1965: Smoke Blowing

I have been focused on 1965 all week after watching last week's Mad Men. This next to the last episode of the 4th season was titled "Blowing Smoke" and the year was 1965. It has made me remember how strange that year was for me personally and evidently for our country in general. I remember my 11th birthday that year and how distraught I was because I had loved being 10 and I didn't want to change. I realize now, that our world was changing and I was feeling it. We were all beginning to learn that things are not always as they seem. Culturally, it was an in-between time, with a "big change is on the way" feeling in the air. There was a lot of smoke blowing going on and a lot of smoke in our eyes...Matthew Weiner gets it totally right every time. My thanks to him, once again, for giving me the inspiration to remember....

Ahhh The Beatles were still presented as the upbeat good guys. Little did we know that in the next year they would begin recording St. Pepper and everything about them, and about music, would shift on its axis.

In contrast to the Beatles, The Stones are presented as the naughty and dark December's children...but we were the ones in the dark, not realizing this was the beginning of one of the smartest, most business savvy, and long lasting music endeavors of all time.

We were only one year away from the formation of The National Organization for Women, but this is what we loved to watch on TV.

One of the greatest and most influential men in black history would be killed in 1965, but Malcolm X was better recognized at that time as a symbol for violence, racism, black supremacy, and antisemitism.

There was a big change in board games making them a showy 3 dimensional adventure. They also took so long to set up, you never had time to actually play them. Our first good lesson as children as to what Saturday morning Ad Men could do to you.

Bob Dylan, who had been the great hope for Folk Music, goes electric at the Newport Jazz Festival, abandoning the folk orthodoxy and sending Pete Seeger over the edge.

Sonny and Cher have a number one hit with I Got You Babe, but it is accused of being a poppier version of Dylan's It Ain't Me Babe.

Truman Capote will change literature by writing the first "non-fiction novel", claiming everything in this great book was true.

We are determined to make one of the most influential musicians of the 20th century a convict as Johnny Cash is arrested again- this time in El Paso for supposedly smuggling heroin across the border of Mexico. The heroin was his prescription drugs in his guitar case. A few years later our fear of him will subside after he has his religious epiphany at the Nickajack Cave in Tennessee.



We are in hot competition with the Russians for the race in Space...but we are Lost in Space on TV.


We begin to work on Barb's image...but it never takes. Move over, Barbie and let's clear the air, Mrs. Blankenship is the real astronaut.



We send troops to Viet Nam, with an unfortunate beginning to the biggest smoke blowing event ever. Once again, man prayed for rain, then cried because it was raining.



The last episode of Mad Men is tonight and it is titled "Tomorrowland". Some of the smoke will clear as that hippy, hopeful, and exciting last half of the Disneyland sixties is coming....bring it on.