by Jeff Guinn
In 1964, Timothy Leary began openly advocating LSD use, declaring that the drug would allow users to reach new imaginative heights. Fired from the faculty at Harvard for failing to show up for his own classes, Leary had a keen understanding of the media; he spoke in catchy sound bites that lent themselves to headlines. His most famous was “turn on, tune in, drop out,” a suggestion that resonated in the Haight, where almost everyone wanted to tune in to their higher consciousness and drop out of the straight world. It was the “turn on” part that was the problem. Drugs were hard to come by—marijuana, commonly called grass or weed, was available only from shady dealers in half- or even quarter-ounces, and while LSD, the Kesey- and Leary-heralded drug, was legal, it was also difficult to obtain. And then, like some superhero in the comic books that were popular reading in the neighborhood, came the man whose chemical genius and burning ambition to make acid readily available to everyone irrevocably transformed the Haight.
By the time Augustus Owsley Stanley III appeared on the scene, the twenty-nine-year-old had already lived a colorful, quixotic life. He rejected his patrician family back in Kentucky, joined the Air Force and served as a radar technician, learned Russian as a first (and last) step toward becoming an Orthodox monk in that country, burned through a couple of marriages, taught himself auto mechanics by redesigning the engine of his MG, and finally settled on his ultimate career goal: to perfect psychedelic drugs and get them into the hands of as many users as possible. Owsley invented a bogus company named Bear Research Group so he could order massive quantities of chemicals directly from the manufacturers, then set up a Bay Area laboratory to concoct his own. There he experimented with LSD dosage strength, testing his friends with free samples. He had plenty to spare—Owsley’s initial stock of ingredients was enough for 1.5 million doses. From the first, he considered himself the greatest among the LSD gods. After visiting with Timothy Leary at Leary’s home in Millbrook, New York, Owsley returned to California and cracked, “Leary may be the king in this little chess game, but what nobody realizes is that I’m the rogue queen.”
Within months, Owsley acid was everywhere in the Haight, and he wasn’t fazed in October 1966 when the California legislature mandated LSD use to be a misdemeanor and its sale a felony. First, he began offering acid in the form of liquid tinted the same blue as Wisk laundry detergent. Dealers could carry their LSD openly in Wisk bottles, which contained up to four thousand hits. Then he purchased a pill press and began producing tablets. He changed pill color at random—white, green, pink, purple.
Owsley not only controlled LSD appearance but price. His acid was acknowledged as the best; when dealers flocked to snap up his latest batch, he would sell to them only after they promised not to charge their street customers more than $2 a dose. Owsley himself was a regular sight on Haight sidewalks and clubs, often handing out his wares for free. He liked to treat friends to steaks at some of San Francisco’s better restaurants—his theory was that humans were natural meat eaters whose digestive systems became polluted by vegetables. Owsley paid for these sumptuous feasts with $100 bills, the only currency he would accept from dealers. It was rumored that on days when Owsley held court to sell his latest batch of LSD, there were no $100 bills to be had at most banks within a sixty-mile radius of San Francisco.
Stories about readily available LSD drew more social dropouts to the Haight. Kesey and the Merry Pranksters helped spread the word with a series of highly publicized “acid tests” in bookstores and clubs, where those who wanted could ingest LSD and judge the effect for themselves. Most of the acid was provided by Owsley. Many turned-on Haight residents augmented their LSD intake with marijuana grown discreetly in porch or window flower pots or else purchased from other local growers. There was usually enough not only to share with friends, but to sell (at very reasonable prices, just enough to cover rent and food and incidentals and Owsley acid) to college students and young professionals who wanted to relax after a hard day in the classroom or at work. It seemed safer to these outsiders to acquire their stashes from other white kids; the black guys who dealt drugs in the ghettos were scary. The Haight quickly became, in the words of historian Charles Perry, home to the nation’s first “urban agricultural communes.” Virtually everyone who lived there engaged in friendly dealing. They considered it commerce but not real capitalism. Nobody owned anything or anyone. The best things in life were free.
