When I was a young lad I hitchhiked. A lot. And I’m old
enough to remember Anthony Eden (the noted speedfreak), the Suez crisis – that
last Imperial flourish before Thatcher’s gruesome little war – and the
resulting oil shortage. The UK populace was encouraged to give rides to
strangers to save gas. School hours were cut and The Daily Mirror supplied
cutout stickers to put on your windshield the read “Free Lifts At Your Own
Risk.” Later I’d hitch around the country – London, Brighton, Devon, Cornwall,
even Scotland. Of course, there were problems with cruising pervs but nothing
that couldn’t be handled by a teen pretending he was Woody Guthrie. Today,
alas, it seems to have all gone. Hitchhiking is too reckless, too socialist,
too dangerous for the 21st century, but when our palls at Delancey
Place sent me the following I felt I should pass it along.
“In the early 1970s, the
conservative, older residents of the quiet coastal California town of Santa
Cruz began to be overrun by hippies. To control them, they tried to crack down
on their uncomfortable and often dangerous practice of hitchhiking: To
the older, long-term residents, Santa Cruz's new hippies were an 'undesirable
transient element.' In the summer of 1970, the city attempted to reduce their
numbers by limiting their transience: prompted by several conservative council
members, town legislators considered enacting an antihitchhiking ordinance.
Noisy young longhairs stormed a city council meeting, chanting 'Sieg heil!' and
'Power to the people!' The hippies saw the proposed ban as an outright attack
on their way of life. Hitching was not only central to their low-budget,
freewheeling lifestyle, it was the perfect expression of countercultural
ideals. It was a way of expressing trust in one's fellow man. It was living in
the moment instead of obeying a rigid schedule. And it was ecological and
antimaterialist, because hitchers didn't need to buy cars. In short, it was 'a
beautiful, groovy way to travel,' as one nineteen-year-old girl told Newsweek in 1969. Frequent news articles on the
burgeoning phenomenon all cited the hippie commitment to using highways for
impromptu human connection. As one hitcher put it to the Santa Cruz Sentinel in 1971, 'Mostly you just feel how much
people need each other and how much they take care of each other.' ...
Hitchhiking was not invented by the counterculture. For many decades after the
introduction of the automobile, hitching rides was perfectly mainstream. In the
days when few people owned cars, giving a ride to someone who needed one was
simply the decent thing to do. During the Depression, a lift was a means of
helping out the less fortunate. And once the war broke out, picking up
hitchhikers became nothing less than patriotic duty, since soldiers often
thumbed their way to or from their bases. Emily Post even sanctioned the
practice for young women who had jobs in the defense industry--though she
suggested drivers and hitchers restrict their conversations to impersonal
topics, like the weather. ...
Antihitchhiking campaigns began around the time the interstate
highway system did. In the late fifties, the Automobile Association of America
launched a campaign called 'Thumbs Down on Thumbers.' It aimed at dissuading
drivers from picking up hitchers by suggesting they might be dangerous felons
or con artists. The FBI--impelled in part by J. Edgar Hoover's hatred for
student activists who were hitching to civil rights and antiwar
demonstrations--joined the campaign, issuing scary statistics and creating a
poster titled 'Death in Disguise' that featured an ominous hitchhiker. 'Is he a
happy vacationer or an escaping criminal,' the poster asked, 'a pleasant companion
or a sex maniac--a friendly traveler or a vicious murderer?' The Saturday Evening Posthad the
answer in 1957: 'The Hitchhiker You Pick Up May Be a Dangerous Criminal!' The
magazine reported that 'Drivers have had their heads bashed in with stones,
have been dismembered and have been disemboweled by strangers they picked up on
the highways.' ...
In spite of early scare campaigns, hitchhiking continued to
grow in popularity. In the sixties, articles published in magazines as varied
as Life, Harper's, the National Review, Newsweek, and Scholastic all viewed thumbing in a positive light. A
1966 Sports Illustrated feature was typical: it recounted fun
stories about hitching, described as 'a valid ticket to adventure for
uncountable thousands every year.' Author Janet Graham--a practiced
hitcher--even included a perky list of 'Tips to Girl Hikers.' They included
'Take a companion-or a hatpin'; 'Be neat but not gaudy -- no low-cut blouses';
'If he's tipsy or wolfish, say you are heading elsewhere'; and 'Learn in five
languages: 'I'm going to throw up.' '
Part of why the practice persisted was that early campaigns
against hitching presented the hitchhiker as the threat. Early hitch-horror
films like Felix Feist's The Devil Thumbs a
Ride (1947) and Ida Lupino's The Hitch-Hiker (1953) cast the hitchhiker as villain, a
story line that continued even in later films like Roger Corman's The Hitcher, made in 1986 and
remade in 2007. In these films, the hitchhiker never has a backstory; he simply
looms into sight by the side of the road and opens his campaign of torment. "The Hitcher was partly inspired by Jim Morrison's
song 'Riders on the Storm,' from the 1971 Doors album L.A. Woman. Morrison's lyrics --
whispered and sung at the same time for added effect -- describe a hitchhiking
murderer and warn the driver not to give him a ride, but here, too, the image
feels like a metaphor. Morrison was not writing a public service message about
picking up hitchers: to be a rider on the storm is simply to be a person on
the turbulent journey through life, with the hitchhiker standing in for any
bogeymen who can ruin the trip. ... The hitcher-killer felt no more real than
the zombies, werewolves, or aliens who stalked the nation's dreams. And in
fact, the real danger of hitchhiking was almost never to the driver; it was to
the hitcher. By 1973, Santa Cruz was subject to a series of grisly murders
committed by Ed Kemper, who cruised area
highways giving rides to unsuspecting hitchhikers.” Ginger Strand – Killer on the Road:
Violence and the American Interstate (University
of Texas Press)
The secret word is Thumb
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