Free clinic founded amid ‘total chaos’
The Wednesday night, June 7, party celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic, honoring founder David Smith ,wasa tribal gathering of veterans of the ancient Haight-Ashbury. These weren’t the stoners sitting in doorways and smoking away their prospects; these were the people who came to and are still coming to the rescue, working to provide health care for street people and park residents, and to turn around the lives of alcoholics and addicts.
The party was at Love on Haight, a store whose premises were donated for the occasion by owner Sunny Powers. There was a display of fancy cakes decorated with adages of the era (“Love is the Answer,” for example), and the door to the old clinic, which warned patients, “No Dealing” and “No Pets,” and was propped up against one wall.
Ceremonies emceed by Ben Fong-Torres featured a coterie of supportive and admiring politicos, as well as staffers and administrators who have been toiling in these fields for years. In 2011, Walden House leader Vitka Eisen, who was at the celebration, became CEO of HealthRight 360, now the parent organization for the Free Clinic, Walden House and an array of clinics that serve all kinds of needs, in accordance with the credo “Health care should be a right, not a privilege.”
Board of Supervisors President London Breed hailed Smith as a “change maker,” mentioning that losing her sister to a drug overdose had brought home the importance of the work. Also speaking: state Assemblyman David Chiu, Assessor-Recorder Carmen Chu and declared mayoral candidate Mark Leno, who recalled being a freshman at the University of Colorado, driving with friends to an anti-Vietnam War demonstration in San Francisco. One of his companions “had her mouth open and someone put something in it. An hour later, we were at the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic.” Eisen noted the number “of people’s lives you saved, who went on to save other lives,” and Smith credited her for saving the clinic with the merger.
If you’re thinking that the reverent remarks of all the remarkers were met with hushed respect, well, this was a party for, by and about iconoclasts. I talked with Barf Bucket Bob ,whowas taking pictures and asked “What’s funny?” when I laughed at that identification. “That’s my name, my title and my job,” he said. The real life problems of the Summer of Love? Dr. Gantt Galloway said in his years at the clinic, he’d dealt with “intense psychedelic reactions.” The clinic’s first piece of equipment, he said, “was a lava lamp.”
“What was the Summer of Love like?” Smith asked the crowd. “It was total chaos. Like this party. We had a hard time figuring out who was in charge. We had a great time.”
P.S.: As to the June 21 lighting of the Conservatory/Summer of Love concert in the park, Cosi Pavalko, founder of the Haight Ashbury Seniors, is complaining that the living veterans of the era are being left out. Surrounded by Summer of Love hoopla, she says, the residents of the neighborhood have “zero, zilch” senior services. “No free lunches. No senior center. Nothing even at the local library until I started gathering the graying tribe a year ago . ... We are the ‘commune generation’ with no community . ... We can’t even boogie at the Solstice event because they sold out in hours. No fair.” (It’s a free event, but tickets were required.)
Laurie R. King, who lives in Santa Cruz and writes fiction, including 25 novels, sent along a new book to which she’d contributed. “Anatomy of Innocence: Testimonies of the Wrongfully Convicted,” is a compendium of stories about people who were convicted of crimes and served (in most cases) lengthy sentences .... before science or logic or investigation or truth-telling served to exonerate them.
The book is edited by Laura Caldwell, founder of the Life After Innocence project, and writer/lawyer Leslie Klinger. Each chapter tells the story of one such victim, is written by a person known as a crime writer, and is followed by a brief description of whether restitution was made by the authorities who wrongly imprisoned the subject. A chilling proportion of the stories are about rape/ murders — with DNA evidence clearing the accused — and about false confessions obtained through torture.
Editors Caldwell and Klinger will be at the Main Branch of the San Francisco Public Library on June 28 at 7 p.m. (And King will be at San Francisco’s Book Passage on Wednesday, June 14, talking about her “Lockdown.”)
“I need to lose weight so I can eat pizza.” Woman on Fourth Avenue, overheard by Jan Feichtmer