Tag Archives: hippies

Joyous Lake 1975

September 3, 2021 – 1:54 am

The Aquarian Exposition: 3 Days of Peace; Music on Max Yasgur’s 600-acre dairy farm near the hamlet of White Lake in the town of Bethel, New York has impacted American music culture for over fifty years. Richie Havens opened the festival and Jimi Hendrix closed the concert with a fiery psychedelic finesse. A half million […]

By Peter | Posted in 70s, NEW YORK, semi-fiction | Also tagged , , | Comments (0)

TOO LATE FOR THE HAIGHT by Peter Nolan Smith

May 30, 2021 – 6:49 am

The bus from Sacramento crossed the bay in light traffic. Most people in the Bay Area had off Memorial Day. The uniformed driver veered off the bridge and entered the TransBay Terminal. Once he parked in the depot, I grabbed my bag from the underneath storage compartment and entered the station. Holiday passengers were forming […]

By Peter | Posted in 70s, California, fights, hitchhiking, semi-fiction, The West, Travel | Also tagged , , , | Comments (0)

VALLEY OF POT by Peter Nolan Smith

April 17, 2021 – 10:33 am

August 1972 was five years past San Francisco’s Summer of Love. A college friend from Crane’s Beach and I had hitchhiked from Boston to the West Coast in 45 hours. A mutual girlfriend, Marilyn, was working as a topless hostess on the Barbary Coast. Three months’ tips paid a year’s tuition. After a few hugs […]

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$148 LEVIS by Peter Nolan Smith

November 15, 2019 – 5:45 am

My mother dressed my older brother and me in jeans for most of the 1950s and early 1960s, however when the hippies adopted the tough western trousers as part of their unofficial uniform, Cardinal Cushing of the Boston diocese banned Levis on his evening rosary program. A fierce Catholic my mother obeyed the Pope’s representative […]

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Woodstock 50

August 18, 2019 – 7:19 pm

On the weekend of Woodstock I was washing dishes at a South Shore hotel outside of Boston. The radio stations reported that hundreds of thousands of hippies were gathering for the Woodstock Music Festival. The announcers were somewhat astounded by this phenomena of a half million young people pulling off the impossible. The creation of […]

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