Category: 3. Sixties

1964: Beatles, Sierra, Free Speech

1964. The year of the Beatles, Mario Savio and the Berkeley Free Speech. The year I also began protesting the Vietnam War, racial segregation, and environmental pollution. The year I took my first trip alone up into the High Sierra After the Sierra Club trip in 1963. The year I first grew my hair long, fought with my parents, and got myself switched from public to Catholic high school for straightening out.

Two months either side of my 16th birthday, January, 1964: John F. Kennedy was assassinated two months earlier. The Beatles arrived in the US one month after.

Resonance with the Rest of Humanity

For me 1964 started with my driver’s license in January. The driver’s license was the pinnacle achievement of reaching 16 years old. I took the test on my birthday, having badgered my poor mom into driving me into the Palo Alto DMV that same day, as my favorite birthday present. Coming of age for me and most of my peers was not drinking age, not voting age, but driving age. Independence. Behind the wheel. I didn’t have a car, but I had access to cars. And girls I hoped to date.

In my case this coming of age felt like resonance with the rest of humanity. The times were as fresh as bright green Northern California rolling hills dotted by dark green live oaks, after a spring rain, smelling of rich warm damp seeds and growth bursting at its seams, under an intense blue sky framed by clean greens. A world ready to burst open and flower. It felt like I was part of a huge wave, surfing history, an entire generation going to change the world, end war, defeat the military industrial complex, turn politics inside out, stop pollution.

It wasn’t just me. It was 1964 everywhere.

And because of my age then, this was all also inside out for me, with the world seeming to match, on the outside, what was happening for me, inside, inside my head, out of my eyes. This burst of the sixties coincided with my own growth spurt, voice changing, and the amazing excitement and passage of the driver’s license. It also coincided with the natural fascination, absolute obsession, with the magic of girls. Everything feminine, of course the curves and shapes anatomy and biology, but also voices, faces, literally, every tiny nuance of the amazing differences between them and me.

February 9, 1964. The Beatles appeared on Ed Sullivan on Sunday night. Television was still black and white. Seventy-three million people watched, spellbound. They did five songs from their first album: She Loves You, I Want to Hold Your Hand, All My Loving, Till There was You, and I Saw Her Standing There.

The Beatles changed everything. Back then our music listening was limited mainly to what we got on the rock stations in radio. From then on, whenever a Beatles song came up on the radio, we all agreed to stay quiet and listen. “Stop. This is the Beatles.” Even Mom and Dad forgave us that. All the kids did the same. We were driving by then, so the Beatles became the most important moments in car travel. (Except for my brother Chip, who was 17 at the time. Chip remained loyal to Wagner and opera until he discovered the Beatles and the Beach Boys, a few years later, at Pomona College.)

The Beach Boys were also popular. And the Temptations, Diana Ross and the Supremes, Bob Dylan, even (still) Elvis Presley. But for the Beatles, and only for the Beatles, talking stopped. It was a Beatles song.

Beatles were a cultural event too. Their arrival in New York on February 7 was on all the major news shows, with teenage girls screaming their heads off, and huge crowds gathering.

Their look, which would seem so innocent after even just a few years, sparked a new battlefield between parents and sons. The Beatles innocent bobs of hair were taken as long hair, unkempt, disrespectful, revolutionary. They tracked to the Free Speech movement, the student rebellion, distrust of authorities, and, in just a short time, the whole concept of hippies. Immediately me and every friend I had, plus most of the other guys our age, wanted to grow our hair like Beatles. The long hair became the flag and banner of hippies, the new world, the calls for change. Kids left home over it. Parents kicked them out. The battle had been called.

And from there, with the Beatles, hair became the symbol of protest, the divider between generations. Kids became hippies. “Don’t trust anyone over 30” was a common cry in the generational war. So-called hippies, mostly kids with long hair and dressed in the hippy-influenced style of the time, were everywhere. In the Bay Area, by 1964, hippy style was the default for all teenagers, not the exception.

By 1964, the Vietnam War was reaching the nightly news and gaining public attention. We saw helicopters and troops, thumbs up signs and such, and occasional shots of troops firing and under fire. Technically they were still just US advisors, but they sure looked like troops on the news. A few people (and me and most of my friends) opposed the war this early, because it supported a corrupt regime and foreign intervention. But it was still public policy. The domino theory reigned supreme in Washington. And at this point, most of the public still believed what the government said about the war, the need for the war, and fighting communism. Dad was a staunch supporter, while Mom and her kitchen pundits began to doubt.

July 31, 1964. The Gulf of Tonkin incident. A minor navel skirmish in the waters outside Vietnam. It played heavily on our nightly news. It was followed on August 7 by the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which essentially authorized Johnson to conduct full-scale war in Vietnam. And years later, it turned out that the incident was largely manipulated by the Johnson administration to create a justification for escalating the war.

1964 also hailed the free speech movement in Berkeley. It was the first of many organized student protests in the 60s. Its most visible leader, Mario Savio, was a national hero for youth, and goat for adults. It exploded over university rules that limited political campaigning and activism on campus to clubs representing either Democrat or Republican parties. Activists were protesting the Vietnam War, Racism, pollution, and so forth.

The clashes started in October 1964 and continued off and on for most of 1965 and even into the following years. Chip was a law student at Berkeley and got caught in the tear gas at least once.

