By November 1963 John Kennedy had been assassinated and Lyndon Johnson had become President. The Vietnam War was omnipresent. I was 16. The draft was on. All the boys I knew then were hyper aware of what was coming for them. ROTC was on every campus. One friend was planning on joining the Merchant Marines, but most I knew weren’t trying to jump out of the gate early and sign up. It wasn’t a declared war and fighting the “Commies” in Vietnam, just because, was a pretty hard sell. On the West coast folks felt that Kennedy had tried to moderate involvement and Johnson was upping the involvement.
I joined the high school Young Republicans. Why? Someone asked me and I was into joining groups. When you moved every two years like I did, it was a smart idea to be a joiner. Plus, I was developing opinions and ideas about what was going on around me. The war was front and center.
I remember one meeting at the school; there may have been more. However, very shortly after that there was an announcement that we were invited to a statewide meet up where we would be choosing representatives.
The meet-up was in Stockton CA. We lived in San Rafael then. Woot! An out of town event for a 16 year old, chaperoned. Four of us, shiny geeky white republicans, plus, an 18 year-old chaperone went.
We got there, I think, during the middle of the day, checked into an event motel and had a very short meeting after which we were dispersed to “caucus”. Our chaperone disappeared. So we went to a few motel rooms to meet each other. In the first room were a few people saying absolutely nothing to each other. Though they suggested we stay, we thought we should look for some actual “caucusing” so we went looking and found: drinking, and next thing, a lot of sex. It seemed like every door we opened folks were writhing on the motel beds.
So, you know, as “Young Republican” representatives, this highly unethical situation left us not knowing what to do next. The four of us decided to go across the street to the bowling alley and go bowling. It was fun; I hadn’t bowled before and none of us were really any good, but we were a good new group together. I remember, it grew strangely quiet in the alley. When we got out of the door we saw it was dark and we started back quickly to see if anyone had shown up for the proscribed motel dinner. Walking out the door, four young Hispanic men confronted us. Stockton had a high Hispanic population even in 1963. Next thing I know, for no apparent reason, one of the locals had hit one of our smallest boys in the nose. I’ll never forget that clot of blood, the size of a softball, in his hand.
Protection mode kicked in and I went into the perpetrators face and confronted him. It was scary because I had no idea what I was going to do. Fortunately, because I think, he was expecting to kick the intruding boys off his turf, and not a girl, he stepped back from me enough that we achieved a kind of stand off. We walked away and took care of our friend. It was a time long ago; no knives or guns were involved.
The next day was the final meeting with a lot of hung over barely speaking representatives who voted in somebody for something. Clearly everything was prearranged and what we had witnessed those two days was “real” Republican politics in action. We left.
I have thought about that event often; how we invaded unknowingly another’s turf in an unfamiliar town, who they must have been and grown into, how we were scolded for leaving the motel, even though we knew it was safer than the motel, how my actions possibly impacted my friends self esteem as being the only one, a girl who stood up, whether the boys were smarter, how we never really talked to each other after that, and what the heck politics was all about anyway?
By 1964 we had moved again, this time to Lake Oswego, OR. I was 17, not yet a voter. Dad was a Republican and Mom was a Democrat. I was not a Republican.
Six months later, in 1964, Hillary Clinton was 17.
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/showelection.php?year=1964
http://www.factcheck.org/2008/03/hillary-worked-for-goldwater/
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