I was there at the beginning of the Beatnik movement, the hippie movement, and the Whole Earth Catalog.
The Beats were mostly in New York and San Francisco. I went to the U. of Chicago, in the geographic middle, in August of 1955 and was in the male dormitories in 1957 for six months. For reasons I still don’t understand, I was a widely known radical organizer with a sweatshirt, blue jeans, disheveled hair and a full beard. The Beats were visible in the youth population of the time. As they traveled from Coast to Coast they stopped in Chicago at the University where I got them dorm rooms to stay in. I knew about a dozen of the Beats at the time. An article in Time magazine in 1959 said I was one of the Beats.
When I returned to San Francisco in 1960 to go to grad school at U.C. Berkeley in economics, my wife, Helen, and I lived in San Francisco on Broadway a few blocks from North Beach. The Beat scene was centered around City Lights bookstore owned by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. There were five other Beat businesses. The most important was a small restaurant at approximately 575 Pacific Ave. that had a monk’s bowl of rice and meat and some veggies. Across the street at the Columbus Tower was a street level window with a few seats that had a chrome Italian espresso machine, the first I ever had in the U.S. In the next block North on Columbus was a second-hand bookstore, a bar on what is now Jack Kerouac Alley and City Lights. In the next block of Grant across Broadway was The Saloon where heavy beatnik drinkers hung out.
In 1963 Salli Rasberry arrived with her boyfriend. They went immediately to North Beach where the Beats had created a jazz and comedy scene. Raz, whom I didn’t meet for seven years, moved to Masonic Boulevard in the Haight-Ashbury. Jazz was the overlap of the two youth cultures. Both smoked pot. The Beats had speed which was sold to students and truckers. Raz and her bunch, later called hippies, soon got LSD from the gang around Stanford that got it from psych researchers.
The Beats were a little older than Raz and her bunch; most were in their mid to late 20’s. The Beats wore d ark clothes and had long hair. Their view of the world was summarized perfectly in Ginsberg’s poem, Howl. Grim, rejectionist and hopeless.
Raz and her crowd were also rejectionist about the stultifying society around us, but they were ecstatic, joyful, optimistic, and full of color and vitality. Their clothes were rainbow-exciting, their music loud and wild. They intended to change everything. Starting with food, sex, and living arrangements.
North Beach was the primary overlap of Beats and hippies. On a personal basis they met at a house off Kings Mountain on the road over the top, from Palo Alto to Pescadero. It was a fairly large primitive house just a mile west of SkyLonda coffee shop. That was where Hippies, the Rainbow Bus, Kesey, the Beats, and the outlaw gang of Hell's Angels bikers hung out. I went there twice with Portola Institute (the core of the Whole Earth Catalog) friends to hang out.
I was well known in the hippie crowd as the banker at Bank of America from 1964 to 1966 and later as VP of the Bank of California who invited all the hippie movers and shakers to a Japanese lunch on Fridays from 1967 to 1970. When the first Trips festival was organized by the Beats and Stewart Brand in January 1966 at the Longshoreman's Hall, Stewart asked me to handle the ticket sales and money collection at the door.
I collected the money for an hour, but the whole scene was too exciting and too many of my friends were there, so I asked the one person I trusted, Bill Graham, to take over the door for me.
I finally met Rasberry officially in Spring 1971 at the Demise Party of the Whole Earth Catalog. We had met many times but that night we sat on a bale of hay talking from 3 am till sunrise at 7am and became lifelong friends.
This is a good place to point out to the historians of the future that the political Left never was connected to the hippie movement. Hippies joined all the parades of the anti-Vietnam era for the dancing and music. I know because I knew the Lefty organizers. I started the Graduate Student Union at U.C. Berkeley and Mario Savio was my Treasurer in 1963. He became famous in 1964.
Tom Hayden used my living room in San Francisco to try and organize the East Coast media to cover a hippie be-in in Golden Gate Park. I was opposed to any official publicity and stopped it.
Abbie Hoffman was a colleague who helped me put on a fundraiser for some forgotten cause but he pulled out when stoned and paranoid. I handled the gate myself and returned the money to anyone who wanted it.