Huckleberry House, after 50 years, keeps doors wide open to runaways
There was a telling moment the other day in Haight-Ashbury, when the contradictory legacy of the Summer of Love — feel-good hippie idealism and street-grubby desperation — flickered into view in one place.
It was at the Huckleberry Youth Health Center. Inside, groovy posters with slogans like “Loving yourself is the greatest revolution” adorned the walls, and the guy in charge of the laid-back medical staff wore a pork-pie hat.
At the entrance, 18-year-old Cassidy Schramm stood with his bulging backpack, battered guitar and Chihuahua named Janis. He needed cream for body lice after weeks of hitchhiking from Riverside County and camping in San Francisco. His blue jeans were brown and his long, stringy hair hung in clumps.
The clinic gave him the cream for free, and the staffers cheerily wished him well. “Stay safe,” one called out.
Even though he named his dog after rock-blues singer Janis Joplin, who used to live just a few blocks from the clinic, Schramm didn’t have
much of an idea of what the whole Summer of Love thing was about, beyond free love and music.
And he didn’t know he was standing in one of its most important byproducts — the descendant of the first shelter for runaway youths in the country. But there he was, being helped by a Huckleberry House staff whose mission has stayed pretty much the same since the doors opened in June 1967 — helping free spirits survive in a free-spirited but sometimes cold-hearted city.
“They’re really cool,” Schramm said. “I don’t really know the history around here, but, whatever it is, I’m glad it happened. Feels right. Like maybe the ’60s were supposed to be.”
That’s how those who work at Huckleberry House, offering shelter, health, justice and counseling services, see it.
Huckleberry House began that historic summer as an emergency response to the flood of kids pouring into the Haight. It was a joint effort by organizations including Glide Memorial Church and the activist group the Diggers, which were growing alarmed as the flowers-and-rainbow vibe of the neighborhood turned into something more desperate.
Drugs that were fun just a year or so before were becoming hard-core and addictive, and a lot of the kids who were showing up weren’t just looking for tie-dyed counterculture. They were fleeing abusive homes or embarking on their own journey of dope-addicted aimlessness.
Through the years since it began providing a roof to youths ages 11 to 17, the little shelter has grown into the comprehensive Huckleberry Youth Programs. The organization encompasses the shelter, a juvenile justice diversion program, an academy that helps youths go to college, an anti-sex-trafficking operation, the health clinic on Cole Street and a range of counseling and family support services.
“I think the values that this place began with are still here,” said Doug Styles, Huckleberry Youth Programs’ executive director. “Nobody needs to be kicked out of their home, and we’re all about hope, love, helping people for free wherever we can.
“There’s just less tiedye and long hair than there used to be.”
In its first year, Huckleberry House helped more than 600 kids in crisis. This past year, the combined operations had a $6 million budget with 70 employees, serving 6,700 youths.
Huckleberry traded the two-story house that served as a shelter on Broderick Street in 1981 for the current shelter’s location on Page Street, a stately three-story Victorian. With blue, white and aquamarine colors inside and out and casual but neat rooms filled with overstuffed chairs, the place is designed to be welcoming and calming for the 300 or so children who wash up on its doorstep each year.
Many are runaways, and, for them, Huckleberry House maintains six shelter beds for short stays. Some of the youths are just seeking help to deal with tumult at home.
No kid is turned over to the cops or sent home against his or her will, unless a criminal warrant or court order is involved. Instead, Huckleberry will try to get the young people and the parents into counseling.
“It’s really about families being in crisis, and we want to reunite them,” Styles said. “About 93 percent of our kids wind up going home again, but we stay with them with counseling for a while — the parents and the kids — to try to help them be successful.
“Most parents do want to love their kids, but for some reason it’s not working out,” Styles said. “Too many jobs, emotional issues, you name it.”
The need for such a shelter in the Haight was obvious to many back in 1967, despite the image being spread throughout the nation that the Summer of Love was pure hippie joy. The real summers of innocent flower power came the two years before, they said.
“The media drew a picture of what was happening in San Francisco in ’67 with peace and love and all that stuff, and it wasn’t accurate,” said Peter Albin, bass player for the band Big Brother and the Holding Company, which lived in the Haight at the time and was hitting it big with Joplin on vocals. “You had runaways and drug addicts, con men, users and abusers, juvenile delinquents. They all came here. It was unbelievable, and it changed things.
“They really needed something like Huckleberry House,” Albin said. “I’m glad it came along.”
Wayne LaRue Smith was one of those runaways in 1967, and he credits Huckleberry House with helping him survive what he said was a hellish childhood of constant beatings at the hands of an alcoholic father.
Smith wound up at Huckleberry House at age 12 after fleeing his home in Reno and taking refuge in the storeroom of a head shop on Haight Street.
“Being at Huckleberry House was the first time I remember spending time with adults who treated me with respect, with care and with love,” Smith recalled by phone from his home in Key West, Fla. The staff contacted his parents, who came to San Francisco and went through counseling with Smith before taking him home.
Although his time with his parents turned bad again, “my experience at Huckleberry absolutely set the stage for my healing later in my life,” Smith said. He went on to become a lawyer, and his 2008 victory in a Florida court allowing him and his partner to adopt a son helped led to the overturning of that state’s law banning LGBT people from adopting children.
Smith has also been a foster dad to 33 children. “Part of my reason for wanting to be a foster parent and to adopt is that I wanted to be like Huckleberry, to be a caring adult,” he said. “I am always grateful to that place.”