Parental Stress, Kids & the Rolling Stones

My poor parents. Devout Southern Baptists, they permitted minimal TV in our house. Music? Cue the hymnal. Two church services on Sunday and one on Wednesday evenings were the week’s outings.

The only movies we were allowed were religious (e.g., “The Ten Commandments” and “Ben Hur”) or Disney (“Cinderella” and “Sleeping Beauty”) until I was 13, when my oldest brother persuaded my parents to let me go to “West Side Story.”

Clearly, my three brothers and I were a challenge for my blue-collar parents from Appalachia. Like many Southerners, they moved north looking for work in 1938, settling in Dayton, Ohio.

As a teenager, my older brother Jim was a big Elvis fan. When “The Pelvis” was scheduled to appear on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in 1956, Jim and Dad had a shouting match about skipping Sunday night church. I don’t remember who won; I suspect Dad and Jesus. Instead, Dad brought home a Pat Boone record. Listen to this, he said.

Then there was my younger brother, Bobby. Both my parents and the high school were horrified when he let his crewcut grow “long” (he had bangs), wore “sissy” shirts (flowers and “hippy” designs) and listened to rock ’n roll. By then, Elvis seemed tamer. Dad still listened to Pat Boone (who was as big in the ’50s as Elvis).

In 1964. Bobby was a sophomore in high school and wrote for the student newspaper, the “Lions’ Roar.” He was ecstatic to cover a concert by a new British group called the Rolling Stones.

Dayton’s new Hara Arena could accommodate 6,000, but fewer than 1,000 showed up for the show by what the Dayton Daily News called “this latest anti-barber bundle from Britain.”

Doubtless, Bobby’s review was more glowing. Sadly, however, that article was not among the stack of school newspapers that my mother saved — maybe she threw it out? But I clearly remember Bobby’s non-stop chatter about the performance. To Dad’s disgust, he sang Stones tunes around the house for weeks. Bobby was in heaven. Mom and Dad were not.

I wish I had Bobby’s review, but Gee Mitchell’s opinion in the Dayton Daily News is entertaining — “The Rolling Stones gathered neither moss nor customers in Dayton last night,” the paper reported. Disdainful of the music, “or whatever designation is given the component parts of their brand of noise,” Mitchell slammed the “loose-hipped antics of Mick Jagger, the group’s lead ‘vocalist.’” The Stones would never make it, Mitchell concluded.

But Jim’s and Bobby’s musical preferences turned out to be nothing compared to what my poor parents’ other son and their only daughter (me) put them through. In the 1960s, Woody joined the Army but was dishonorably discharged for “homosexuality.” Meanwhile, when I was 17 and still in high school, I got pregnant and had my first child. The school tried to ban me from class, the yearbook and graduation.

Then Bobby dropped out of school and hitchhiked to Haight-Asbury in time for the Summer of Love.

These were difficult times for my church-going parents. But despite their stress, worry and occasional anger over their children, one thing was constant: they loved us unconditionally, no matter how many reasons we gave them not to.

Brenda Cooper of Trinidad has had her own moments with her three kids.

NOT A PACKED HOUSE — The crowd that turned out to see the Rolling Stones in 1964 at Hara Arena in Dayton, Ohio, was enthusiastic, but underwhelming. “They’ll never make it,” critics said.Courtesy Dayton Daily News archives.