PBS American Experience & Summer of Love

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American Experience Summer of Love PBS Documentary American Experience Summer of Love PBS Documentary pbs, frontlinefull, episodes 2014 .

[music]

Major funding for American
Experience is provided by

the Halford Peace Loan Foundation.

National corporate
funding is provided by

Liberty Mutual and
the Scotts Company.

American Experience is
also made possible by

the Corporation for Public
Broadcasting and

by contributions to your PBS
station from viewers like you.

Thank you.

[music]

(narrator) It was the largest
migration of young people in

the history of America.

From every direction,
they came.

From the biggest cities and
from the smallest towns.

All bound for San Francisco
in the summer of 1967.

A hundred thousand is a minimum
estimate of what's happening.

I think it'd be a major
historical event for this country.

We're trying to do what no
one else has ever done

before in this culture,

and that is to find a
new way for humanity.

Minds are up for grabs.

It's up for grabs.

Civilization is up for grabs.

I think everybody knows it.

(narrator) Drawn by the city's new
hippie-counter-culture,

with its vision of changing the
world through peace and love.

They arrived in numbers great
enough to create a crisis

in San Francisco,

and threaten the utopian
dream itself.

(Mary Ellen Kasper) There were people who were
coming who were just coming

for the drugs,
who weren't coming for,

say, a spiritual awakening.

Kids were coming from all
over the country,

they were straining the
infrastructure of the city,

they were straining
the resources.

What could there
be but trouble?

It got ugly,

and the original people that
really went out there for

peace and love left.

[music]

(narrator) Yet thousands would
be swept up by a

revolutionary movement that
would shape American life

far beyond that
turbulent summer.

[music]

[music]

January 14th, 1967.

Golden Gate Park
in San Francisco.

Never before had America witnessed
such an usual gathering.

There was no lineup of big
stars swelling the crowd.

No tickets were sold.

No political candidates spoke.

It was simply a coming together.

They called it "the gathering
of the tribes. The Human Be-In."

(Mary Ellen Kasper) There were, like, twenty thousand people,

and it was this gloriously
beautiful day,

as you can only have in certain
times in San Francisco.

Sun was shining,
people were wonderful.

You know,
it was like,

"by god! Look at how many
there are of us!"

(narrator) To most of the country,

the Be-In must have seemed like
a world turned upside down.

A Harvard professor
exhorted the crowd to

reject the traditional
path to success.

(Timothy Leary) Turn on, tune in,
drop out.

[crowd cheering,
applauding]

I mean drop out of high school,
drop out of college,

drop out of graduate school.

(narrator) Hindu chanting melded with
motorcycles and rock music.

[music]

(Peter Coyote) It was such an exciting,
heady time to find out that

under the official reality,

there was these seething turmoil of
young people learning new music,

new thoughts, new ideas,
new literature,

new poetry,
new ways of being.

(narrator) This turmoil of young people
was in part due to sheer numbers.

Never before had so many
Americans been under 25.

There were over 90 million
of them,

nearly half the population,

and many were disillusioned
with the world around them.

[music]

The president many had found
inspiring had been assassinated

barely three years earlier.

War in Vietnam was killing a hundred
American soldiers every week.

Month after month,

dozens of young men were being
drafted into the army.

And the struggle for civil
rights at home

had grown increasingly militant.

Those gathered in a park
that sunny January day

sought a different world.

(Theodore Roszak) It would be a world
where people lived gently on the planet

without the sense that they
have to exploit nature

or make war upon nature
and find basic security.

A simpler way of life.

Less urban,
less consumption-oriented;

much more concerned about
spiritual values about

companionship,
friendship,

community,
sharing,

ideas,
values,

insights.

A world in which that was
considered more important

than the gross domestic product.

(narrator) The first hippies where
children of the 1950's;

the baby boom generation.

Their parents had endured years
of economic depression,

and a brutal World War.

Now, the future looked bright.

Millions of Americans
started families,

encouraged by the unprecedented
prosperity of

the post-war economic boom.

(Peter Coyote) We came out of World War
II as the richest,

most powerful country
on the planet.

And our families built
the suburbs,

and the fathers went
off to work,

and the mothers stayed home,

and the kids were basically
left to run around.

(narrator) The new standard of living
in 1950's America offered

an abundance of affordable
homes,

sleek, new automobiles,
miracle drugs.

Science and technology seemed to
have an answer for everything.

But beneath the surface,
lurked a deep anxiety.

Peacetime had devolved
into a bitter cold war

between superpowers.

Americans linked to
communist groups were

hounded and persecuted.

[overlapping,
recorded voices]

An atomic arms race fueled
fears of annihilation.

