1968: A Love Story

By John Edison Schwab

What happens when big-city boy leaves the city for the first time to meet small-town girl?

THE YEAR IS 1968: the year Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King are murdered-- campus protests-- the height of the Vietnam War.

DOUGLAS HOLLAND is the only son of a lower-class Jewish family in sprawling, frenetic Los Angeles, and a recent college graduate. Doug has no trouble getting dates, but the ultra-sophisticated L.A. women repel him. He longs for a beautiful, sunny, more conservative girl. Doug Holland has never been in love.

SO HE IMPULSIVELY GRABS a rural college scholarship, in a last ditch attempt to escape the madness of Los Angles and the shallowness of L.A. women. But he never imagined what awaited him in tiny Athens, Ohio.

CLASSICALLY BEAUTIFUL and Christian, Paige Howard, an entering freshman from a small Ohio town, is decidedly upper class. Paige seeks someone sincere as well as attractive – different from the immature boys wanting backseat sex. But Paige is a sorority girl with a predetermined set of values and ideas. – Enter Doug.

ON MEETING, Doug and Paige discover that, despite considerable differences, what they have been so fervently seeking is each other. But trouble brews. It is Doug’s idealism and stubborn unwillingness to compromise his principles that dooms the relationship. When Paige rejects him, Doug’s anguish is so great he volunteers for suicidal duty in Vietnam. But then Paige, unaware, comes to realize she has made a terrible mistake. Is she too late to stop him? The stand-up-and-cheer climax provides the answer.

1968 – A Love Story is not only topical, ala Forrest Gump. It has that one element that sets apart such classics as The Graduate, An Officer and a Gentleman, Pretty Woman, and Sleepless in Seattle--

POIGNANCY

And it’s funny: Doc Hollywood meets Northern Exposure. You’ll laugh and cry. You will feel this simple, compelling story. And your heart will soar.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Mar 18, 2003
• ISBN: 9780759660809

John Edison Schwab

John Edison Schwab grew up in West L.A. in the Sixties. He went on to earn B.A. and M.A. degrees in creative writing and has taught writing on the university level. Mr. Schwab lives on the Monterey Peninsula in California. He has already published a work of non-fiction. This is his first novel.

Book preview

This book is a work of fiction. Places, events, and situations in this story are purely fictional. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

© 1998, 2002, 2005 by John Edison Schwab.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a

retrieval system, or transmitted by any means,

electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or

otherwise, without written permission from the author.

ISBN: 978-0-7596-6081-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-0-7596-6080-9 (e)

1stBooks – rev. 11/22/2023

Contents

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For my wife,

and for Lorry and Milt

1

Douglas Holland sighed.

The sigh came every morning as he lay in bed, gazing up at the same crack in the ceiling, trying to muster the will to go out to tackle the day.

It was an early August Saturday, and since he worked Saturday afternoons and evenings, he enjoyed the luxury of sleeping past nine.

Monday through Friday he worked as a day camp counselor for West Coast Jewish Community Center in Pacific Palisades, California. Each morning at 7:45 the yellow school bus would pull up outside to pick him up first. Then the campers, age six to twelve, would board with each stop, so that by the time the camp was reached at 8:45 in the Brentwood hills, the bus was full of riotously singing campers. Holland would of course lead the rolling songfest: If You’re Happy and You Know It Clap Your Hands! and other rousing ballads. Once at the campsite, after the 200-plus campers were duly assembled with their respective counselors, the day would commence: a singing assembly and the day’s schedule announced, then arts and crafts, assorted circle games, relays, sports –– soccer, flag football, softball –– dancing, day trips to the zoo, etc., etc. This was his third and last summer, and it was none too soon.

