Where Have All The Flowers Gone-With Pete Seeger In Mind  

 

Josie had to laugh, an ironic laugh to be sure, about the days when she had met her first serious beau, Jeff Patterson, freshman year at Wisconsin. Of course coming from the big city she had to get used to the smaller scale of things on campus and the more sanitary slower life-style but after a few weeks she adjusted, an adjustment made easier by her roommate from Chicago, Susan Phillips who was totally unlike girls like her high school best friend Frida and the other JAPs (Jewish-American Princesses in the parlance of the time, maybe now too except the princess probably is not capitalized in these more democratic times) from Hunter College High who were catty and devastating to those who were not JAPs. Susan was the daughter of a kosher meat butcher, a working-class Jewish girl a type of Jew except for Uncle Rudy, her father Nathan’s older brother who was a bricklayer, that she was not familiar with.

 

Susan was smart but also less pretentious in her manner than any girl at Hunter, including Frida, who were using that institution as a resume builder in order to catch some rich Jewish husband from Long Island, something like that. Susan was different as well in that she did not eat, drink, breath her Jewishness unlike Josie and her brown-eyed, brown-haired, brown everything world crowd but had a boyfriend, a blue-eyed blonde boyfriend, Jason Robbs, from Racine who was into folk music, illegally drinking at the constant frat parties and involved in a campus project against nuclear proliferation and whose friends were too. Normal Midwestern kids.

 

Susan had met Jason at the Rathskeller, the hang-out for all Freshman since officially they could not go into the bars that dotted the streets around the Quad, where he was tuning up his guitar to go out into the Quad and sing for a crowd that would gather anytime a singer who could actually sing, some couldn’t, would strum a tune, something from the protest songs that were then becoming a staple of the folk milieu. Susan had asked him what he would sing and among the songs on his playlist he listed Pete Seeger’s Where Have All The Flowers Gone which she had only heard once on the campus radio folk hour on one Sunday night but which she had liked. Jason said he would dedicate the song to her and that eventually led to that boyfriend status.

 

So Susan certainly was a pleasant roommate to have around but here is where the laugh part of what Josie was thinking about came into view. It was through Susan, or rather through Jason that Josie met Rudy Jones, Jason’s roommate from, Oxbridge, a small town outside of Milwaukee who was even more political than Jason since he organized stuff on campus through Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and was building a reputation as a radical in the Quad. He was a blue-eyed, brown haired guy, slender and could talk a mile a minute which fascinated her. More importantly Rudy seemed to pay special attention to her and while he was a campus big shot politico he rather shyly asked her for a date after a few talks with her.

 

Here is the funny part their first date almost didn’t happen, or rather almost didn’t lead into another. Of course in those days rich or poor the guy, especially on the first date, was supposed to ante up the dough for the date. Rudy though was a dirt poor kid, a working class kid at Madison on scholarship and financial aid and so he was worried about whether he would have enough to cover his expenses. See the cheap dates then, the cheapest except maybe going to some ill-lit cafeteria and having a seemingly see-through cup of coffee and watch the winos, con men, hoboes, drifters and other nightly flotsam and jetsam do their thing hardly the stuff to impress on the first date, was to hit the coffeehouses which also dotted the Quad. The one “assigned” to the Freshmen was the Dusty Dog (a whole sociology dissertation could have been written about the social class structure and where each class could or could not be seen at that university then but that would await another day) and that night Guy Vander, an up and coming folk singer who did covers of guys like Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, and Josh White was playing  so beside the coffees and maybe a shared pastry he would have to throw a couple of dollars into the “basket” that would be passed around and which up and coming folk singers used to keep themselves going, at least keeping some ill-disposed rent collector from the door.

 

Borrowing a dollar from Jason Rudy though he would be okay. Rudy picked up Josie who looked lovely that night in a skirt and peasant blouse that all the folkie women were wearing now having seen Joan Baez or Judy Collin wearing one in a performance and so everyone had to run out and get one (same thing with the long-ironed hair look that Joan Baez pioneered but Josie had such frizzled hair it would have she said taken a steamroller to get the damn thing straight).

 

They talked as they walked to the Dog, or rather Rudy talked a mile a minute about Guy who had gone to Wisconsin and about an anti-nuclear bomb demonstration he was helping to plan on campus. When they got to the Dog they found a table for two toward the back which Josie was pleased about since he might hold her hand, something like that. Rudy ordered the obligatory two coffees and asked Josie if she wanted some pastry thing to eat with the coffee (this coffee or some drink other than tap water thing was a necessity since although the place did not charge a cover you had to buy something to have in front of you or face the boot out the door to let paying customers in). She said they could share a brownie. Rudy breathed a sigh of relief.

 

Guy came on shortly after and did great job on the first set especially on Pete Seeger’s Where Have All The Flowers Gone which was starting to become very popular on campuses among the myriad students worried about whether there would be a tomorrow what with the nuclear bomb threat hanging over everything that happened in the world. Shortly before intermission though Josie said she was thirsty and a little tired so she would like another coffee (and also to help finish off the that brownie she was nibbling at since she was a little nervous about whether would like her since she had not been out with a non-Jewish boy since she was a junior at Hunter College High in Manhattan, Ted Higgins, a budding folksinger who after a few dates went off to try and “find himself” and had only selected, by mother or friends, “nice Jewish boys after that). Rudy looked stricken at that moment.

 

Josie not having had to worry about money or about asking her “nice Jewish boys” whether they could afford to pay on a date, momentarily thought it was something she had done or said to make him turn red like that. Then a light bulb or something went off in her head and she rescinded her request by say “maybe I had better not have another cup I have to get up early to study for that Western Civ test Monday and the coffee would keep me up all night if I have it this late.” Beautiful, and Rudy immediately relaxed. As they were leaving after the second set was over and Rudy had paid the check and put that couple of bucks in the basket Josie said, “Hey, that anti-nuclear protest of yours is going to require all your money so next time let me pay, call it a donation, okay.” Needless to say there would a next date, more than one, no question.