REFLECTIONS : From the Flower Children to the Cops, They Were There . . . and They Remember

SAN FRANCISCO —  On a velvety-warm Saturday recently at the corner of a couple of streets named Haight and Ashbury, someone had shinnied up a signpost and done what someone had probably done every weekend for 20 years.

Over the metal sign that read “Haight,” this particular somebody had taped a paper rectangle that read, predictably, “Love.”

A generation ago the Summer of Love was radiating psychedelic images of peace, love, drugs, sex and rock ‘n’ roll from the counterculture’s epicenter. That summer, says a Connecticut writer who lived there then, it seemed like “there was the Haight-Ashbury, and then there was everywhere else.”

At its best, it had a festive fervor, a surreal, antic charm, and an inventive anarchy. Ballet star Rudolf Nureyev, arrested in a house where marijuana was found, jumped from his cell at the Haight police station and jeted around the squad room twice before leaping into the paddy wagon. A Bay Area bank executive went to work one day in a tie-dyed business suit.

At its worst, it had a self-indulgent passivity in an angry era of activism. Hallucinogens like LSD, intended to blow up mental roadblocks like dynamite, did not send everyone on the same enlightened trip; some freaked out and never got home from that psychedelic Oz.

Poet Allen Cohen, now 46, edited the Oracle, the Haight’s pioneer underground newspaper whose vividly colored pages (which Cohen first imagined in a dream) were scented with jasmine.

The Haight “became the country’s Rorschach test,” Cohen says, “everyone’s favorite whipping boy and everyone’s favorite mecca all at the same time.”

But in that last summer before Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. were murdered, before the Tet Offensive and the brutal Chicago Democratic Convention, these people believed that all you did need was love.

Dr. David Smith

Dr. David Smith was speaking in some Midwestern city when a well-dressed man came up to him--a vice president at “some major corporation”--and shook his hand.

“I had a bad acid trip in 1967, and you treated me,” he said warmly. “Thank you.”

Smith, founder of Haight-Ashbury’s Free Clinic, is, like the clinic, still going after 20 years. “When I started the clinic, a professor of mine said, ‘Where did you go wrong? You were always such a promising young student.’ ”

Smith opened the clinic that summer, a place where “free” was philosophy as well as economics. “Love needs care,” whether it was bad trips, infected bare feet or a commune lined up for VD shots.

“It got real popular to say, ‘Oh, nothing of value came out of the ‘60s.” But a great deal did, he says, including the free clinic concept, now an integral part of the nation’s community health care.

After a million patients, the clinic is still in business, with 60 paid staff, 400 volunteers and 300 outpatients a day, many of them “new poor.”

“Our original motto was, health care is a right, not a privilege,” he said. “We felt even if you had a life style the mainstream of society didn’t approve of, you still had a right to health care.

“I’m very much a product of the ‘60s, if you believe that delivering health care to the poor, the outsiders and the medically indigent is important for our society. And I do.”

Lenore Kandel

In 1967 in San Francisco tourist bars, women danced nude onstage, covered only by the mantle of the law that let them do it.

But that spring, a policeman in the Psychedelic Shop came across poet Lenore Kandel’s “celebratory” erotic “The Love Book,” and busted it as obscene.

“Far out!” laughed Kandel, when she heard. Then she thought, “What was a policeman doing looking at poetry, anyway?”

The Haight’s so-called “Love Poetess,” now 54, saw her work--described by Haight scholar Charles Perry as “Elizabeth Barrett Browning (on) acid”--tried, convicted as obscene and overturned on appeal. “It particularly seemed to upset them that it was a woman” writing such things.

The furor made it a best-seller by poets’ standards. “There’s nothing like having the police as your publicity agents.”

It helped to make her a high-profile woman in the Haight. Although the ‘60s killed off the girdle and The Pill gave women sexual freedom, even “New Age” women were often “chicks” who cooked and cleaned.

Kandel was an exception. “At that time a lot of women were resentful because they weren’t listened to; I was listened to--I don’t know why.”

It was all a “live, 3-D show of challenging, questioning, it’s OK to try. I feel so lucky; it was a wonderful time. It three-dimensionalized hope and belief.”

Kandel, living in a third-floor San Francisco apartment a long way from the Haight, still makes ends meet with odd jobs, and still writes “spiritual alarm clock” poetry, though nothing has matched the success of “The Love Book.”

