Years on the 7s #4: 1967

        On its 50th anniversary, much can be made of 1967. It's a vivid year. Summer of Love. "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band." The debut of Rolling Stone magazine.

Against the backdrop of the escalating Vietnam War, the counter culture is in full flower power. Its epicenter, San Francisco, beckons. From a distance in Fredonia and Buffalo, I resonate with the excitement of the era. Every day is a brave new world.

However, having reached a quarter century on the planet, I'm a little too responsible, a little too plugged in, to grow my hair to my shoulders, pull up stakes and head west.

This is the year that the Dunkirk Evening Observer makes me Fredonia Bureau chief, complete with office over the Liberty Bank branch in the center of town. It's a one-man bureau. My accounts of the contentious Village Board meetings increase attendance at them.

I have a reportorial rival in the formidable person of Agnes Palazzetti, who writes for The Buffalo News and seems to know everyone in the county. A year later she will encourage me to get a job in Buffalo.

I have a cheap, drafty second-floor apartment on the corner of West Main Street and Canadaway Street, rented from the father of Ross Scanio, a high school friend who lived across the landing when I first moved in. On the other side of the alley is the Henry Hotel, where fights regularly spill out the back door. 

The narrow living room, which I painted a vibrant dark blue with white woodwork, is big enough to accommodate a rolltop desk that belonged to my grandfather, who died in 1961. Across the back wall there's a growing record album collection crowding my award-winning college book collection on shelves made of concrete blocks and boards. 
Centerpiece is a lumpy, pull-out couch that used to sit in the playroom at my parents' house. After the Alco plant in Dunkirk closed in the early '60s, they sold the farm. Now they're in Annville, Pa., near Hershey and my father's welding job with Cleaver Brooks, a boiler factory in Lebanon, Pa.
I'm the last of our family in Fredonia. Brother Tom became the first of us to get married, to Karen, in the summer of 1965, finished up at Purdue University by the following January and is an engineer for B. F. Goodrich in Akron, Ohio. My other brother, Bill, graduated from Fredonia High School in 1966 and is studying engineering at Penn State. 

I'm driving a light blue 1967 Volkswagen Beetle, successor to the beloved light blue 1957 Beetle I rolled over at 55 mph on an icy curve the previous November with my friend Nancy Lazarczyk riding shotgun. Miraculously, in those days before seat belts, we were unhurt. 

There's also a motorcycle, my second one, a black Honda 165 with megaphone mufflers that the previous owner installed. In the winter, I stash it in my bedroom, which is bigger and draftier than the living room.

This also is the year that I connect with the first profound love of my life, the woman who two years later will become my wife.

Laura Zuckerman is a junior at Fredonia State College and more than a passing acquaintance when we run into one another over green beer on St. Patrick's Day at the Colonial Inn, a collegiate watering hole on Main Street. She's the ex-girlfriend of a good friend of mine, Bill Miller.

One of the happiest moments that spring is when Laura tells me she's gotten a new prescription for birth control pills. 
This prompts me to break off another relationship – a three-way affair involving a couple in Westfield. Pipe-smoking Phil Abrams, who works at Welch's (was it in the lab?), subscribes to the Playboy philosophy and for several months has taken an odd pleasure in sharing his sweet wife Linda with me. My friends, who openly disapprove of this arrangement, are glad to see it end.

I know Phil and Linda from Alvin's Hideaway, a candlelit coffeehouse in Dunkirk presided over by Alvin Scime, flamboyant and gay with his shaved head, his beret, his cape and his Citroen. He's a scandal in a traditional Polish Catholic neighborhood (the parish priest preaches against him from the pulpit) and he aggravates the neighbors even more because he speaks better Polish than they do.

My best friend, Dan Cudney, a lingering connection from high school, introduced me to Alvin's shortly after I returned home from Syracuse University in 1964. A man of well-cultivated talents and obsessions, Dan taught himself guitar by mastering a Bach cantata and performs at Alvin's. A rudimentary folksinger and guitarist myself, I pair up with him for Bob Dylan songs.

We evolve into a group and become an attraction at Alvin's. By 1967, Dan is firmly settled into Buffalo's Elmwood Avenue district and his girlfriend, Kathy Notley, an office clerk at Sears on Main Street, is singing with us. Our lineup also includes a drummer, David Sipos, one of Kathy's boyfriends, and Ron Magrum, a Fredonia State student who plays guitar and started hanging with us at Alvin's.

We rehearse at night in Kathy's basement apartment in a big old mansion on Soldiers Place, a Frederick Law Olmsted circle near Delaware Park. And we've been branching out from Alvin's. My rollover accident occurs on the way home from a gig in the Leon Hotel, a country bar on U.S. Route 62 in Cattaraugus County.

Being pot smokers, for a while we call the band the Nickel Bag. And in the manner of the Beatles and other bands of the era, we hang out together a lot. We go on stoned romps to local attractions like Chautauqua Institution and Griffis Sculpture Park and the Lake Erie beaches.

Our most ambitious excursion is a vacation trip to Cape Cod, Dan and (I'm pretty sure) Kathy in his Beetle, Laura and me in mine. We bask in the presence of Richie Havens at an amazing concert in a little coffeehouse in Provincetown.

Our other big adventure is a trip to Toronto to see two of our idols at the O'Keefe Center, the San Francisco hippie bands Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead. Kathy bears a distant resemblance to the Airplane's Grace Slick and does a great version of her signature song, "Somebody to Love." In our sets, it's always a high point.