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Summer of Love

In late 1966 I find myself stationed a few miles south of San Francisco at Moffett Field. I’m attached to Transport Squadron 8 and assigned to work in the base radio shack sending teletype messages all over the world. In those days I don’t have a car and spend most off hours hitchhiking around the area with my camera. Most people I meet in this way are wonderful to a wandering sailor. The afternoon I first hear about a strange tribe of people called Hippies was an exception. Myself and John Borsh, a sailor from Minnesota decide to explore the Carmel Coast. We find ourselves walking a narrow winding section of Highway 1 just south of Point Lobos. Two wild men recently out of the Air Force who had just ingested a strange chemical called Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) decide to pick us up. At first the men seem normal. Myself and farm boy Borsh soon find out how LSD makes people crazy. The men say they are on a quest to find Hippies. They explain that Hippies are people who all live together in a tribe. They know of some in San Francisco but want to see the coastal bands. The men never cut their hair and the women will have sex with anyone, they say of Hippies. This sounds all well and good until their acid kicks in. The driver goes completely crazy. He almost kills us as he drives like a lunatic along the winding coast highway. We find no Hippies along the coast that day, so our insane traveling companions decide to give up on the coastal tribes and seek out a magical place they know of called Haight-Ashbury. We beg our way out of the car near Moffett Field, and they roar off to more acid and free love. We decide to quit hitchhiking. The next weekend we talk a loud Texan (who everyone called Tex) into taking us into San Francisco to find the land of Hippies.
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Having never seen people reacting to music with a few tabs of LSD raging around there chromosomes, is a wonder to behold and photograph.
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Having never seen people reacting to music with a few tabs of LSD raging around there chromosomes, is a wonder to behold and photograph.

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  • This is Ben Black Elk. This is where my photographic quest starts in the summer of my 18th year. Native Americans say we reach an age when we would gladly trade the rest of our life for a single summer in our youth. Should that time come, I’ll take the summer of 1965 when Lenny Kaczor and I walked off to look for America, and discovered old Ben. This photo of Ben gets me my first newspaper photography job in 1966 but the job costs me my student draft deferment. But the photography experience makes me a Navy photographer.<br /> <br /> Even if one only gets a moment in life to repeat, I’ll take that instant of epiphany, under the dark cloth, when the old Sioux prophet came to focus on the ground glass of my antique press camera. So compelling is the surging current in my soul, only my tripod keeps shaking hands from blurring this image of Black Elk. <br /> <br /> Young and foolish, I think I’ve discovered an old Indian in full Sioux regalia who happened to be sitting around Mount Rushmore National Monument. Instead, Black Elk, discovers me. I don’t know then Ben is considered America’s most photographed Native American in history. I take my photographs and he calls me to sit with him. <br /> <br /> He tells me the story of the first photographer he had ever seen when he was a young man, like me. “The man had a camera just like yours,” says Ben gestering to my rare 3 1/4 X 4 1/4 press camera, “The photographer scared my people with his magic because we felt he captured our spirits with his strange black box.” Ben goes on to explain that time, education, and understanding has taught him differently. Yet part of him can’t shake his original belief that cameras steal a bit of our souls. <br /> <br /> From that conversation forth, I know I’m a photographer. I go off into the world with a new understanding of my place in the grand scheme of things. I take a piece of Black Elk’s force with me, and live the life of a spirit catcher.
  • Once I discover Haight-Ashbury it becomes a favorite photographic destination. My short Navy hair and camera spooks the Hippies who assume I’m an undercover policeman. I’m mistrusted and given a wide berth by suspicious Flower People. This probably saves my chromosomes from destructive encounters with sex and drugs. This flute player is especially paranoid when he notices my lens pointing his way. I was only able to snap a few shots before he fled in terror.
  • The Hippie movement starts to fall apart about the time the media and the world discover San Francisco’s phenomena. Flocks of runaway children come to be addled by drugs and soon attract predators. Charles Manson gathers his family. Ken Kesey loads his magic bus. One day I sit on the public green in Haight-Ashbury and hear two young girls talk of their unbelievable exploits. Raised with Minnesota farm values, I’m shaken by their sleep-around drug talk. I want to be their big brother and send them home to Indiana and summer along the Wabash. In “The Indiana Girl” Marty Cooper wrote and sang about this at the time. “Sing us a song of way back when. Sing a song of Indiana one more time, and you can be your daddy’s girl again.” Yet I’m touched by the gentle soul in this picture with doe like eyes. She radiates enlightenment for my lens in that summer of love. She glances my way after I snap this picture. Her calm peaceful smile fills my chest with warm tingly summer love.
  • A band with a name like the "Mothers of Invention" seems incredibly clever to me, but I don’t understand the strange new names of other musical groups. In fact I don't even know the names buzzing around San Francisco are for musical groups. A man sees me photographing Zappa, Mama Cass and friends and assumes I can help his group. He keeps following me around asking me to come meet the Jefferson Airplane. I don’t know what that might be, a Jefferson Airplane, and assume the man is stoned. He keeps waving to a group of Hippies seated under a tree. They wave back and Grace Slick catches my eye. I don’t go meet them though as I’m beginning to find it disquieting to visit with Hippies on acid. Ms. Slick might have lured me over, but I'm soon chased away by a crazy man who fears my mind is trapped in a black box.
