1967 - The Summer of Peace, Love, and Happiness

[Sanslines]

This upcoming Summer 2007 will mark the 40th anniversary of the 1967 Summer of Love in San Francisco.

From the original Summer of Love:


We are here to make a better world.

No amount of rationalization or blaming can preempt the moment of choice each of us brings to our situation here on this planet. The lesson of the 60's is that people who cared enough to do right could change history.

We didn't end racism but we ended legal segregation.

We ended the idea that you could send half-a-million soldiers around the world to fight a war that people do not support. (Iraq proved that we didn't end this idea - yet)

We ended the idea that women are second-class citizens.

We made the environment an issue that couldn't be avoided.

The big battles that we won cannot be reversed. We were young, self-righteous, reckless, hypocritical, brave,silly, headstrong and scared half to death.

And we were right.

Abbie Hoffman

Government or business did not make the above happen in the '60's. People did! Imagine what people can accomplish when they pull together and rise up to promote change!! Get up, get active, and get to work promoting positive change!

http://www.summeroflove.org

http://www.2b1records.com/summeroflove40th/info.html

[Naturist Mark]

The big battles that we won cannot be reversed.

Sad to note that many of those battles have been reversed since Hoffman passed from this world.

-Mark

[nacktman]

Originally posted by Naturist Mark:

quote:

The big battles that we won cannot be reversed.

Sad to note that many of those battles have been reversed since Hoffman passed from this world.

-Mark

So true, so true!

[usmc1]

Well maybe, but, some old bull hippies are still out here...mot working harder, just working smarter.

Anyway, I get a kick out of it when you old farts reminisce.

[shomymojo]

guilty of being an "old fart"...and an X hippie...my close friends tell me I had a very good time...the 60's were far out man !!!

[Ken Palmer]

This is great! It's just too bad that I was only about one-year old when this season came around! I was born in October of 1965! Darn!

Ken Palmer

Originally posted by Sanslines:
This upcoming Summer 2007 will mark the 40th anniversary of the 1967 Summer of Love in San Francisco.

From the original Summer of Love:


We are here to make a better world.

No amount of rationalization or blaming can preempt the moment of choice each of us brings to our situation here on this planet. The lesson of the 60's is that people who cared enough to do right could change history.

We didn't end racism but we ended legal segregation.

We ended the idea that you could send half-a-million soldiers around the world to fight a war that people do not support. (Iraq proved that we didn't end this idea - yet)

We ended the idea that women are second-class citizens.

We made the environment an issue that couldn't be avoided.

The big battles that we won cannot be reversed. We were young, self-righteous, reckless, hypocritical, brave,silly, headstrong and scared half to death.

And we were right.

Abbie Hoffman

Government or business did not make the above happen in the '60's. People did! Imagine what people can accomplish when they pull together and rise up to promote change!! Get up, get active, and get to work promoting positive change!

http://www.summeroflove.org

http://www.2b1records.com/summeroflove40th/info.html

[nudeM]

The majority of the 60's were my 'single digit' years, so I don't remember too much. In fact, the summer of '67, I turned 10. Wow double digits.

[Walt Iliff]

Ah yes....1967, the year I graduated from HS and went off to college starting in the summer at that bastion of hippie liberalism, Antioch College, home of co ed dorms (unheard of anywhere else) and the occasional Saturday nite nude swim at the campus gym. I remember the community had two "governing" bodies: The Community Council (COMCIL) the Administrative Council (ADCIL), so a group of like-minded students formed NUDCIL, leaving a security guard who walked into the meeting speechless to see all the kids sitting around nude reading, studying and talking. Fun times. Also, pot was only $10.00 for a clean ounce, no seeds or stems. Those were the days my friends.

Walt Iliff

[R.M.GREENMAN2]

Ah Yes! 1967!! The summer I was born!
So I remember nothing of it, but can at least say I was around!

To me...the Summer of love was 1987, not sure about the peace...my head was too far up my own arse to care at that point....Kinda miss those days of being old enough to know better but too young to care!

[Sanslines]

Originally posted by Walt Iliff:
Ah yes....1967, the year I graduated from HS and went off to college .......... Also, pot was only $10.00 for a clean ounce, no seeds or stems. Those were the days my friends.

Walt Iliff

Walt, my friend.......Times have changed....Remember......Just say NO to drugs!..........lol.......lol

[Walt Iliff]

How can I say NO to drugs. I'm staring at 9 prescription bottles from my cardiologist....I have officially become my father. LOL

Walt

[usmc1]

Sometime during 1967 a couple of young Marines sneak out of base to a skivvy house (Dong Ha, Phu Bai), Vietnam, and slam some Tiger Head beer and catch a short time to become "numbah one lover" and dodge MPs and snipers while slipping back to base.

During that year, America would suffer 11,153 deaths in Vietnam.

This link takes you to the names of those who died during the "Summer of Love"

http://www.countryjoe.com/solcas.htm

Meanwhile, back in the world:

Elvis Presley and Priscilla married
Dartford Tunnel opened
The words 'bell bottom' introduced into the dictionary
First heart transplant--patient dies 18 days later.
The BEE GEE's first single is released
The Graduate' film is released

Ernesto "Che" Guevara is assasinated by CIA agent Rodriguez

Other Deaths:
Spencer Tracy
Woody Guthrie
Langston Hughes
Alice B. Toklas
John Coltrane

And...
The MIRV is developed
Pulsars and Quarks are “discovered”
Record of the Year: "Strangers in the Night," Frank Sinatra
Album of the Year: Sinatra: A Man and His Music, Frank Sinatra (Reprise)
Song of the Year: "Michelle," John Lennon and Paul McCartney, songwriters
Miss America: Jane Anne Jayroe (OK)

And..
Detroit Riots leave 43 dead.
Thurgood Marshall appointed to U.S. Supreme Court
Israel defeats Arabs in Six Day War.

