This month, Janis Lodermeier returns to talk about hitchhiking.
A lot of people hitchhiked. Like hippier types, but then it started to get really spooky, not just in this neighborhood, just anywhere. It never was safe. I should not have been doing it. But I didn’t have a lot of choices. And sometimes you meet up with somebody that was hitchhiking and it could be fun. Until it wasn’t. And there were times I even told some people that I hitchhiked, that gave me rides, I said ‘you should be careful too of who you pick up because they’re crazy crazy people too.’
Some of the rides were fun and…most of them were not memorable. I wouldn’t remember and then they, it was just getting to the point where there were, it was bad most the time. [Even] my brothers told me ‘you shouldn’t be doing this anymore.’ And stuff, but I would not recommend it. Times were different. You’d have to be plum crazy to do it now, for real. Even then it was just a brief period where it was all it was fairly safe, but then it but I would never say, recommend doing that. I rarely got picked up by a woman, even hippie women, but I don’t blame them. I used to go kind of like ‘whaaaat we’re kind of the same.’ You shouldn’t do that, and a lot of rednecky type people were getting long hair, it was getting harder and harder to tell who was who. You had to be careful who you picked up because there are crazy people both ways and stuff so I survived it, but I was lucky.
I think once when I was hitchhiking, Dennis Banks, one of the leaders of AIM gave me a ride. I’m 99% sure that it was him… When I was thanking him for the ride and closing the door and we were right in front of the… he dropped me off in front of the Original AIM headquarters, which I didn’t know were the headquarters at the time. When we were looking right at each other I thought ‘that is him’ because I’d seen him on TV a lot and in the papers and he was really really nice. And I actually got to meet, before he died, Clyde Bellacourt who was one of the other leaders of it at the coffee shop, whatever direction that is. I just saw him in the coffee shop… So that was kind of neat. So I got to meet both of them.