In November, the 1964 presidential election. That election divided my parents and a lot of the country, much more than Kennedy vs. Nixon. Johnson vs. Goldwater was a clear choice between Johnson’s moderate “Great Society” and Goldwater’s (in my mind) extremism. Goldwater was a hawk. The Johnson campaign tied him to nuclear war and mushroom clouds. Nobody I knew wanted Goldwater except Dad.

Mom and Dad squared off with Mom firmly for Johnson and Dad almost as firmly for Goldwater. Discussions around debates and TV commercials generated frequent arguments, many of them followed by long periods of angry silence. Goldwater was so true to his conservative ideals that he made Johnson look good. Johnson’s 60% victory was the largest margin ever.

And yet, as it turned out, Johnson too was a hard-liner hawk. He turned aggressively to win the war in Vietnam, without much regard for protests, or truth. His administration created a trumped-up incident in the Gulf of Tonkin to gain public acceptance of sending more troops. They lied about the progress of the war, the death count, and the corrupt politics of South Vietnam. He became a symbol of the military industrial establishment that — we were sure — was running the nation.

Growing Up. My 1964

February 10, 1964. Monday. The day after the Beatles’ first US appearance on the Ed Sullivan show. In the middle of a California February afternoon, sunny, I sat comfortably on a typical yellow school bus bench seat, spread out on one seat, glowing inside for the casual attention of three girls within earshot.

The bus wound through the big sprawling houses of Los Altos Hills at the top, up Magdalena and back around to Mora Drive. Where I lived was the last stop before school, an advantage in the mornings, but a long ride in the afternoons. Every day it took an hour to go all the way around the hills and get home.

The ride was okay because those three girls, one a senior, one a junior, and one a sophomore like me, were temporarily accessible for idle conversation like normal humans. Not, as they were for most of the day, goddesses. I was an equal. We talked about the Beatles, their sensational debut the night before.
It was probably on that bus, in 1964, that girls turned gradually into humans, for me. I was a sophomore in high school. But the license meant nothing without a car, and even a car would have meant little without a girl to invite on a date. That too happened that year, for me; but later in the year.

By then it had been two or three years since I’d woken up to their existence as something higher, brighter, much more beautiful than a normal human being. I saw their new curves, and noticed their manner, so delightfully different than me and my friends, the boys. I was in Los Altos public schools, so we grew up together, in elementary and middle school. But girls, just as girls, were magic. Looking back, our generation didn’t have porn of any kind. Yech. Our boy imaginations went wild with what we had, a touch of underwear ads, gorgeous movie stars, and yes, the girls around us. Goddess is an apt word. As went through puberty together they became luminous. And inaccessible. And magic.

That daily bus ride, that year, was a breakthrough. It took me until the following fall, in a different high school, to actually invite a girl on a date, the homecoming dance, holding her magical hand and dancing with her, and the smell of her all dolled up. But on the bus ride, talking about the Beatles, they returned to humanity. We could talk. There were still people living in those bodies, some of them even the same people they’d been in elementary school, when they were just girls.

I might have been a nerd, if we’d had that word, because I was good at school. But I was also good at sports and girls liked me. I was too chubby, but I was one of the better athletes on the playground, a captain of the middle school football team, a big hitter on the baseball team, so I wasn’t subject to the teasing I might have been. I was fine with the girls in elementary school, but too shy in high school.

Girls, especially these smart, pretty girls, were still goddesses, not to be approached … except for the irony that on the bus, removed perhaps from the normal social structure, they were just plain friendly, like people.

In 1964 that Oldsmobile convertible, the one that had made Mom cry, came of age along with me. By that time Mom had forgiven it. It had taken us for a once-in-a-lifetime father-and-sons fishing trip to Castle Crags State Park. It took us to Stanford Football games. What a car. Huge, for one thing. Literally 18 feet long and 6.7 feet wide. With a 315 Hp engine. And convertible.

We had also discovered that convertibles made no sense. Not even in California, the best weather possible. It was cold at less than about 72 degrees, and too hot and sunny at anything over 80 degrees. So, the red convertible lived with its white top up, slowly rotting. It was cold, windy and noisy. Dad kept me away from it for as long as he could. But there were those special odd times when I tooled around Los Altos in it. When I stomped on the accelerator — which had to be away from home, for obvious reasons — it could burn rubber for five or ten seconds, 50 or more yards. It was too much car for a young driver. I was bad with that car, and it urged me on when I was.

Around the same time, my PE friend Terry McKenna invited me to join his after-school group that they called — because Awalt High School demanded the formality of it — the Foreign Affairs Club.

Terry was a gangly, awkward guy, a year older than me, super smart and wicked funny. He and I loved to make wisecracks from the sidelines, potshots at the PE teacher and some of the more annoying classmates. Terry was fun. His club was about the same kind of issues that were in the air, in the environment around us; and that same Spring, in 1964, crystallized as the Mario Savio Free Speech Movement in Berkeley.

Hippies captured our imaginations. Styles, and thinking, gravitated towards the hippies. Berkeley, with the Free Speech Movement, and San Francisco, with a collection of new psychedelic rock groups, became a center of it.

Terry McKenna went on to become a folk hero for a subset of extreme intellectuals who connected higher math with higher consciousness, LSD, and the enlightenment concepts that had begun a couple decades earlier with Aldous Huxley’s Doors of Perception, mixed with measures of eastern philosophy and political rebellion.

Summer of 1964 I got Fred Klein, a classmate at Awalt, to join me in my first backpacking trip in the Sierra. Fred was vital because his mom let him take their car, a 1950 Buick, so we were able to get there. This first trip was where I discovered everything not to do with backpacking. If it weren’t for the glory of being in those mountains, it would have been a nightmare.