The USS Liberty, a US navy ship, is “accidently” bombed by Israeli jets.

First ever Super Bowl

And I've heard that one could get a lid of high quality ganja for ten bucks!

1967 TWTYTW...

[Sanslines]

Walt..........this one's for you!

From Wiki: Timothy Leary:

.....Leary argued that psychedelics, used with the right dosage, set and setting, and with the guidance of psychology professionals, could alter behavior in unprecedented and beneficial ways. His experiments produced no murders, suicides, psychoses or "bad trips". The goals of Leary's research included finding better ways to treat alcoholism and to reform convicted criminals. Many of Leary's research participants reported profound mystical and spiritual experiences, which they claim permanently altered their lives in a very positive manner.

According to Leary's autobiography Flashbacks they administered LSD to 300 professors, graduate students, writers and philosophers, and 75% of them reported it as being like a revelation to them and one of the most educational experiences of their lives. They also gave LSD to 200 clergymen, and 75% reported that they had the most religious experience of their lives......

Leary founded the International Foundation for Internal Freedom in 1962 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Around this time, their Harvard colleagues grew uneasy about their research, and about rumors and complaints (some by parents of students) that reached the university administration about alleged distribution of hallucinogens to their students. To further complicate matters, their research attracted a great deal of public attention; as a result, many people wanted to participate in the experiments but were unable to do so because of the high demand. In order to satisfy the curiosity of those who were turned away, a black market for psychedelics formed near the Harvard University Campus.......
Leary later wrote: "We saw ourselves as anthropologists from the twenty-first century inhabiting a time module set somewhere in the dark ages of the 1960s. On this space colony we were attempting to create a new paganism and a new dedication to life as art."

.....Later the Millbrook estate was described as "the headquarters of Leary and gang for the better part of five years, a period filled with endless parties, epiphanies and breakdowns, emotional dramas of all sizes, and numerous raids and arrests, many of them led by the local assistant district attorney, G. Gordon Liddy"......Repeated FBI raids ended the Millbrook era. Regarding a 1966 raid by G. Gordon Liddy, Leary told author and Prankster Paul Krassner, "He was a government agent entering our bedroom at midnight. We had every right to shoot him. But I've never owned a weapon in my life. I have never had and never will have a gun around."

Timothy Leary:

“ A psychedelic experience is a journey to new realms of consciousness. The scope and content of the experience is limitless, but its characteristic features are the transcendence of verbal concepts, of space-time dimensions, and of the ego or identity. Such experiences of enlarged consciousness can occur in a variety of ways: sensory deprivation, yoga exercises, disciplined meditation, religious or aesthetic ecstasies, or spontaneously. Most recently they have become available to anyone through the ingestion of psychedelic drugs such as LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, DMT, etc. Of course, the drug does not produce the transcendent experience. It merely acts as a chemical key - it opens the mind, frees the nervous system of its ordinary patterns and structures. ”

Allen Ginsberg:

He talked openly about his connections with Communism and his admiration for past heroes of Communism and the labor movement at a time in America when the Red Scare and McCarthyism were recent memories. Later he travelled to several Communist countries to promote free speech; he claimed Communist countries, China for example, welcomed him in because they thought he was an enemy of Capitalism but often turned against him when they saw him as a trouble maker.

In 1965 Ginsberg was deported from Cuba for publicly protesting against Cuba's anti-marijuana stance and its penchant for throwing homosexuals in jail, but also for an alleged remark referring to revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara as "cute."

The Cubans sent him to Czechoslovakia, where one week after being named the King of a May Day parade, Ginsberg was labeled an "immoral menace" by the Czech government because of his free expression of radical ideas and was then deported. Many important figures from Communist Bloc countries such as Vaclav Havel point to Ginsberg as an important inspiration to strive for freedom.

Ginsberg also talked often about drug use. Throughout the 1960s he took an active role in the demystification of LSD and with Timothy Leary worked to promote its common use. He was also for many decades an advocate of marijuana legalization, and at the same time warned his audiences against the hazards of tobacco in his Put Down Your Cigarette Rag (Don't Smoke): "Don't Smoke Don't Smoke Nicotine Nicotine No / No don't smoke the official Dope Smoke Dope Dope."

[Zorro]

Charles Manson started the Family and lived in SF during the summer of love (at 636 Cole, right in the heart of Haight-Ashbury, I might add). Unabomber Ted Kaczynski started teaching at Berkeley in the fall of 1967. Ted Bundy was at Stanford in the summer of 1968. And the Zodiac Killer murdered his first two victims in Vallejo (a mere 30 miles from SF) in December 1968. That's how I remember the Bay Area in the late 1960's.

[Walt Iliff]

Originally posted by Zorro:
Charles Manson started the Family and lived in SF during the summer of love (at 636 Cole, right in the heart of Haight-Ashbury, I might add). Unabomber Ted Kaczynski started teaching at Berkeley in the fall of 1967. Ted Bundy was at Stanford in the summer of 1968. And the Zodiac Killer murdered his first two victims in Vallejo (a mere 30 miles from SF) in December 1968. That's how I remember the Bay Area in the late 1960's.

WOW!! FAR OUT!! Talk about the glass being half full.

Walt