Hey, old guys: where were you during the Summer of Love?

It was a long time ago. I’m not sure I remember very clearly.

I was living with a group of people in what was called a commune in Santa Barbara, California.

Doing farm labor because in the small town I lived in, that was the only way to make a decent amount of money. That summer, some friends invited me to join them to go see a new band, called the Doors. I was not enthusiastic, as it was five dollars for standing room, and that was about a half of a day’s pay in those days. They convinced me to go along because we might meet some nice chicks. The band was not bad.

I was 13, teaching sailing to younger kids at an island resort, and having my first Real Romance. (I’m still friends with him, all these years later!)

Thanks for the rush of memories, @Jeruba! What were you doing during the summer of love?

Ground zero, and just there by coincidence. I’d never heard of a hippy. Just another in a long series of seemingly random yet very fortunate coincidences. Things like the incredible apartment I stumbled into on Page, a block from Haight st. 2 blocks from Ashbury- $65 bucks a month!

I was still living at home, getting ready for 10th grade. My big brother had been sent to Vietnam as a medic the previous December, just in time for the Tet Offensive. He had been popped for possession of a small matchboxfull of Marijuana and the judge gave him a choice of enlisting, or going to jail on a felony. My summer was crowded with sailing regattas around Florida.

I was 12, living 15 miles away down the Peninsula. We read about hippies all the time in the Chronicle, saw them when we went into San Francisco. I had orthodontist appointments every three weeks and my mom drove the Haight to get there.

My older brother and my best friend’s older brother had both been to the Fillmore, and we used to get mini versions of the week’s Fillmore poster in the mail every Thursday, with the line up of the weekend’s show.

I was on vacation from my first year in college. I worked at a variety of menial jobs through a temp employment agency. I met a lot of people I would not otherwise come into contact with. On later vacations, I worked with my brother and cousin in a tobacco store jointly owned by my father and uncle. I remember it as being a fun time.

As for the Summer of Love, I remember reading and talking about what was going on. As the joke goes, if you remember what was happening, you were not fully participating. I am a political progressive, but was not into drugs. I tried marijuana a few times but did not have any mystical experiences. I don’t remember what year it was, but I recall being in the draft lottery and coming up 250th, meaning I would not be sent Vietnam.

The lottery was not instituted until December, 1969. I still remember that slime-ball Nixon’s speech.

This is a great thread. Thanks, Jeruba.

^^Edit: My brother was sent to Nam the following December. He was in boot and then Ft. Sam Houston Combat Medic School during the summer of ‘67. It was a long time ago.

I was at Fort Sam, in the Medical Field Service School. The Army was lots of no fun.

14. I wasn’t old enough to participate.

The war defined the era to a much greater extent than the flower children, and once again I lucked out. It was rather eerie the way the war crept into my consciousness. I grew up like most boys with a great interest in war and death, and had done a lot of reading about WWII. I’d also read about the brilliant campaign of Giap in defeating the French at Dien Bien Phu. But i completely missed the connection when I was in college and the draft boards were sweeping the streets of the country clean of young men in 1964. I had a 2s deferment for school, but my local board was on my ass at the close of each and every semester demanding proof of both satisfactory grades and enrollment in the next term. After 2 years of that shit, I finally started paying attention and went looking into Ho Chi Minh. It was a revelation and the great turning point in my life. Because it was at that point that I realized that the war was only possible because of the things we were NOT taught nor told.

I was in Kodiak Alaska, where there were no flower children.

@marinelife: flower bears? Flower crabs? Flower salmon?

College and partying, sometimes more party than classes.

I was 9, but I remember watching the Vietnam war unfolding on TV. Of course it was the 6 o’clock news only as 24 hours news streaming had not been developed yet. And TV went off the air around midnight. But I remember being scared watching the news on Vietnam and being in awe of the flower children.

By 67 the war was in full swing, flower power was all the rage and the rumor was that women in the town outnumbered men to the tune of 7 to1. It was a show almost impossible to relate. I was 22 -23 with no obligations and living a fairy tale life of adventures the like of which this world will almost certainly never see again. Unbelievable!