I equipped myself as best I could, with a heavy cloth sleeping back, a barely acceptable backpack, a heavy cloth sleeping bag, and incredible extra weight including a book on the flora and fauna and fishing equipment with multiple bait and lures. My pack weighed at least 60 pounds, probably more. We had bad cooking equipment, no stove, bad food, and damn little of even that. We didn’t fish and I never opened the book. Fred, bless his heart, looked to me as the supposed expert. As a result, his packing was just as bad as mine.

We drove to Yosemite Valley and slept overnight by the car parked at Happy Isles. The first day we hiked eight or so miles up the mist trail past Vernal and Nevada Falls into Little Yosemite Valley. We barely managed to eat portions of horrible cardboard food. The second day we hiked up to Merced Lake, another gorgeous hike, another ten miles, and another badly organized campsite with a barely acceptable fire and barely edible food. The third day we hiked up through Boothe Lake and Emerick Lake to Vogelsang. That was the third day of just a small ration of almost inedible food. The views and the hikes were gorgeous, everything I’d dreamt of during the long year since my last time up in the high mountains. And the headaches were constant.

On the fourth day we hiked down from Vogelsang to the road at Tuolumne Meadows and hitchhiked a ride from there down to Yosemite Valley, where we picked up Fred’s car and drove back down in defeat. Although the all-you-can eat Smorgasbord restaurant in the outskirts of Merced was a welcome consolation. That became a mainstay for the drive home for many other trips.

In 1964 Mom and Dad moved me from the public Awalt High School to the private Catholic all-boys St. Francis high school. I took that as being about me turning hippie, left-wing radical, even as a 15-year-old kid. But I don’t remember objecting that much. I guess I was compliant.

However, a funny thing happened when I started at St. Francis. I found friends there fast. George, Tom, and Bill became really good friends. We hung out together on weekends, even went backpacking together. George was best man at our wedding. The girls from Holy Cross High School, a mile up the road, joined us for dances, extra-curricular activities, school plays, and so forth.
That would not be the first time I’d have my school changed to straighten me out.

That fall Chip left for Pomona College. They didn’t drive down to Pomona to leave him off or fix up his dorm room. They put him on a plane at the San Jose Airport. As we drove to the San Jose Airport, Dad lectured Chip to not be a tight ass. “When the guys go off for a drink, go with the guys. Don’t be the only one who didn’t.” That was a reflection on Dad, and things he missed during his college years. I found it oddly humorous: both Dad saying it, and that it might have needed to be said.

1965: Worst Job Ever

Worst job ever: selling encyclopedias door to door. Or, in my case, not selling encyclopedias, door to door.

You may not be aware of what an encyclopedia is. Before the Internet, conscientious parents bought a set of encyclopedias for the home. Each was a matched set of 20 or so think leather-bound books. They presented a comprehensive summary of human knowledge in alphabetical order. Kids used them to do homework. Look up Thomas Jefferson, Pearl Harbor, lizards, Greek tragedies, and there was the summary. Like wikipedia today. I was supposed to be selling the Colliers.

They trained us. It was a culture of cynical deception. In sales meetings the good salespeople bragged about deceiving stupid customers. Selling to a childless household was a big achievement. They’d brag about how many times they got through the door promising they weren’t selling anything, then selling something, and getting their victims to bay.

First step, when the door opened, was tell them I was doing an educational survey. A lie. They taught us to answer objections (everyone always asked “what are you selling?”) with straight bold-faced lies (or bald-faced if you prefer). The goal was to get inside the house and into the living room.

Next step, in the living room, was the survey. How many kids? What grades? How much do you care about education? How far have you (parents) gone in school?

Then the hook: “Do you know that kids in homes that have encyclopedias have (some outrageous lie) percent more chance of going to college?”

And then, the fancy brochures come out. Pictures of encyclopedias. Sample pages. Payment plans.

If you know me, you’ll guess how successful I was. That’s right: zero. Not one sale. I spent two weeks in training, and four weeks trying, but not a single sale. I never even convinced anybody I was just doing a survey, much less getting into their living room. So I made no money. Not a penny. There was no base salary plus commission, no payment for training; it was all on commission and I sold nothing.

What I learned: I don’t like general sales. I especially don’t like selling stuff people don’t want or need. I am not a convincing liar. Also, I hate that culture: The book ‘Think and Grow Rich’ by Napoleon Hill, and the people who brag about lying well and selling stuff people don’t need or want.

By the way, I did have an after-sch00l job while I was in high school. I’d walk from St. Francis High School to my Dad’s office. Dad had an optical store in one side of the office. He prescribed glasses, and they sold them. I worked after school five days a week. I liked the people, and it was a pleasant job.

1966: High School to Haight Ashbury

The summer of 1966 changed my life completely. Magic for me, black magic to my parents. Finishing high school, followed by a magical summer, followed by a disastrous failure to launch. I left home to join the hippies in San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury district. And returned home to go to Notre Dame.  I was witness to history. San Francisco, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, the summer of love, and hippies. Me included.

As I graduated high school that year, I had a summer job lined up at a mountain camp, and I was going to Pomona College in September. I had a dorm room reserved and classes chosen. When Stanford and Harvard declined the honor of me, Pomona College was my best choice. I’d also been accepted to Notre Dame, but I’d respectfully declined. I did not want to go to a Catholic university in the dregs of the Midwest.