(Theodore Roszak) That combination of affluence
and anxiety is

a crazy-making combination
to live with,

to grow up with.

So, you had a generation of kids
who arrived at high school

and then in college trying
to make sense of a world

which they've been told is
just grand and wonderful

and there's nothing to
complain about anymore;

and on the other hand,

you look a little
deeper into it,

and it's just awful and scary.

[sirens]

There was a deep issue here,

whether material affluence
is what life is all about,

because that is what an
industrial society,

a market economy,
can give you.

But what if that's
not good enough?

[man reading from paper]

(narrator) It wasn't enough for the
so-called beat generation who,

starting in the late 1940's,

congregated in the North Beach
district of San Francisco,

a city long known as a sanctuary
for those outside the mainstream.

The beatniks,
or hipsters,

rejected the conformity and materialism
of 1950's America,

and embraced poetry,
and jazz,

mysticism,
and marijuana.

(Mary Ellen Kasper) Even in my early years,
I knew I wanted something

different than the world
I saw around me.

I used to get on the bus
and ride to North Beach,

and sit in the coffee houses
and listen to people read poetry

and listen to folk music.

And that was the first time
I'd seen women who didn't have

their hair done every week,

and who didn't wear
girdles routinely.

(narrator) By the mid 1960's,

as North Beach became
commercialized,

baby boomers drawn to
a bohemian lifestyle

began moving into a low-rent
neighborhood across town,

the Haight-Ashbury district.

They shared the beatniks'
distain for corporate America

and the politics of
inequality and war.

But they preferred the sunshine
of nearby Golden Gate Park

to the darkness of
coffee houses;

the passion of rock and roll to
the cool of modern jazz;

wild, expressive colors to
beatnik black.

They were derided by some
as junior-grade hipsters,

hippies for short.

Many began experimenting with
communal living in large,

Victorian houses of the Haight,

and visions of a Utopian society
began taking shape,

enhanced by a min-altering new
drug called LSD, or acid.

(Joel Selvin) The LSD use was a fundamental
building block and

a new way of thinking in
a new community.

Why do we have war?

What is the power of love?

Who is God and why is he here,

and what has he done for
me lately, anyway?

I mean, these were questions
that were being debated by

young people who were just
growing into their bodies

and their minds and theirselves.

(Mary Ellen Kasper) We really thought that drugs
were gonna change the world,

we really did.

We thought if you turned on,
if you took acid,

you would really change,

because we had changed
from those experiences.

Experiences of cosmic oneness,

where I truly felt I was
no different than you;

I was no different than
my black friends;

I was no different than
anyone who lived in

any other part of the world;

nor was I that different
than my dog.

"God lives inside all of us"
is a clichéd way of putting it.

(Joel Selvin) You were going through a door,

and you wanted to be in the rooms
on the other side that door.

You wanted to know
what was there,

and you wanted to take that
knowledge back with you.

(Recorded voice) It is a sense of being in
communion with powers greater

than yourself and intelligence
that far outstrips the human mind,

and energies which
are very ancient.

You have a sense of being
brought into God's workshop,

where the veil is pulled away,
and for the first time,

you see how things
really are.

(Joel Selvin) Hey,
you know,

we're trying to learn to
live better and

to think better and to be
better human beings

and to be a better race.

To be a better civilization,

and to make this
whole thing work.

(The Grateful Dead) What we're thinking about
is a peaceful planet;

we're not thinking about
anything else.

We're not thinking about
any kind of power;

we're not thinking about any
of those kind of struggles or

nothing about revolution
or war or any of that.

We would all like to be able to
live an uncluttered life,

a simple life, a good life,
you know?

And, like, think about moving the
whole human race ahead a step.

And one of the ways of achieving
that being is through drugs.

I think, for-personally, is
that the more people turn on,

the better the world
is gonna be.

[music]

(Joel Selvin) The music changed
just immediately.

I cannot explain to you what
it's like to be in

a crowd of 5,000 people on LSD with
the grateful dead also on LSD,

leaving the crowd through a
series of improvisations.

But before that, rock and roll
songs were three minutes;

period, paragraph,
we're out of here.

[music]

(Charles Perry) One of the peculiar things
about LSD was that

for a very long time,
it was legal.

It seemed illegal,
I mean it was so wild,

you figured that it,
you know,

if anybody hears about this,

they're definitely
gonna make it illegal.

(Ronald Reagan) Well, I'm terribly frightened
of the problem of LSD.

I think there's been a
great deal of misinformation

by those who seem to
see no harm in it,

that I think our only hope
lies in a concerted effort

of education so that young
people will be aware that

there is nothing smart,

there is nothing grown up or
sophisticated in taking

an LSD trip at all.

They're just being
complete fools.

