The Peculiar Truth about the Summer of Love
Published in
3 min readJun 18, 2024
- 1966: A loose band of cultural gadflies flitted around San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury district performing guerilla street theater. Given to wearing Olde English costumes, the generally good-natured actors used the entire city as their stage.
- Local newspaper columnist Herb Caen named them hippies — the babies of the Beat Generation’s hipsters (babies + hipsters = hippies). But the actors didn’t describe themselves with that word. They called themselves the Diggers.
- The Diggers were fond of conducting free events, including giving away free meals. They scavenged in grocery store dumpsters and restaurant garbage cans for casually discarded foods that they cooked into stews and soups. They also baked cheap bread in coffee cans.
- The food was given away to anyone who passed through a doorframe set up in the Golden Gate Park Panhandle, a symbolic gesture with a vague reference to the Doors of Perception.
- The Diggers also created a Free Store, which they called The Trip Without a Ticket. The basic concept was similar to a Goodwill Store except no money was exchanged. People brought in used clothes, used shoes, used furniture, hand-made artwork — anything and everything. All items were left for anyone to take as they pleased. No cashiers, no cash registers, no cash. If you saw something you liked or…