I was 13.
Before that summer we lived in St. John, Washington, the next fall we were in Endicott, Washington.
During that summer I stayed/visited my grandparents in Boise, Idaho. Grand Dad ran a lead-silver mining operation in northern Nevada so we spent a lot of time down there living in an old cabin that was probably built in the 20’s.
I hadn’t even started to think about growing my hair long. That woulkd come later, in 1968, when we moved to Moscow, Idaho.

I was in Germany, father was in the Air Force stationed at 3 Fighter Wing in Zweibrucken, so I missed out, of course I was only 10 years old so it probably wouldn’t have made much of a difference.

I was 11.
I was immersed in music, television, and comic books.

It was the summer between junior & senior years in high school, when I was 16. We lived near Chicago but I spent that summer at U of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, at a 10-week summer institute program in mathematics, where we got to pretend we were in college. I remember seeing “flower power” graffiti vividly painted on campus fences. On the radio I remember hearing “Windy” by The Association & “San Francisco” by Scott McKenzie (here’s a complete top-40 list). I remember the Beatles releasing Sgt. Pepper album that summer, though I wouldn’t appreciate its artistry for several more years. LBJ was president. Viet Nam was constantly on tv news. (Luckily I didn’t get drafted to Viet Nam in 1969, thanks to a birthday lottery number over 200.) I viewed the whole hippie counterculture movement with detached bemusement—it held no charismatic appeal to me as it did to many of my age cohorts. A case of bad vibes, I guess, lol

I was 3. One of my friends, who lived across the street, had a sister who was much older, as she had a different father. The older sister was in her late teens and she and her friend were described as hippies. My friend’s sister was mean, but her friend was really nice. I can’t recall her real name, but everybody called her Twiggy, because she had the short hair, thin build and huge eyes, enhanced with makeup.

My brother was 8 and he and my male cousin regularly wore “hippy” style clothes like Nehru jackets, paisley shirts, and striped bell bottom pants.

1967. It was Canada’s Centennial year and we wore a lot of Little House on the Prairie style costumes. I was 10 that summer. We had a radio in the car by then. On a camping trip to the Maritimes, we were listening to a lunchtime call-in show when someone called in a panic “there are hippies in town !!!” None of us really knew what they meant. Later that summer I wanted to embroider flowers on my pants. My mother said no, so I drew them on with oil pastels. So there!

Well, I wasn’t yet old enough to vote, but I had a job and shared a fifth-floor apartment in Boston. During the day I dressed as conservatively as my college-girl wardrobe would allow (I was a dropout at that point) and went to work at an insurance company. At night I let my long hair down, put on a shift and sandals and some beads, and went out to be a hippie.

I could easily find huge crowds of people my age, on Boston Common, on Charles Street, in Harvard Square, on Cambridge Common, and along the river. People brought guitars and made music, sang Bob Dylan songs, lit candles and read poetry, passed joints to strangers, greeted everyone as a friend. You didn’t have to smoke anything, just stand around and inhale. If you had food, you shared it. God, it was fun. What a great time to be young.

At the time I had no idea why we looked threatening to neighbors and cops. I can see it now, but from inside the crowd it just felt light-hearted and mellow. It hadn’t all turned ugly yet, but that was coming.

I was 18, just out of high school. I had auditioned for the Navy Band and was told to practice for a few more months and come back and try again. My self-esteem was so low at that point that I considered it a total rejection, and just went ahead and enlisted on a 120-day delay. That was in May. That summer I worked at the Arsenal. It was pretty good money, and I was not yet the pacifist I would become over the next three years. I also had a girlfriend. We dated over the summer. I took a trip to Montreal for Expo ‘67, and came home to get ready to enlist. When the day came, my siblings and my girlfriend saw me to the train station. As we said our goodbyes, she handed me an envelope, and asked me not to open it until the train was out of the station. The letter said she was going to enter a convent, and live the religious life. I quietly put the letter back into the envelope, closed the flap, tore it up and threw it away. I went spent the rest of the year in Basic Training, and only looked forward.

that’s a wonderful paragraph. I hope you have a journal or some biographical sketches to compile into a book.