[music]

(narrator) California did make LSD
illegal on October 6th, 1966.

The hippies openly flaunted
the new law with

a love pageant rally
in the Haight,

and their own declaration
of independence,

"The creation endows us with
certain inalienable rights,"

it read.

"That among these are
the freedom of body,

the pursuit of joy, and
the expansion of consciousness."

[Music]

On the heels of the
love pageant,

a group of anarchist,

street performers
called The Diggers

began distributing free food.

We're trying to start
a pilot program here.

It's called The
Diggers' Feed-In.

you go home,

you cook whatever you can
cook at your kitchen,

and you bring it out,

and you serve it to hungry
people on the street, you know?

And if everybody does it,
we'll all have a ball, you know?

(Peter Berg) The street theater that we'd
been doing was now going to be

acted out as an alternative
society where food,

shelter,
entertainment,

was going to be free
without ideology.

(narrator) The Diggers salvaged food from
restaurant and supermarket overflow,

prepared it in their
communal kitchen,

and brought it twice
a day to the park.

(Judy Goldhaft) I used to go to the wholesale
produce markets

and get produce for the
free food that we did.

Unbelievable amounts of
food were thrown away.

I remember once there were
crates and crates and

crates of cantaloupes
that came in.

They didn't quite meet the
standards for sweetness.

They couldn't be sold.

They stood in back of
the produce market.

We came there twice a week
and we picked up

ten cases every time we came.

(narrator) For The Diggers,

the free Feed-Ins also
served to push people

to examine their own values.

(Peter Berg) We were looking for the people
driving by going to work,

who would see people
gathered in a park,

eating food free,

and that this would
provoke them.

Provoke their idea of
what they were doing,

like going to work.

(Peter Coyote) We thought culture is much
more important than politics.

Let's just start getting
people living the way

they want to live.

You want to live in a world
where you don't have to work?

Let's make it!

You want to live in a world
where you can get food for free?

Let's make it!

You want to live in a house
with, you know,

lots of women and men,
and live the way you want,

let's do it!

Let's make the world
you imagine,

real by acting it out.

And if you can act it out,
it's real!

[music]

(narrator) In December, The Diggers
dramatized another hippie

belief that the pursuit of money
interfered with a fulfilling
life.

They staged a happening.

They called it
"The Death of Money."

(Peter Berg) People dressed in animal heads, took huge pieces of money,

stage money,

and put them in an out
of an enormous coffin

in a march down Haight Street,

singing "Get out my life,
why don't you, babe?"

to Chopin's Death March,
and it went

♪ Get out my life, why
don't you, babe? ♪♪

[chuckles]

[music]

(Mary Ellen Kasper) We certainly,
on some level,

thought money was the root of
all evil and thought having

a lot of money was not a
good thing for your soul.

We were not living without money
because we had lots of it,

and it made it easy.

(Peter Coyote) We were living without money,
because we wanted our time,

and we wanted to be authentic,
and we didn't want to get jobs.

[Music]

(narrator) The Be-In in January 1967
put San Francisco's hippies

in the national spotlight
for the first time.

While beatniks wanted the
world to leave them alone,

the New York Times said the new
hippies want to change the
world.

Newsweek wrote of their regimen
all-embracing love,

nonviolent, mystical,
and bizarre.

These stories of hippies
resonated with

young people across the country.

(Sandi Stein) The Boston Globe had pictures
of Haight Street,

pictures of people dancing,
and I can remember saying,

I thought,
"Oh, look,

everybody looks so happy."

And I'm thinking,

"Oh, I'd really like
to go there."

[Music]

(narrator) Sandy Stein was only 13,
questioning, and impressionable.

She anguished over the
grief that

permeated her Boston neighborhood,

because of the Vietnam War.

(Sandi Stein) When somebody was
killed in Vietnam,

they would put a flag
in the window.

And there was not a block
that you could walk in that

working-class,
middle-class neighborhood

that you didn't see
flags in the windows.

And my home was full of
fighting,

arguing,
and so I think,

I think also that those ideas of

peace and love were [sighs]
were wonderful.

You know,
they all looked good.

(narrator) San Francisco looked good, too,
to Claudia King.

At 23, she was frustrated with
the slow pace of

civil rights games she'd
been working on since

high school in Chicago.

(Claudia King) Every time and idea came up,
it would be

"Okay, how you gonna fund this?

"Who's gonna do this?

Who's gonna do that?"

And, you know,
I was young,

I wanted to have it now,
you know.

And I really believed that
it should just change,

and we should all smarten
up and do better.

I was really ready to go
to the Haight-Ashbury.

[music]

(narrator) So was Phil Morningstar,
a restless teenager living

in a conservative town
east of Los Angeles.

