Sixties futility

[Bekah]

On Apr 9, 2009, at 11:49 PM, Richard Fiero wrote:

> Robin Landseadel wrote:
>>  . . . It was a short step from the summer of love  to the drug  
>> nightmare of 1968 in the Haight.

Yes, it was - way too short - but I think the message spread quickly  
and it thrived for a long time.

I was there in spring and summer of  1967 (living on Sacramento St.)   
then away from about September of that year until March 1969 (in  
Berkeley only for a long weekend during that time).   In March 1969   
what I saw at the corner of Haight and Ashbury was horrible.   Many  
of the storefronts were closed and the very few people on the street  
looked haunted - one wearing a cape over his head with a really grim  
face peering out.  It was totally depressing,  very sad, upsetting.

It had been coming on for awhile I suppose.  In March and for years  
prior the Haight area was very safe,  lower middle class and college  
students finding cheap rent and in early 1967 a certain easy  
camaraderie within the community with constant flute music playing on  
the stoops and in store fronts.  Artists and musicians lived there  
(from what I hear - I didn't know any.)   Incredible scene.  Then the  
press got hold of it and  by the summer there were lots and lots of  
people ages 10 to 50 and tourists driving through.  During that  
circus of mid-summer 1967 some folks carried mannequin parts for the  
show of it but all the stores were open and people were on the  
streets at all hours.   But then came the day in late summer when  
someone was picked up for carrying a human leg and a few days later a  
body was found in the Bay.   I learned later that this was just  
before Charlie Manson picked up his girls and headed south.   Also  
about the same time some folks held the burial of the hippies in  
effigy in the park and many left to spread the word  - many to go  
back to school - including myself - but some to communes in the north  
like Morningstar Ranch or Wheelers but all the way up to Oregon.    
(Reagan was governor - '67 - '75 -  and despised Morningstar - and  
redwood trees and so on.)  There were other communes in Southern  
California like Catalina (an enormous house near USC) and ?  -  I  
visited  a couple of these  in  1970 I think - memory fails.   Maybe  
Inherent Vice can use them?

The commune scene was also quite different - some were "back to the  
earth" types and others were urban and very political -  I see the  
1969 characters in TPR as being very much along the lines of the  
urban political type.  Catalina was a very clean house with posters  
of Che on the walls and ex-law students as residents.  They'd dropped  
out of school because the revolution was imminent.

The times of the 1967 hippies was so very short but their impact was  
great because the mood and attitudes  spread (political attitudes  
included but that becomes problematical).   Pardon any errors in the  
above - it's an era of heavy-duty nostalgia for me.  -  There's quite  
a lot on the web about it but I'm getting off topic.

Bekah