1967 San Francisco: My Romance with the Summer of Love

By DH Parsons

“Go to San Francisco?”

It’s the Summer of 1967 and the eyes of the world are on San Francisco.

A young man with time on his hands and a deep curiosity decides to see what all the hoopla is about.

DH: “Why on Earth would we want to do that?”
Manny

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bliss-Parsons Institute, LLC
• Release date: Aug 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781948553025

Book preview

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To Annie

Introduction

I don’t remember driving to the airport or getting on the plane, but I do remember the takeoff out of LA and the flight to San Francisco. It was a bumpy flight, and only my second commercial airline experience — the first, just the week before, was even worse — so I wasn’t a happy flier. My friend, Manny, was the one who insisted we take a whole week and make it an adventure, and he had to work hard to convince me.

Go to San Francisco? Why on Earth would we want to do that? I asked him on that summer day in 1967. I’d just returned a few days earlier from a whirlwind trip to that fabled city with another high school friend, Bart. There had been a few good times, but it had been a tiring ordeal.

Because that’s where it’s all happening! Manny informed me, as if I had no idea what was going on up there.

What do you think is happening in San Francisco, Manny? I asked. I just got back from there. It’s a fun city — kinda crowded, but nothing out of the ordinary.

You and Bart weren’t there long enough, and you got there during a lull in the action. There’s tons of stuff going on now — the whole hippie thing! Crazy music, interesting people, new philosophies, and girls that never wear bras flopping around all over town day and night! Manny was more excited than I’d ever seen him.

All of that huh? I wasn’t as thrilled by his reasons to, once again, travel four hundred miles north while seated inside a heavy metal tube thirty thousand feet in the air, praying the whole way that the plane wouldn’t lose a wing. That braless thing though …

"Come on, DH, Frisco’s where it’s happening right now. There’s never been anything like what’s going on up there. Not just the hippies and the boobs, but an entirely new way of lookin’ at life. There’s a place up there called City Lights Bookstore that’s a major hangout for a bunch of hard-core dudes that make the existentialists look like amateurs!" We had been studying existentialism in college the previous semester.

Oh? And who might they be? I knew full well who they were. Bart and I had been to the City Lights Bookstore when we were there, and the place was almost empty.

The Beats! Kerouac’s buddies — Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Bill Burroughs, Neal Cassady, Lawrence Ferlinghetti …

I’m quite familiar with those guys, Manny, but the actual Beat movement ended in 1960, give or take a year or five.

Just the popular movement. Some of the old Beats are still around and they live in San Francisco. Most of those guys are still alive and kickin’. Who do you think inspired this Hippie stuff?

Milton Berle? I was well aware that the Beats were still an influence in the American literary and music scenes, especially in San Francisco. I had a girlfriend whose memory I’ve never been able to shake from my head. Her name is Abby. Her pedigree is 100% Beat, and she exudes Beat from every pore. She taught me a lot of stuff, even in total silence. She lives up there now, somewhere.

Come on, DH, it would be a blast!

I don’t know Manny. I can dig the Beat stuff but I’m not as enamored by this whole hippie thing as you are. I don’t have a lot of money saved up, and I’m not sure my parents would be too supportive either. This will be my second trip there in two weeks.

Yeah yeah, and the excuses go on and on and on. Your parents are pretty cool, DH, and besides they’re on a camping trip all next week. They won’t even know you’re gone. It won’t cost much — we’ll only be there for a week, and we can probably find some hippies to stay with if it gets too tight.

Great. Stay with some hippies. I’m not even sure I’ve figured out what a real hippie is, Manny.

They’re just people! They eat food, play music …

Take drugs, get drunk …

That’s just what the newspaper people say. You can’t believe anything they write. Come on, I think it’s worth the risk.

I never did like that word, risk, I told him. Okay, I’ll go, but you have to promise never to tell anyone about this. I’m not sure I want to be associated in any way with the hippie thing. I’m trying to be an artist, not a hippie.

You have my word. I’ll never tell a soul.

Three Days Later

Three days later Manny and I were, indeed, sitting in a big metal tube thirty thousand feet up in the air and headed for San Francisco, about to become a part of a scene unlike any other — a magical moment that would rock the world for ages to come — living out a role at the very center of a cultural revolution that would become a historical moment in time: 1967, The Summer of Love.

I had $200 in my pocket.

I also realize now, fifty years later almost to the day, that because of my own lack of enthusiasm — unlike Manny — for the hippie movement at the time, I interacted with San Francisco not as an excited young hippie wannabe on a pilgrimage to the West Coast Mecca, but as an observer or a reporter. I kept careful notes in my journal the whole time I was there, recording objective, on-the-scene impressions of the people I met and the experiences I had.

