Hitchhiking: Why I'm Against It:

Hitchhiking has been a popular thing here in the United States (and throughout the world) for ages. In the 1940's and the 1950's, it was very common for soldiers on leave from the military, or who'd just come home from the war(s) to hitchhike home, or to hitchhike back to their base, if they were on their way back from their military leave.

During the mid to late 1960's, however, when the hippie/flowerchild counterculture began to go into full swing, hitchhiking here in the United States became even more commonplace. It was not uncommon to see people waiting on the ramp entering the Mass. Turnpike or other large interstate highways with signs that stated the place(s) that they were destined for, or even the direction that they wanted to go. Lucky!

I still remember stories that my (now long-deceased) grandparents used to tell me about how, up through the early 1960's, they used to pick up hitchhikers and even take them into breakfast or whatever, without ill results. There was one story, however, that my grandfather told me, about a guy he knew who'd picked up a hitchhiker, who'd gotten into the back seat of his car. The hitchhiker, who was carrying a sledgehammer, was preparing to hit the guy who'd picked him up over the head with it. The driver saw that in his rearview mirror just in the nick of time, and covered his head with his hand. The hitchhiker hit the guy who'd picked him up with the sledgehammer anyway, and permanently mashed the driver's hand grossly out of shape. Not a pleasant ending.

During the mid to late 1960's, when the counter-culture was in full swing, however, the situation regarding hitchhiking (and picking up hitchhikers) began to worsen, although it was mainly the people who hitchhiked and were picked up who were in the most danger. As the crime rate here in the United States began to increase rather rapidly, so did the grotesque incidents that occurred while hitchhiking, many, if not most of which failed to make the evening news or the papers.

In the 1970's, there was an even bigger increase in crime throughout the United States as a whole, and more ugly incidents occurring in which hitchhikers were the victims, became more commonplace, and more showed up in the papers.

Here in the Boston, MA area, for example, during the early 1970's, a whole slue of young women ranging in age from their late teens through their mid-20's, who were college students, or working woman, who were hitchhiking to classes at school, or to work, disappeared, never to be seen or heard from again. Their bodies were found, in very distant places, either by the roadside, or in wooded areas. One woman had been killed and nailed to the wall of a tenement in Boston's Roxbury section. Some women had been strangled, others had been stabbed. Moreover, these were tough women who knew their way around, had it together, and how did they end up? Dead. It was found that these woman had been picked up by a serial killer, who's now serving a lifetime jail sentence, where he belongs.

In the spring of 1972, two teenaged couples from the high school in which I'd graduated from three years before, who were on a double-date, on a Saturday night/Sunday morning, decided to hitchhike home. They were picked up by two men who, although they were clearly intoxicated, did not seem hostile, at least not at first. The two girls were let off first, without incident, but then things took a nasty turn. The two boys were taken to a very secluded area near the Lincoln, MA-Waltham line, where the two men who'd given the two young couples a ride, attacked and beat up both of the boys. One of the boys received a concussion due to being hit over the head with a blunt, heavy instrument, and the other was nearly mowed down by their attackers' car while they were escaping to get help.

In the mid-1970's, the grisly overall pick up-kill scenario was rather tragically played out once again, when two young college guys who were hitchhiking home very late one night from downtown Boston, were picked up by two rough-and-tough men from Southie (South Boston, MA), taken to a secluded place, and murdered.

During the 1970's, it was quite common to hitchhike. My younger sister did more hitchhiking than I did, although I, too, occasionally did some. Once, when I was in college, I hitchhiked a ride to my music lesson in Cambridge and was picked up by a young man who was a former drag-racing champion. He drove at what must've been 50-60 miles an hour, though the streets, and through Harvard Square, yet! I did get there in one piece, however. When I told my mom about it, she said "Well, at least a former drag-racing champion would know something about how to drive a car very fast." She had a point.

I had a couple of rather weird experiences myself, where the conversation started out perfectly innocuous, and then slid into sexual innuendoes and overtones. In each instance, I asked the guy to let me out.