The summer started great. Right after graduation, eight of us took off for Yosemite. We left cars in the valley, took the bus to Glacier Point, and hiked up Illilouette Creek. Thick snow kept us from going through Red Peak Pass to the upper Merced basin. We gave up, hiked 16 miles back down to Little Yosemite Valley, then climbed Half Dome before going back home. It was a good start for a summer, early for backpacking, but my best way to celebrate graduation. With my new down sleeping back, a graduation present, which is still in the family as of 2020.

Camped where we had to turn back, about two miles from Red Peak Pass. That’s me on the right, sitting, looking at the camera.

The summer of 1966 changed my life completely. Magic for me, black magic to my parents. Finishing high school, followed by a magical summer, followed by a disastrous failure to launch.

Then I was off to Camp Unalayee, my summer job for 1966. It was the ideal way to spend a summer, backpacking, dealing with kids, living in the mountains, and getting paid for it. High up in the Trinity Alps. West of Mt. Shasta, an hour or two of dirt roads from the tiny town of Callahan, CA. It isn’t in the high Sierra; but it looks like it should be. Shiny granite, beautiful clear blue lakes, gorgeous green meadows, and snowy peaks.

The camp itself still exists. You can find pictures with Google images, and it appears on Google Maps. We sent three kids and two cousins there in 1984. In 1966 it was one or two rustic old buildings along the creek that drained out of Mosquito Lake, surrounded by clusters of makeshift group campsites around the creek and along the edge of the forest looking over the meadows and the lake. At each group site, kids slept in the open, sleeping bags on ground tarps, around a campfire with a metal grill for cooking. Each two-week session included boys and girls 6 to 16, grouped by age and gender, with two counselors for each of the 10 groups. It rarely rained that summer. When it did, we all got wet.

We got to the camp in the back of a flatbed truck with wooden staked sides that drove for all of 12 hours from the Bay Area. Locked in without shade, with people I barely knew. They were all friendly, but I was me, and they were strangers. The last two hours or so, after we passed Callahan, was over bumpy, dusty dirt roads. The truck shook violently with the bumps, so we all had to stand and hold to the sides. That was a long day.

And then, pretty much paradise. The Unalayee of that time was a non-denominational kids’ camp run by left-leaning anti-war parents, mostly. And the culture was all hippy all the time, a kaleidoscope of folk songs, protest songs, long campfire discussions, and all of it laced thoroughly with peace and love and hope for a new world order. We all read Tolkien and J.D. Salinger, and we were all either Franny or Zooey or Frodo to the elders’ Gandalf. Each one of us was a voice in the wilderness, speaking the truth of a whole generation, dancing to our own individual drum; no matter that it was all the same voice and the same drum. There were no drugs at Unalayee, but I was pretty much high the whole time. High on all of it, from the kids, to the cooking, to the overnight backpacks, to all the thoroughly reinforced ideals. We were against the war, against racism, in favor of dropping out and tuning in. We were Ken Kesey’s magical bus. We were the Beatle’s Magical Mystery Tour. On days off between sessions we’d be driven in the truck down to Callahan, where we felt like a scene from a movie, the hippies encountering the small-town rednecks. We were heroes of our own movies in our own heads.

I did have the occasional adventure at Unalayee. The second week of the camp, three of us counselors had taken a group of younger kids on an overnight backpacking trip to Washbasin Lake, about three miles from the main camp. The lake was nestled in a meadow, with peaks above it and a wide view of the Callahan valley below it. After a campfire dinner, one of our youngest, a six-year-old boy, had bad stomach pains. Agony apparently. Was it appendicitis? Feeling heroic as hell, two of us hiked at night back to the camp, guided by moonlight on the mostly rocky and open landscape. We got to camp and then hiked back with an old canvas stretcher with wood handles. Then we loaded the kid on the stretcher and hiked the trail, still at night, back to the camp. We got there about dawn, at which point the kid was fine. Gas pains. But we still felt heroic.

I’ll never forget Log Lake at about the sixth week of eight. The morning I dove into the lake. I was stuck without camera, without journal, so I recorded the moment in memory.  

Log Lake has its own small patch of paradise, invisible from anywhere but the high peaks above it. There was a meadow on the east side, a few trees, good sleeping spots, and good rocks and old logs for cooking and eating. On the west and south side, the rocks rise through boulders and snow patches, very little green, up to peaks above it. It was like a perfect Sierra Club calendar photo, although it’s not a particularly well-known landmark. I’ve never seen a picture of it published anywhere, never even heard of it since. I did find it in Google maps, so I know I didn’t just imagine it.

We had reached Log Lake after a long day’s hike. It’s about five miles one way, but tough miles, cross country without a good trail. We had to go down from the camp to Tangle Blue Creek, and then up a steep hill through rocks and bristle, navigating by maps and faith. It was a tough hike, but we got there in time to settle in, cook a simple dinner, hold a campfire with the kids for a while, and then sleep.

I can’t tell for sure, but this could be Log Lake. It looked like this. The photo doesn’t identify it well.

The next morning, I woke up before anybody else, shortly after the sun hit my sleeping bag, and jumped into the lake. I had braced myself for an icy, painfully cold mountain lake, like an electric shock that takes your breath away. Instead, its temperature was so much better than icy that the memory lasted. It wasn’t warm by any means, but it was no colder than the brisk temperature you’d expect from a country club swimming pool in August.

