The Last Carefree Summer
Summer 1964. The Beatles were coming to the Hollywood Bowl. I’d finished my junior year with straight A’s. My crowd was poised to run the school: class president, vice president, secretary, treasurer. I was co-editor-in-chief of Highlights, the school paper. The Democrats were “the party of peace and paychecks” and nights called for parties. Days called for the beach.
Skip—my tanned older stepbrother with a slight resemblance to James Dean—owned a business that made fiberglass animals: horses, cows, pigs, and chickens. Some were small, some actual size, and some, like the chickens, much larger. There was a market for whimsy that summer.
Skip hired a professional fine arts sculptor to design a twenty-foot-long fiberglass dinosaur. Sascha S. Schnittman was a graying fifty-year-old who had studied at the Cooper Union Art School and the National Academy of Design. He belonged to the National Sculpture Society and exhibited his art everywhere. His dinosaurs were bound for Sinclair Oil gas stations and I wanted to see them.
The heavyset Schnittman paraded through the plant. “That’s my work,” he said, patting the little head of one of the dinosaurs.
“They’re nice,” I said.
“They’re perfect. I created them. And I’m Schnittman.”
-o-
Bruce & Terry’s “Summer Means Fun” hit the airwaves, and fun was what I craved. Lying torpid on the sand at Santa Monica’s Tee’s Beach, I told my clique about Skip’s company with its appropriate name, International Fiberglass.
“You guys don’t make monkeys?” Eric asked. The son of a novelist (The Deep Six), soft-spoken with a sweet disposition, Eric walked around in a black Stetson with a long feather protruding skyward. For reasons I never knew, we called him E.G.
“No,” I said, “but there are dinosaurs. And pigs.”
Richard, the strongest and shyest among us, emerged from the waves and flopped down on his towel. Silence followed as we absorbed the sun. I might have dozed off. The patter of disc jockeys on the transistor could do that to me.
A song ended; the news came on, something about Vietnam. I ignored it.
A minute or two slipped by before John said we should “put one of those fiberglass things on one of our cars and drive around with it.”
Eric volunteered his station wagon.
I suggested we put the pig on top.
“No,” John said. “Something bigger, like your dinosaur.” John tried too hard to belong. Tall and overweight, his light-brown hair was combed into ducktails that evoked 1955. On weekend nights he lumbered, unannounced, into my house, hoping I could find something for us to do. We nicknamed him Jingles.
Another round of news on the radio interrupted us. I think the announcer said something about “American military advisers in South Vietnam.” But I was focused on the single-piston-engine Cessna flying low along the shoreline with a banner behind it that read: Tan, don’t burn. Coppertone.
An hour or so went by. The air temperature slipped a degree or two as a marine layer drifted in. Somebody asked what we should do that night—a round of miniature golf or Marco Polo in one of our swimming pools. I voted for Marco Polo.
-o-
“Yep,” Skip said the following week when I asked if my friends and I could borrow a dinosaur. We picked a gold one. The way Schnittman had tilted the head, sculpted big eyes, and added a grin gave his reptile a goofy expression. We tied our beast to Eric’s station wagon, cinched it down, turned on the radio, and headed to Beverly Hills.
Up and down our town’s curvilinear streets we rode, reaching for as much attention as passersby would accord us. And it was considerable. Then we decided to surprise some of our friends, starting at the house of a girl one of the guys liked.
Eric maneuvered onto her circular driveway, as close to her front door as he could, and blew the horn. Clad in a sundress and flip-flops, Elly greeted the sight with alacrity. So did her little black-and-white terrier, which turned away the moment I held up my Brownie and photographed them. As I wound the film forward to take another picture, the news on the radio announced another Vietnam incident.
“Turn that down,” one of us said. We were too busy chatting with Elly.
Next, we drove to Richard’s house, a one-story of alabaster stone near Trousdale Estates, the ritzy new section of Beverly Hills. He appeared fresh from a backyard swim, still in his bathing trunks. With him was Howard, a quiet member of our group. I snapped a photo—of Richard feigning fright, Howard feigning cool, and Eric just standing there wearing his feathered cap. Three months later, my shot would end up in the Highlights.
It was an apex year for cruising. Every baby boomer in the Southland eased their hot rods, their flame jobs, and their muscle cars on the blacktop for a couple of miles along the Sunset Strip. They’d drive down Hollywood Boulevard before turning around and pointing their wheels back the other way. We joined the cavalcade with the dinosaur on our hood.
