1968 - The Sounds of Silence

My Parents

In the late sixties, our post-depression, post-war parents were giddy with their successes.  Dads rode the pre-dawn train to work and martini lunches in New York City.  They sported narrow ties and dark suits.  Moms car-pooled, gardened, emulated Julia Child and worked for the Junior League.  They all wore Ray-Bans.  On weekends, most parents drove sports cars and partied to shake off the long days of working, striving and managing their growing progeny.  Cocktail parties were the rage –see The Graduate- and children were preferably seen-and-not-heard.  And we did our best to remain unseen, acting out our harmless preteen dramas, tuning in the distractions of friends and folly, tuning out our parents.  We were rebels, or so we thought. 

All the while, unbeknownst to me, my parents were planning a rebellion of their own.  In 1968, they broke out of the country club circuit.  Were they set off by assassinations, war, social/personal unrest or were they just on a lark?  We’ll never know, but the course they set for us in spring of '68 sent our social sphere into a spin… 

1967 - Southern Connecticut



gaggle of misfits

In 1967, during the height and high of Drop City, while Clark was emulating Bucky Fuller, I was obsessed with Paul McCartney, Matt O. and gum-wrapper chains. I was a “disruptive” and frustrated seventh-grader in a girls’ school, an old Vanderbilt estate on Long Island Sound. As the carpool parents drove away, we would roll down our knee-highs and roll up our regulation seersucker skirts, talk about boys, dances, make-up, make-outs and smoke our parent’s cigs on the beach during recess. Our little gaggle of misfits poked fun at our conventions and tore at the grosgrain ribbons that were our shackles.



listen to "Dancing in the Street"



On weekends, we’d gather with our boyfriends-of-the-month, eat onion dip in wreck rooms and Boogaloo to Martha & the Vandellas, Marvin Gaye and the Beatles. Tennis, swimming and sailing filled our summer days, manners were taught at dinner, but late at night we’d steal from our sweltering quilted bedrooms to smoke and kiss in the spacious fields of our rural landscape. On those late night escapades, we were mischievous and rebellious, funny and dangerous, bound by our salacious secrets.

The exhilaration and freedom I felt in the darkness –and safety- of our great outdoors fueled my courage and the passions erupting through America's suburbs paved the way for my escape.

Drop City: the legend and the legacy



UPDATE:  A documentary about Drop City and its inspiration is in progress.  Production has begun and a "KickStarter" campaign has been launched to fund this exciting project.  Please donate what you can, so the film will go forward.  See a video trailer and pledge info here:  http://kck.st/9uk7Ed  Thanks.

Clark Richert's Preview of Drop City - 1967

Most of us have heard of it.  The image resonates, in my mind, with the philosophy of the 60s, a nebulous state of cool.  But what was Drop City.. a city of drop-outs or Timothy Leary’s acid-dropping experiment?  Or T.C. Boyle's wayward book of the same name?

Nope, it was none of these.

 

Drop City was an intentional community formed in the hills near Trinidad, Colorado in 1965, the inspiration of artists Clark Richert, Gene and Jo Ann Bernofsky, and Richard Kallweit who just wanted to escape the system, live rent free and focus on their art.  It was a scrubby goat pasture they bought for $450, and the "first rural hippie commune."

Known for its geodesic dome-style architecture, combining the principles of Buckminster Fuller with salvaged car roofs and old telephone poles, Drop City* became an icon of rural communal living.  In 1967, fourteen residents lived with the land and created paintings, sculptures, furniture, and the domes, works of art themselves.  Eventually, nine domes, including the Icosadome, the kitchen, theater, and the Triple dropped onto the horizon.  The droppers lived to their hearts content, with no intention of becoming a large community. But, media coverage and the Joy Festival in June 1967 attracted hundreds of hippies, and Drop City grew.  

According to Gene Bernofsky,  "...we were not models, hippies, or a commune. Those trademarks are strictly the invention of establishment media." 

But, like it or not, the Droppers had the kind of visionary optimism that would soon characterize the entire hippie movement.  Jo Ann Bernofsky says, "We knew that we wanted to do something outrageous and we knew we wanted to do it with other people. . . . It was full of vitality… exciting and wonderful. You had the sense that anything was possible."

To Clark Richert, inspired by Mark Rothko and Bucky Fuller, his own limitless art/science sensibilities and the junk yards of southern Colorado, Drop City was his passion.  He remembers the synergetic interaction between artists and residents that created experimental expression. 

Since 1973, he has worked as an artist, geometer, philosopher, and professor at the Rocky Mountain College of Art & Design.  In February, Clark presented a highly acclaimed retrospective of his work, “1960 – Present,” in Denver.  This summer, he was honored as participant in the Biennial of the Americas. 

One of Clark’s current goals is to develop another creative-person community, and soon.  Drop City may rise again!

            *In 1967, Drop City won Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion award for innovative and economic housing construction.

http://www.dropcitydoc.com/Watch_the_Trailer.html

 http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=pondchadwick&annotation_id=annotation_203430&feature=iv#p/a/u/0/Nb-DbSGg4Qg

Alternative Living Today

      Sitting on the shore of a remote isle in the Pacific Northwest, where scrub oak and madrone tumble from the hills to the high water line, and residents ferry to their chosen isolated lifestyle, we’re thinking of alternatives to our traditional American way.  Here, we feel at once the slowing of island time and the awareness of lost immediacy.  There is the comfort of self-dependence, the forced inaccessibility, the certain confidence in ones ability to accept, and find the freedom in, the limitations.  For the effort, we are greatly and naturally rewarded.

       Though it was instinctual at the time, I know why we chose remoteness, challenges and self-sufficiency in the 70s: the satisfaction and low impact of paying attention to every cause and effect.  Before debates over climate change and resource depletion, it felt good to take only our share.