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. 