I guess Log Lake was that much warmer than normal because it was small, shallow, and surrounded by rocks. It must have been warming up during the days. I don’t know that, and it doesn’t make sense that it had snow patches just a few hundred yards above it; but they were small patches, probably not draining all the way down to the lake in August.
A bracing swim, drying myself laying on a rock in the sun, then breakfast. A glorious moment.

I was about six weeks into the eight-week camp. When I looked ahead, it was back home with my family in Los Altos for a couple of weeks, and then off to Pomona College. There was nothing, but absolutely nothing, wrong with life at that moment, and everything right.

Two weeks or so later, I was back in the back of the truck. I held on to the staked sides as the truck reeled back and forth. I canned across the Tangle Blue Creek valley, to where Log Lake was hidden from view below the peaks above it. I was happy, tired, lost in my own thoughts. The dust clouded everything. “Tim, you’ve got a beard,” one of the older — she was like 23 — counselors noted. My blonde silky excuse for a beard only showed when covered in dust.

I was going home in a glow, floating. I was lean and wiry, weighed 30 pounds less than two months earlier. My hair was long and flowing, down past my shoulders. And I belonged to a worldwide movement that would change the world. We were hippies. If membership IDs had been issued, I would have had one. Peace, love, world unity, power to the people, an end to the rule of the military-industrial establishment. Dance to your own music. Drop out, tune in. Timothy Leary, Aldous Huxley, and, of course, the Beatles too. Flower power. Don’t trust anybody over 30.

I was in love with the group, with the music, with the people I’d been with, and also (I was 18; give me a break) with one of the girls, 16. For days on end, I slept at home, but spent all day with my new friends, much of the time in San Francisco. When I wasn’t able to take the family third car (our much-beloved 1958 Chevy station wagon, which pretended to be mine most of that year with Chip away at Pomona), I’d get one of my new friends to pick me up.

Pressure built. The parents became more worried, and me, just footloose and fancy free, an 18-year-old hippie, enjoying my friends and the streets of San Francisco.

After a few days of it, the parental foot came down. No, I was no longer allowed to spend every day gone with my friends. Too much was too much.

To which — sign of the times — I responded by leaving home. With some nasty insults as I left. I came home around nightfall in the car of a guy named Howie (another counselor) to get my guitar, sleeping bag, and backpack. I spent the night God-knows-where and ended up in the San Francisco Airport the following morning, with a guy named Mac Brown (also a counselor) and a ticket to fly to Santa Rosa. I was sleep deprived, exhausted, and in a non-drug-induced high.

Yes, that’s odd. Santa Rosa was at that time barely 90 minutes north of San Francisco. Why fly? God knows. It was kind of a lark. I guess I had enough money for a cheap ticket because I’d been paid for Unalayee and during those two months we had no way to spend money. So, it must have been miserable pay, but still, it was something in my pocket.

Mac was 21, so old.  He had a real beard, and he owned a hot rod. Literally, a 1932 ford chassis over a 1954 Chevrolet engine, with the open engine and front wheels. That car was something I’d only dreamt of. At the time, as we took off for Santa Rosa, I hadn’t actually seen it. But I’d sure heard of it.

My plan was to accept Mac’s offer of a spare room in Santa Rosa, get a part-time job, and go to Sonoma State College. I didn’t care about college at Pomona College, paid by parents. I was going to be truly independent.

And of course, none of that worked out. Not even the hot rod. He did own it, he had built it, and he took me out in it too. But it didn’t run. The transmission argued with the engine and both refused to work with the other. So, it would go about a block and then seize up. Mac would then spend 20 minutes convincing the two warring parties (engine and transmission) to make up and work together. Which would last about another block.

First, though, before settling in Santa Rosa, Mac and I went back to Haight Ashbury. Somebody related to Unalayee had access to an old house just a block from the historic corner of Haight and Ashbury. We were allowed to crash there, meaning spread a sleeping bag on the floor and sleep there, for free.

As I write this, hippie is a put-down to some, a Halloween costume to many, a cultural and historical anomaly for wikipedia. But in the summer, 1966 it was a worldwide movement centered in and born of San Francisco. It was an early head start to a wave of change that swept the globe. It was free love, free spirits, flower power, don’t trust anyone over 30, fight the establishment, tune out and turn on, LSD, marijuana, peace and freedom, the age of aquarius. The Beatles were hippies. All the rock stars were hippies. So was Timothy Leary, the SDS, etc. It was youth revolution.

Still, I am glad, and proud, that I was there. When you read about hippies, know that I was right smack in the middle of it all in 1966. I was a verified San Francisco Haight Ashbury hippy. I lived it. The Haight Ashbury district of San Francisco was the world center of the hippie movement, a vibrant young neighborhood full of you people with outlandish dress, outlandish ideas, and great music. There, in summer of 1966, was in many ways the roots of it all. Scott Mackenzie’s song “If You’re Going to San Francisco” was actually a year later; but it took a year for what we started to spread widely enough. the protests against the Vietnam War, the rise of a whole generation believing we would change the world for the better. Taking to the streets to protest the war, and, later, taking the administration building to protest the war.

