Mea Culpa: I Was a Weekend Hippie

Yet another ME post. I’ve covered parts of this before here and there, but in honor of the various Occupiers it is time to distance myself from that lot once and for all.

1967: The Navy, in their wisdom, sent me to Mare Island Naval Shipyard for a school. It was the beginning of The Summer of Love in ‘Frisco. Needless to say weekend liberty found me, in civies,  at the corner of Haight and Ashbury observing the nubile, female, dispensers of Free Love. I don’t recall exactly how many, but I spent several weekends doing the same. My opinion of the hippie culture was NOT in any way negative. Make Love Not War made perfect sense  to me? And some of the music was outstanding.

1969: I once again found my self  in San Fransisco. I’d flown into Travis AFB and was leaving via SFO. At the latter a group of hippie looking folks decided to spit at me and my brethren and/or our uniforms. Most of us had just came back from a war and were a bit testy – fun ensued . Interestingly none of those hippies looked particularly nubile or sexy?

I out processed and came home to West Virginia. I ran into some high school pals and found out they were heading to Cape Cod for the summer so I joined up with them, hopped into my newly acquired ’69 Buick and headed out. I planned to go to school in the fall, so why not? We had a nice house there, and I found a job renting sailboats and giving sailing lessons.

Then we started hearing about this concert down in New York. I bought two tickets, made arrangements to get that Friday off, loaded up my current lady friend along with another couple and off we went.

I won’t bore you with further details except that most of the hippies there were akin to those I’d first came into contact with and I wondered about those at the airport? I had to be back at work Monday so we left early Sunday morning walking behind the stage while the Jefferson Airplane was playing.

Aside: I tore up my two tickets when it was announced the concert was free. I’ve been kicking myself in the ass about it since.

A year or so later I hitched across country a time or two, was educated (disillusioned) about communes, and developed a even more jaundiced view of ‘hippies’. There were some good ones, but fewer with each encounter. I wasn’t sure if I was changing or they were?

Flash forward to 2007.  Some friends and I organized some folks to go to DC to counter some “hippies” who said they were gonna target Our Wall.  Some of us had met at The Kerry Lied rally on 2004 and had stayed in touch.  At GoE I saw first hand what passed for hippies in the 21st century.  There and at subsequent similar events I developed something more than simple distaste for what Jonn now calls hippies.

So I will maintain that there were some good, well meaning, hippies once… myself amongst them. Now they are just shitheads who call themselves hippies.

Category: Geezer Alert!, Pointless blather