The Sixties

For sure. I love my car, but I wish I had a choice about using it all the time, for everything. I would definitely use it less.

 

It's the same in the UK - I would rather use public transport sometimes, but the options are limited, and train travel has become ridiculously expensive.

 

Amtrak is slightly less expensive than airline travel, thanks to government subsidies, but schedules are thin outside the Washington to Boston corridor. Local trains reaching the edges of some metro areas are significant exceptions.

Cars are great for things like relaxing weekends in the mountains, in remote places where public transportation has never gone; losing yourself on country roads where you might meet another car once every 10 or 15 minutes. Not good at all for driving into the city for work, stuck in a traffic jam with 800 other people all going to the same place. We could all be on one long train.

 

Always loved the idea of the 60s, but anything before the internet is much worse

 

You've got a lot more space over there! So air travel is much more commonplace than here.

Also since we have far less in the way of unspoiled natural areas, what we do have can get quite busy, and often 'tourist' routes are chock a block in the summertime.

 

When gas was cheaper, parts of western NC and Virginia used to get quite crowded in October, when the leaves were changing color. Then we found the undiscovered treasure that is the eastern third of West Virginia. At the moment, tourism is down in all these places.

My first memories of public transportation date back to the late sixties. I barely remember, but most towns still had abandoned streetcar tracks in the pavement. The streetcars were long gone, replaced by nasty busses with equally nasty and scary looking riders, the absolute bottom of the social pyaramid, the lowest of the low.

The middle class had mostly moved to suburban neighborhoods that had no sidewalks, and nowhere to walk to if there had been any sidewalks. The car was king.

Privately owned and operated long distance trains were barely hanging by a thread. The trains I saw looked like this:



Around here, the upper middle class and upper class used Eastern Airlines to go on vacation.



Eastern survived into the eighties.

 

I recall steam trains from my early childhood. Soot and smoke blackened locomotives, but nice trains, with compartments and a corridor at one side.Lots of woodwork. They disappeared by the mid-60's. And at the same time, many branch lines were closed down in a big re-organization of the rail network.

Also something called a 'trolley bus' in the city of Wolverhampton. They looked like a normal double deck bus, but ran off overhead power lines like an electric tram. My memories are not that detailed as this was when I was only 5-6 years old.
One very clear memory I have of those buses though is that it was while travelling on one with my Grandmother that I first encountered a Black person. That must seem strange to someone from the south of the US - but immigrant blacks hadn't moved as far as our small town at that point in time.

 

Okay, I'm not quite old enough to remember steam trains, except in historical preservation operations. They were gone from regular service here before I was born.

Believe it or not, they still operate in the city of San Francisco! Single level, of course, because it's the US. I like the concept. I'm not sure why it didn't catch on.

 

That's happening here in the netherlands as well. They still offer a lot of options if you have the money or are a specific kind of student (used to travel a lot more with train myself when I got student discount). But i just have to pay more for imo less service. But in the end I mainly care about it bringing me from point A to B, and if for instance would be dirt cheap if I had to stand the whole way that would suit me (they don't offer that option though)

I was born in the 1980's in the north of the netherlands in the countryside and even then and there black people (or actually most other races or non westeuropean foreigners) were quite 'exotic' (certainly for a little white local kid). What also helped with that is that the mainstream culture wasn't as mainstream as it became already a decade later. City and countryside life and people seemed to have different consensuses, views and experiences on a lot of things. I guess in the Netherlands that all ended in the late 80's and definitely in the 90's. I can also imagine this all sounds kind of funny or remarkable for americans or people from UK because the netherlands is such a small country But these differences were really apparent.

 

Oddly enough, some of them ended up in San Francisco, on the Market Street / waterfront line. I remember seeing a bronze plaque in several of them noting their Pittsburgh heritage.

