Haight-Ashbury, 1967

I went back to LA after the Peace March, but the die was cast. I had spent a couple of days wandering around Haight-Ashbury while there and was totally taken with what was going on. People were having a ball! There was a fun-filled spontaneity to EVERYTHING! To someone who had grown up in an atmosphere of death and dying (my mother had died from  MS when I was 11), of McCarthyism and the Cold War, and then had spent four years in  college studying science and history while reading the  Existential nightmares of Khafka  and Sartre, the idea of chucking it all and having FUN was very appealing. Thus, I went back to LA, finished up whatever job I was doing at the time, and prepared to go to San Francisco and try my hand at the SUMMER OF LOVE!

Initially Golden Gate Park was the center of everything. There was this place called Hippie Hill and everyday musicians would congregate there and play for hours while scores of daily-arriving hippies laid out on its grassy slopes, smoking joints and thinking about what to do next.

I called her Miss Sunshine and in many ways this picture sums up what much of the summer was like: Hippie Chicks, music, stoned freaks, and people just digging the moment.

This picture also shows a stereotypical view of what went on everyday. It was a summer of LSD-induced trances and people lost in their own inner realms in the midst of hundreds of others who could only stand and watch--even while wishing they could be there too.

There were dozens of impromptu concerts that summer and this picture shows a typical crowd. As the summer progressed, the hair got longer and the clothes got wilder, but that didn't happen for awhile. At first we were just a bunch of straight people who weren't too sure what we were searching for, we just all knew that we WERE searching.

This multiple reflection picture made while looking through the side window of a concert sound truck captures my feeling of the kaleidoscopic reality that was Haight-Ashbury. Psychedelic Man!

The words at the top, the bright sun and dark shadow, and the Hippie girl striding along with her colorful shawl and straight hair certainly typify the feeling of Haight Street in the early summer. 

As the summer progressed, however, there was a decided change in the weather and by mid-July we were enveloped daily in chilly fogs as this study of two young women shows. They're still barefoot and mini-skirted while walking along looking like escapees from a scene on London's Carnaby Street, but the blush was off the rose. Languid sunshine-filled days in the park were a thing of the past. 

This is certainly a graphic example of what Haight-Ashbury looked like by late summer. People still kept coming, but now there was a look of apprehension in their faces. In a way it was sort of like what happened at Woodstock two years later which also started out as a giant lighthearted outdoor party until the rains came. Still, like Woodstock, we refused to be cowed by the sudden shift of reality. We all pulled together and made the most of what was still happening. The indoor concerts at the Fillmore and the Avalon and the Haight Theater became our places of refuge where we smoked our dope, dropped our acid and dreamed of wither we went from here.

Eventually summer ended. The party finally wound down and as fall approached, we got ready to go on with our lives. North of San Francisco, just beyond the Golden Gate Bridge was a place called Mount Tamalpais which gave one fantastic vistas of the surrounding area. Here we were, high above the fog-shrouded valleys below, staring out at the sublime view of a California sunset, the mighty Pacific Ocean covered by a fog bank as far as our eyes could see! The show was over, but its memories would see us through the thousand and one nights of the political nightmares which would soon follow. 

San Francisco Peace March, April 1967

The most contentious political issue to emerge in the 1960's was the question of the Vietnam War. Racial equality was an old story, but President Johnson's Civil Rights legislation had gone a long way toward establishing a framework for its eventual achievement, however there was no such solution for the War. Thus, by 1967 a growing vocal opposition to the War was sweeping the country. Meanwhile, in LA I was also hearing a lot of things about San Francisco, mostly about the Hippies and  Haight-Ashbury, so when I read there was going to be a large demonstration against the War in San Francisco, I decided it was time to go up and see what was going on. Therefore, in April I went to join the protest.

Allen Ginsberg, the  Beat Poet, had relocated to San Francisco and was a prominent figure both in the anti-war movement and also in the emerging New Age scene that was swirling around the LSD-inspired Hippie rock music /Eastern religion /Be-In movement.

The operative word in all of this was L-O-V-E!

The march itself was very impressive as it drew 100,000 people from the Bay Area and much of California to participate in what was a glorious, and peaceful protest of a war that ultimately would claim over 54,000 American lives, as well as countless Vietnamese deaths. In spite of the fact that we lost the war amidst dire threats that disastrous consequences would befall our nation and all of Southeast Asia, virtually nothing happened except that the country of Vietnam became united after decades of Colonial depredations by outside powers.