The Summer of Love of hippies, love-ins, Monterey Pop, LSD, Sgt. Pepper, Haight-Ashbury flower children and Vietnam War protests happened without most of us who are now hearing about its 50th anniversary.
That’s because half of us weren’t born yet and only a fringe of the day’s young Baby Boomers actually put flowers in their hair and tried to “tune in, turn on and drop out.”
Back then, in 1967, LIFE magazine and other media put the hippies and their counterculture of psychedelic music, drugs and art on their front pages. Fifty years later, the news clippings are faded and the promised cultural revolution of peace and love, social awakenings and expanded consciousness lies dormant.
Sonoma County shared some of the vibes of the original Summer of Love. There were hippies here in 1967 and the music of San Francisco’s Jefferson Airplane and Grateful Dead took over the local radio airwaves. But most of us were busy graduating from high school, trying to stay out of the draft or planning a family.
The 58th annual Analy High School graduation took place that year on June 14 with 265 students. Healdsburg High School’s graduation with 240 seniors, featured valedictorian Ann McCutchan’s speech, “Born Free.” Windsor didn’t have a high school back then and the Cloverdale High School class was another small one. Santa Rosa still had only two high schools, with Montgomery opening just a decade earlier.
Three days after the 1967 Analy graduation, Sebastopol lost its first Vietnam War casualty, William Blessman, son of Mr. and Mrs. Lowell Sanders. In the same issue of The Sebastopol Times, hippie Ramon Sender of the Morning Star commune in Occidental placed an ad offering to trade for labor or organic vegetables.
It was in the middle of the Summer of Love that construction started on the Warm Springs Dam that would fill Lake Sonoma 18 years later. Mini skirts were outlawed by Forestville Elementary School and the City of Healdsburg celebrated the 100th anniversary of its incorporation with an eight-day celebration.
A contingent of Cloverdale, Geyserville and Healdsburg officials petitioned the State Highway Authority to expedite a $9 million lane-widening project for Highway 101 because of too many traffic fatalities on the two-lane roadway.
All the while, life was changing, whether we dropped LSD or not. Everybody wore bell bottoms or Levis. Things were groovy and tie-dyed. More serious, there was an unpopular war on our TVs every evening and there were civil rights protests still smoldering in America. Women’s Lib, Gay Rights, the Pill, lots of marijuana and a new language (“Far out, man”) all happened.
And, then, they didn’t.
The Summer of Love was the climax of the age of the hippie counterculture. It started with the 1950s Baby Boomers who grew up among the rising affluence of an expanding middle class. Spoiled or bored, this upwelling of a younger generation questioned their parents, authority, old values and norms. New media opened their lives to a wider world of Eastern religions, psychedelics, anti-establishment politics and lots of new expressions and definitions of love.
Now, 50 years on, we’d be hard pressed to find very many remnants of the old hippies’ peace, love and harmony. Following the Summer of Love, we elected Nixon and Reagan and we were engulfed by the Moral Majority. Hollywood and advertising co-opted the movement’s fashion and art. Psychedelics were outlawed and the flower children got jobs in government, law or corporations. Marijuana is now a big business, but alcohol is the dominant drug of choice.
Where’s the love? The Boomers and hippies seemed to be trying to say good-bye to the older, straighter times of their parents and the establishment. Tie-dyed or button-downed, the young inhabitants of 1967 seemed to be looking for a very different tomorrow.
That hippies’ tomorrow never came and it is all our loss.