I’m sure that for all of the hundreds of thousands of people who were there either as tourists or as residents of San Francisco during the Summer of Love, there are as many different tales to tell — some better, and some worse — but the variations should not invalidate each other. The stories told by those who lived through the warm, chaotic summer days of 1967 should not be censored or criticized, but read together like chapters in a book to gain a clearer picture of a brief, colorful episode in American history that affected society and politics for decades — if not for generations — one way or the other.

The pages that follow relate my own personal experience with the Romance of the Summer of Love as recorded in my journal. I cherish every memory that I now share with you.

Day One

The plane ride wasn’t too bad. I held my breath most of the way, but there was very little turbulence and the landing was smooth. Manny and I travel light with just the bare necessities packed into one backpack each: two changes of clothing, a razor, a toothbrush and whatever other little items could be stuffed inside. We didn’t know where we’d be staying or what we’d be doing, so these would be easy to carry in case we had to carry our stuff around with us.

The airport is several miles south of the main part of the city, and the roads in between are definitely not pedestrian-friendly, so we caught a bus just outside the terminal to take us into town. We had no idea what we were doing. This was Manny’s first trip to a big city other than LA and, even though I had just been to San Francisco with Bart the week before, memories of that whirlwind trip were just a blur. We had picked up a map at the airport but it didn’t show where hotels and motels were located, so we figured we’d head into the heart of San Francisco and just walk around looking until the right one jumped out at us.

At the Commodore International Hotel

We walked around for a while after we got off the bus and were standing on the sidewalk trying to get our bearings. I looked up and realized where we were.

Hey, Manny. This is where Bart and I stayed last week.

I hope they changed the sheets since then, he replied drolly.

I am now seated at a little desk by my bed in the Commodore Hotel on Sutter Street, San Francisco, recording the day’s adventures in my journal. I have just finished writing a letter to my parents, which I will drop in the mail when we go out again in a little bit.

Letter home from the Commodore Hotel

Here I am, obviously. The plane ride was all right, but unfortunately we sat in the middle and couldn’t see the ground because of the wing. Our hotel costs $14 a night, or $7 apiece; it’s about as cheap as possible. You wouldn’t believe the prices!

We arrived at 9:05 am; took a bus to the Hilton ($1.10). Walked a mile (uphill) to the Commodore, opened the door, got our room, took the elevator upstairs (4th floor), opened the door to our room, walked in, changed clothes, went out the door, went downstairs, locked up our money, and walked 4,000,000 miles to Haight-Ashbury (where we saw 20 hippies and about 40,000,000 tourists). After a while we got bored and took a bus back to the hotel (15¢). Then we walked another twenty million miles to Fisherman’s Wharf, ate some crab and walked forty million miles back (we took the long way, over Nob Hill, it’s great) Now we are here. We have ordered a chicken dinner, which will be delivered soon. Then we will go to Fillmore Auditorium and see a groovy rock band.

Adios, Din.

P.S. I’ll send you a postcard.

…

Our legs are aching from all the walking up and down hills we did today, but that won’t stop us from heading out again soon for the Fillmore Auditorium. We aren’t sure where it is, even though I was there just last week — my sense of direction is so bad that I can’t find my way out of a paper bag.

We can’t come to San Francisco without catching at least one concert. That’s what this hippie stuff seems to be all about — the music, the bands, the performers — and the Fillmore Auditorium gets them all. I think Buffalo Springfield is gonna be playing tonight, but I’m not sure — that’s just what some kid down in the lobby told us earlier. He also said that The Doors and Jefferson Airplane are supposed to be there soon, maybe even tonight, so I have no idea what we’re gonna get. I just hope we can find the place on foot. We really can’t afford to take buses everywhere we go. Taxis would be great because the taxi drivers know the city so well. But that’s out of the question — we’d be broke after just a couple of trips.

The biggest disappointment of the day so far has been Haight-Ashbury. There were thousands of tourists with cameras and tote bags all over the place — a lot of them were my parent’s age! I thought this hippie thing was a kids’ deal. Manny and I counted only twenty possible hippies on the entire block we were on, but they could’ve been tourists who were dressed for the part and wanting to blend in with the real things. But if that’s the case, where are the real things?

One rather thin girl with stringy dishwater hair and large nipples poking through her shirt looked like she might be the real deal, so Manny struck up a conversation with her. She was standing by a street lamp in front of a music store. Her bright yellow t-shirt had a guitar printed on the front, so I’m guessing she might have worked in the store.

