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This was like a foreign country, like no other that I had visited. It was thousands of hippies dressed in every manner: long hair both men and women, beards, beads and hand crafted jewellery. And then I got 'spaced out', as the saying went, on Golden Gate Park and my plans of further travel went glimmering.
It was the late spring of '68 and while I had heard that many if not most of the original hippies had left for else-wheres, the heyday having been the year before and the 'Summer of Love'; the majority still remaining were kids and young adults from all over the country and even the world, hardcore and
gritty, trying to make it by selling newspapers to tourists in the streets, making and selling hippy clothes, beads and jewellery or just drugs. But it was still before the lower middle class week-end gentrification of the hippy movement, with the in between fashion of safe for work moustache and over the collar hair, store bought hippy accessories with the bell bottoms, pastel and flowered tops and the compulsory beads.
The hippy Haight Street proper with the crowds, head shops, coffee galleries, jewellery stores, bead shops, record stores with some of the pre-influx original business's scattered in between, were almost all housed in the store fronts of old and beautiful wood Victorian, two and three story buildings. This section started at Masonic Street and ran a total of 5 or 6 blocks to Stanyan Street
which bordered Golden Gate Park. The street itself had two sides in character.
The north and sunny side of the street was filled with crowds hanging out on the side-walks, playing music, selling wares spread out on blankets.
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