Summer of Love

I was just watching a show on public television on the Summer of Love, i.e., the Summer of 1967, Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco. I had left there by the time that summer rolled around, but it would seem that I was there at the perfect time: October 1966-March 1967. After that, apparently, it started getting “heavy,” as we were wont to say. Far too many aimless young people straining limited resources, and having too many bad drug-induced trips; too many straight folk come to gawk at the weirdoes. It turned into a zoo, but I missed that part.

I went to S.F. from Washington, D.C., where I had lived for not-quite-a-year, after graduating from high school back in Texas. I and the roommate I had acquired in Washington, through a roommate-finding agency, had decided that we were bored with D.C., and wanted to experience the Land of Milk and Honey. So we piled our few paltry belongings into her new Mustang, and had driven halfway across country before a big screeching fight (the sort that two strong-minded females being together 24/7 can produce) sent Grace on alone. I had to cool my heels in Texas for a couple of months, while I worked as a clerk in an insurance company to make the money to continue the trip by bus.

But I made it at last, and instantly fell in love. This was the most beautiful city I’d ever seen, thanks largely to a perfect marriage of hills and architecture. You could live in a roach-infested tenement (as I did), and have stunning views out your windows. The cable cars with their clanging bells charmed me; I loved the way people swung on and off them, and helped turn them around at the bottom of the hill. The usually-cool weather agreed with me; I liked the frequent fogs.

And I just happened to wind up living in Haight-Ashbury. Had never heard of the place, knew virtually nothing about hippies – I was this nice middle-class girl from suburban Texas, after all, who had spent the previous year working as a trainee assistant buyer in a large department store in Washington, D.C. – how was I to hear about hippies? But suddenly I was surrounded by them. Which was just fine with me, though I was never really one of them, despite the long hair down my back, and the Jefferson Airplane on the stereo.

For one thing, I worked. It never entered my mind not to work. If you wanted a dependable roof over your head, and to know for sure where your next few meals were coming from, you had to work. My parents had taught me well. I was only 19 years old – turned 20 while I was there – but it was quite clear to me that all the free this and that was not free; somebody had to pay for it. So I put on my Jackie Kennedy A-line dresses every day and took the street car (not so charming as the cable cars) into the heart of the city to do my file clerk/recep-tionist/addressograph operator thing (does anybody out there remember addressographs?)

Nonetheless, I was not really in judgment mode. Indeed, that was a big part of the whole ethos: you do your thing, and I’ll do mine. I was enjoying the sense of freedom, just like everybody else. Freedom mainly from the strictures I (we) had always known. Can’t do this, mustn’t do that, should do such and such. To hell with all that. Listen to groovy music, make love (I very soon had a boyfriend – we picked each other up at the I/Thou Coffee House – and later my real boyfriend, who would eventually become my husband, joined me), take walks in the sunshine, lie in the grass at Golden Gate Park and read a book, buy some incense at a head shop, get high. True, my enjoyment of all this leisure was limited to the weekends, unlike my full-time hippie neighbors, but that was o.k. Life was still a cabaret.

The show I was just watching emphasized the drugs that were a large part of the scene. They weren’t really, for me. I certainly smoked the occasional joint – and unlike Bill Clinton, but like virtually everyone else, I inhaled – but the only time I ever tried anything stronger, Pink Ladies, my roommate called them, the high was pleasant enough but the coming down was so bad I swore I’d never try anything like that again. (And I never did.) For me it was much more about being in the middle of this a big, friendly, easy-going, generous confluence of young people. All of us in adamant rebellion against our parents, and what we felt they stood for. It is surely one of the great ironies of the twentieth century that the genera-tion that worked so hard to insure that their children would be spared the hardships they had known, mainly earned their children’s scorn.

Until those children got way older, and learned a few things.