@stanleybmanly Thanks. Mostly from memory, but starting to journal, especially some of the older stories.

I was at school. I have a group picture from those days of all our teachers staring grimly at the camera. It brings back memories and is titled “Summer of Love”

Did not know it happened, I was still playing with G.I. Joes.

On June 21, 1967 I was in Golden Gate park digging the Summer Solstice party. It was far out, man- the Grateful Dead and Big Brother & the Holding Company were playing for free, man!

The next week I tripped back up to the Haight and partied 6 weeks for fuckin’ free, man.

I went back down to Los Ang in August and bought Hendrix’s first album. It was trip city, dudes.

I was a 7 year old kid in Chicago cooling off in open fire hydrants. 2 summers later in 1969 I was hanging out with friends in a nearby forest preserve when out of nowhere a VW bus all painted up with colorful Flower Power graffiti comes rumbling through the prairie grass, it comes to a stop and a half dozen hippies barrel out of the van and go leaping, prancing and dancing through the grass with a cloud of smoke trailing them. That was the closest I ever came to a Haight-Ashbury moment.

I was in the Navy stationed at Mare Island, learning how to blow things up. We took the occasional trip to Haight Ashbury to see the circus. They didn’t hate us yet but we definitely didn’t fit in. I was way more into alcohol than drugs. Got married for the first time at the end of the year (it didn’t last long). and shipped out shortly after. Not my best year but the training set the course for the rest of my life. Not the blowing things up but the electronics.

I was only 9 too but within a few years I knew several friends whose older brothers went to Vietnam and I was enthralled by the hippies and music of the era. When I was eleven we moved to Albuquerque N.M. where I was born and I became friends with a bunch of 20 something hippies that rented a little farm communal property. I hung out with them all the time, one girl named ‘Jan” especially, who was about 23 or 24. She drove an old pickup truck and one day while we were out kicking about she adopted a Nubian Goat and named him Chevis Regal. haha

Soon they had a small herd of goats on the property and I loved going over the hang out with everyone, goats included.
I was her little sidekick and I did yoga with everyone and they were quite impressed at my limberness. New Mexico was a hippie mecca in the early 70’s, lots of hippie transplants from all over the country.

Well hell..who isn’t limber at 11? lol These experiences heavily influenced me and while I wasn’t old enough to be a flower child I was and remain a hippie at heart, choosing to live on rural properties over the last 25 years or so and aspired to the whole, back to nature, simple living of the times. I also was a major Grateful dead fan and saw many of their shows in the mid-70’s through early 90’s. Good times, good times.

@Coloma Your old man was an architect, right? Did he ever take you to Paolo Soleri’s Acosanti? It was a bunch of young architectural students living communally building a city in the middle of nowhere. They made beautiful structures out of used, eco-friendly materials. Absolutely amazing. Soleri was a genius. Bucky Fuller spent a lot of time there visiting and working on his geodetic domes.

@Espiritus_Corvus No, but that is super cool. I always wanted to build a rice straw bale house. Like Adobe, super insulation and fire proof too.

I guess I missed this Q when it first came around… just like I missed the Summer of Love.

In Summer ‘67 I was starting what would become a lifelong fandom of the Boston Red Sox during their Impossible Dream season. (A worst-to-first finish in the American League, which was not broken into different regions at that time.)

And preparing to start my freshman year of high school. (But not really “preparing” for that, only ignoring that that would also be a thing to deal with towards the end of the summer.)

I was in no way a “flower child”. For one thing, even as a 13-year-old I read the newspapers for news of the Vietnam war, had a map of Vietnam posted in my bedroom, and mapped the various major battles, figuring that I would probably be there before too much longer. So in that sense I was a child preparing to be a soldier…