He enjoyed somewhat more his Saturday job as a car-parking attendant at his father’s Beverly Hills restaurant. Actually, it wasn’t his father’s –– Dad managed the restaurant, he didn’t own it. The tips were good, however, and he loved getting behind the wheel of the Jags and Mercedes and Thunderbirds. He hated the Cadillacs, though. Jew wagons, he called them –– Jew canoes. Jewish boys were supposed to get a Cadillac when they became doctors or lawyers, CPA’s or dentists. Holland loathed status symbols. If his Jewish friends or their parents knew he felt this way, they would consider him an anti-Semitic Jew. But it was not the case. He simply did not think that Jews or any ethnic or religious group should stereotype themselves with status symbols. And holding the door open for the rich broads with their diamonds and furs also caused resentment. Was he envious of their wealth? No. Some persons had wealth, while others, like his parents, had not found the key to unlock wealth’s door. He simply bristled when wealth was flaunted. A contradiction, of course. If you’ve got it, flaunt it, right? He vowed that he would never broadcast his wealth –– if he ever acquired it, that is.

Enough philosophizing, he told himself. His feet slid out from under the covers and met the floor. Tiredly he pushed off from the bed, stood up straight, stretched, and then wiped the sleep out of the corners of his eyes. Yawning, he sauntered to the bathroom to brush his teeth.

He was twenty-two and a recent graduate of a nearby state college –– San Fernando Valley State –– or just Valley State, for short. His paternal grandfather, upon arrival at Ellis Island from Germany, changed the Jewish-sounding Hollenstein to Holland, which he figured would make life easier for his family in the United States. In this he was most probably correct. People were often surprised to discover that Doug Holland was a Jew.

Of average height and frame, he had a full head of dry, sandy brown hair parted on the left, impish grin which radiated crows feet from his green eyes, and nose somewhat too large for his face. But that was his most distinctive feature: his face. It was what most people remembered about him. It was a face capable of great expression –– especially love. Not mushy, lovey-dovey love. Rather, love of other human beings.

Glancing in the medicine cabinet mirror, he gave himself an impish grin. Cute, maybe, he though cockily; handsome, no. He went to the bathtub and twisted the faucets. It was in the shower where he did his most reflective thinking, as the hot water cleared his head.

His thoughts turned to last night’s beach party. It was merely the latest in a string of unsatisfying dates and relationships.

Gail Kaplan had been in his economics class his last semester. She had average looks, long painted fingernails, smoked menthol cigarettes and wore green eye shadow most of the time.

Last night he took Gail to a combination beach party/grunion hunt. After the folk songs had been sung around the campfire –– Blowin’ in the Wind, If I had a Hammer –– they rolled up their pant legs, grabbed their buckets and flashlights and wandered up and down the beach in search of the elusive grunion. In all the times he had been on grunion hunts, Holland had never seen one. Others swore they had caught scores of grunion. That by consulting the newspaper, tides and moon, the grunion ––silver, herring-like fish –– would be deposited on the beach by a breaking wave, and flip-flop up the beach to lay their eggs in the sand, catching the next wave to return to the sea. During this vulnerable time, the object was to locate with flashlight the squirming silver fish, grab them barehanded, and drop them into your bucket.

All he, his date and the others saw for two hours were the twinkling lights on the Santa Monica Mountains, the Santa Monica Pier a mile distant, and the fluorescent glow of the crashing waves, caused by the red tide, or plankton –– micro-organisms that infested the ocean every summer. But no grunion. The only thing many caught last night were colds.

Afterwards he drove Gail to a wooden beachfront coffeehouse in Malibu. Then they parked at the beach a while, kissed, petted, talked a little, and he drove her back to her apartment, returning home after two in the morning.

Gail had not enjoyed the evening, and neither had he. It had all the ingredients of an enjoyable evening, and was not the fault of the beach party and the characteristic non-appearance of the grunion. It was simply that Gail was typical of all the other girls he had dated: liberated and independent and aggressive, fickle and too hung up on themselves to desire a permanent relationship with a man –– only a series of men to satisfy their ever-changing whims.

Holland felt so inadequate with these women. It was not, however, because he lacked self-assurance. On the contrary, he was fully aware of his considerable qualities and abilities, sometimes to the point of cockiness. But if he liked a girl, he was incapable of pretending that he didn’t, playing hard to get. Life was short enough, he thought, so why waste time playing games? Games were detours. If he couldn’t be honest with a girl and express his true feelings to her, then what was the point? A relationship based on dishonesty was no relationship at all. Above all else, Douglas Holland loved true things. Consequently, he was honest...to a fault.

