It’s Summer 1967 – You’re A Teenager – You Live In L.A. – Everyone Is Knee-Deep In Flowers And Incense – Not You -You’re Up To Your Eyeballs In Algebra.

KFWB – B. Mitchel Reed – July 15, 1967 – Gordon Skene Sound Collection –

Summer 1967 – Summer School 1967. While the rest of the world is heeding the winsome allure to “Wear Flowers In Your Hair” and being busy sampling the forbidden fruits of mind expansion and meditation, you’re stuck in Algebra class.

They talked you into it – your parents. They said you would graduate sooner if you went to Summer School. Think of it: Out a whole semester early – Freedom, within sniffing distance. No more waking up at 5:30 to catch the bus – no more people you don’t like – no more L.A. City Schools cafeteria food – no more sneaking behind the cafeteria to smoke with people you hardly know who are always bumming Marlboros off you.

That’s what you’re thinking about as you stare out the classroom window – mind, light years away from Square Roots and Isosceles Triangles. Mind on maybe squeezing two weeks out of Summer before the last year of school starts. With your luck you’ll miss the whole thing – the Concerts, the Beach, the Love-Ins. Everybody will talk about seeing The Grateful Dead and all the joints they smoked and the guy passing out tabs of acid at the Griffith Park merry-go-round. Not you – you’ll miss it all – you’ll be studying for the mountain of tests they’re going to be giving you and you’ll just be content to just be envious. Your kids will ask some day “what did you do during the Summer of Love?” – you’ll answer; “nothing – I sat like a frog in a snowstorm in Algebra class for 12 weeks”. What a dud you turned out to be.

Why did you let your parents and worse, your counsellor, talk you into doing this in the first place? Maybe it was all the Family Dog posters you were putting up in your room. Maybe it was trying to grow your hair, and just as it was getting good in the back you got busted by the Boys VP. Maybe it was your red eyes at the dinner table or staring at the mashed potatoes for just a little too long. Yep, could be a lot of things. Or maybe it was everything.

But at least you get to graduate early. There’s that.

And your constant – your go-to – your perennial sure-thing; B. Mitchel Reed and KFWB – that’s the thing that keeps it all together. As a reminder, here is an hour’s worth of BMR as he was on July 15, 1967.

Editors Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

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