Mark Schweickart

The Hat Fluffers of Buckingham Palace Mark Schweickart

This humorous memoir takes the reader inside the mind of a Catholic boy growing up in Ohio in the 50's to mid-60's. Small boy concerns--dirt-clod fights, grade-school football, boy scout camp, and the terrors of the confessional--give way to anxieties about high school dating and the ever-looming war in Vietnam. The tone bounces between laugh-out-loud comedy to, more often, a gentle poignancy. Coming of age in time for the Vietnam draft, he struggles with depression, or as he calls it, his "sadness," that underpins his still goofy, often hilarious perspective. When his father ships him off to college, he knows that dropping out will leave him exposed to the draft, so he teams with another student to make a run for it. They hitchhike across America, getting rides from an array of oddballs, such as the husband and wife at each other's throats, the backwoods character just out of the pen, the maniacal non-stop driver who demands they stay awake to keep him awake, and the ex-Indy-500 driver, who no longer even has a driver's license. When they make it to California, they stumble upon the beginnings of what would become the iconic 60's as they find themselves sleeping in a crash pad in Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco. A treat for both those old enough to remember, or those younger and curious about, the mid 60's before they became the psychedelic, riot-torn 60's.