Someone honked. Eric didn’t look. He concentrated on edging through the traffic that choked Hollywood Boulevard. The radio was tuned to KRLA, “Your Beatles Station.” Riding in Eric’s station wagon with an extinct reptile on top was bracing. A car full of giddy teens edged alongside us. “Hey, Dino baby,” one of them screeched as the driver leaned on his klaxon. “Dino” became the name of our creature.
A song on the radio ended. The news followed, a Vietnam story to which I didn’t listen because a sedan pulled up, laden with girls. One of them, tan and blond, yelled something. I hollered back. Her car sped ahead of us; Eric tried to catch up. It took a couple of minutes but he succeeded, and the girl leaned out the window so far I thought she’d tumble into the street. She looked straight at me. She was stunning. From both our cars, KRLA blared “Please Please Me.”
“What are you doing tonight?” she called. She stared at me, her smile on full wattage.
I should have yelled, “Spending it with you.” I should have shouted for her phone number. Told Eric to pull over and let me jump into her car. Instead, I gaped. Wordless. When her car drifted away, we never saw it again.
I still wonder about the girl in the car. She became my version of Citizen Kane’s girl on the ferry, dressed in a white dress and a white parasol. The lady whom Mr. Bernstein, Kane’s loyal employee, saw for one second and never forgot.
“I’ll never see her again,” I said, more to myself than to anyone else in the station wagon.
“Bit the rag,” Eric said. Like “The In Crowd” that Dobie Gray extolled in his hit song that year, we had our own way of talking.
Two weekends later, we returned to the Sunset Strip. Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign had opened its L.A. headquarters in a storefront at its western edge. It was late, perhaps closing time, but volunteers milled about.
Eric pulled to the curb in front so everyone could see us. John and I leaned out the windows and waved our arms. Full of glee, Howard bounced in his seat. “Back to the Stone Age with Barry,” John and I hollered. Eric held onto the wheel, ready to peel out in case anyone charged us. Nobody did. Barry’s disciples remained frozen, staring at us through the storefront’s bay windows.
-o-
One late August night, with Dino keeping us company, Eric, Brian, Gary, and I whooped through a twenty-minute drive from Beverly Hills to the sea. We barreled down the California Incline where the road dropped from the top of Santa Monica’s cliffs to the Pacific Coast Highway. A quick left and we arrived at Tee’s Beach, where each set of breaking waves became a band of light. An algae bloom had created a red tide. The diatoms made the water glow whenever a swimmer or a wave stirred it.
Brian was the first into the sea. Gary joined him and they swam toward an oncoming shadow of water the top of which was a strip of lit algae. Before diving under the wave, Brian’s head stuck out from the vertical water, his mouth an oval, eyes glaring. A corona surrounded him.
Then the wave crashed. Brian scored a perfect ride to the beach. “All right, all right,” he shouted.
Gary emerged from the glowing froth, throwing back his head and reaching for the most powerful interjection he could muster. “Hey Bamboola!”
-o-
In the Vietnam draft lottery, Gary and Richard scored 292 and 359, out of the 366 numbers for each date of birth, including leap year. Their numbers were high enough to immunize them. Howard drew 16. He was living in Berkeley then, where the local draft board was firebombed, and his records were lost. I pulled number 35. The Army took one look at my bad eyes and my beautiful pilonidal cyst and awarded me a pass known as a 4F. My draft card still lives somewhere in storage.
I lost touch with John and Eric. John escaped, but I forget how he did it. As for Eric, his high school girlfriend thought he became a conscientious objector.
Brian went to work at Bell Labs, helping design exoatmospheric engagement tactics for nuclear tipped anti-ballistic missile interceptors. “They figured it was better for me to build their radios than carry them through some rice paddy,” he said.
None of us fought in Vietnam. None of us would be so carefree again.
© Anthony J. Mohr
Anthony J. Mohr‘s work has appeared in Commonweal, DIAGRAM, Hippocampus Magazine, Los Angeles Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Superstition Review, and ZYZZYVA among others. His debut memoir Every Other Weekend—Coming of Age With Two Different Dads (Koehler Books) was published in 2023. A six-time Pushcart Prize nominee, he is on the staff of the literary magazine Under the Sun and is the managing editor of the Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative Social Impact Review.
The Loch Raven Review 