Is this where it’s happening? I couldn’t believe Manny actually said that.

What? she replied with a dreamy slur.

We came up from the south to catch some entertainment, he explained. Are we in the right place?

You mean, like, music and stuff? she asked.

Yeah, that. That and whatever.

You gotta go to Fillmore or to the park for the best music. The park’s free, Fillmore’s not.

What’s Fillmore? I asked her. Manny rolled his eyes at my dumb question. We’d been talking about the Fillmore Auditorium earlier, but when the girl just said Fillmore, it confused me.

You really aren’t from around here are you? Fillmore Auditorium. That’s where the biggie’s play. Reed, the Dead, the Holding Company, Zeppelin, Cream, CCR, Zappa, Pink Floyd. You gotta pay to get in though. Or if you go to the park you can usually catch somebody playin’ somethin’ for free. Sometimes one of the biggies drops by and strums some tunes.

You mean Golden Gate Park? I asked her.

That’s the one. The tone of her voice and her expression let me know I’d asked another stupid question.

We thought there’d be more going on here at Haight-Ashbury, but it’s kinda dead, Manny said.

It’ll get livelier later. Everybody’s sleepin’ it off. I’m just up and around ‘cause I got a job in there. She pointed to the music store. I’m one of the unlucky ones. I gotta work for a living.

That’s unlucky? I asked. Aren’t you lucky you have a job? I bet jobs are hard to come by around here. Lots of competition.

Ha! The lucky ones don’t have to work. Lots of ’em have money when they come here to play at being a hippie. Others do the street thing.

What’s the ‘street thing’? Manny asked.

Hookin’. Laying on your back for five minutes and making twenty bucks, or bending over in an alley for ten.

You mean … At a loss for words, Manny clears his throat.

That’s exactly what she means, Manny.

I tried that for a while, but it’s undependable. Get’s cold here in the winter too. She shivered with the memory.

Well, it seems to me that a job is better than doing that, I said.

Yeah, but I gotta keep regular hours with a job. I’m not much for that.

She looked at me thoughtfully. Say, you wouldn’t wanna spend a little time with me in that alley over there would you? She smiled bigger than she should have.

Uh … no … Now I’m stuttering. I’m afraid Manny and I are in a hurry to get somewhere.

Afraid you’ll catch somethin’? I ain’t got nothin’. Her voice was teasing, but her eyes showed scorn.

No, I said quickly. It’s just that we have an appointment we need to keep and we’re already late.

Right. I could tell she didn’t believe me.

I grabbed Manny’s arm and pulled him back toward the hotel saying goodbye to the girl as we went. She told me her name was Angel and that I could find her there at the music store any time if I ever wanted her. Apparently she slept in a room in the back of the store.

You’re crazy! We could have had some fun with her, Manny said as we walked away.

You mean you believed her when she said she didn’t have any diseases?

Well, she didn’t look sick!

Manny, what am I gonna do with you? She was emaciated, dirty, and way too eager to go into that alley. What does that tell you?

I don’t know. But please tell me we didn’t fly all the way up here just to walk up and down hills.

I’m sure we’re gonna have a lot of fun now that we’re here. But we wanna be careful not to screw it up.

Manny’s disappointment was quickly forgotten as his excitement for the adventure returned. She had hair under her arms. Did you see that?

Yes, I saw that.

She’s gotta be the real thing — a real hippie. That’s the way the girls are I hear. They never shave their pits.

…

So our first experience with a real hippie in Haight-Ashbury was kind of a bust and nothing much to write home about, making my letter to my parents a bit short. I certainly wasn’t going to tell them about getting invited into an alley for a few minutes by a hippie girl. But, like Manny, I do hope we have some sort of fun while we’re up here, and that we don’t just spend our time walking around looking for stuff to do — we do enough of that at home. We get in a car on a Friday night and Manny says, Now what? What do you want to do? And I say, I don’t know, lets just drive around and see if we can find something. And we end up driving around finding nothing.

Fisherman’s Wharf was nice — atmospheric and with lots of good food. We sampled bunches of seafood while we were there, including a whole crab that we split between us. Not a lot of hippies there, though. It’s more of a conventional adult tourist area with grownup things to do and see.

