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The
Martha's Vineyard Times is a weekly publication.
May 19 - May 25, 2005 Edition
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North Road Do-it-yourself Island The Martha's Vineyard Times May 19, 2005 I was pushing toward 40 when I first heard. “Don’t trust anyone over 30.” I felt uncomfortable after that despite new bell-bottoms, long sideburns teased from my already thinning hair, even a beard – a chiseled “Ahab,” later a grisly unshaved face altogether – until I realized my hirsute condition added 30 years past the trust barrier – and I shaved. Those days were the sixties and seventies, a great clashing of generations and revolution from the social constraints of another age, especially the alienation of young people from society in large part over the Viet Nam War. Our vocabulary changed overnight, not necessarily new words but different meanings to the old ones: toke, roach, yellows, reds, uppers, downers, LSD, trip, ‘H’, speed, OD (often fatal). The Vineyard became a magnet for the young wandering generation, rudderless if not homeless, separated from family, school, and traditional friends. Mixing with tourists in L.L. Beans, teens and early twenties shuffled along alone or in pairs, wool hats pulled down to their eyes, girls in long trailing skirts and bizarre combinations of other clothes, boys in torn dungarees, patched or unpatched, underwear peeking out or bare cheeks. My accountant arrived one morning from Boston and noted he had shared passage on the ferry with a host of the unwashed, most without underwear. How he came to the latter conclusion I didn’t want to ask. The community was aroused and frightened. Psychologist Bill Bruff wrote a paper describing the invasion of hippies and early steps the Vineyard community took in coming together to face their new issues. Bill was an early disciple of venerable psychiatrist Milton Mazer who had helped found the new Mental Health Center at Martha’s Vineyard Community Services (MVCS). One evening a capacity crowd filled Oak Bluffs School gymnasium to hear several Harvard and Boston University “experts” lead a discussion of illegal drug use. One of the police chiefs present warned against setting up a youth center for teens on weekends for fear the gathering of kids would prove too much for Island police. My one take-away message from a speaker was never to experiment with even one dose of heroin for fear of addiction. The psychiatrist spoke from his “personal” clinical experience. Dr. Mazer, Bill Bruff and David Smith, another of the mental health psychologists, had noted an alarming increase in drug over-doses and emergency room visits of young people with all sorts of problems. Some arrived from as far off as California with nothing more than five bucks in their pockets, said Tom Bennett, current director of the Counseling Center at MVCS. Already a youth drop-in center had been established where kids could hang out, talk with counselors, obtain referral to Cranberry Acres, a private campground where they spread sleeping bags in a huge tent for two dollars a night. A hot line was manned 24 hours a day for emergency counseling on drug issues, illness, and housing. In 1965 the Vineyard suffered four fatal auto accidents involving teen-agers and, despite the warnings from a police chief, Dr. Mazer led MVCS to establish a weekend youth center in the old telephone building at the head of Vineyard Haven’s Main Street. The building was the generous gift to MVCS of Judge Sherwood Tarlow. Dave Smith and later Tom Bennett of the then Mental Health Center became director. I thought I had learned in the Army never to volunteer for anything, but after talking with Tom one evening about the steady influx of “flower children” and “hippies,” I found myself setting up a free evening medical clinical on the center’s second floor. Everyone involved became a volunteer: nurses, clerks, and doctors. Medicines were obtained as free samples from drug companies. The last resort was a written prescription with a prayer that the patient could find the funds. (Few scrips were written.) The borrowed exam table I remember came from Dr. Donald Mills and must have weighed a thousand pounds, a relic from the early forties. I cannot imagine now how we managed to put together the materials and supplies needed but we did and we saw a steady flow of patients from 7 to 9 pm, 10 pm, sometimes 11 pm three evenings a week. Fortunately, but sadly as I reminisce about the experience, most of the conditions we saw were mundane, often the result of poor hygiene like skin infections and body lice. The term STD (sexually transmitted disease) began to acquire common usage. Family practitioners had begun to see more of these cases in their offices, but the numbers we saw in the clinic seemed like an epidemic. We dispensed large dose penicillin shots, other antibiotics by mouth and thousands of words of advice about safe sex, condoms, diaphragms and birth control pills but no narcotics! The saddest patient was the occasional young girl with an unwanted pregnancy — not a huge number but tragic. I hope most of them followed my advice to “Give your mother the benefit of doubt and call her.” Usually they appeared bereft and in need of a dose of family love. The recklessness with which many waged this sexual revolution would be tempered within a decade by fear of HIV-AIDS. During our fourth summer a stylish young woman dropped in to our clinic announcing she was just off a jet from Dallas; her gynecologist had insisted she stop for a PAP smear as soon as she arrived. I recognized then that some good things must end and this would be the year. Our user population was beginning to thin. Out of this era came the Youth Center in 1965, a drop-in center, later to become Project which encompassed the medical clinic; a group for older young people as a social center and men’s and women’s groups managed by Sherm Goldstein; the first women’s services group begun by Liz Dolan; and a work program under the federal Comprehensive Employment Training Act (CETA). This group found summer jobs for young people, cleaning up beaches, parks and the like during summer months. The time in history was a defining one for the Vineyard. Although the topography of many of the social, medical, and psychological services we see here today has changed, their origins or their formative years were shaped in that time of radical unrest. Drugs, alcohol, mental illness, and access to medical care continue as critical problems. Many street drugs are more dangerous and addictive than ever, but the force of Vineyard determination to find solutions, although sometimes halting, remains strong. |
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