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An interesting factor of living a very long time is that events that were part of your life move into the realm of History with a capital H. An internet search defines events that happened in the late 20^th century as “near history.”

My latest novel takes place in 1970-1971. That seems so recent to me, but it is 55 years ago. When I studied American History in high school in 10^th or 11^th grade, fifty years previous took me to a time when horses and buggies shared the roads with a few of the new-fangled cars, women wore dresses to their ankles, and Arizona was still a territory.

The late Sixties and early Seventies must seem as quaint to today’s teenagers as that history did to me. The one thing that has persisted is the music of the era with graying Sixties rock stars still packing music halls and most of the intervening stuff forgettable.

This has all been on my mind the last few years as I’ve finished writing and publishing  Everything We Thought We Knew set on a rural commune.  My intent was to immerse the reader in the times while giving them some characters with concerns typical of the era. 

When writing historical fiction, it is important to support the plot and the action with all sorts of sensory detail and this era offered lots of opportunity. It was such a departure from the previous decade in much more than just the music. In the case of my intent for this book, all that detail wasn’t just background for the plot, it was the essence of the story. 

The label that most often comes to mind for the time is “sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll.” While it was that, it was much more. The food, the vocabulary, the literature, and the politics were as distinctive as the music. 

The Hippies (for want of a better term) were anti-war and marched in protest against the American involvement in Vietnam, especially when boys they had sat next to in geometry came back in body bags. Like the young people of the day, my characters were deeply invested in stopping the war, but most of them wanted to protest peacefully. They called it Flower Power when they carried flowers to protests and handed them out to the soldiers and police. But sometimes they went too far in their protest and so did my characters. 

Food saw a change. For the traditional family of the Fifties and Sixties , TV dinners were a special wondrous treat though their attraction was their novelty, not their flavor.  I recall coming home from school and mixing up a glass of Tang, a concoction of orange-flavored chemicals and vitamin C formulated for astronauts.  It wasn’t great, but hey, it was astronaut food. 

Meals in communes or Hippie households were a rebellion against all that, eschewing anything fake or processed, often centering around brown rice, something that never appeared on my childhood dinner table. Oatmeal had been around for centuries, but the Hippies transformed it into crunchy granola. And lentils! Households with roots in the Middle East might have eaten them, but I sure didn’t until I landed in a commune. My characters bake their own whole wheat bread and even make their own goat-milk yogurt (popular in Europe but practically unknown in the US).  

I wanted to give readers a clue that these foods were introduced and popularized by the Hippies though they soon made their way out of the health food stores to the regular grocers. 

Every era has its vernacular. Using the right phrases signaled you were hip and in the know.  I wanted to include them in the dialogue but not overdo it. We called things “groovy” and “cool,” something interesting was “far out,” something unpleasant was a” bummer”,  money was “bread”, and the craving for snacks that came from a marijuana high was “the munchies “.  I haven’t called anything groovy in decades, but I still use cool.

In composing Everything We Thought We Knew, I didn’t plan to write the great American novel and probe deeply into the human psyche or motivations. But I did think that the time needed to be documented before we all forgot. I was surprised when an early reader exclaimed, “I’m sure I knew some of those people!” No she didn’t. The characters are all fictional. But they were types, and it was fun that she recognized them.