 

I think there maybe more parallels than you imagine between the UK and the Netherlands when it comes to the way in which attitudes have shifted. For one thing, immigrants to the UK tended to settle in cities, not rural areas such as the place where I live. When I went to school, there were no non-white kids at all.
Later I met quite a few black people when I lived for a time in London and then Birmingham.

My impression looking at the Netherlands from outside has always been that it's a socially progressive society.

 

I'll bet a lot of people in the UK had a hard time in the sixties figuring out what to think about race relations in the US, with no personal frame of reference to help them understand it.

That's still a bit of an issue, since black Englishmen have a completely different heritage and history, and therefore different attitudes.

I'm guessing in the sixties, you had a lot of ferryboats crossing the English Channel?

 

They still exist in parts of the Boston area. For instance, in Watertown Square the sky is criss-crossed with trolley wires.

 

That's a very interesting point about attitudes in the UK -

I was only a kid in the 60's, so I had only a child's awareness of such issues. I think though that there was a certain amount of hypocrisy in attitudes in general. British racism was something intimately bound up with the Empire. It's easier to justify stealing people's wealth and destroying their cultures if you think they are an inferior race. (OK -the Empire did some good as well).
Before the 60's, most of the racism was racism at a distance, and didn't amount to much in the UK itself other than an increased sense of xenophobia. It was different in parts of the Empire such as Kenya, where it turns out British forces committed bestial human rights abuses against insurgents - far more than they would have inflicted on white rebels.

My guess is that US racism and it's history were poorly understood over here. In my own family, my mother had a sympathy for the blacks in the south, and she was also a big fan of Nat King Cole, as well as other black musicians and actors. My dad was an old fashioned racist and I don't recall ever hearing him talk about the US situation - he generally had a slightly sneering attitude towards many things American. I believe now that this came about because of America's ascendency as the major world power which had displaced Britain.

At school in the 60's we were taught about the horrors of the slave trade, and a very brief outline of the US Civil War. Because of the geographical location and the lack of immigrants, the issue of racism was never on the agenda at school - not even later on when I went to grammar school in the 70s. We did learn more about the American south, lynchings and so on, and the moral lesson we were to learn was anti-racist. But as I say, racism wasn't something we had to deal with day to day.

As a kid I saw more racism in racist TV 'comedies' than I ever did in the real world.

More generally, I think probably black American music helped to change attitudes here. Soul was very big here in the 60's and 70's. Muhammed Ali also did quite a lot I think.

As a modern Brit, although maybe an atypical one, I'd say that more socially liberal, even most educated people here regard US race issues with horror these days. There's a recognition that racism is racism, and that we have our own problems with it, but what shocks people in this country is when you get a shooting or beating to death of a back person by cops. (it has happened here, but the scale is very different)

To answer your other point - yes, there were many ferry services to the continent, and also high speed hovercraft. I went over 3 times on the hovercraft. It's gone now, mainly because of the channel tunnel - which is an amazing piece of engineering. The ride on 'le shuttle' is absolutely smooth.

 

They still have these running in seattle


and on the topic of sixties really been on another huge jefferson airplane kick. To have seen them in San Francisco in '67
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcJwv7fL6MU

 

I've always been a big Motown fan. When some black Americans today dismiss it as nothing but crap music that black people made to sell to white people, I don't fully believe it.

I wonder if they feel the same way about jazz.

The national sit-in movement protesting segregated lunch counters and other restaurants began in February of 1960, in downtown Greensboro, NC:


The first four students, and quite a few more that joined them in the days to come, were all students at nearby A&T State University. Jessie Jackson had not yet begun his football career there. Over the long summer break, they were replaced by students from Dudley High School, which was all black. A&T students resumed their vigil in the fall.

Wow! Now that's a ferry!

 

I've heard the same said about Bob Marley. I don't really buy the idea.

 

Opps....double post.

 

That's totally not legit. He was almost universally popular in Jamaica before anybody else had ever heard of him, and that island is almost 100% black.