Seattle: Growing up in the 60s and 70s

Many major events happened in the 1960s and early 1970s. I was born in the mid 1950s. I was a child in the 1960s. I was in high school in the early 1970s. Therefore, many of the major events were in the background of my daily life and not a major personal concern. But, sometimes the current events of the world intruded on the daily life of a kid growing up in the City of Seattle.

My brother Dave is nearly a decade older than I. He was in rock and roll bands in the early 1960s. Band practice was sometimes at our house or a nearby neighbor's. My parents, as well as many of the adults in the neighborhood, would bail their houses when the band started to play and go shopping up at Safeway in White Center. My folks said it was a great time to catch up with all the neighbors that they never see when they were all home. All the younger kids would head over to the house to listen to the band practice. The Seattle area had lots of bands all practicing for the “Battle of the Bands.”

As the boys in the band got closer to their senior year in high school, the conversations would turn toward the escalating conflict in Vietnam, the possibility of being drafted into the military, who they knew in school who had gone to fight, who went to Canada, and who got married or went to college to get a deferment. My brother got married and joined the National Guard. He spent six months in boot camp in Louisiana and Texas. He somehow got into the medical corps and part of what they did was practice giving shots to oranges. This is what I his little sister remember from his letters about what he was doing -- he gave shots to oranges. Later he had to spend a month each year at the base near Yakima, Washington, in the heat of the Eastern Washington summers practicing war games. He hated it and does not much care for Yakima to this day.

In the early 1970s, the war in Vietnam had escalated even more and there were protests and a greater push for peace. A decade after my brother and his friends had talked, I overheard the boys at school talking about the escalating conflict in Vietnam, the possibility of being drafted into the military, who they knew in school who had gone to fight, who went to Canada, how unlike our older brothers you could not get a deferment, and who went to Canada. But I was a girl and girls did not fight in the war. I knew people who went to war, got drafted, were wounded, killed or were missing in action. I had friends wearing MIA bracelets for their brothers or cousins or boyfriends. That was as close as the war got to me on a personal level.

My Uncle Dickie, my father’s youngest brother, was career Air Force and he served in Vietnam as well as Korea. In his one or two visits to the family, the war was not mentioned. My uncle kept much of his military life to himself and his service had little to do with me.

While I was playing hide and seek with the neighbor kids, riding my bike, swimming, talking and giggling -- for hours or as long as my father would allow –- to my friends on the telephone, all those current events of the time were not the dominant issue in my life, no not the dominant, but they did shadow much of what I did, how I think and who I became.

Civil unrest; race relations; the war; the draft; the draft dodgers; school busing; riots; the assassinations of John F Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King; communes; Peace, Love and Flower Power; protest songs; flower children; and Haight Ashbury, drugs sex and rock n’roll and the breakup of the Beatles. All of this was shown nightly on the TV news – the first few years in black and white and the later years in living color. All of this provided the background for my formative years and became a part of who I am.

Diane Brown
Sno-Isle Libraries


Comments about the photograph:

This is one of my brother’s bands. It is not the one I was thinking about when I wrote the above but the one he was in a year later. My brother Dave Brown –the guitar player and Lynn Whitehall – the bass player – got married in August 1965 after her June graduation from high school. He graduated in 1964.

In my brother’s words: "This picture was taken in 1965 at 26th Ave. S.W. and Roxbury (West Seattle/White Center) in the MarketTime Store parking lot."

The car is a 1954(?) 55 Vett. Dick is on baritone sax, Tom on piano, Lynn on bass, Curt on tenor sax and his Corvette, and Dave Brown on Guitar. "The Sierras" (MarketTime was an early or alternative name for Fred Meyer,)

Photograph courtesy of Diane Brown. All rights reserved.