Life takes funny turns. It found me, in May of 1966 living
at 1016 Masonic Street in San Francisco, a block from Haight and two from
Ashbury. Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t go there. I landed there, fleeing an
Arkansas governed by Orval Faubus, and hoping to catch sight, by some miracle,
of what at the time I thought was a great love of my life. It was a girl who
had left me standing alone on Fayetteville’s Leveritt Street, and married a SF
native.
Hope springs eternal, as they say, in a young heart. I had
nothing else to do, and the apartment on Masonic just happened to be available. I
had no idea at the time who the hippies were, but I would soon learn.
A miracle did happen. Armed with my college degree and a
draft card stating I was “1A,” (better known to my fellow Americans as “canon-fodder”),
I managed to land a job with a company in the Mission District. I rode the
Haight-Sunset bus to and fro each day and lived a happy life until the Draft
Board found me.
Gosh, what things I saw. Masonic dead-ended at the panhandle
of Golden Gate Park, across the street from where Ken Kesey and his Band of
Merry Pranksters parked that summer and danced the days and nights away for a
spell.
There was the local who went out on his balcony overlooking
Haight each morning and played “Reveille” on a beat-up trumpet.”
Sometimes, the “Grateful Dead” would hang out on a porch
stoop.
It was fun to see the kids begging money, attired in clothing
that cost $200 or more.
I thought about this the other night when the family and I
watched a documentary on PBS about the Haight-Ashbury. It concentrated on 1967,
the so-called “Summer of Love.”
For my memories of 1966, the show left out some things. One
was the sight of a Bank of California branch a half block west of Ashbury on
the south side of Haight. From opening to closing, a line branch from its door
all the way around the block. They were cashing those checks from home so they
could keep sneering at me for having a job.
Still, it was exhilarating, and I wouldn’t have missed it
for the world. There was something childlike and fascinating about the
experiment.
Then one morning I found myself at the Southeast corner of
Haight and Masonic waiting for a bus, not to take me to work but to the Oakland
Induction Center. I remember waiting there with an elderly Chinese man and
watching the fog gallop down Haight toward us. (No “little cat feet” crap in “The
City”). It thundered that morning, and it doesn’t thunder in San Francisco as a
rule.
I’ve thought about that many times. In his book, A Generation of Sociopaths. How the Baby
Boomers Betrayed America, Bruce Cannon Gibney says my generation supported the
Vietnam War but didn’t support serving in the military. I guess I represented
the opposite view. I despised the war, but served when my country asked. And it
has never forgiven me. Such is love.
By the summer of ’67, I was stationed in Monterey,
California and rode the bus up numerous times to The City to visit friends.
Things had changed. Every bus disgorged a group of wild-eyed
newcomers. Some, it seemed, were still in their early teens. The streets were
filthy. Stores had changed. The fun was forced. The very air seemed to tell the
cleansing fog to “begone.” The “Haight-Ashbury,” as it had existed, was doomed.
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| Just trying to fit in—a lifetime habit. |
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