So the Haight was reborn with a cheerful, noncompetitive approach to life. According to legend, the surviving Beats of San Francisco and Haight-Ashbury gave the new kids a derogatory nickname. The Beats liked to think of themselves as skeptical, clued-in hipsters. These goofy little dupes were something less: hippies. The term got thrown around a lot in the Haight and eventually was picked up by the local media. In September 1965 the San Francisco Examiner published a prominent story about the regeneration of the neighborhood. Its headline described the Haight as “A New Haven for Beatniks,” but in the body of the story, Haight residents were collectively identified as hippies. The kids embraced the term.
Through the rest of 1965 and all of 1966, the Haight flourished. A thriving new music scene exploded virtually overnight. Promoter Bill Graham took over the Fillmore Auditorium in a decaying black neighborhood on the edge of the Haight, and that venue, along with another called the Avalon Ballroom, featured lots of San Francisco–based bands—the Grateful Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company with Janis Joplin, Quicksilver Messenger Service. Besides bands, there were many other performers—mime troupes and comics, and clowns in full face paint wandering the Haight streets during the day distributing balloon animals. Everyone was a little different—but if they weren’t different, they wouldn’t have been there.
There was a nagging concern. Drugs weren’t in short supply—everybody had a joint or a tab to share—and area churches outdid themselves in opening temporary shelters so everyone could have a bed. But food was a problem, until an unlikely group stepped up.
The Diggers, who originally came to the Haight as part of a mime troupe, were quintessential anarchists. They believed that any organization or business, including government, schools, and stores, infringed on individual freedom. Everything should belong to everyone without cost, and sustenance topped the list. Even their name reflected that philosophy—the original Diggers lived in seventeenth-century England, where they defied the authoritarian government of Oliver Cromwell by taking over vacant farm land and raising produce, which they gave away for free to the starving British poor. The Haight Diggers harvested their crops from San Francisco groceries, raiding the stores’ back lot dumpsters for aging but still edible items—wilted vegetables, meat that was past its sell-by date but hadn’t spoiled. They lugged their daily haul back to the Haight, concocted huge amounts of soup or stew, and then carried the steaming vats to the Panhandle and served free afternoon meals to whoever was on hand and hungry. Within the group, sexism was rampant. Digger men chatted with friends and ambled around the Haight while Digger women scrounged, cooked, hauled, and served the food, then cleaned up afterward.
They did more than hand out free food. Traditional newspapers carried few stories of interest to Haight residents. The Diggers printed and distributed leaflets with useful information about parties, concerts, and even how to get a lawyer if you were arrested for drug possession. They harassed Haight businesses if they believed meal or merchandise prices were too high, and in November 1966 opened their own shop, the Free Frame of Reference, which stocked donated secondhand clothes and household items. The name was appropriate: Haight residents, particularly penniless newcomers, were invited to come in, look around, and take what they needed. Everything was free.
Nineteen sixty-six in the Haight culminated with a free Christmas Eve Digger turkey dinner for five hundred at a local church; afterward fresh Owsley LSD was passed around. Musical entertainment was provided by the Chamber Orkustra, a new Haight band. The Orkustra’s founder and lead guitarist was a nineteen-year-old currently calli
ng himself Bobby Snofox, or, sometimes, Bummer Bob. His real name was Bobby Beausoleil, and he would be heard from again.
Community events were a big part of the Haight’s charm. Few weeks went by without some impromptu concert in the Panhandle or special street theater presentation. It was a way to celebrate being pioneers in a new way of life. There was a growing sense that someday soon everyone would throw off constrictive moral and spiritual shackles, if only the Haight’s influence spread widely enough. In that spirit, neighborhood leaders decided to kick off 1967 with their biggest bash ever, one intended to unite Haight’s hippies with like-minded souls throughout the Bay Area. A secondary intent was to forge stronger solidarity between Haight residents and Berkeley’s student radicals. After all, even though their methods were so different, their mutual aim was to create a better, more equal society.