We took the scenic route back to the hotel from the Wharf, through the Russian Hill neighborhood, and up into Nob Hill. The quiet streets were lined with beautiful mansions, fancy hotels, parks, etc. — very nice. Part of me wishes that I had the money to live there, but I’m not sure that I’d ever like being in San Francisco full time. The place is kind of hectic. There’s some sort of action goin’ on just about everywhere you look. And the people! We’ve only been here a little while and we’ve already seen an assortment of eccentric characters dressed in some pretty weird outfits. I’m not talking about hippies; I’m talking about regular residents. To be honest, I’m not sure that some of them aren’t quite right upstairs. It’s gonna be an interesting week.

We were well up into the Nob Hill area when Manny decided he couldn’t walk any more; the new shoes he had bought for this trip had worn a painful blister on his heel. We didn’t know how much further it was to the hotel, or where the nearest trolley or bus stop was. We could’ve hoofed it, but it would’ve been a long painful walk for Manny. While we were deciding what to do we spotted a passing taxi, so we flagged it down to take us the rest of the way back.

We were both concerned about the extravagance of the taxi ride, so our conversation in the back seat turned to our dwindling cash. We had started with about $300 between us for the whole week, but there was the bus from the airport, the hotel — not as cheap as we had planned — and now this taxi. And food — food is more expensive here than we had thought. Even if we buy our food at a market, how are we gonna cook it? Do hotels have stoves we can use? Our room doesn’t have a stove. A whole week? Geez.

Having overheard our conversation, the taxi driver offered a suggestion. If you get hard up, you can always do what all the other kids in town are doin’. Go beg some beans from the Diggers. His speech was punctuated with a fine spray of brown tobacco spittle.

Even though I’d have to witness the spittle spray again, I had to ask him, What or who are the Diggers?

Is that another band? Manny asked.

Naw. The driver rolled down the window and spat out a big wad of brown goo. It’s a group of actors and misfits that hand out free food in the park.

Are there a lot of people here that need free food? I asked.

Since the hippie crap started up we gots tons o’ no-accounts comin’ in here from all over. They don’t bring no money wit ’em neither.

So the Digger guys feed them.

The city council don’t want outta state hippies dyin’ here in The City. Gotta feed ’em ta keep ’em alive. Can’t get rid of ’em neither. They’s comin’ in droves and they ain’t leavin’. I guess the city’d rather have the Diggers fatten ’em up a bit. That’ll be three bucks — for the ride. The advice is free.

In my concern over the state of our finances I had not noticed that we had arrived at the hotel. We thanked the driver and paid him the three dollars. Although it was less than I had expected, it was still three dollars that we no longer have. And it’s still just the first day of our visit.

We called the front desk when we got back to our room and asked if they had a nurse who could look at Manny’s heel — that new shoe had really done a number on it. They didn’t have a nurse, but they did send up a girl wearing a cute little outfit that made her look like anything but a nurse. She pulled a bottle of mercurochrome and a pack of wide bandages out of a brown bag she was carrying and went to work. She seemed to know what she was doing. She got a wet towel from the bathroom, washed off Manny’s foot, swabbed it with antiseptic, and then put on a bandage.

That feels better, Manny said. I just hope I can keep the bandage on with all the walking we have to do.

I’ll wrap some tape all the way around your foot and leave the extra stuff with you in case you need to put on a new one, she said, smiling sweetly.

That’s very nice of you, I told her. Are you a maid here?

Ha, no. I don’t work here. I was in the lobby visiting my friend, Tricia. She’s the reception clerk downstairs. She asked me if I’d run this stuff up here ’cause she can’t leave the phones right now. I’ve been coming in here for years — know the place like the back of my hand — so I help out when I can.

Well, you seem to know what you’re doing.

Our hotels get a lot of people with the same problem. Tourists come here and think they’re gonna do a walking tour of The City, but this isn’t the best city in America to walk in if you’re not used to it. It looks small on the map, but the streets have lots of miles and lots of hills. It tires a person out pretty quick, and if you don’t have proper footwear then you’re gonna have sore heels just like young Manny here.

Hopefully my shoes will break in soon and I won’t have to worry about it.

He’s pretty tough. He can make it, I said.

You’re probably right, she said. So, what are you guys gonna do tonight? It’s a big town.

We’re gonna try to find Fillmore Auditorium and catch a concert, I told her.

Great! The Fillmore’s the place for concerts, that’s for sure.

You know where it is?

Sure. It’s over on South Van Ness, I think. I’m not too good with street names, but I’ve been there a few times and I can get there in my sleep.

Can you draw us a map? Manny asks.

I can do better than that. I can take you there!

Really? Manny and I spoke in unison.

Sure, I’d love to. My sister can pick us up. She has a car and would love to come with us.

I didn’t think anybody in San Francisco had their own car, I said.

