Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Fifty years of love and Haight
San Francisco commemorates the season the hippies came to town and stayed awhile
San Francisco commemorates the Summer of Love’s golden anniversary, man. Flowers in hair, optional.
SAN FRANCISCO — This year marks the 50th anniversary of the 1967 Summer of Love. There will be many stories written and told about it. This almost certainly will be the only such story that won’t mention singer Scott McKenzie and the John Phillips lyric, “If you’re going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair.” Except for that. While the original “Summer” was happening, San Francisco wasn’t quite sure what to do with it, but, in general, it coped. So in 2017, it’s celebrating.
What was the Summer of Love? It was many things, but here’s the shorthand version: In 1967, thousands of young people — many of them hippies or those who would be hippies, lured by visions of unrestrained access to a variety of pleasures, some of them hallucinatory and others more organic — descended on San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood and environs for the summer to share it all with like-minded folks. Some had flowers in their hair.
Upper estimates of how many actually showed up approach 200,000, but no one seems to really know. For sure, it was a lot, remarkable at a time when the dominant interstate communication device was still a rotary dial telephone.
By the end of August, most had staggered back to school. But the impact of the event has been debated for ... well, for 50 years. Naysayers will have their nay, but Dennis McNally, San Francisco-based author, historian and longtime publicist for the seminal band of the era, the Grateful Dead, says this: “All the issues that happened in San Francisco — it happened in many places, but San Francisco was ground zero — every one of those, in highly evolved form, is central to the culture wars that are going on right now.”
The issues: gender identity and sexuality, natural foods, the environment, drugs, materialism.
The 50th anniversary celebration of the Summer of Love actually began in the Winter of Last Year with retrospectives and forums and exhibitions all over the area. They’ll continue through the Summer of This One.
Some of the commemorations will be as appropriate as a 50th anniversary edition of the Monterey International Pop Festival, on the same dates (June 16-18) and on the same stage as the original that spotlighted Jimi Hendrix, Big Brother and the Holding Company (with Janis Joplin), the Grateful Dead and many more. (Most of the original performers, due to fate, will be noshows this time.) It was that festival that drew thousands and pretty much set everything else in motion.
And some commemorations will be, well ... “Summer of Love Blanket Day” at AT&T Park (a ballpark that didn’t exist in 1967) will be on June 25. The first 20,000 fans will get a blanket before the Giants play the Mets.
For a complete schedule of all that’s going on, including the de Young Museum’s exhibit, “The Summer of Love Experience: Art, Fashion, and Rock & Roll,” check out www.sftravel.com/sum mer-love-2017.
By most accounts, the Summer of Love was a memorable, and for many even a joyous, few weeks. We still see institutions here that were born then of necessity and compassion.
A former mime troupe called The Diggers established free-food centers that summer, and others carry on the tradition. Another Diggers invention, a street-cleaning program in the Haight that traded light maintenance work for shelter and food for the homeless, lasted decades, and was revived and expanded in 2014.
Says Sunshine “Sunny” Powers, a shopkeeper (Love on Haight boutique) and spreader of glitter: “Anyone you see in an orange vest cleaning the street is a homeless youth.”
The story of the Summer of Love, like so many things that summer, defies orderliness. A reasonable chronology would begin with the Beats — poets and authors and philosophers and lovers of jazz and espresso (Ginsberg, Kerouac and more) — who in the 1950s first settled in the North Beach neighborhood, then found in Haight-Ashbury cheaper rents, fewer tourists and that traditional San Francisco tolerance.
They were joined in the neighborhood by artists, musicians and entrepreneurs. By the mid-1960s, Haight-Ashbury’s sometimes-wobbly but affordable housing was occupied by as many people as it could accommodate. The neighborhood had a vibe.
The Grateful Dead, not yet rich or famous, took over a house on 710 Ashbury St. For a time, Janis Joplin lived with her girlfriend up the street, at 635. Others in the neighborhood, at various intervals: Patty Hearst, Charles Manson, a relatively conventional Danny Glover, Country Joe McDonald, Jimi Hendrix, Sid Vicious. Grace Slick. Hells Angels.
And onto these streets, in one memorable summer, came 60,000 or 100,000 or 200,000 young people seeking reinforcement or new friends or new sensations. And what a summer it was.
And what a summer this one could be. It won’t be 1967, but ...
“The city is really going to celebrate the anniversary,” McNally says. “An element of that is nostalgia. There’s still plenty of 70year-olds alive who actually remember it.”
Some of them may even have some flowers in their hair. If they have any hair left.