Organizers put aside their disdain for San Francisco city government and formally reserved Golden Gate Park’s sprawling Polo Field for Saturday afternoon, January 14, 1967. The first internal debate involved what to call the event. “Pow-wow” and “A Gathering of the Tribes” were seriously considered before the eventual choice: “A Human Be-In,” soon shortened by planners and the press to “Be-In.” No one was certain how many people might attend. Flyers for the 1–5 P.M. event simply asked attendees to bring “children, flowers, flutes, drums, feathers, bands, beads, banners, flags, tangerines, incense, chimes, gongs, cymbals, joy.” Scheduled speakers included Beat poets Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, LSD guru Timothy Leary, and Buddha.
Winter weather in San Francisco is notoriously erratic, making any outdoor program chancy, but January 14 dawned clear and bright. Organizers were concerned that the San Francisco press would emphasize a smaller than expected crowd, so Haight shops and cafés voluntarily closed for the day in an effort to encourage residents to go to the Polo Field instead. They shouldn’t have bothered. By 9 A.M. hippies in rainbow robes and feathered headdresses began arriving in the sprawling meadow. They mingled with students wearing blue jeans and T-shirts. More than twenty thousand were present by the official 1 P.M. kickoff, everyone crammed together and no one minding. The Diggers distributed free turkey sandwiches; Owsley donated a large, particularly potent batch of LSD tabs dubbed “White Lightning.” Anyone who felt like tripping on acid did so in style. Ginsberg, who desperately wanted to be as important to the hippies as he had been to the Beats, opened the program by chanting “We are all one!” while someone blew into a conch shell. Leary encouraged all present to turn on, tune in, drop out, and a dozen San Francisco bands performed. As the sun set around 5 P.M., Ginsberg offered a final chant to close the program. Then the crowd stunned park officials by cleaning up every scrap of trash before wandering off into the dusk, still singing and chanting. The Be-In was a magical event, far surpassing what its organizers could ever have hoped for, and it was directly responsible for destroying the Haight spirit that it celebrated. If the neighborhood was Eden for hippies, then the San Francisco media inadvertently became the serpent.
Local reporters, photographers, and film crews attended the Be-In, and their subsequent broadcasts and articles and photographs accurately captured the rapturous atmosphere. National newscasts and publications took note. It was impossible to live in America for the next few weeks without seeing, hearing, or reading something about Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, the place where free food, love, and drugs abounded. Everyone was welcome there. Across the country, disenfranchised youth responded. Previously, a few dozen hungry, penniless newcomers found their way to the Haight every week. Now there were more than three hundred a day. It didn’t take long for neighborhood leaders to realize what was happening. They met with San Francisco police chief Thomas Cahill and other city officials, requesting help to house and feed the descending hordes. Cahill, a conservative who viewed the hippies as proof of America’s moral decay, cracked that they had become “the love generation,” and made things worse by announcing no tents could be up in any city park after 10 P.M., meaning Haight newcomers no longer had a place to camp out. A neighborhood research team did its best to question members of the ever-growing mob about why they had come; its report concluded that some were psychotic, 40 percent bought into “the mystique of the Haight and think it will change the world,” and 45 percent were “attracted by minimum time spent working and maximum time getting stoned.” This wasn’t the hippie Utopia celebrated just weeks before.
