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Truly Strange Tales of My 1970s Babysitters
Multigenerational childcare weirdness
My first babysitters were “hippies”, as my parents called them. It was San Francisco in the late 1960s, and my dad was a theatrical director, so, yeah, we were surrounded by hippie actors, though my dad was a bit older than they and most assuredly what they would have called “a straight”. That used to mean a person who didn’t do drugs.
I have no real memory of these babysitter hippie chicks. I’ve been told one of them wasn’t paying attention and let my younger sister, a toddler, walk out of the house and roam the streets of San Francisco until an old man brought her back home. We still don’t know how he knew where we lived. Maybe he was an angel.
I hope to God none of these babysitters gave me or my sister LSD sugar cubes back then, but we’ll never know. But sometimes, I can feel weird things happen to my brain when I listen to The Beatles’ “Sergeant Pepper” album, or Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb.”
My vivid memories of babysitters happen after my family moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1971. My dad was hired as Artistic Director of The Milwaukee Repertory Theater, so my parents now had money to hire sitters from babysitting agencies.