(Phil Morningstar) It was a semi-rural area,

kind of Southern California
Bible-belt,

and I was reading the Berkley at SF article and I was looking at all that stuff,

and they're talking,
about you know,

crash pads,
free food.

And my father was very
intolerant of any views that

disagreed with him,

and so at 14 I took walk down
to Greyhound bus station,

and bought a bus ticket.

Next stop,
San Francisco.

[music]

(narrator) In March, hundreds of kids on
spring break flooded into the
Haight.

(Charles Perry) They heard by word of mouth.

I mean, if you went to one
of the great public events,

like the rock dances,
you would meet people.

And they would say,

"Hey, man, you gotta come
to the Haight, man,

it's really beautiful there."

(Peter Coyote) Kids were looking at
pictures of kids like

them sitting on the stoops,
cupping a joint,

looking around for the cops,
and saying

"Holy cow! People are living
free in San Francisco."

And they came out here to invent
whatever that meant to them.

(Joel Selvin) Everybody had a different
entrance point.

Some people came in because of
the sexual liberation prospects,

some people came in because
they appealed to music,

some people came in because they were angry and scared about

the draft in the war.

But once you were in that
vortex, once you were in that

swirling miasma of social
and personal change,

all the doors were open.

(narrator) For many longtime residents
of Haight-Ashbury,

the growing hippie community
was unwelcome.

(Art Gerrans) We had an influx of all people
from all over the country.

I mean, they're from
all over the country.

And we'd stop them, we'd
find out they were from Midwest,

from back East,

and they wanted to come out and
experience what was going on

in the Haight-Ashbury.

(narrator) Art Gerrans was born
in the Haight

and joined the San Francisco police department

at age 22,
assigned to Park Station.

(Art Gerrans) Yeah, it was kind of
a quiet station,

until the hippies came.

The old timers that lived
out there didn't like it.

They were used to having a nice,
quiet neighborhood.

(Virginia Snyder) Our neighborhood here
was just really lovely.

We could push our buggies and
strollers down Haight Street.

There were three or
four bakeries,

there was a candy shop,
there was a Woolworths

I was annoyed with them
for changing my neighborhood.

[singing]

(narrator) By late March, Haight Street
was already bursting with

hippies and hippie-wannabes.

Many feared that when schools
let out for the summer,

San Francisco would
erupt into chaos.

[Music]

(Jay Thelin) There were these headlines.

Hippies warn San Francisco.

Big print.

Hippies warn San Francisco
about-all these kids come in,

and then a couple days later,
Mayor warns Hippies.

(John Shelley) The hippies seem to be
a new way of life,

that's their right.

But they have no right to
inflict their way of life

on everybody else to
the detriment and the

exclusion of people continuing
in their way.

And when they blocked
the streets,

then it is interference
with the normal,

routine life of a community.

It will be stopped!

(narrator) Hippie leaders were incredulous.

(Stephen Levine) The mayor is-this is really
very insidious what he's up to.

He wants to stop human growth
where it wants-he is

trying to throw the seeds of
this growth out of the sandbox.

Which is a presumption
that it's his sandbox,

and it isn't,

because it's a very
cosmic sandbox,

it just happens to
be occurring here.

I took a trip in December,
you know,

and talked to a lot of kids in
some other cities about whether

or not they were
coming out there.

And a lot of kids said,
"Oh, we read, you know,

we read the magazines, and
we've heard a lot of talk,

but I don't know,
you know.

We got a scene here, and
we're happy, you know."

But as soon as the mayor
comes out and puts

the taboo on with them.

By telling them that they're
not welcome.

[overlapping voices]

What he doesn't know-

He should have thought
about it first, you know.

What I think he doesn't know is
that we don't want him to come,

yet,
you know.

That this neighborhood is by
no means prepared to handle-

(George Tsongas) Haight-Ashbury cannot handle
a 100,00 requests;

there isn't room!

The city of San Francisco can,
the state of California can,

everyone can!

And if they open up
their hearts,

they can!

And I say that welcome them!

(Reporter) The city of San Francisco has
been warned of a hippie invasion

come summer in numbers almost
too staggering to comprehend.

[yelling, car honks
in background]

The Park and Recreation
department has ruled that

no longer will the hippies be
allowed to sleep in Golden Gate
Park,

and police chief Thomas Cahill

says the rule will be
rigidly enforced.

(Thomas Cahill) If they come in and you have
them in the park

where there are no
facilities for them,

then you are going to
have a health problem.

(Someone ask) Chief, are you threatening to
kick them out of San Francisco?

(Thomas Cahill) I never said a word about that,

but I will take whatever police
action is necessary,

and I'm not going to cross
bridges until I come to them.

