The Summer of Love

This piece picks up at my first time driving a stick and my last day employed at a ranch, from which I was removed after driving into the Post Office. Into, not to, as intended. It was an accident. But it destroyed a few panes of government glass. I headed west and arrived in San Francisco, where I found a job and a room in Haight-Ashbury during the Summer of Love.

Hippies came to The Haight to inhale and indulge. Cops came to contain or arrest. Reporters came to write it up with speed, and I do mean with speed. Photographers came loaded with film, or just loaded.

There were 100,000 hippies plus sex, drugs, rock ’n roll and one quite bewildered girl on the lam. And it was the Age of Aquarius. Every wall sported psychedelic signs with quotes like, “LSD is a psychedelic drug which occasionally causes psychotic behavior in people who have NOT taken it” (Timothy Leary).

Or “I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me” (Hunter S. Thompson) with whom I later worked at Rolling Stone.

Hippies woke up at 3 or 4 PM each day, ingested, then ambled out to panhandle at the aptly named Panhandle Park. In fact, they rescued the Panhandle from the bulldozer, which would have replaced it with a freeway. If built, the freeway would have saved commuters six minutes between downtown and the Golden Gate Bridge.

I smoked weed, if offered, but did not do shrooms or psychedelics. Instead, I worked two jobs, got maced and went to San Francisco State College, where I worked at the library and attended classes, and to Berkeley (The University of California at Berkeley), where I also worked at the library and attended class when I could get there without being gassed.

This was during the war in Vietnam, which wasn’t a war. Rather, it was a “conflict” that engendered peaceful protests which were met by phalanxes of State Police, City Police, County Police, University Police, and the National Guard, outfitted with gas masks, to preclude demonstrations on campus.

Technically, more than two students in any one place was a demonstration, and even peaceful demonstrations were a threat to peace, while tear gas and mace were not a threat to peaceful gatherings.