Haight residents hoped that the influx of needy newcomers would slacken as the Be-In faded from public memory. That possibility was lost in early April when Paul McCartney popped into the neighborhood for a quick look at a place whose reputation as a hippie haven had spread all the way to England. McCartney apparently failed to take in the piles of trash and milling herds of ragged misfits. Instead, he pronounced that Haight hippies were collectively “colorful and fun,” and his comments made fresh headlines. A Beatle had endorsed the Haight. That encouraged still more people to come, and among them were hardened dealers sensing limitless profits from a growing mob of consumers who believed it was their social and spiritual obligation to ingest drugs. Owsley still controlled most of the LSD market, and marijuana was smoked in the Haight as often as conventional cigarettes. But these new pushers offered hard drugs—heroin and Methedrine and other chemicals encouraging harsh hallucinations and physical violence. Haight arrivals, and not a few longtime residents, proved indiscriminate in what they took and how often. Used syringes became commonplace on the Haight’s sidewalks. The hard-line dealers wormed their way into the community and swiftly became as integral as the Diggers.
If dealers were the least welcome arrivals, runaway teenagers were the most heartbreaking. Sixteen or fifteen or even younger, they came from around the country, more runaways than any major city could have comfortably absorbed, let alone a relatively small neighborhood. Some had left home for the thrill of it, and after taking in the Haight’s increasingly unsavory atmosphere, they had the sense and the resources to go back home. But many others, in the words of Joan Didion, were “pathetically unequipped” to deal with their new surroundings. They were misfit kids, the ones with no social skills who had trouble making friends or fitting in back in their hometowns, or else were at critical odds with their parents and wanted someone more understanding to take them in and tell them what to do. The ones least able to fend for themselves were the most likely to stay.
So many defenseless teenage sheep naturally attracted both shepherds and wolves. Street preachers had always roamed San Francisco, but now the Haight attracted an inordinate number who pontificated on street corners or in the Panhandle, all of them claiming to have the answers that their confused listeners needed. It was possible, within any few Haight blocks, to be exposed to a wide variety of proselytizers: Buddhists, Hindus, fundamentalist Christians, Satanists, socialists, anarchists, pacifists, isolationists, and plenty of poseurs adopting guru guise for the purpose of seducing gullible youngsters. “You can’t emphasize enough the innocence of most of these starry-eyed kids,” recalls Beat and Haight survivor Glenn Todd. “They were ripe to take advantage of, if anybody wanted to. Throw out some talk about peace and love in Golden Gate Park and you could sleep with a dozen naive little girls if that was your intent.” For many, it was. An April 16 street leaflet described another too typical scene: “Pretty little sixteen-year-old middle-class chick comes to the Haight to see what it’s all about & gets picked up by a seventeen-year-old street dealer who spends all day shooting her full of speed again & again, then . . . raffles off her temporarily unemployed body for the biggest Haight Street gang bang since the night before last. . . . Rape is as common as bullshit on Haight Street.”
Things were about to get even worse. All during the spring of 1967, newcomers converged on the Haight. In May and June, when schools around the nation closed for the summer, the number of arrivals was expected to multiply at a staggering rate. One estimate had 75,000 more descending on a neighborhood with a residential cap
acity of perhaps a tenth of that number. It was “The Summer of Love.”
By then Charlie Manson lurked in the Haight, and he was eager to greet the newcomers.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Charlie in the Summer of Love
Charlie arrived at the Haight in April 1967 after the Be-In (in January he was still behind bars at Terminal Island) but before high schools let out for the summer and the full tide of would-be hippies washed in. Somebody handed Charlie a flower, he had his initial acid trip and loved it, and he spent a night or two on the soft grass of Golden Gate Park. Decades later he’d also claim that he performed at the Avalon Ballroom with the Grateful Dead, which even for Charlie was an outrageous lie. Nobody took any special notice of him; Charlie appeared to be nothing more than another scruffy pilgrim negotiating the crowded streets. But Charlie was taking in everything around him, looking for an angle, trying to calculate how he could turn some aspect of the Love Generation activity to his own advantage. As was the case in Berkeley, the Haight was no place for pimps because free love eliminated the need to pay for play, and peddling dope was out of the question, too—everyone in the neighborhood had easy access to acid and weed, and Charlie lacked the finances and connections to get into dealing harder drugs.