And certainly, nobody should
let their young children

come into San Francisco
unsupervised to become

a part of a group such as that.

(Willie Brown) The powers to be in the city,

wanted to erect a way in which
no newcomers would be

welcome to the Haight-Ashbury.

There was the assumption that
this was a absolute drug-out
culture,

this was a place where all
of the so-called

family values were challenged.

I was just absolutely blown
away about how distant what

the soups and the mayor
were attempted to do was,

from my understanding
of a democracy.

(Joel Selvin) The white, middle-class
establishment starts

reacting to this movement
with anger and vehement,

and they move to repress
this thing and shut it down,

acting just like we
thought they would.

(narrator) The clash of cultures
reverberated throughout the
city.

(Joe Dolan) Now,
certainly,

these shaggies and hippies
with their talk about peace

and brotherhood and
understanding and international
amity,

all this ridiculous nonsense, naturally,

the newspapers are gonna play
up the things they say,

especially when these people
bang tambourines and

like Alan Ginsberg,
go into these absurd chants,

these Hindu chants;
well, naturally,

they're gonna play this
sort of thing up.

It would be absurd to expect
that they're not gonna do this.

Oh, I grew up in my neighborhood
of mostly Irish and Italian
kids,

and,
you know,

we go to church together, and-but we had work ethics,

and mostly blue collar workers,

and you learn from your mother and your father about, you know,

going to work and
being responsible,

and doing the right thing.

There where these kids here,
they don't want to work.

They wanted to fall out,
they didn't want to work,

they don't want responsibility,

they want nobody to
tell them what to do,

they wanted to have sex,
they wanted to have dope,

and just sight-see and
go in the park, get stoned,

and they were sort
of wasting their lives.

They weren't going nowhere.

(Interviewer) Why don't you like the
hippies around here?

(Ruth McCalister) I don't like their morals,
I don't like the example

they're setting for
younger people,

I don't like being pushed
off of the streets,

walking in their filth
on the street.

I don't like to look at them.

I don't like the sound
of their voices and

the filthy words they use.

I don't like their
filthy posters.

I just don't like them.

[Music]

(narrator) A sight-seeing company began
running a bus down Haight
Street,

calling it the only foreign tour
in the domestic United States.

[Music]

The hippies make many trips.

And the trip of the hippies
is generally an unusual one.

A world about themselves,
and of themselves,

and marijuana,
and of course,

of LSD is being used.

(narrator) Tourists were even provided
with definitions of hippie slang.

(Audio recorded) Teenie-bopper is a hippie
in early teens.

Speed, combination
of heroin and athedrin.

Stoned, high,
as on LSD.

Straight, square,
conventional.

Trip in an LSD experience.

Turn on is to commence
euphoretic experiences

to turn on the LSD.

Weed is marijuana.

We've seen the better
of the worst of the

Haight-Ashbusry district,

and now back into low-gate park
at our next stop will be

the Japanese tree garden.

[music]

(narrator) In April, the hippies sought to
ease growing tensions in the
city,

presenting an optimistic
vision of

the coming summer to
the local media.

(Ron Thelin) The Haight-Ashbury community
has created the council

for a summer of love
in San Francisco.

Within the Haight-Ashbury
population,

there are many strata of
imaginative and

creative energies whose spirit
extends throughout San Francisco

and the world.

The people here today
represent...

(Stan McDaniel) Our purpose is to provide
an atmosphere which is

more healthy than the kind
of atmosphere that the

city government has,
and the newspapers,

have tended to put out about the
influx of young people to the
city.

And see, we don't believe
that the young people are

coming here are the sort
of thing that's been

associated with vagrance.

In fact,
we believe in them.

We believe that they're here,
as a matter of fact,

for a spiritual purpose.

They're gonna be bringing
a lot of energy with them,

a lot of enthusiasm,

and they're gonna be doing creative things and

providing for themselves.

The coming in is going to
cause difficulty,

might cause turmoil,
might cause ...

a very real friction,

but the important thing is they're gonna all

go back to their towns,

and when they do,
they're gonna turn on everybody,

and this thing is going to
be all over the country.

(Charles Perry) By the time the beginnings
of the flood were

becoming obvious in late spring,
the oracle was telling people,

"Please don't come.

Please stay home and do hippie
things in your home town.

I mean, we're gonna
me out of dope,

there's gonna be food shortage,

there's not gonna be
a place to stay."

[music]

(narrator) The anticipated summer onslaught
was becoming a national story.

In late May, Look Magazine sent
a young writer to live under

cover as a hippie in the heat.

(William Hedgepeth) Before I got the assignment,
I had just paid peripheral

attention to the hippie movement.

I was just a straight-looking
person who happened to wear

an eyepatch as a result of an automobile accident,

and wore a tie, suit,
that kind of thing.