A lot of people don’t, but Sissy does. She’s going to school at UCLA and she needed a car down there, so when she comes up here to see me she drives instead of flying in a plane. She hates to fly.

That makes two of us.

Three, she said. I’m terrified of flying. That’s why Sissy has to drive up here to see me. I don’t have a car and I won’t fly.

Well, it seems like we have our evening planned. Hey, we don’t even know your name.

Angela, but everybody calls me Angie.

What a coincidence, Manny said. We just met a girl over on Haight Street named Angel.

I nodded in confirmation. The only two people we’ve actually met here are both named for heavenly beings.

Well, it seems like the Angels are looking after you two. That can’t be bad, she said with a wink.

The Concert at the Fillmore

Angie and her sister, Sissy, came by the hotel and picked us up about an hour before the concert was to begin. That was a good thing because I don’t think Manny’s heel could have taken any more serious walking. The two sisters look very much alike; they aren’t identical twins but you can sure tell they are related.

Angie’s hair is reddish blonde, maybe more blonde than red, a little longer than shoulder length. She was wearing it in a ponytail poked through the hole in the back of a baseball cap. She’s cute and much younger than I thought she was when she came to our room earlier. My first impression was that she was about twenty-five years old, but she’s only nineteen. She has an all-American face with a few freckles on and around her soft little nose; blue eyes, full lips — a lot like a young Doris Day. In spite of living in San Francisco, her passion in life has little to do with music or hippies, but with baseball, of all things. In fact, she’s on a team with a 5-0 record in the citywide league this season. She plays first base and, according to Sissy, Angie is the team’s most reliable home run hitter. How cool is that? I’m not into sports much these days, but I used to be when I was younger. My brother, Jim, and I used to watch baseball games all the time. Hardly a day went by in the summer that we didn’t have the radio tuned in to a game. We kinda lost our taste for it when pro baseball started looking too much like any other big business. I might be able to develop an interest in a city team like Angie’s, though. They don’t have contracts, don’t get paid, they all get along and have great fun. And at least one of them, Angie, is cute as a button.

The concert was loud and wild — the noise and activity set my teeth on edge. We thought The Doors would be playing but the headliner was Cream, the same group Bart and I saw last week. Apparently they were so popular that they were held over. We got there early and found space to sit on the floor in front of the stage where we could watch the band play up close and loud. The band members came down and chatted with us a little before the concert and during intermission, which was kinda neat. Manny was in seventh heaven when Ginger Baker, the drummer, had a conversation with him for a good fifteen minutes about drumming techniques — I never knew there was such a thing as a drumming technique. It was a kick watching Manny’s face throughout the exchange. He was clearly in awe of the drummer whose frizzy red hair looked like it was on fire during his wild performance. It must have been the lighting combined with Baker’s sweat that caused his hair to glisten brightly as he whipped his head around as he played. The girls in the audience went crazy over it.

The band members talked and behaved as if they were high on pot or some other drug, or tipsy with booze — or maybe both. Angie told me later that it’s hard to tell if a hippie or a rocker is really high or not, because they seem to feel that they have to act like it even when they aren’t. It’s all part of the show.

We watched Eric Clapton prance around the stage as he tried to get all the guitar and microphone cords unscrambled before the concert. He was fully aware of the girls amongst the early arrivals in the auditorium. They swooned dramatically at his every move, even when the band wasn’t playing. Every now and then he turned and flashed a smile into the audience, driving the girls totally bananas. It was quite a show, both onstage and off.

Are you telling me that even on the streets, the real hippies out there all like to fake being high or drunk? I asked Angie during a break in the action.

Even on the streets — although there are a lot of real dopers out there. It’s just hard to tell the difference if you aren’t used to them. The rule of thumb though, is that if they’re really quiet and just sitting in a corner somewhere, those are the ones that are doped up. If they’re loud and obnoxious and full of themselves, those are the ones that are drunk. If they’re sober, well, they’re back home in Kansas.

We all laughed at that.

So these Cream guys may be just acting drunk? I asked.

Hard to say. Rock bands are in a class by themselves. They can be totally sober and still act silly and obnoxious.

Manny rose to their defense. They’re entertainers!

It’s what they do, Angie agreed.

I guess the wilder they act the more famous they’ll get, I said. I think these guys are on the road to being pretty famous already, so it wouldn’t hurt if they started drinking more to speed up the process.

It’s hard to tell if a band will make it big, Manny said. There are some really bad bands out there that are gaining fame quickly, but the market’s getting saturated.

I think The Doors are gonna be pretty big,