Postcards from the Rogue Valley

1964

In the summer of 1964, as I drove my family’s Rambler to the Santa Monica beach club where I’d snagged a job entertaining preschoolers, I’d blast the radio whenever Martha and the Vandellas showed up singing “Dancing in the Street.”

Callin’ out around the world
Are you ready for a brand new beat
Summer’s here and the time is right
For dancing in the street

They’re dancing in Chicago (dancing in the street)
Down in New Orleans (dancing in the street)
In New York City (dancing in the street)
All we need is music, sweet music
There’ll be music everywhere

… It’s just an invitation across the nation
A chance for folks to meet
There’ll be laughing, singing and music swinging
Dancing in the street

It was the summer’s pop anthem, hitting No. 2 on the Billboard Hot chart for two weeks. I was more than ready to swing to the music, though partying wasn’t my forte.

When radio station KGFJ, the first 24-hour news station in the country, broke for the day’s headlines, however, the beat changed: “Three volunteers for the Freedom Summer Project — a campaign to register African-American voters in Mississippi — went missing today and were later found murdered.” “African-American revolutionary Malcolm X’s calls for ‘freedom by any means necessary.’” “The enactment of the Voting Rights Act of 1964 signals the end of racial discrimination, President Johnson says.” “The Gulf of Tonkin Crisis launches Operation Rolling Thunder in Vietnam.”

This was the backdrop for Martha and the Vandellas’ Motown dance track. 

Written by Marvin Gaye, William “Mickey” Stevenson and Ivy Jo Hunter, “Dancing in the Street” was reportedly inspired by watching people cool off in water from opened fire hydrants on the streets of Detroit. As the story goes, Gaye saw Martha Reeves in the Motown studio, where she worked as a secretary, and said to the producer, “Hey man, try this song on Martha.” The track was then recorded in less than 10 minutes in two takes, after they had failed to turn the recorder on the first time. (NPR, 1.5.17)

Open fire hydrants notwithstanding, “Dancing in the Street” soon became a civil rights anthem, a rally soundtrack interpreted as an “invitation across the nation” to protest against racism, oppression and segregation. When asked by the British press at the time if it was a call to action, Reeves burst into tears and insisted it was “a party song,” claiming: “I just want to be responsible for being a good singer.” (Financial Times, 11.6.23)

Activists weren’t the only ones to see the song as a call to action.  Some radio stations at the time apparently took the track off their playlists. In 2013, US journalist Mark Kurlansky wrote a book entitled: Ready for a Brand New Beat, How “Dancing in the Street” Became the Anthem for a Changing America. 

Reeves later acknowledged that the song was about “feeling free enough to dance in the street… you don’t have to worry about policemen coming and telling you you can’t.” (Financial Times, 11.6.23)

After “Dancing in the Street” swept the nation in 1964, race riots ripped through American cities the following summer, beginning in Harlem, spreading to Detroit and Newark, and ending in Watts. Meanwhile, in August, 1965, U.S. Marines reportedly won a “decisive victory’ at the Battle of Chu Lai in Vietnam. Violence was in the air.

(For followers of Oregon history, it may be worth noting that while Watts was exploding, a group of neo-Nazis took to the streets in Portland.)

This was the summer I started growing my political wings.

2024

I write today three days after the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania. The weekend headlines echo the dystopia which has become our norm. It’s hard not to feel knocked out.

An Assassination Attempt That Seems Likely to Tear America Further Apart (NY Times)
At least 90 killed in Israeli military operation targeting Hamas military chief (NY Times)
Heat-Related Emergencies Are Soaring in the U.S. Can Hospitals Keep Up? (NY Times)
See Beryl’s 6,000-mile path of destruction, from Africa to Vermont (Washington Post)
Hackers stole call and text message records on ‘nearly all’ AT&T customers, company says (The Guardian)
Some in a blue-collar job are just one injury away from homelessness (LA Times)
‘Everyone is drinking it’: Why this type of ‘forever chemical’ seems to be everywhere (Washington Post) 
. . .

And then there are yesterday’s headlines, about Judge Aileen Cannon’s dismissal of Trump’s classified documents case, arguing that special counsel Jack Smith was improperly appointed, and Trump’s pick of the ambitious ideologue J.D. Vance as his running mate.

