September 23, 2018:
Little blonde family in the suburbs, as it's supposed to be.
Little backyard swing set, all chains and sharp metal corners. Today the manufacturer would be sued out of existence. Back in Nov 65 we all pretty much assumed it was good to keep fingers and skins away from ouchie corners.
Baby is joyous. In all her photos she's thrilled, curious, laughing. Older brother seems puzzled. In his pics he's tepidly sluggish, as if baby sister inherited all the brains and the curiosity and the laughter while he got a certain earthy determination to put one foot before another. Here, he wonders if he should be in the picture at all.
Young mom is pretty. Striped dress with cloth belt, butterfly glasses, bouff pulled back for the afternoon. In all these pics, young adults of that era seem older than their age. There's a stolid aura of responsibility, as if they were saying by their clothing and their posture, We have put away childish things and are being what we've always been told we should be. Grownups, in that slide-rule-in-the-pocket white collar suburban ethos exemplified by NASA, not yet overrun by hair and LSD.
Because the rebellion that began on February 9, 1964 hasn't yet reached suburban Sunnyvale. At the moment, Hewlett-Packard is safe from experimentation. Yet unbeknown to anyone in this picture the Acid Tests have begun. Ken Kesey has graduated from MKULTRA next door in Menlo Park and is just over the ridge in La Honda, with his pals the Hell's Angels and Hunter Thompson and Allen Ginsberg and The Grateful Dead. The hills are swingin', baby. How long before the suburbs go paisley?