Beats gone, hippies in
Crowd invades Frisco
In 1950 there was the best Generation. In the 60's comes a new breed known as the "hippies"
Although the hippies will migrate to both coasts this summer, San Francisco will probably be the hardest hit.
The city should have gotten its first warning that something bizarre was happening in 1966 when 10.000 people passed in and out of Longshoremen's Hall for a trips festival organized by novelist Ken Kesew.
The event's name referred to psychedelic trips. The entertainment was do-it-yourself.
EVERYTHING WENT on at once. Electronic bands shouted, fantastic and sensual light patterns jumped up and down the walls, weirdly costumed spectators danced and groups clustered around stroboscopic lights whose effects were supposed to turn one on.
By the time Sandra arrived, the Haight - Ashbury was seething with excitement. A human be-in in the park Jan. 14 had attracted 15,000 people.
"Wow, if we can do that, we can turn on the world," the hippies exulted.
LATER IN the spring, the beins occurred every Saturday and Sunday afternoon. Long forgotten ballrooms, the Avalon and the Fillmore converted early in 1966 for rock bands, drew thousands each weekend night.
Sandra, the Dancing Elephant, has been high on pot too many times to count. Four times she has taken the eight-hour long LSD trip, but she regards acid with caution.
And with good reason. One of her experiments was a bad trip in which she sat shaking with panic and had to be talked down by an understanding fellow hippie.
HIPPIES ARE better physicians in such situations, she says, because they offer love instead of the coldness of an emergency hospital.
The LSD Rescue Service, a volunteer group whose telephone number is widely published, deals with another 20 or 30 a week in the immediate area of the city. The rescue service estimates 40.-000 people here have taken LSD.
At San Francisco General Hospital, psychiatrists now treat about five bad trippers daily. About one out of five is kept overnight, and about one out of a dozen is committed for extended psychiatric care.
The hippies are warned by psychiatrists that the long-term consequences of taking LSD simply are not known, and there's evidence to suggest it may have physical, psychic and genetic damage which is permanent.
BUT FOR THE hippies, recently being called flower children, the danger is far outweighed by the spiritual insights claimed for LSD.
A good trip is said to awaken the senses to their environment. The walls, the floor, the ceiling and the furniture all are supposed to vibrate in harmony.
"I saw God," is the flower children's refrain, and their frequent discovery is, "all is one."
Despising conventional institutions, the hippies have organized a complete set of their own. Each is formless, and denies any strong personal leadership, for in the hippie creed—if there is one—the
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individual must remain a small part of the collective.
The Haight- Ashbury's "new community" includes a theater group to give free plays in the park, a job co-op, a housing agency, a group renovating an abandoned theater, several newspapers, at least 25 businesses, and happening house, which plans lectures and discussion groups.
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ALL THESE activities have turned Haight Street, once a second rate neighborhood business artery, into the place tourists want to see first, even before topless night clubs or Fisherman's Wharf.
Auto traffic often is at a standstill. Long haired youths sit in circles on the sidewalks. On every block hippies stand in the street waving The Oracle, their foremost newspaper. The last issue sold 100,000 copies.
Overlooking it all, a theater marquee is emblazoned with the single word, "LOVE."
But in the older stores, the merchants are full of hate and anger. Their customers can't park, are accosted by panhandlers and must step over reclining bodies to enter the stores.
IN AFTERNOONS, amplified electronic music from the park smashes through walls of apartments of the elderly blocks away.
Letters arrive daily at the hippie job co-op advising the flower children to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge. A bullet recently banged through the co-op's front door.
Health authorities report venerable diseases in the district has multiplied six times in three years. Narcotics arrests, numbering 148 in 1965, now are running at the rate of 1,000 a year.
Police Chief Thomas Cahill has called the hippies "no asset to the community" and Mayor John F. Shelley and the board of supervisors have declared them "unwelcome."
A trouble here is just who are "they?" Nobody appears to have defined the term, hippie, with precision and clarity.
IT IS DIFFICULT to define a phenomenon that keeps changing, a movement which includes many kinds of people. There are hippies capitalists, priests, social workers, artisans, do-absolutely-nothings and some who work 40-hour weeks.
And there are what Police Capt. Daniel W. Kiely calls "pseudo hippies," the thrill seekers who don a costume and "some looking for some of that free love."
The flower children themselves define themselves variously as "seekers" of spiritual wisdom, as being "self aware" and as those responsive to "the vibrations of love."
Besides advocating use of drugs, San Francisco's "new community" has some common philosophical concepts.
SOMETHING HIPPIES are not, is beatnik. And the notion they are filthy is based more on hair lengths than fact, although bare feet do get grimy.
Its members regard world
leaders as probably insane and their capacity for solving any of the obvious problems of society as hopeless.
But at present they find protest of the establishment as futile, and choose "to live our protest" by creating a new way of life rather than by staging demonstrations.
THEY BELIEVE their parents' devotion to the acquiring of material things has made them unhappy and half-human, and that in our affluent society there should be plenty for everybody.
They argue automation is making labor less and less necessary, and that their generation must individually learn to derive joy from leisure time.
They conceive of love as sharing, and offer love as the supreme value.
What the hippies believe is worth study if for no other reason than that they may be signaling the unspoken thoughts and dreams of the young all over the nation.
IN THE VIEW of Dr. John Milner, a University of Southern California professor, hippies reflect "a general reaction against the establishment which cannot be dismissed as it might have been by previous generations as an adolescent fling or the sowing of wild oats."
Among the hippies themselves, a few think their trip will end in "concentration camps."
These pessimists foresee their own forceful repression because of their attack on all of the nation's institutions. And they predict that resistance to the Vietnam war may take the form of widespread sabotage requiring thousands of arrests.
But most hippies are bubbling with hope. There's talk of moving into the vast open spaces of Nevada and quickly outnumbering the state's 183,863 registered voters.
Presumably, the hippies would abolish the casinos, set up free drug dispensaries, ban alcoholic beverages, establish marijuana farms and substitute group marriages for the quickie marriage and divorce business.
THE DOMINANT hippie personalities are confident that beins this summer in many cities will start vibrations leading to formation of thousands of new hippie groups.
The San Francisco Examiner has regarded the hippies editorially as "a fad" which will pass just as the city's beatniks did.
Summer Kansan Tuesday, June 20, 1967
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