.” One gang’s members, I remember, wore signature maroon pants and obligatory wing-tip shoes, so visible in the yearbook’s photos. The gangs weren’t dangerous, weren’t violent; they were more like stylistic rivals. One shopped at Planet Sears, the other at Planet Woolworth or its twin planet, Kresges.
In that yearbook, lo and behold, I turned another page and there, on Page 155, wedged between photos of Ellen Cox and Bill Daly, is yours truly, Dennis the Menace, with black hair, black-rimmed glasses, black shirt, black pants, black shoes – as if I’d just landed from Planet Soot.
I favored black because it was what the beatniks wore, especially black turtlenecks. In the 1950s, beatniks (from Planet Bohemia) hung out in the underground jive bars and coffee shops of Greenwich Village in New York City. They’d sit around rickety tables covered with checkered table cloths on which were empty wine bottles with burning candles wedged in them. In those dim-flickering caverns, they’d play chess, smoke cigarettes, talk smart (or try to), read poetry, listen to folk songs and smoke some more. Sometimes they’d have street protests against atomic bombs.
I liked beatniks.
One day, when I was about 13 years old, Dad asked, “So, Sonny, what do you want to be when you grow up?”
“A beatnik.”
He and Ma exchanged jaw-dropping looks. I thought they were about to call the cops. Or an ambulance.
“WHY beatnik?” Ma scolded. “Beatniks are nothing but shiftless bums!”
“Well, I don’t care,” I said. “Better to be a bum than be stuck in this boring town. It’s Dullsville.”
Turns out I didn’t become a beatnik but a different kind of bum – a hippie. By the mid-1960s, there was an alien invasion (the Beatles) from Planet Aquarius. Peace and love and music filled the air as our hair grew longer and longer, much to the hand-wringing grief of parents.
We’d saunter down the streets of St. Cloud and greet other hippies: “Hey, bro, what’s happenin’?”
Groovy!