Those days were like an all-day pageant. The neighborhood was all color and flare, odd stores selling odd used stuff, new age art, lots of rock music, locals (including me) with hippie hair and dress, and tourists driving through. It’s fun to be part of a pageant. We liked it when normal people pointed at us as if we were the animals in the zoo. We hung out in Golden Gate Park and around the neighborhood. We did nothing but sing, talk and breathe. Well, the more enlightened and slightly older ones among us did a lot of sex and drugs too … but that wasn’t me. I was only 18. I was afraid of the drugs. The girl I thought I loved was there, brightening every day, but also making it pretty clear pretty quickly that she loved everybody, not just me. And she was even younger than me, and, thank heavens, not having sex with anybody. I survived the blow, grieved for about 10 minutes, then went on with the pageant.

I wish I had pictures. But pictures were for straights, our equivalent of muggles. We were making history. We were going to change the world. I was full of the spirit of the Age of Aquarius, the San Francisco summer of love, Golden Gate Park. I had hair down to my shoulders and a two-month beard — so thin and downy that it only showed up in some lighting and some angles — but still.  I was a prop in a tourist attraction. Straights drove by slowly in their cars to look at the hippy crowds in the Haight. I was one of them. 

Looking back on it, fifty-some years later, I feel only loss and sadness. We thought we were changing the world forever. We didn’t. Some of us kept the ideals — I did — but most of us let go as we grew older. We changed a part of the world for a while. We broke up some stereotypes, we opened some minds, we opened some cracks in the power stronghold of older white men and the military-industrial establishment. The world was better for it, for sure. Maybe we pushed some things in the right direction, maybe even enough to make some stick even as the world pushed back. We were at the root of the green movement, concerns about raping the earth, pushing for diversity and civil rights, and gay rights, youth power, breaking up establishment power. But we saw so much pushing back on that later on. The people got old, power structures pushed it all down, and what we have left are mostly hopes and dreams.

1966: The Haight to Notre Dame

Through August of 1966 I evolved from Catholic High School kid to the Trinity Alps to Haight Ashbury hippie. In September I devolved into Freshman at Notre Dame.

In my previous story, “1966: From High School to Haight Ashbury Hippie,” I hinted at what went wrong for me during that period. I was too young for free love and I feared drugs.

Once I’d moved in at the Haight, it took me just a few days to discover that there was a lot more love for generic people far away — the Vietnamese, the drafted soldiers, the vaguely downtrodden and oppressed — than there was for that actual human standing next to you.

And the “dance to your own music” idea came to mean “be different, but just like us, different the way we are.”
And the worst, for me, was the pressure over LSD. LSD scared the hell out of me. I’d seen two different people, at two different times, temporarily trapped in a bad-trip hell of their own making, in complete terror, unable to escape, forced to wait until the chemical in their brain wore off. But some of me people pressured me to drop acid myself. They promised glorious visions, truth, benightment. I said hell no. But the pressure continued, nonetheless.

So, I gave up. I called home. I said I wanted to come back. I’ll never forget the long pause, as the parents left me in a phone booth, while they considered. “Yes,” came the answer, finally. “Of course you can come home. But you’re not going to Pomona College if you do. You are going to Notre Dame instead.”

The parents were right. They did the right thing for me. Like the kid I was, I was mad at them, and I went to Notre Dame determined to hate it. I did hate it for most of my first year, except for football Saturdays, the classes, and a few friends. But then came Innsbruck the second year, and I met Vange the third year, and was married the fourth year. I’m proud of Notre Dame and glad for my parents’ decision.

I am also proud that in the 54 years since then, my politics haven’t changed. I still believe now in the ideals we held that summer.

A California Hippy at Notre Dame

The Notre Dame campus is gorgeous in Spring and Fall. It still is now, but even more so in 1966. The golden domed administration building looked out to the north over a shady park-like main quad. Looking south from the golden dome, just to the right, the gothic cathedral with its huge spire. And then Sorin Hall, the oldest dorm, with a broad porch with white post railings. Across the quad from Sorin, to the left from the main dome building, stood the old theater and student union. That section opened up onto the huge south quad, 100 yards wide and 600 or more yards long, from liberal arts building O’Shaughnessy Hall at its east end to the old student gym at its west end. Between them, the quad lined with old beige brick college style buildings, very few postwar practical. The hallowed football stadium stood just south of O’Shaughnessy. The then-almost-new 10-story library was just north of it, with another park-like quad between the library and the stadium. The campus ended at the stadium, so student parking took up most of the newer areas that are now full of more modern buildings that extended the campus to the south. Behind the golden dome, two lakes, and a narrow road passing between them — the walk to St. Mary’s College, where the girls were.

However, I went there determined to hate it. And that was easy.
The trip there helped me hate it. Temporarily stranded in O’Hare Airport in Chicago. With two big suitcases. Saved by a returning sophomore who identified us as would-be freshmen. He helped us two of us get a shuttle downtown and then the South Shore train into South Bend, and a taxi to campus.

The dorm helped me hate it. I was assigned to Dillon Hall, on the south quad. At least it was one of a few experimental dorms that mixed all four years together, instead of just a freshman dorm. I was glad for that. I got a very small room with just enough space for two bunk beds, two metal desks, and two metal “closets” with room for some hanging clothes and a couple of drawers. When my roommate asked me where I was from, he was not satisfied with “California.” So he asked “but from what kind of neighborhood?” I said suburban. So he asked, “no, but you know, Italian, Polish, Irish, what?” That was the first time I’d encountered that which-neighborhood mentality, which, I guessed, was common in New York. Joe the roommate was from a very Italian town on Long Island. He lived to play baseball. We entered a nine-month relationship best described as a truce. By the end of the year, after Joe didn’t make the baseball team and flunked out, the only thing we had in common was hating the place. We had a brief fist fight before the year ended. Joe won that, perhaps because I didn’t know it was happening until after it was over. One punch.