Here in Ashland, it is the summer heat and wildfire smoke that are kneecapping us most, though. We’ve grown used to these byproducts of climate change the past several years, but this July is off the charts. For the past two weeks, the temperature has routinely topped 100 degrees (111 one day), a pattern that our local TV weatherman suggests will persist into the foreseeable future. Before Matt Jordan appears with his weather map and red tie, updates on the containment and eruption of nearby wildfires have filled the first 15 minutes of the evening broadcast. The creek that runs through the woods near us, three months ago breaching its banks, is now dry.

Not surprisingly, downtown Ashland limps through the day — think COVID without the trauma. With the warmest temperatures falling between 4 and 10 pm, the evenings offer no relief. On weekends, out-of-town tourists bring some swagger, but Ashland’s biggest tourist attraction, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival is still fighting for its post-pandemic life. The upcoming performances of “Much Ado About Nothing,” staged in OSF’s magnificent outdoor Elizabethan theater, may fall dark.

But the story I would like to share unfolds 3,000 miles from here.

Two weeks ago, Tony and I visited our Brooklyn family in Carroll Gardens, a tightknit community made up of aging Italian immigrants, young families, tree-lined streets, and historic brownstones with pocket gardens sporting roses older than me. 

We had the time of our lives — but not what you might think.

School was still in session when we arrived, and the parade of parents (more dads than moms) walking their kids to the neighborhood elementary school was a 2024 version of dancing in the streets. I was headed for my Morning Joe.

“Have a best day,” crossing guards called out, often adding the child’s name. “You too,” a girl with a princess dress answered back. One dad walked with his arm around his nine-and-something daughter riding her skateboard. Another, carrying a toddler on his shoulders, trailed his six-year-old on his scooter. “Stop at the corner,” he yelled ahead. As kids said goodbye to parents in the schoolyard, they rushed to friends. 

When school ended six hours later, it seemed as if half of the 750 pre-kindergarten through fifth graders at P.S. 058 moved across the street to Carroll Park, originally a private community garden created in the late 1840’s and now two square blocks of swings, basketball courts, sprinklers, benches, and more.

Parents, in my case my Ethiopian daughter-in-law Kidist, ushered their brood to the park — in her case, almost-ten-year-old Lucas and four-year-old Timmy. Kidist had encouraged me to join her. “You’ll like this,” she said.

For the next two hours, seated on a bench under a centuries-old sycamore tree, I watched a universe of children — light and dark-skinned, English-speaking and not, privileged and less so, toddlers through pre-teens — chase each other, fill balloons with water and throw them on the pavement (it was 86 and humid), play tag, shoot hoops, soak in the sprinklers, talk in small groups, ride scooters.

Parents, maybe 50 or more, looked on and chatted. Kidist, who has given her all this past year as a volunteer at PS 058, attracted a nonstop stream of friends. “Please meet my mother-in-law,” she’d say, and before I knew it, I was caught up in conversation, too. I met Yassar and Lena, he from Tunisia and she from Morocco. Marwan, sitting next to me while feeding his four-month-old, was there with his four-year-old Adam, who was one of Timmy’s best friends. Clarence, Kidist’s star volunteer partner, spoke to her two daughters in French; she and her partner had arrived recently from Hong Kong. Carrie, a single mom who wished her son were Lucas’s first-choice for friends, hoped the new school Nathan will attend in the fall would be a better match for his learning style.

“Can you watch Timmy while I buy some tomatoes at Gourmet Fresh?” Kidist asked Clarence.  “Can you bring Nathan home with you?” Carrie asked Kidist. “I have to meet with the electrician.”

Rather than head to the Museum of Contemporary Art or the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, to Bloomingdales or a boat cruise around Manhattan, Tony and I headed to Carroll Park each day where we watched a village raising its young in real time. Our last two days, we were bystanders to a blooming friendship between Lucas and the young lady who had pursued him all afternoon. 

Perhaps other storylines will threaten the hopes for connection, inclusion, and generativity that I took away from Carroll Park — but, dear God, I hope not. 

The first thing I did when Tony and I returned home last Thursday was purchase 500 postcards to send to voters in swing states. A tee shirt I ordered that says “Vote like your LIFE, children, wildlife, health, rights and the planet depend on it” arrived today.