  • A boy with kaleidoscope eyes chases after me exclaiming in horror that my mind is trapped inside a little black box. My camera has taken me prisoner, he yells. I feel like Alice dealing with the Mad Hatter. I run to a group of people who seem to love the horrible noise a young black man is making with his guitar. Everyone is hugging and swaying to impossible tortured notes. I’ve never heard guitar feedback. I grit my teeth and photograph those who bang their heads on the smoke-scented air as Jimi Hendix abuses music. I don’t photograph him and walk away thinking he should burn his guitar.
  • As if posing for Milton Glaser’s famous 1967 poster of Bob Dylan, this young man stands out in the crowd as a Hippie of style. The leather, beads, shades and walking staff give him a level of panache. If I were given to radical altering of photographs in Photo Shop, I’d be temped to turn this image into a Glaser poster. One day perhaps I’ll make this shot look like Dylan in silhouette with a shock of wavy psychedelic hair.
  • I’ve never printed this negative before but in making this scan, I’m struck by the girl’s resemblance Janis Joplin. Images found of Janis on the Internet bear this resemblance out, but Joplin didn’t seem so freckled. Whoever this girl is, I don’t remember anything about her. For example, I’m not sure if she’s crying, laughing or tripping. I only notice the wings on this girl’s coat just now. Is she actually an airline stewardess or pilot? Not likely. More probable the wings are just part of the Hippie bead, flower, and pin-clad costume. Often when I photographed people in Haigh-Asbury, many were lost if the rapture of drugs, music, dance, or all the above. This allowed me to approach and photograph them as creatures in a human zoo
  • As Jimi Hendrix produced impossible sounds from his guitar, I’m astounded how people are affected. The wailing tomcat notes of feedback seem a joy to the Hippies. I'm at once taken by the strange music-like noise and the abundance of hair. I’m shooting an old twin-lens Mamiya camera, the very one someone just accused me of having my mind trapped in, that allows double exposures. I shoot a close up of three people hugging that looks like a mountain of hair. I forget to rewind and accidentally record this psychedelic voyager in another reality. What did that Hendrix guy say? "Pardon me while I kiss the sky." But I think he says "Kiss this guy" and find it all so strange.
  • What’s that I see in her eyes? Is her lip about to turn up in a snarl? Is it my military haircut and Navy shoes? Oblivious, I wander photographing Hippies as if visiting a zoo.
  • Buttons seem are the bumper stickers of the time. “Flower Power,” his button tells me is what the summer is all about.
  • In the Summer of Love in 1967 parents believed that giving young children LSD would help them develop into beautiful flower people. This child was part of a Chalk In. Children were give colored chalk and acid. Parents cheered and enjoyed their art as if at a Little League game. One wonders how this worked out for this young tripper.
  • Keep in mind hippies look new and wonderful to me in 1967. My heart soars as I photograph this pretty lady. This image of a blond Golden Gate Park lovely looks normal by today's standards. Hippie men draw attention to themselves with long hair back then, but the look is more subtle with females. Hippie girls turn away from the popular habit hair held high, ratted, and cemented with hairspray. The women of Haight-Ashbury wear their manes down, straight, and natural. This look pleases my photographic eye.
  • Young girls wasted on psychedelics, banging their heads on the pot scented air as Jimi Hendrix makes his guitar moan. This attracts the predators to a feast. I see it in this shot, the dark figure looming.
  • By the time The Summer of Love is in full bloom, I’ve visited the Haight-Ashbury many times. Having grown up in Anaheim taking visiting relatives to Disneyland, I feel it’s my duty to bring fellow Sailors Hippieland. I tell them the music is even wonderful and like everything else it’s free. Frank Zappa, Mama Cass Elliot, and the Mothers of Invention entertain from the back of a flatbed truck and invite me up on the stage to photograph.
  • Having never seen people reacting to music with a few tabs of LSD raging around there chromosomes, is a wonder to behold and photograph.
  • There was no chance I would try LSD. The result scares me. Even pot I stay away from, especially when one considers the Navy was sending sailors off to 10 years of hard time for simple possession. My camera is my trip, developer, stop and fix are my chemicals. Wish I had kept it that way.
  • Ignoring Jimi Hendrex, snubbing Grace Slick and Jefferson Airplane, I can’t get enough of the Mothers of Invention. They invite me on stage to dance with my camera. I dance and photograph the only group who won’t survive the summer.
  • I bag my first Hippie when he presents himself to my lens in 1966. Only then, I don’t have the word Hippie to describe him. I’m fascinated by his clothes, long hair, and beard as he stands selling underground newspapers on a city corner. Perhaps he’s a Beatnik I think. I include the dapper young man standing in the background in the image. I see him as a school boy who poises in handy contrast. With his books neatly tucked, he accentuates my astonishment at seeing my first Flower Child.
  • Everything is art, open and lighthearted. Giant bubbles drift over the enchantment, as the children dance and play.
  • Seeing a black child and instinctively photographing as if catching something unusual speaks for the time. The old rules that keep black and white people segregated are cast aside that summer. Yet this photograph of a black child playing in Golden Gate Park seems cutting edge at the time.
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