IVIV news: "Groovy artifacts from 1960s Marin County commune"

[Doug Millison]

http://www.sacbee.com/topstories/story/2154527.html

Groovy artifacts from 1960s Marin County commune sorted
By Susan Ferriss
Published: Wednesday, Sep. 2, 2009 - 12:00 am | Page 1A

NOVATO – The '60s aren't dead. They're in an archaeological site north  
of San Francisco.

An old commune where the Grateful Dead and other bands used to romp is  
being excavated and items catalogued by state park archaeologists at  
Olompali State Historic Park.

Among the artifacts: the classic hippie beads, a marijuana "roach  
clip," fragments of tie-dyed clothes, and a reel-to-reel tape a Marin  
County studio technician has promised to try to restore. [. . .]

But the commune, he said, is as much a part of Olompali as the rest of  
its history, stretching back thousands of years.
"I see the commune as part of the Cold War," he said. "If we hadn't  
had the Cold War, we wouldn't have had Vietnam, and if we hadn't had  
Vietnam, we wouldn't have had the commune. It was one of the reactions  
to the war."  [. . .]

The commune members lived, Parkman also noted, in a historic 1911  
stucco mansion that was built on and attached to an 1828 adobe of a  
Miwok Indian chief. The adobe, now fully visible, is the oldest  
standing structure in the state north of San Francisco and a national  
registered historical site.  [. . .] acid rock was their soundtrack.  
And in 1969, while many in the commune were working at a rock concert  
light show in San Francisco, an electrical fire broke out at the  
mansion and gutted it.

The fire was part of a downward spiral Olompali-Barton blames on a  
decision to open the commune up to more than a closely knit circle of  
families.

"There were the freeloaders who came," she said, "who sat in the  
living room playing music and not helping at all."