He was once called a sap to his face by one of these girls, because he let her know his feelings for her, and therefore left himself vulnerable. So he was forever confronted with the problem: He desperately wanted a girl to need him, but was unable to project superiority, for he always placed himself on a par with his foil.

Furthermore, he always sought one special, crucial ingredient in girls: modesty. He had always been infatuated by, and a sucker for, attractive, nicely-dressed, conservative girls. But he wanted it that way. He preferred his women moderate but conservative in carriage: no sloppy, boyish clothing or outrageous makeup, no foul mouth, never braless, fast, or loose.

The more modest they were, the more he was attracted to them, for two reasons. First, winning them was a challenge. If they spurned his advances he could blame it on excessive modesty. But if they didn’t the satisfaction was powerful, for he had then succeeded where other guys had probably tried, and failed. Second, only with a conservative, less experienced girl could he ever hope to feel himself equal, perhaps superior.

But in Los Angeles in the ultra-liberal, anything goes year of 1968, there were not very many attractive, conservative girls left. To Holland, L.A. girls were almost unanimously sloppy, boyish, outrageously made-up, foul-mouthed, braless, fast, or loose –– or any combination of these. Moreover, he had not met any that had been winnable –– that loved and needed him in return.

When the Beach Boys sang I Wish They All Could Be California Girls, they must’ve been thinking about women other than the ones he had been taking out in Los Angeles, he thought ruefully.

But he had taken a step which might possibly introduce him to another type of girl. He had applied to the graduate school of business at Ohio University in Athens. He would hear any day now whether he was accepted on scholarship for their two-year MBA program, and he was hopeful.

Another reason why he was hoping for acceptance was he had never been out of California, except for Tijuana and Las Vegas, and had never seen snow fall (only on the ground in the California mountains), never seen leaves change color, never felt the change of seasons. In addition, he had never lived at college –– he commuted to classes like the vast majority of California students. He could have selected one of any number of colleges, but chose Ohio because it had the ring of Middle America to it, as in Bye Bye Birdie. It was a small college in a small town, and he had never lived in one.

It was time to try something different.

He summoned up again a mental picture of Eastern girls. In magazines and in the movies they were clad in plaid wool skirts, wool sweaters, knee socks and penny loafers. They had peaches and cream complexions and wore little makeup. Were these girls merely Madison Avenue fabrications, or did they actually exist? Maybe he would get a chance to find out.

The reverie ended abruptly as the hot water petered out.

Goddammit! It reverberated off the bathroom walls.

Stepping out of the tub, he toweled off and shuffled back to the bedroom. Slipping into his briefs, he picked up a Newsweek magazine from the nightstand and flopped onto the bed, letting his pores dry out.

The magazine carried articles about the upcoming, soon-to-be-divisive Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and the challenge of Senator Eugene McCarthy to the front-runner, Vice President Hubert Humphrey. It also contained articles detailing more anti-war/anti-Johnson demonstrations around the country.

He mused about the days of President Kennedy and how Americans had been united as a people and believed so strongly in their country, their leaders and their institutions –– and in their destiny. Why, you couldn’t sit down at the dinner table back then, he recalled excitedly, without hearing: What did JFK say/do today?, or, JFK said/did this today.

The magazine also carried an article about assassination.

Assassination.

He remembered the first time. Recalling it now, it seemed like an illusion.

He was getting dressed after high school gym class in the steamy locker room. The braggarts were about as usual, boasting about their latest conquests –– always imaginary –– in the grossest descriptive terms. It never impressed him, and because he showed no interest he was not liked by many of his male peers.

He was jockeying for a position in front of the mirror when he overheard someone behind him remark, as though the words were somehow funny: Didja hear President Kennedy’s been shot? And someone else snort: What’s the punchline? There were too many straining at the mirror for him to tell which jerk had uttered the words. How stupid, he thought, forgetting the bad joke entirely.

Emerging from the locker room he encountered about thirty or forty guys standing transfixed beneath the gymnasium loudspeaker, motionless, saying nothing, heads down, listening intently to some radio report.

And then the awful connection.

And now he remembered the first time he broke down and cried. It