The Summer of Love, part one

The Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace, July 1967 (Don Dale photo)

The longest letter I ever wrote home from Bitburg was eight single-spaced typewritten pages. It was dated 25 July 1967 -- the military style was creeping into my personal correspondence -- and I have it in front of me as I write this. My mother kept very few of my letters from Bitburg (and I kept none of hers to me), but she saved this one. I found it among her papers after she died.

I wrote the extraordinarily long letter just after I returned from a five-day leave in London. I had always wanted to see London. It was impossible to grow up in Richmond and not be somewhat influenced by England. So much of Richmond's architecture, taste, and history is tangled up with and still influenced by England, from Jamestown to today. Plus, I had studied English literature at the University of Richmond.

London was my first European venture outside the Eifel. It didn't start well. I had planned to take the free military bus from Bitburg to Rhein-Main AFB in Frankfurt. There I planned to snag a free space-available seat on a military hop to a U.S. air base in England. From there, I'd change out of my uniform and into civilian clothes and buy a train ticket to London. I had no idea where I'd stay in London, but I had a copy of "Europe on $5 a Day" -- yes, that was possible in 1967.

But the bus to Rhein-Main was full of people with military orders, and all I had was leave papers, so I couldn't get on. I was still determined to go to London, so I went back to the barracks and woke up my friend Glenn Thomas, who had been at Bitburg for about two years. He called his friend Helga, a civilian who worked in the base ops office, and she gave him directions on taking the train from Bitburg to Trier, then from Trier to Frankfurt. She also checked to see what military flights were scheduled from Rhein-Main to England. She thought I might be able to get a hop to RAF Alconbury, a British base about 60 miles from London.

I made it to Rhein-Main AB that evening after spending most of the day on trains. I checked in at the base transient billets, hoping to spend the night. My plane was to leave at 8 the next morning. The transient billets were full for the night. I tried the passenger hotel (where I'd have had to pay to spend the night), but it was full, too. So I spent the night trying to sleep in a chair in the transient lounge.

At 6 the next morning I checked in with base ops, signed the manifest for the flight to Alconbury, and by 8 a.m. we were airborne. "We . . . ha!," I wrote to my parents later. "There was me, a tech sergeant, an airman 1st class and a colonel, on board a C-118 with seats for at least 30. We rattled around quite comfortably."

From Alconbury I took a train to King's Cross Station in London, where I had my first experience with London's Tube. (Don't call it a subway, my guidebook said, because Londoners use subway as the word for an underground passageway to the other side of the street.) I thought then -- and still do today -- that London's Tube is a marvel of sensible, convenient transportation.

By 3 p.m. I had checked in to the Victoria Hotel near Victoria Station. I'd found it using "Europe on $5 a Day." I paid for three nights at 30 shillings a night (a shilling was equivalent then to about 14 cents). I had a clean, neat room very near a Tube station. The room had a sink, a mirror, a bed, a wardrobe and a dresser. The bathroom was down the hall, and you had to feed coins into a meter to get hot water for the bathtub. More important, the room rate included a full English breakfast.

I had left Bitburg the morning before and hadn't really slept overnight in the Frankfurt lounge, so the first thing I did was take a nap. By 7 p.m. I was up again and eager to explore. I took the Tube to Piccadilly Circus, where I strolled the brightly lit streets and enjoyed the sights, while appreciating the experience of being with real civilians.

Back in the States, the summer of 1967 was known as the Summer of Love, and much of that same culture permeated London that summer. Keep in mind that I'd had little contact with civilian life for a full year. Remember too that in those days, as the standard joke went, stewardesses told incoming passengers, "We are now arriving at Byrd Airport in Richmond, so please set your watches back 100 years." In short, I grew up in a city that still reveled in the 19th century. And I was naïve and untravelled.

Piccadilly Circus was almost overwhelming. I dodged traffic to the circle in the center where the statue of "Winged Christian Charity" stands. Sitting on the steps at the base were the first real hippies I ever saw. Later I described them in my letter home as young, wearing sandals, jeans and T-shirts, with long hair. The ones I met had a thirst for conversation and a longing for new experiences. "They don't do anything," I wrote my parents. "They just sit and watch people and observe life."

I stayed until about midnight, with a break only for dinner at a nearby Italian restaurant (recommended in my guidebook). "The hippies were the neatest thing I was to see during the whole trip," I wrote.

Actually they weren't. But the whole idea of them made a powerful impression on a callow youth from Richmond who'd been around almost nobody but GIs for a year.