Recently I was noodling around the Internet when I came upon a video of a flash mob that was pulled off by a group on University of Minnesota music students. Later that evening, after a couple of beers, it dawned on me that I and about nine other Green Bay fifteen year olds had invented the flash mob in 1967. Please stop rolling your eyes and sighing and reserve judgment until you read the rest of this post. Once you read the whole story, I think, you will agree with me, that I am owed royalties from everyone who has ever planned, participated in, or witnessed a flash mob.
1967 was a heck of a year in the good old U.S. of A. Race riots erupted in Buffalo, Detroit, Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Newark, Tampa, and Washington D.C. Martin Luther King publically denounced the Vietnam War and Muhammad Ali refused induction into the military. Large scale anti Vietnam War protest were held on both coasts and the students at Cheyney State, the oldest African-American institution of higher learning, took over their university. The Dow Chemical protests broke out on the campus of the University of Wisconsin – Madison signaling the beginning of years of radical anti war protests. The first “Be – Ins” were held in San Francisco and New York and San Francisco’s “Summer of Love” blossomed in and around Golden Gate Park. It is safe to say the country was experiencing a certain level of turmoil.
Not so much Green Bay. The city’s entire African American population was fully engaged with Vince Lombardi in winning the Ice and Super Bowls. The University of Wisconsin-Green Bay was just in the process of becoming a four-year institution and the anti-war movement was pretty much a guy named Bob, who used to banter with my mother on our driveway after he walked home from high school with my brother. However, to paraphrase Bob Dylan, we knew something was happening out there, but we didn’t know what it was. I don’t think the flash mob would have been birthed outside the context of our shared national experience.
In mid-September of 1967 I began going down to Tower Park after dinner to sit with a group of 15 year olds and shoot the breeze. I wasn’t really friends with these guys but was accepted, probably because I could be a little funny once in a while and they just didn’t care one way or the other. The collective reputation of this group wasn’t great but our activities at the park were pretty benign.
Tower Park was about two blocks from my house and the entire park was about a third of a small city block. The park got its name from an old water tower that stood in the back right hand corner of the park. On two sides of the park there was a two and a half foot stone wall that we would sit on when we gathered. Across the street was a small store that featured “penny candy” and canned goods that had been on the shelves since the Korean War. Next door was a dairy store and across the street was a small drug store, realty office and a barbershop.
The local merchants weren’t crazy about having us there but we never really did anything that could hurt their business so there was an uneasy truce between us. Sure, once in a while we would see an older brother of a kid we knew drive up and run in and get something from one of the stores. All nine or ten of us would pile into his car and refuse to get out until he drove us where we wanted to go. No one seemed to resent these types of things all that much and usually the “victim” would end up having a good time driving us to wherever we wanted to go.
One other time one of the neighbors talked to us about being loud and using foul language. To our credit, we took that complaint seriously and self policed ourselves when things got loud or someone forgot and got too profane. By and large, it was a peaceful, if uneasy, co-existence.
About twice a week a kid named Nick would join us and was dubbed our leader. Nick was a troubled kid. I first met him when we were seven years old. I was standing in my front yard drinking a coke when Nick walked up with a live snake in one hand and asked for a drink of my coke. I wasn’t inclined to share because I didn’t know Nick that well, but more importantly, he had a very obvious mucus problem going on. When I refused, Nick asked me if I would change my mind if he put the snake he was carrying in his mouth. This didn’t seem to sweeten the pot very much, so again, I told him no. He put the snake in his mouth and then demanded I give him a drink. We ended up in a fight that ended with him going home crying.
Between the age of seven and fifteen, Nick fell in with a group of older guys that would probably be described today, as skinheads. Nick did a lot of weight training and they taught him to fight and by the time he was fifteen he was one of the toughest kids around, if not the toughest. I was always grateful that he never sought revenge for our earlier fight because I would have ended up a bloody mess.
Nick was the best dressed fifteen year old in the city. A typical outfit would be dark dress pants with a knife edged crease, spit shined shoes, a starched button down dress shirt and an Arnold Palmer cardigan sweater. He always looked like he was going to meet up with the Rat Pack and do Vegas up right.
When he did come down to the park he would pace back and forth in front of us and expound on whatever was on his mind. We, his audience, would insult him, his ideas and even his clothes. He would feign outrage with a goofy grin on his face and everyone would have a good time with it. None of us would have dared to talk to him that way under normal circumstances but he seemed to really enjoy the give and take and his unofficial designation as our leader.
One Tuesday evening, someone, and I don’t remember who, said we should have a rally. The idea was that we would tell everyone we knew to meet in the park at 6:00pm on a certain day. That was the entire agenda. Just show up. There wasn’t any other plan then to meet next Tuesday in Tower Park. Then in a true stroke of genius, someone suggested we call it the “Tower Power Rally.”
All the next week we would greet each other with “Tower Power” and a closed fist salute, held shoulder high. This was years before social media made it possible to spread a message far and wide almost immediately. All notice of the Tower Power Rally was done face to face, one attendee at a time.
