Before the term hippie existed - coined by San Francisco newspaper columnist Herb Caen - there was a loose band of cultural revolutionaries who flitted around the Haight Ashbury performing guerilla street theater. They called themselves the Diggers.
Given to wearing Olde English costumes and parading through the neighborhood, the Diggers were generally good-natured actors who used the entire city as their stage.
The Diggers were fond of staging free events, including giving away free food. They scavenged in grocery store dumpsters and restaurant garbage cans for casually discarded foods that they cooked into stews and soups. They also baked cheap bread in coffee cans. The food was given away to anyone who passed through a doorframe set up in the Golden Gate Park Panhandle, a symbolic gesture with a vague reference to the Doors of Perception.
The Diggers also created a Free Store, which they called The Trip Without a Ticket. It was located on the corner of Carl and Cole Streets in San Francisco.
The basic concept was similar to a Goodwill Store except no money was exchanged. People brought in used clothes, used shoes, used furniture, hand-drawn artwork - anything and everything. All items were left for anyone to take as they pleased. No cashiers, no cash registers, no cash. If you saw something you liked or needed, you were invited to take it "because it's yours. "
Whenever people asked who was in charge of the place, the standard response was, “You are.”
In his memoir, Sleeping Where I Fall, actor Peter Coyote (an original Digger) suggested that draft dodgers or deserters from the Vietnam War could acquire fake IDs and new identities at the Trip Without a Ticket. It acted as a sort of hippie Underground Railroad.
The Summer of Love was not a spontaneous event. Haight Street shopkeepers dreamed up the idea six months in advance. The announcement came in January 1967; it was scheduled to coincide with the summer solstice on June 21.
Young people flocked to San Francisco from all over the U.S. that summer. An acquaintance of mine told me how he and a girlfriend hitchhiked from Ohio. They arrived with nothing and no expectations. "Pretty much all we did was get high," he said.
Once all the young people arrived, the Haight scene went downhill fast. Few people had money. The shopkeepers' idea of selling their wares to their target customers turned out to be a joke. Anyone who had ready cash used the money for dope. The only businessmen making any real money on Haight Street were drug dealers.
The Diggers anticipated the bad vibes outsiders were sure to bring to the neighborhood. So they ventured north into Marin and Mendocino Counties to join communes. When the Summer of Love officially began, most of the Diggers - the original hippies - had fled the scene.
Bad elements threatened to undo all the Digger idealism. Biker gangs sold drugs to speed freaks who slept in doorways. Bad acid was to blame for suicides. Cops and hippies fought on the streets. Drug-related murders soured things further. Within a year, the Haight Ashbury neighborhood rapidly declined and became an unsavory place.
Oddly enough, the Summer of Love altered hippie idealism or the worse. But the neighborhood and the era is remembered as a beautiful place and time. To paraphrase the old joke about the Sixties, if that’s how you remember the Summer of Love, you probably weren’t there.
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