Beyond Paris. Paul Alexander Casper
but also inundated us with almost daily news about the Vietnam War, the rise of the counterculture, and fashion being turned upside-down by the mini-skirt. Drugs were an ever-increasing topic of conversation, with LSD especially fascinating. The world was seeing once and for all that the Civil Rights Movement was not going to go away. Rock music was exploding and piggybacking on all the subjects in the news. The young all over the world were being affected by the experiences of those who lived through Woodstock, those who changed Haight-Ashbury—the hippie world was now global.
Many people were saying many things, but one brilliant line hit the nail on the proverbial head when Dylan sang, “The times they are a changing.” As 1970 opened, many young people from various parts of the world began traveling, especially to Europe and parts east, to find themselves. Most were coming to loaf, to find cheap drugs and to avoid responsibility. I knew who I was and what I wanted. My plan was all laid out. It was good, and it was going to happen. I was different. After college and after a year of working in a nationally known graphic design studio in Chicago, I decided I knew most of what I had to learn about advertising/design–and about life. Quite an accomplishment to think so, let alone believe it, at that point. I was just twenty-one years of age.
Nothing was happening in Chicago, and I needed adventure. As seemed to happen often with me, I was sitting in a bar late one night with Steve Stroud, a Theta Chi Fraternity brother, fellow artist and good friend, and an idea was hatched. Our plan was to get jobs in advertising on the Champs-Élysées and have great adventures. Shortly thereafter, we quit our jobs, bought one-way tickets to Paris and were ready to go when Steve was drafted. It was only a couple of weeks before our travel date. I didn’t want to go at that point, but Steve never wavered. He said, “You have to live the dream for both of us; I might never make it back.” He put his money where his mouth was, drove me to New York and put me on an Icelandic flight departing JFK.
The flight was both eventful and uneventful. We were packed like sardines in, it seemed, one of Icelandic’s oldest jet props. It felt like we were flying in slow motion. The noise was deafening, and of course, I was anxious and antsy with the anticipation of shortly stepping foot on foreign soil for the first time. But the drudgery of the flight was broken by the announcement upon landing that there were problems with the aircraft. Apparently, our scheduled stop in Iceland—because the jet-prop couldn’t carry enough fuel to make it all the way across the Atlantic—was very lucky because somewhere over the deep blue sea all kinds of lights were going off in the cockpit…we needed to land, and quickly. Our short-planned layover lasted over twenty-four hours, with us passengers permitted to only walk around the airport.
I kept imagining what Europe would be like: would I be able to talk to anyone, would anyone understand me, how would I get to Paris from Luxembourg, would I be able to deal with French francs? What type of job would I obtain? So, when a fellow passenger, Doug Richmond, who was about my age and from New York, seemed to be interested in and curious about my plans to get a job in advertising and start a new life, I took the opportunity to explore why he was traveling. Doug was what I thought of as a New York type—not very tall, longish dark hair, bold and kind of mouthy. He had attitude and was worldlier than I was. As the day and night passed, and finally the flight continued, he decided he had to see if I could really get a job. He was just bumming and was intrigued. It seemed luck was with me again; my new acquaintance had taken French for many years in school, so we would be able to communicate. As he took care of one of my biggest concerns, I also took care of one of his. He was worried about finding an affordable place to stay. As Steve Stroud and I spent a couple of days in NYC before my flight, we had happened to start a casual conversation with a guy at the Museum of Modern Art. It so happens he had just returned from traveling himself, and he had a lead on a great small cheap hotel in Paris. He wrote the info down on a matchbook cover, and I put it in my pocket. But as we all know, luck can go both ways. As I talked to more people on the plane who lived in Europe and particularly Paris, the prospects for getting a job were not looking promising. A hard-to-get-your-hands-on work permit was apparently going to be a problem.
Our flight eventually landed, and Doug and I collected our heavy and way too many bags and found a night bus to Paris. It was 3:00 or 4:00 a.m. when we exited the Paris bus station. There was no one around and no taxis or any other type of transportation. We didn’t know the exact address of our destination, The Hotel Namur, but it wasn’t far from the intersection of the Luxembourg Gardens and St. Michel. Unfortunately, we were a block or so away from the Louvre and nowhere close to our destination. After crossing the Seine, always looking for non-existent taxis, and walking for literally four hours in pouring rain, we gave up on finding the Hotel Namur and talked our way into a seedy little place that didn’t even have a name but was dry.
It’d been a couple of days, and unbelievably it was still raining. We did eventually find the Hotel Namur, which was great and cheap. Unfortunately, the couple of local government offices I visited to find out about the process of getting a job were complete dead ends. It could take up to six months to get a work permit. I encountered a good number of smiles and giggles when I admitted I really didn’t know any French. What did I expect? But I was twenty-one and naïve.
It just wasn’t fair. I’d flown all this way just to be snickered at, laughed at and left on the street with not even a whisper of a hope of getting a job. One very nice French woman pointed out that not only was my dream of working in an ad agency in Paris caput, but I probably couldn’t even get a job as a street cleaner because I wouldn’t be able to understand my boss when he told me to go to a certain part of Paris to clean a certain street.
Although crushed by my recent findings, I discovered and got to know Paris, sometimes with Doug, sometimes alone. We went to the Louvre and sawthe Mona Lisa and Venus de Milo—amazing; walked and people-watched along the Seine—hypnotizing, visited Notre Dame and The Luxembourg Gardens—ancient greenery and captivating; The Eiffel Tower—beautifully arranged steel to the sky; The Arc de Triomphe—majestic at the end of The Champs Élysées. These are places that once seen can never be forgotten.
One night we went to The Olympia, a famous theater on the Boulevard des Capucines in the 9th arrondissement, to see a French variety show. I didn’t understand most of the evening’s entertainment, except for a French female singer, Marie Laforêt. Other than back in 1963, when I first heard “Sukiyaki” by Kyu Sakamoto, I had never really heard or been enticed by any foreign language song. But that night, when she sang “Paint It Black” by the Rolling Stones in French, I was mesmerized. Besides falling in love with her immediately, that entire experience of being captivated by mystical foreign music forever etched itself in my mind. I knew then I would have to find that kind of music, wherever or whenever; it would now be part of my life forever.
In recent days I’d been walking back to the Hotel Namur by myself, as Doug turned in somewhat earlier than me. It was now around 9:00 p.m., and I still hadn’t eaten dinner. At least it had stopped raining. I’d been sitting too long and needed to stretch my legs. Down Boulevard Raspail to Rue Leopold Robert, looking down a small, quiet street, I saw a warm ochre light breaking the darkness. Just a nondescript small café, but it looked empty and inviting. I entered and slid into a small table beside the front window, a perfect spot to write down some of the happenings of the day, as I tried to do every night, in my travel diary.
As I was finishing my bowl of boeuf bourguignon, a group of people arrived, a hodge-podge of unknown nationalities. One of the guys sat in a chair next to me, smiled, and in what appeared to be a South African or Australian accent, asked, “American? Francais? Oder sind Sie Deutscher?” Before I could answer, he continued in English. “What’s your story, mate?”
I wasn’t sure what he meant, so I said, “I’m not sure I have a story.”
If he meant what was I doing here, that was a good question. It certainly looked like I wasn’t going to get a job. If anyone needed a story, I did and quick. Right now, I was stuck in neutral in Paris. Quite literally up the Seine without a paddle.
“Maybe you will, if not today or tomorrow, maybe very soon,” came his reply as he got up and walked over to his group. One of the girls brought out a guitar and started strumming.
I ordered another beer as a guy in his sixties walked through the door and sat