Finding Summer of Love poster child
The last runaway teenage girl from the legendary summer of 1967 — the Summer of Love — has been found. Her name is Jaki Katz and she is alive and well in Boise, Idaho. She was 16½ when she ran away from an unhappy home in Philadelphia and headed west 50 years ago.
She was looking for “love and acceptance’’ then. Now she is 66, has two children, is a painter, designer and sculptor and has had a lifetime of adventures, and no regrets. “Running away was the best thing I did,” she said.
Katz’s story came to light this summer at a Summer of Love exhibition at the main branch of the San Francisco Public Library. One of the displays was concerned with the young people who flooded into San Francisco that summer. A lot of them were runaways, lost kids looking for love in all the wrong places. There were posters all over the Haight-Ashbury: families searching for their runaway children.
One of the posters is on display at the public library exhibition this summer. It’s headlined: JAKI KATZ MISSING $500 REWARD. There was a picture of the girl. She was 5 feet 1 inch tall, 90 pounds, short brown hair, braces on her teeth. “Very talented artist, Loves to dance,’’ the poster said.
Hundreds of people have seen the exhibit since in went up in July. One of them, Margret Wynn, who was visiting from Los Angeles, wondered about Katz and ran a simple Internet search. Anybody could do it. And there she was: Jaki Katz Ashford, artist. She had a home page and a Facebook account. Wynn reached out. It was the same person. Jaki Katz had been found.
“It just goes to show you can’t run away in a digital age,” said Susan Goldstein, the city archivist, who found the poster in the library’s historical collections.
Katz turns out to be charming and talkative. “I’m so excited to be the poster child for the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love,” she said. Though she ran away heading west in the summer of 1967, she didn’t make it to San Francisco until the next year. While her parents looked for her in different parts of the country — including San Francisco — Jaki was living under an assumed name in Eugene, Ore.
Why did she run away? “I was a child of middle-class parents who lived in suburbia,” she said. “I was spirited and they were not. They were afraid of everything, and that was the problem. I was an unhappy child and a miserable teenager. So I decided to run away.”
She had a plan. After a high school class one day, she dumped her school books in the garbage and headed for the airport. She had saved some money, and bought a ticket to Portland, Ore., and made her way to Eugene, a college town where she had friends.
She got a job and rented a small apartment. She was on her own.
Her parents kept looking. The JAKI KATZ MISSING poster turned up in a Newsweek magazine. Her parents bought an ad in the National Observer. It was the 1967 equivalent of going viral. Somebody noticed. Katz is vague about who it was. Early in 1968 the phone rang in her apartment. “Jaki?” a man asked. “Yes,” she said. It was the cops.
She was sent back to Philadelphia, but she still disliked living at home. “I told them I’d run away again, first chance I got,” she said. But she agreed to wait until she finished high school. Then it was back to Oregon.
That summer, she felt the call of the wild and hitchhiked to San Francisco. “I remember standing on the corner of Haight and Ashbury. I’d arrived.”
The Summer of Love was over. “It was very different in 1968. There were a lot of problems, a lot of crime, but it was an amazing city,” she said She lived in the Fillmore and in Oakland. “I had a lot of very creative and subversive friends. A very subversive crowd. You know how it was. You did a lot of things you weren’t supposed to do.”
Eventually, she left that world behind and lived the rest of her life. She became a professional artist. She painted, did sculpture, and designed medals. Her paintings are vivid, colorful and political. She calls herself “a child of the ’60s.” She married and divorced. This summer, she took back her old name. “I”m Jaki Katz again,” she said.
Over time, she made peace with her parents and took care of them in their last years. Her mother lived to be 95; her father made it to 96. Katz remembers a last conversation with her father. “‘I love you, Poppy,’ I said. And he said. ‘I’m the luckiest man in the world to have such a wonderful daughter.’
“And that was the real gift,” Katz said.