Dillon Hall, Notre Dame

The weather helped me hate it. The first two weeks hot humid, clothes sticking to skin at every step. Of course, without air conditioning. Then gray, cold, hostile, with increasing hostility into long bleak winter months. The first snow felt like weekends, skiing, good times, something delightfully different. That lasted about 10 minutes. And the winter took from November through March, followed by a day or two of spring, and then straight to sweltering summer.

That Notre Dame was still all boys helped me hate it. The messaging said men, but we were boys. Six thousand of us vs. a thousand St. Mary’s girls. That fall there were several panty raids. I joined one of them. It started in the dorm with excited shouts, followed by hundreds of us walking the mile to St. Mary’s. We stood outside McCandless Hall laughing and shouting. The girls inside threw panties down. Like most of my classmates, I managed not a single date my freshman year. The girls, favored by a 6-1 ratio, reserved themselves for the junior and seniors.

And so, I did hate it. A lot. For all of my first year. It was a very long, dreary year. But the nonstop cloudiness of it came with three silver linings.

The huge silver lining was signing up for Innsbruck. It was almost pure chance too. I hadn’t had the benefit of orientation or even any interest in it. But when I lined up at registration day to choose classes, I saw a checkbox marked “Innsbruck program.” That was barely two years after the 1964 Winter Olympics in Innsbruck. So, Austria, mountains, and skiing. I had no idea beyond the box there, but I figured “what the hell” and checked the box. That changed my life.

Also, it was a bit of a kick being “the hippie” at Notre Dame that first year. That, despite an obligatory haircut and losing the wannabe beard while still at home. “There’s a hippie in Dillon Hall.” It was fun to be noticed, and particularly for that reason. I was proud of it. I wasn’t quite the only one. There was another guy with long hair in one of the other dorms, a sophomore I think, a drama guy. But still, I liked the label.

The there was also football. At first, I was going to boycott football because it was against all I stood for. Clearly an offshoot of the military industrial complex and the realization of everything wrong with Notre Dame. But then came the first football Saturday, on a gorgeous late September day, rock bands playing in several spots on campus, excited people everywhere, lots of girls, a day so charged that it felt like sparks might fly everywhere and anywhere at any time. And I did manage, with great difficulty, to not join the crowds that headed for the sold-out stadium in time for a 1:30 kickoff. And that, despite the fact that my numbered season ticket, seating along with my dorm mates, came with tuition. I lingered outside for about an hour, envying the crowds inside, lured by the cheers I couldn’t help hearing. But I couldn’t stand it. By halftime I was there, taking my seat, while dormmates razzed me, as in “look, the hippie decided to join us.” Before I sat down I addressed my group, with something like “I’m still a hippy, but I have my priorities.”

After that I was at my seat for every minute of every other game that year, and I watched the away games on TV. The season ended with an historic game against Michigan State on Nov. 19. They were 10-0, we were 10-0. We had Terry Hanratty, Rocky Blier, Alan Paige, Pete Duranko, among others. They had Bubba Smith. The game ended in a 10-10 tie. It appears on most lists of the greatest football games every. I saw it on a huge black-and-white projected screen on the basketball court, which was blurry, but enough to watch. We all hated that revered coach Ara Parseghian coached for a tie when it we had the ball and 1:10 to go. We ended up sharing the national championship with Michigan State.

My second year at Notre Dame wasn’t at Notre Dame at all. It was in Innsbruck, Austria, and that only after six weeks in Salzburg, Austria. Definitely the best year of my life before falling in love, marriage and kids. And one of the best ever. That feeling a kid gets just before seeing what Santa Claus left on Christmas morning? I had it just about every day for a full year. I’d wake up, remember where I was, and just be overwhelmingly glad to be me, there, at that time. The glow and the wonder never left. The novelty never wore off. But that’s a different story.

I like to say “I failed as a hippy.”

1967-68 Innsbruck

In early July, 1967, I sat at breakfast in the dining car of the Orient Express train from Paris to Salzburg, Austria. The train rolled rhythmically along a mountain river, with a lot of white water. Across the river, a narrow road lined by Swiss chalets, white stucco, brown roofs, red flowers hanging out of their windows. Above, rising behind, the alps with craggy and snowy peaks at the top. I floated, elated, the joy of that morning mixed with the realization that I had a whole year of it coming.

We’d arrived in Europe via the U.S.S. United States, an ocean liner. Notre Dame sent us on the ship because in 1967 the ocean trip was cheaper than flying. We’d met in New York to take the ship. We were 36 19-year-old Notre Dame boys, in second class, suddenly subjected to free beer and hard drinks, free movies, free food, free everything except girls. The few young eligible girls on that boat were subjected to constant attention from our group. So, no onboard romances for any of us. But we knew each other from German classes all the previous year, so there were always friendly Notre-Dame-group faces in any of the bars, restaurants, movie theaters, and on the deck and in the pool/gym. Like most of us, I failed to enjoy it fully because I just couldn’t wait for arrival in Europe.

The last night on the ship, we stayed up all night, in awe of what we were doing and where we were going, as the big ship unloaded passengers at Southampton first, then went on to Le Havre, where we arrived in the wee hours of the morning.

I spent the train ride from there to Paris struggling to stay awake and failing. Then we were in Paris; Notre Dame, Champs Elysee, Montmarte. I staggered through the sites, a few of us together, and barely survived the long day in Paris before crashing that night in a sleeper car of the Orient Express, which left Paris at 8 that evening.