As the day approached, none of us knew what to expect. We were hoping to get a few laughs out it and really didn’t spend much time discussing what was going to happen. We had no agenda and no idea how many kids would take the trip down to the park.
On the evening of the rally, I went to my bedroom after dinner to choose my footwear for the evening. Somehow subliminally, I knew running might be in the cards so I selected a pair of low cut black Chuck Taylor All Star basketball shoes.
I was always a punctual kid, a legacy bequeathed me by my father, and was one of the first to arrive. As I was sitting on the wall kids started to trickle into the park. Before long, all of the regulars came and were joined by about 50 other kids. The neighborhood merchants came out in front of their stores and eyed us warily.
At some point someone asked: “Where’s Nick? We need our leader.” Nick lived about two blocks from the park and it was decided that the now, sixty or seventy kids would walk over to his house and bring him back to the park. As we filled the sidewalks and spilled into the street, neighbors drew their blinds and peeked out from behind their drapes.
Nick’s house was one of those tiny houses that sit at the back of a long skinny lot. When we arrived we filled the front yard and spilled across the sidewalk into the street. A chant went up from the crowd: “We want Nick! We want Nick!” Eventually Nick came out on his front porch holding a dishtowel in one hand. His tiny four foot something mother was right behind him. As Nick appeared the crowd roared and the chant grew loader. Nick’s mother addressed the crowd saying he could not come out that night because he had to finish drying the dishes. The crowd rained boos down on the little woman. Nick spread his arms out, embracing us all, and said, “Ma, my people. They need me.” The crowd roared. Nick’s mom then grabbed on to his arm to physically restrain him from leaving the porch. Nick finally gave in to parental guidance and went back in the house, presumably to finish drying the dishes.
It was a good thing that Nick’s mom had the courage to stand up to the mob. She knew Nick was always one incident away from being committed to the Boy’s School in Wales WI (read prison) and the last thing she was going to let happen was to let Nick go down to the park and ”lead his people.”
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Having failed to shake Nick loose from that ferocious maternal grasp, the kids walked back to the park. When we got there, the crowd had tripled. Adding to the spectacle was the younger neighborhood kids, who were riding their bikes around the edges of the crowd. After all, this was the height of the baby boom and every neighborhood had about eight gazillion kids.
Kids were sitting on every square inch of the stone wall and standing in groups throughout the park. Every bus that stopped at the corner by the park burped forth more kids from all parts of the city.
As dusk began to fall, people started talking about leaving. All of a sudden, a bevy of police cars, lights flashing and sirens screaming descended on the park from all directions. A paddy wagon pulled up and stopped right in front of where we usually sat. The place took on a surreal feel.
I began to examine my escape routes and determined I was in a good enough position to stick around and watch what was unfolding for a little while. My friend Don (Uncle Don) was late getting to the Park because he had football practice. He had arrived about a minute before the cops showed up. I watched as he was ushered into the paddy wagon. Later he told me a cop had asked him what he was grinning at and when he was unable to give an appropriate response, he was given a ride downtown.
Kids scattered in all directions and the police grabbed as many as they could. I took off through a back yard with a friend and we were making our way back to my house when a police car came screeching around the corner and a cop began running toward us. We took off and this is where my choice of footwear paid off. My friend had chosen the more stylish penny loafer without socks look and as he took off one of his shoes didn’t go with him. The cop was able to grab him and he received a free ride downtown.
When I got home I grabbed the basketball and began to shoot baskets on the driveway. Before long kids making there way out of the dragnet joined me and soon we had a game of fifteen on fifteen going. This drew my mother’s attention, as she knew I wasn’t anywhere near that popular, and she stuck her head out the back door and asked what was going on. I told her something was happening at Tower Park and we were playing basketball and staying out of trouble. Apparently satisfied, she went back in the house.
After a little while I walked down to the corner where the police had barricaded the street and innocently asked the cop standing there what was happening. He told me it was none of my business and I should get my ass home as fast as I could. While I was there, I heard his radio crackle to life and a slightly apprehensive voice say, “They are coming from all over.”
I walked back to the house and played a little basketball. Before long everyone went on their way and I went in the house. The Tower Power rally was over.
The next day our gym class teachers lined us up at attention in military fashion and walked around like Colonel Klink and Sergeant Schultz sticking their faces close to the usual suspects’ mugs and sneering “Tower Power aay.” We all used our well-practiced, blandly innocent looks and the matter was dropped after a couple of days. There was nothing to pursue anyway. There had been no property damage and no laws had been broken. All we had done was exercise our right to free assembly and invent the flash mob in the process.
So that’s my case for claiming credit for inventing the flash mob. Sure there have been enhancements since 1967, but any fair person would agree that my claim for royalties is justified. So if you have planned, participated in, or seen a flash mob please send me a onetime royalty payment of $17.95. If one gullible person sends me the money, I will buy a case of beer with it. Think of it as an investment. Imagine what else I might invent after a few more beers.