But then after that,
after Haight-Ashbury,

I decided what in the world I
wanted to wear a tie for again?

[Music]

(narrator) Within hours of his arrival
on Haight Street,

William Hedgepeth had
been offered free food,

clothing,
shelter, and LSD.

(William Hedgepeth) It would have been completely
phony to go out there and

be a total spy,

and just report on
these people.

I mean, there was just no
sense in that, you know.

I mean, this is participatory
journalism, you know?

Dirty job,
somebody's gotta do it,

so I figured that I was taking
these drugs on behalf of

the American people in order
to tell them the truth.

[music]

It seemed to me then that the
new phenomenon of hippies

was part of a
religious movement.

They were completely
sympathetic and loving,

in fact,
toward others,

and they handed out flowers
to tourists and nay-sayers

and people who demean them.

I was so entranced with it,
that I thought

"Well, this is a perfectly good
alternative universe to me,

"I mean.

"I don't need money,
you know,

"don't need anything.

I can stay here if I
wanted to."

It was as benign an expression
of the finer angels

people's nature that I
have ever seen before.

[Music]

(narrator) In June, a siren song on Top-40 Radio reached into

every corner of America,

beckoning the young and the curious to join the pilgrimage.

(Charles Perry) And that was the vision.

There's, you know, everyday you
saw scores and scores of people,

maybe hundreds of people,

showing up just gaping that
this was the great place,

and this is where they
were going to be.

[People making music]

(Peter Berg) We were being delivered an
audience by people coming

to San Francisco,
so we welcomed it.

We encouraged it.

We thought it was a staging area
for transforming society.

[music]

(Sandi Stein) In June,
I went out my window,

ran away from home,

and I had two pairs of pants and a couple of t-shirts,

and I think I stole 20
dollars from my mother.

Went into Boston,

and a friend of mine walked
up to me and said,

"Hey, there's a guy
with a convertible that

wants to go to San Francisco,

and he wants some people
to go with him.

You wanna go?"

And I said
"Yes. You bet."

[Music]

There was a whole generation
moving as great sea of youth

moving across the country.

There were hippie way stations,
you know,

that were full of people
like us, you know,

doing similar things.

[Music]

(narrator) At dawn on June 21st,

the official beginning of
the Summer of Love.

Several hundred hippies gathered
on a hilltop near the Haight

to celebrate the
summer solstice.

It was an affirmation of their
connection to the natural world.

A connection that was becoming
harder to maintain as

the Haight-Ashbury population swelled.

[Music]

In fact, many of the original
hippies had already begun to

flee the city for communes in
the countryside,

or to pursue a spiritual quest.

[Music]

But with schools now
out for the summer,

young acolytes and thrill
seekers continued to swarm

into San Francisco.

[Music]

After hitch-hiking
across the country,

Sandy Stein was finally
dropped off on

the corner of Haight
and Ashbury.

(Sandi Stein) It was like arriving
in Wonderland.

Like you pushed on the mirror,
you know,

like Alice pushing, pushing,
pushing on the mirror,

and then finally you
come through.

[music]

(Claudia King) Everybody was talking this love,
peace;

racism was supposed to
be really un-hip.

I mean, there's all these
things that were,

you know, not acceptable for
a few minutes, you know?

It was just the little,
short time,

but it was really,

just like something
that shimmered.

[music]

(Phil Morningstar) I kind of went crazy
when I went there.

You could go into Golden Gate
Park and sit up on hippie hill,

and meet a group of
people and say hi,

and just start
smoking with them,

and the next thing you know,

you're at their place
partying with them,

and you sleep with
one of the girls,

and it was great!

[Music]

(Claudia King) You might see people making
love on the street corner,

have to walk around
them and (hums, chuckles).

You know,
it was just,

I mean,
it was out there!

[music]

I heard a voice behind me say,
"You're going to need

some shoes,
probably a coat."

I said, "I don't know
where I'm gonna get one,"

and she said,
"Well, I do."

She said,
"My name is angel."

And I said,
"I'm Sandi."

And she said,

"We need to go over
to the free store."

"What in the world
is a free store?"

(Joel Selvin) A free store,
what fun that was.

I mean, just the idea
was liberating.

The place where they gave
you things where money was

no longer the relevant issue.

(Judy Goldhaft) At that time, people
didn't have garage sales.

People, if they moved, and
people moved around a lot,

didn't have anything
to do with their stuff.

When we opened up a free store,
and said,

"Okay, bring your stuff here,

and we'll redistribute
it for you."

Everything came into
the free store.

Everything!

(narrator) By July, the great mass
of young people had

reached staggering proportions.