So, it really hit me that next morning, waking up in Switzerland. It all seemed magic. Swiss Alps. Europe. The Orient Express. And that, just the first day of a whole year.

We spent the rest of the summer in Salzburg learning more German language. We lived in a reconfigured stable-turned-school. The school, all single story buildings including dorms and classrooms, was on the grounds of Schloss Klessheim, a 17th century baroque mansion that appeared as one of the sets of the movie The Sound of Music, set in Salzburg.

It was about a quarter mile or so downhill to a small village, with a single store and half a dozen houses, and a Gasthof beer place that became a favorite haunt very quickly. Where we lived was also about mile’s walk from the old-town view of the castle from the river. The walk took us through a long tree-lined street, then some village houses. It came up to the river and castle view as encountered one of our favorite beer places. That bier garden had an outside section under big shade trees, perfect for summer weather. An Austrian Schilling was worth four US pennies, and a two-liter beer stein came for 20 schillings, so, 80 cents. Welcome to Austria in 1967. As a 19-year-old kid.

The picture here is from Schloss Klessheim. I’m there with my shirt off.

These two are from the walk down town along the river:

And one final picture of Salzburg in 1967:

After eight weeks in Salzburg, before settling in Innsbruck, we had three weeks of vacation. Jim O’Connell and I took off hitchhiking, living the dream. “Hitchhiking in Europe” was something students did back then. It was considered safe. And “Europe on $5 a Day” was all the rage, an extremely popular travel book.

Jim and I discovered together that hitchhiking, although it worked, also meant a lot of time waiting around at the highway entrances outside the city. And $5 a day meant some pretty dreary youth hostels, generally dark, dirty, and dorm-like if dorms had been fixed up in 500-year-old crusty damp old cities.

We hitchhiked up the so-called “Romantic Road” in central Germany going north from outside Munich to east of Frankfurt. The highlight for us was Rothenburg am Tauber, where we ditched the youth hostel and rented an actual hotel room, with two feather beds, for about $3. It’s a gorgeous town completely surrounded by ancient medieval walls.

We did manage to take a boat up the Rhine river, from Frankfurt to Cologne.

We spent the school year in Innsbruck, taking classes in the university. Ten of us lived in a widow’s big home at Schmelzer Gasse 2, about a mile downriver from the university, a pleasant walk away, through the old town and along the river.

The picture here is the house we lived in:

And this next one is on a bridge over the Inn river, not the main bridge for which the city was named, but one just 100 yards from the house. The house was across the street from the church in the background. The guy in the middle is Jim O’Connell, my roomate. The one furthest from the camera lived across the hall. And yes, that’s me on the right:

In this picture I’m on the balcony of the room I shared with Jim:

The following are pictures of Innsbruck:

In November four of us took a train to Venice, and found it flooded, a common occurrence:

Over the Christmas break, a group of us took trains down to Florence, then Rome …

… and on to Brindisi, in the eastern tip of Italy, where we caught an overnight ferry to Corfu, in Greece. And on in trains to Athens, then Istanbul, and then two days on the train back from Istanbul through Bulgaria and Yogoslavia to Innsbruck.

Before the train ride, which took all night, all the next day, and then all the following night, we pooled our meager resources and gave our cash to Colm Gage, one of the group, to buy food and drink for the journey. Colm, however, arrived at the train with only apologies and reasons why not. That made for a very interesting trip, with only enough money for a few rolls. Some young men took pity on us in Yugoslavia, and shared some food.

February of that year I bought my Volkswagen, using Dad’s money, for way less than it would have cost in the US. The deal was that Europe was so cheap back then you could buy a new VW, use it for the year, ship it to the US, and sell it used in the US for considerably more than you’d paid for it new in Germany. I was the eighth in the group to do it, all the others having been quicker on the draw, which meant they got to use it all year, not just the last few months. None of us actually sold the cars to make the profit. We kept them. Mine sat at home for my third year at Notre Dame, and then my parents gave it to me for my senior year.

I picked the car up in Munich. Two days later, as I sat waiting for a red light in Innsbruck, somebody backed a car out of a diagonal parking space and dented the side. Insurance worked.

That car took me skiing every day. My friends counted 63 class days in a row that I missed class because I was up skiing, accompanied by different members of the group.

On the big spring break that year, that car took me and three friends through Germany, northern France, England, and Wales; and back.

That car also got me very close to jail for drunk driving. It was at a “green beer” (meaning fresh, just brewed, the first batches of the season) festival up the river from Innsbruck. I drove with friends. And, being young and foolish,

And it was 1968. We sat in the breakfast room together each morning, so we shared the news of Robert Kennedy being shot, and then, a few weeks later. Martin Luther King. We read about riots in the cities. We felt far away, but still, dismayed.

I spent my last two weeks in Europe alone in Paris. I’d failed to coordinate with friends. So I spent the days walking through a gorgeous summer in Paris; and the nights pretty much alone in a cheap hotel room on the West Bank, listening to windows breaking and tear gas pops and the other sounds of student riots. It wasn’t just Paris; it was also all over the US and major cities in Europe and Asia. I participated in student demonstrations in the US before and after, but in Paris, that time in 1968, I stayed inside, feeling very American. And that, in the days of the Vietnam War and police violence opposing integration, was not a good thing to be, in the left bank in Paris in the summer of 1968.