The Next Nightmare

I'm going to do my best to describe Tyler, Tx as we found it in December of 1969. It's going to be tough because I still have mixed feelings about the time we spent there... So here goes:

The population of Tyler was around 50,000 at the time but it felt much smaller - I could swear everyone knew everyone... In many ways it was a typical southern town. There was a center square with a courthouse and a 4-lane "main drag" named Broadway where thousands of teenagers cruised on Saturday nights. There were brick streets with the occasional "revival" or antebellum style home. There was a Baptist church on every corner. Well, not really - it just seemed like it. And there was (is) a beautiful rose garden on the west side of town that often served as my "fortress of solitude"...

Now - I should note that Tyler was in a dry county. If you wanted a drink you either had to join a "private club" (basically any restaurant) or drive to one of the liquor stores or taverns across the county line out hwy 31 east... BTW: It was a really good idea to steer clear of that stretch of road on Friday and Saturday nights.
Of course, teenagers had to go to Louisiana to buy booze. The drinking age was 18 there but a lot of places didn't check IDs... Yeah - the whole "dry county" thing seemed pretty hypocritical...

Tyler was solid working class - built on oil, agriculture and manufacturing. No need to know anything else... Most people who were born there died there. No need to go anywhere else. They worked hard, loved God and country - and voted Republican. No need to do anything else...

And by late 1969 everything they knew and loved was being threatened...

It had been a mere seven years since the commies tried to put all those missiles in Cuba...
Six years since the Feds forced George Wallace to allow "negro" students to attend the University of Alabama...
Five years since the passage of the Civil Rights Act...
Four years since Malcolm X was assassinated, the race riots raged in Watts, and the Voter's Rights Act was passed...
Three years since the Black Panthers were founded, the NY Times asked if God was dead, and Masters and Johnson published an explicit book on sex...
Two years since the Supreme Court upheld interracial marriages, and those long-haired commie junkies in San Francisco were talking about free love and protesting the war in Vietnam... (Hey - that war was the only thing stopping the rest of the world from falling to Communism.)
It had been less than two years since the Tet Offensive, the assassinations of MLK and Bobby Kennedy, the raised black fists at the summer Olympics, and the musical Hair opened on Broadway.
And it had only been a matter of months since the Manson murders in LA - and that commie hippie thing up in Woodstock...

So there was communist inspired rock music everywhere, X rated movies in the theaters and race riots and war protests all over the country... Yes - America was going to hell in a handbasket and the good people of Tyler wanted no part of it...

Now I don't mean to imply that they were somehow stupid or evil... Far from it... They simply lived in a monoculture - they had never experienced anything other than what they had always experienced. And at the time the possibility of a violent minority uprising or a communist takeover seemed very real... That kind of fear causes all sorts of irrationality.
As an example - most people in Tyler wouldn't hesitate to give the shirt off their back to a stranger in need - that's the kind of community it was. Yet the mere sight of a young man with long hair sent many of them into an almost homicidal rage... It made no sense at all.

Here's another thing that didn't make sense to us (at first):
Shortly after we got there we were having breakfast at a diner and quickly realized that the old white couple at the next table were extremely upset that there was a black family eating there too... But everyone working in the kitchen was black... So - how can you be that bothered by a black family sitting twenty feet away while not caring that the food you're putting in your mouth was touched by black hands??
It took us a while to realize that most of the racial tension was rooted in fear rather than hatred... It was more about placism than racism... And interestingly enough, older blacks were just as afraid of change as older whites. The whole thing was both fascinating and disturbing...

I guess the point of all this is that "culture shock" does not begin to describe what we were experiencing.

And having set that backdrop I'll continue with the story in my next entry.