Estimates ranged from
50,000 to over 100,000.

Gawking tourists only
added congestion.

I've heard about this place.

I'm from Southern California,

and enjoying seeing what
I've read about.

They're literally hundreds
of these fellows, bearded,

and girls that are dressed
eccentrically,

and cars with flowers
painted on them,

and it's really just
out of this world.

We drove up and down the street, and then I said,

"Well, let's get out and really
get a good look at them."

The last two months or so,

the newspapers and the
TV stations and

all sorts of people have been
writing various articles about

the hippies as if
they were animals,

something to look at.

Thus, we've gotten hundreds
and literally thousands

of people coming up to
Haight-Ashbury to watch people.

The people here are human,
they would like to be talked to,

they don't want
to be watched.

And the irritation,
the frustration,

the friction that builds
up because of this,

makes Haight-Ashbury a terribly
unpleasant place to be in.

The heat had become a circus.

A caricature of its
idealistic beginnings.

Shops now catered to souvenir
hungry tourists

and weekend hippies.

College kids with no intention
of dropping out took on

hippie personas for the summer.

Hundreds of young runaways
wandered the streets aimlessly.

For many, the capitol of
the counter culture no

longer seemed a shimmering
wonderland.

(William Hedgepeth) The strain of mysticism
and utopianism can only

work in small groups.

You can't really have
50,000 thousand people

living like they were
in Haight-Ashbury.

(Mary Ellen Kasper) Things were getting tougher.

The attitudes were
getting tougher.

There were people who were
coming who were just coming

for the drugs,

who weren't coming for, say, a spiritual awakening or

for a sense of community,

or to be part of something
bigger than themselves.

If the Be-In was the bringing
together of all that energy

from the previous years,
it was the high point,

and the Summer of Love was
the beginning of the end.

[Music]

(narrator) William Hedgepeth's article
for Look came out in August.

He reflected on the finer
angels he'd witnessed.

"Hippies are working
toward an open, loving,

tension-free,
nature-oriented world,"

he wrote.

But he also told
the darker side.

"Of spending the night
in a filthy,

litter-strewn,
dope fortress,

with half a dozen hippies lying
in various stages of drug stuper"

(William Hedgepeth) I happened to be there at a
time when it was just

passed the major blossoming.

People were talking about the
fact that Haight just

isn't like it used to be.

I was really part of the
vagrant street crowd,

and most of those people that
were on the streets were under
17.

They were my age.

You know, people thought
of college students;

they didn't realize how many
young children,

13, 14, 15, 16,
were out there.

What do you think they've
got here, Violet,

that makes you want
to come here?

Freedom.

Freedom to what?

You can be what you are.

To love!

Well, you don't have
to-you can be yourself,

you don't have to be what
adults want you to be,

and everything like that.

What do you want to do
here that your parents

wouldn't want you to do?

Nothing!

[chuckles]

That's it.

(Willie Brown) For many of them,

they didn't find what they thought was the magic,

and their resources expired,
and they disappeared.

They decided not to go the route
that so many kids did go by

staying without resources.

(Virginia Snyder) I used to volunteer at our
retreat on Masonic.

And they would come,
filthy, filthy dirty.

They were sleeping in the parks,
sleeping here or there.

I can remember going to
park police station one

time with the group,

and the entire wall were
snap shots of runaway

children from all over.

(Reporter) Sandy, your father says you've run away from home three times,

and you've been gone
now for some time.

Yes.

But you said you're
not a runaway.

No, I'm not.

I don't consider myself
a runaway at all.

Where did you spend
last night?

That's none of anybody's
business,

and I won't tell.

I won't tell where I've been
for the past two weeks.

Ever.

How old are you, Sandy?

14.

(Jay Thelin) Periodically, paddy wagons would
drive down Haight Street,

and the officers on
the sidewalk,

and they'd just go in and grab
kids out of restaurants

and whatever and if you
didn't have an ID or

even if you did,
you went in the paddy wagon,

and went to the park station.

We had to book them in Youth
Guidance Center and

the parents would have to
come from wherever they

were in the country,
the Midwest or the East,

they'd have to come back out
and recover their children.

You're not 18,
I'll tell you that.

I raised a girl myself,
and I know you're not 18.

I don't care.

Alright,
come on in here.

Many of them just simply didn't
know how to take care of
themselves,

and they would go barefoot
on the street and

get infections and whatnot.

And they didn't-they couldn't
feed themselves right.

(narrator) The Haight-Ashbury free clinic
established at the beginning

of summer by a group
of young doctors,

treated dozens of
kids every day.

Kids suffering from
malnutrition,

or hepatitis,
or drug overdoses.

[overlapping voices]

How long is he gonna be out?

I don't know,

it depends on how
much he did up.