“Trees are worth a lot. I sit and think a lot before I write a poem. I think, ‘Is it worth a tree?’ ”

Richard Leon

Sure, there are things Richard Leon remembers fondly about the Summer of Love: “I made a lot of overtime.”

Leon, now a 49-year-old police burglary inspector, spent six roiling years walking the Haight-Ashbury beat, focusing on its “bad karma,” crime: from rip-offs and rapes to screaming bad acid trippers hurtling down Haight Street nude.

There were the “Sunday afternoon riots” to be quelled, after tourists came to gawk “like they were in a zoo,” and angry hippies held up mirrors to reflect the tourists to themselves.

“ ‘The Summer of Love,’ I don’t know where they got that name. My impressions certainly were not that rosy.”

It was not all grim: Sometimes, waifish runaway girls--the kind he picked up and sent home repeatedly--would “put flowers in our lapels and try and give us a kiss,” and “offer us food or whatever--which we never took. You never knew what was in it. . . . But the filth and the living conditions were terrible.”

And the Summer of Love--when savvy hippies were packing and moving to mountains or farms--”was the worst time,” when speed and heroin overtook LSD, and violence supplanted love.

“We just did the best we could; there were just so many people pouring in there,” he says. “We didn’t care whether it was a local phenomenon or a national phenomenon.” As far as they were concerned, “it was just was a police problem.”

“I remember just praying my kids would not grow up thinking this is cool.”

Allen Cohen

Allen Cohen has always known that the ‘60s changed him. Twenty years later, he sees they changed everyone else, too.

The man who edited the “Oracle” was at the core of “a very large movement generated by a small group of people and affecting a whole lot of people all over the world due to the mass media.”

For Cohen, 46 now and father of a teen-age son, the ‘60s aren’t “a matter of nostalgia,” but “trying to recapture the passion of the values we held so ideally and intensely, and the values were basically peace, love and community.” And “people still hunger for them today.”

“It was all the time and the right chemicals and the war and the conformity in our culture and the madness in our government” that sparked it.

“We thought we were going to save the world through LSD, because we thought we had something that could connect us with each other, in a warm and human and compassionate way and that could bring the warring nations and the alienation between people together and change the world. We really believed it.”

When the Haight dwindled, he moved to a Mendocino County commune, for “a little farming and a lot of babies,” and wrote an early natural birthing book called “Childbirth Is Ecstasy.”

Eventually he came back to The City (“I sort of got tired of writing poems about redwood trees and mushrooms”), and works for the peace movement, including a coalition represented at the 1984 Democratic Convention. He works in an antique whatnot shop, reading and writing and surrounded, still, by the fragrance of patchouli incense, 50 cents for three sticks.

Michal Goldman

Michal Goldman had just finished work on a civil rights documentary when she went to San Francisco in 1967 to film the life of a commune.

And her enduring memory of the Summer of Love is the endless “chinka chinka chinka” of ankle bells through the thin walls of the next room, where the girl wearing the bells and the head of the commune, a 40ish Madison Avenue dropout, seemed to have sex all night.

Goldman, 43--now a Cambridge, Mass., film maker--was a “gofer” for two “brilliant” film makers. And she plunged into life in the Haight in the crash pad they rented for the commune, whose one baby wandered undiapered through the rooms.

“I kept trying to make some sense out of it. I kept trying to find the sort of profounder truths,” she recalled. She smoked her share of dope, and even tried opium that summer, but the point of the life style eluded her.

“I believed then that capitalism was a terribly oppressive, destructive system,” and she was “in sympathy then with anything that looked to me like a serious attempt to change that. On the other hand, the notion of sort of unbridled chaos . . . terrified me. I didn’t see what could come out of that except fascism” in reaction to such “mindless drifting.”

She didn’t know whether political protest across the bay at Berkeley “was ultimately right or more correct (than the Haight), but it was a lot more serious and it seemed to me it was a lot more sophisticated.”

Talking once with a big-name acid rock musician, “I remember (his) resentment” at the “thousands of people who just flooded in, who just had no consciousness of what this was really all about. But that just seemed to me to be a kind of elitism. . . . If this was going to be a movement, and it couldn’t tolerate or educate the people who are drawn to it, then it fails right away before it’s even begun.”

In the end the Summer of Love taught her something about herself. “I reached my limit there. I woke up one morning and said to myself, ‘No, I won’t do this any more, I won’t do this for one more day.’ ”

She packed her sleeping bag and left.