Where have all the flower children gone, long time passing?

I’m a late hippie, in the sense that I satisfy all of your first paragraph criteria (as well as viewing myself as a hippie of sorts) but simply didn’t exist during the 60s. While it would have been nice to live during that time, I am glad to live in the current time.

They all turned into yuppies in the 80s and now they are all retiring. Free-love became deadly, VWs were replaced by BMWs, and they all bitched at their children when the kids tried drugs and rebelled. I’m not saying all, but really, I haven’t seen a bona fide hippie that has been a hippy since the 60s in a long, long time. Even in Berekely and Humboldt, CA there are sooo few hippies.

Neo-hippies are more into the counterculture, veganism, enviormental protection, etc. They are not real hippies.

When will they ever learn?

Gone to flowers, everyone…

What do you know personally of how grown-up hippies turned out and what they have done with their lives?

I’m kind of hoping for some answers like “I know a couple who make and sell guitars in Santa Cruz” and “One that I know of is the mayor of a small town in New Hampshire.” Any stories like that?

You mean the Rainbow Gathering? The Burning Man? Sensory Deprivation Tanks? Dancing and drugs?

My aunt did a lot of stuff in the Haight. A lot of drugs, she hints. She did the whole scene. She’s doing the housewife thing, now, although not terribly well, since she’s bipolar.

I’ve got a good friend who opened a dance studio back in the day. They did happenings and invited the public to join them, and all kinds of things. Interestingly enough, he still runs a dance troop and he’s still trying to make it accessible to the public. I, myself, was about five years too young for that scene. I missed Vietnam, but got stuck in the last serious recession.

Dennis Hopper is doing commercials.

I know somebody who went to Woodstock, got a job at a big corporation, got promoted, started his own company and is now a highly paid consultant that travels the world but is still a warm-hearted, down to earth person who opens his home to almost anyone.

I know somebody else who went to Woodstock, got a job as a train engineer, built an earthship in the desert and basically travels around in his VW bus camping out and crashing on people’s couches but offering stories and assistance in exchange.

I went to see Simon & Garfunkle when they came around a few years ago. All the fans (presumably ex-hippies) were all straight-laced, sober and boring, and by the looks of it, well-to-do and loving it.

I graduated high school in 1967 in New York City. I went to the first “Be-in” in Central Park on Easter Sunday of that year. Spent a lot of time in the Village and at the Fillmore East. I also bought into the “we can change the world” rhetoric. I smoked a lot of dope, listened to a lot of music and got lucky occasionally.

But like the OP I had to work my way through college, which forced me to wear a suit a couple of times a week, keep the hair relatively short, no facial hair (at least not until I was out of college). In other words, act straight.

It seemed like everyone I knew fell into the work and family routine almost immediately after graduation.

A couple of the ones who went on the road, or worked “in the movment” or “went back to the land” stayed in that “groove”. I think one is still an activist in some small New England town but working inside the system.

The ideals were tied to our youth, the size of our generation, the spread of mass communication and the thought that so many people thinking alike would force the world to change.

Didn’t happen.

I had a friend who was pretty radical, high-strung, the kind of guy you thought might blow something up and he ended up working in the Federal Govt. for years and years with a security clearance.

Who knew?

And those wonderful open relationships we all envisioned, no sexual hang-ups, no possessiveness, the open marriages, all kind of dissipated as we hit our mid to late 20’s and saw the world in different ways and a girlfriend became “radicalized” and another became (much to her dismay) a mother, suddenly, and marriage and conventionality loomed on the horizon.

What a long strange trip it’s been.

SRM (59 1/2 next week)

my psych teacher told us about an artist he knows and he’s still living the hippie life.

an example of something awesome he did recently: every year he invites a bunch of people to this area of a beach somewhere and he has like wooden stakes in the ground, and they all camp out and ‘have fun’ (says the teacher) and they dig where the stakes are. when the weekend or week ends, he somehow gets ahold of a helicopter, i think, and they go up and look down to see that they made these huge pictures in the sand, after they’d just been digging and digging some abstract thing. and then he prints the pictures on tiedye tshirts and gives them to everybody.

i thought it was awesome. i’ve never met the guy, but my psych teacher called him ‘his hippie/artist friend’ multiple times, and says that these beach things are where ‘all the hippies just come pouring out of the woodwork.’
ahhahaa

I have several friends who have managed to come full circle. They began as hippies and eventually got jobs and mortgages and so on because that seemed to be the thing to do. Eventually they were able to retire early and do things they preferred.

One friend gave up being a lab supervisor in the local children’s hospital to make a living selling wind chimes made from driftwood and jewelry made from sea glass. Another moved to Peru where he practices subsistence farming and buys crafts made by local people, and sends them to the US where friends sell them at outdoor art fairs. Others are still musicians who play gigs with acoustic instruments and smoke a little weed and homeschool their kids. Others got together locally and started a drum circle that led to a coffee house/bead store/poetry slam facility.

And a huge number moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico.

You can often recognize them because they drive small, old cars with lots and lots and lots of stickers on them, and because they never seem to be in a hurry.

My ex-boss (a small business owner) was a major hippie – very laid back, overly long hair, daily pot smoker right up until he lost visitation rights to his daughter in a custody battle about 10 years ago. He went straight, cut his hair and started taking anti-depressants in order to see her again. While I understand why he did all that, I would like to note that he was nowhere near as much fun.

My divorce lawyer was an ex-hippie, went to Woodstock and the whole deal. While he looked totally respectable and buttoned-up, he was still a Dead Head, and slyly wore only Jerry Garcia-designed ties with his lawyer suits.

Interestingly, the ex-boss and the divorce lawyer knew each other ‘back in the day’.

Well, shit,
I became a potter (of sorts, when I am not earning a living as an accountant) last year but I don’t associate it with my days as a college student or any hippie roots.

I missed Woodstock cause I came down with mononucleosis the first week of August that year.

I have a friend who turned 18 that summer, went to Woodstock, stayed in the area and spent the next ten years making sandals and belts and batik shirts.

Now she rents cabins in Northern Georgia to people from Atlanta and Chattanooga.

Tempus fugit.

SRM

In between times, I’ve worn a tie to work for many years.
Guess I became The Man.

Many of us found better ways to improve the world at large, especially those who really were into making a better world, and not just using the “dropping out” part of drugs. We discovered we could be a useful part of society without ever “selling out”. We are no longer the object of the news media, but operate mostly under the radar.