If that's what he did,
I don't know.

You want to wake up?

You went on a bummer?

Today, we went down
to the city clinic,

and we talked to the people
down there about

the vermin disease that is spreading
through Haight-Ashbury,

and they told us...

(narrator) The Diggers offered new arrivals
a survival school,

teaching how to get
decent nutrition,

how to find a clean
place to stay,

how to avoid sexually
transmitted diseases.

Anyone who wants to come down,

that they shouldn't be
afraid to come down.

For a check-up, or if they think
that they have this disease,

to go down there right
away and get it fixed.

(narrator) LSD, the revered sacrament
of the original hippies,

was becoming a source of
grave concern

as more and more people experienced
frightening,

bad trips.

(Mary Ellen Kasper) There were runaways taking
drugs who really didn't

have the ego structure
to deal with it.

When you deconstruct your
world as many of us did

with the stronger psychedelics,

you have to build
it back up again.

And for some people,

they simply couldn't
build it back up again,

and got stuck in a very
painful place and

couldn't see their
way out of it.

[music]

(Art Gerrans) We got a call and there's
somebody screaming for help,

so we push the door open,

and we seen these naked woman
slithering around

the floor like a snake.

We wouldn't go in.

She jumps up and runs,

and she goes to down to
the back of the house,

and we go behind her.

She's totally naked,

she jumps up on a bed
like a springboard,

hits the bed,

and goes head first
into the window.

[music]

(narrator) Drug dealers took advantage
of susceptible,

young kids and began pushing
highly addictive drugs,

like speed, cocaine,
and heroin.

(Mary Ellen Kasper) The psychedelic movement
was dying out,

and these other drugs
really hit the scene.

It created paranoia
in people;

people didn't take care
of their bodies.

(Claudia King) I started noticing garbage
on the street,

and people's expressions,
you know,

like their wrinkled
brows and cold sores,

and little kids not looking
like they were

taking care of love
very well.

[music]

(Joel Selvin) These initial,
charming,

innocent steps forward
had change,

like The Diggers' free soup!

I had Digger soup.

It was fun,
it was neat,

everyone got a bowl of soup,

and you know,

eat with some people you
don't know and be amongst all

this new community;
that was fun.

The next time I went back,

man, those people waiting in line for that soup needed it.

I didn't stay.

'Cause now it was squalid.

The utopian moment had
been a-gone.

(narrator) By fall of 1967,

crowds in Haight-Ashbury
had thinned dramatically.

Many of the summertime pilgrims
had returned home,

and there were few
new arrivals.

On October 6th,

exactly one year after
the love pageant rally,

a group of hippies still
living in the Haight

closed the curtain on
the Summer of Love.

They staged a mock funeral,
calling it

the "Death of Hippie."

[music]

(Mary Ellen Kasper) We wanted to signal that
this was the end of it,

don't come out.

Stay where you are,

bring the revolution to
where you live,

don't come here,
because it's over and done with.

[music]

(narrator) Within a year, Haight Street was
lined with vacant storefronts.

The Summer of Love had been
but a fleeting moment

in the turbulent history
of the 1960's.

But it changed the lives of
thousands who witnessed

it firsthand and impacted
America in ways that still
endured.

(Theodore Roszak) I don't think the Summer
of Love left any blueprints

behind on how to build
a better world.

It was much more a
showcase for enjoyment,

for happiness,
for freedom,

but if you probed to
the underlying values,

you can perhaps see the seeds
of a better social order

than the one we're
living in now.

(Peter Coyote) It was an experiment,

but I don't think that the search for some kind of

moral stance is ever bullshit.

I don't think that the
search for justice and

some kind of economic equity
is ever bullshit.

I don't think that trying to
leave smaller footprint on

the planet is bullshit.

I don't think exploring
alternative, spiritual and

medical practices
is bullshit.

They were all valid searches,

and they've all been
completely integrated

into the culture today.

[music]

(Mary Ellen Kasper) Many of those things from that
time have stayed with me;

certainly the importance of
community has stayed with me.

I thought we could
change the world,

and I thought we would
make it a better place.

And I think in some ways,
we've succeeded.

[music]

(William Hedgepeth) Well, when it came
time for me to leave,

I got into a cab here
on Haight Street,

and this one guy who was
bidding me farewell,

he says, "I'll tell you what
I'll do, you know.

I'll write to you at Look,
I'll send you an envelope,"

he says.

"There won't be anything
in the envelope,

but I'll soak the stamp in LSD.

So, you, when you get this,

just lick the stamp,
turn on."

And then we-we were-the cab
started moving down Haight
Street,

and this guy was still young, "lick the stamp!

Turn on!"

[chuckles]

[music]

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