Lauren “Dick” Hallgren

December 24, 1938 - November 22, 2023

Lauren “Dick” Hallgren, a journalist remembered for his gimlet-eyed view of San Francisco in the 1960s, died at an East Bay nursing home on November 22. He was 84.

Hallgren worked as a staff writer at the San Francisco Chronicle from 1962 to 1973, where he was among a stable of irreverent reporters who chronicled the social changes that swept the city during that tumultuous decade.

“Dick Hallgren was one of those free spirits who used to inhabit newsrooms in the glory days of newspapering,” recalled veteran Chronicle reporter and columnist Carl Nolte. “He was fun. He was always interesting. And he was a damn good reporter.”

Hallgren was a general assignment newsman who covered all and everything in San Francisco — neighborhood re-development plans, the brutal home invasion and murder of two aging astrologers, a “beautiful young receptionist” trapped in an high-rise elevator for nine hours, or a dog grooming mix-up that caused two identical looking poodles to be sent home to the wrong owners.

But Dick was especially interested in writing about — and participating in — the spiritual revolution born in the city’s Haight Ashbury neighborhood and fueled by psychedelic drugs and local rock bands like the Jefferson Airplane and Grateful Dead. He covered the 1967 police raid at the Dead’s communal Haight Street crash pad, where several members of the band were arrested for the then-crime of possessing marijuana.

The longest article he ever wrote for the Chronicle was a 1969 profile of Richard Alpert, the former Harvard psychology professor and LSD evangelist, written shortly after Alpert returned from a pilgrimage to India and changed his named to “Baba Ram Dass.”

Hallgren was a longtime resident of the East Bay, and worked for a time in later years as a part-time copy editor at the Oakland

Tribune. In the 1970s, he took on various gigs in political consulting and public relations, where his connections and quick wit came in handy.

Dick was born in Edmonton, Canada on Christmas Eve, 1938, and put up for adoption. He was an only child raised by a severe Swedish father and gregarious Scottish mother. His father worked as a prison guard. To make ends meet, the family took in boarders, including members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

His parents didn’t tell him he was adopted until they were both close to death.

Dick graduated from high school in Prince George, British Columbia, where his family moved when his father got a job at a new prison.

Inspired by the 1957 Jack Kerouac novel On the Road, Hallgren took off on an extended road trip, winding up in New York City, where he worked a variety of odd jobs and lived for a time in Greenwich Village.

By the time the 1960s began, he was back in Vancouver and enrolled as an undergraduate at the University of British

Columbia. During college, he landed jobs at several local newspapers, including the Vancouver Sun.

It was while working as a reporter there that he stumbled across a mysterious man named Captain Al Hubbard, a pioneering LSD evangelist with shady ties to British and American intelligence agencies. In 1959, Hubbard led Hallgren on two high-dose LSD trips, the first was nightmarish and the second blissful. “Coming out,” he recalled, “I was in a radiant place.”

Dick liked to call himself “the first psychedelic college dropout.” His early psychedelic experiences in Vancouver, and later in San Francisco, were chronicled in a 2017 book, Changing Our Minds — Psychedelic Sacraments and the New Psychotherapy, written by Don Lattin, his longtime friend.

“Dick was a lifelong spiritual seeker,” Lattin recalled. “When I first knew him, he was living as a Zen monk at a meditation center in Berkeley — partly as a serious student of Buddhism and partly because he was broke. He struggled a lot with financial insecurity in the last few decades of his life, but he mostly handled it with humor and grace. He called in ‘brinksmanship.’ “

In recent years, Lattin said, Hallgren suffered from mild dementia and memory loss, “but he never stopped being himself.”

He was briefly married twice in the 1960s. When asked for details in recent years, he evoked the psychedelic Fifth Amendment, a variation on “if you can remember the Sixties, you weren’t there.”

“Over the last six or seven years, he was shuffled between various hospitals, skilled nursing facilities and board and care homes for the indigent,” Lattin said. “Some of them were pretty depressing, at least for me, but Dick handled it all with amazing equanimity, like it was all just some kind of cosmic joke.”

His death was preceded by a fall at one of those board and care homes and complications following surgery to repair a broken hip.

No funeral services are planned. At his request, his ashes will be scattered off the coast of his beloved San Francisco, where for a brief and glorious time he reveled in his life as newspaper reporter and man about town.