The Hippie Years: To Be or Not To Be?

 

Anyone who lived through the late sixties and early seventies will likely recall something about the hippie counter-culture movement that gained traction with 1967’s “summer of love” in San Francisco and was immortalized at the Woodstock concert in New York in 1969 and the stage production of “Hair.”  Long-haired youths dressed in bright colors and psychedelic prints preached flower power, peace, and love.  The movement was a reaction to the tight strictures of the post-World War Two 1950s; it was fueled by the anti-Vietnam War movement, the growth of the drug culture, and the elimination of strictures on sexual behavior.  While I never fully embraced the “turn on, tune in, drop out" mantra, I certainly flirted with hippie-ness.

Perhaps my flirtation began in the fall of 1970 when Cecelia Hawkins and I donned our backpacks and began hitchhiking across the British Isles, staying in youth hostels, and, for three months, living primarily on a diet of bread, cheese, and wine.   Or it might have begun the year I was a VISTA volunteer in Pueblo, Colorado, or the following years as I wandered from place to place and job to job, searching for a permanent home and a meaningful career. 

Perhaps it was because I made so little money as a VISTA or because I was working with the very poor on Pueblo’s southside, but I started purchasing my clothes at the local second-hand store.  I can’t recall whether it was run by the Salvation Army or Goodwill, but I do recall the faded navy-blue pea coat, the plaid flannel shirts, and the too-short gold corduroy hip-hugger bell-bottomed pants that became my standard uniform that year.  I wore either high-top lace-up boots or—an expensive splurge—earth shoes.  I also had a supply of long underwear tops.

Me (in the middle) with my siblings

My house in Pueblo could best be described as a shack, located behind the house of a sweet old Hispanic woman who spoke no English.  My landlady and I would sit together occasionally on a bench in her back yard enjoying the shade of a massive oak (or elm?) tree.  She would pat my knee and intone “pobresita, pobresita,” (poor little thing).  Whether she was referring to my clothing, the fact that I was living alone, or that I had to live in her backyard shack, I didn’t know.  Perhaps it was all of those. 

Sitting in that yard, we would watch the cars whiz by on Interstate 25—separated from our road only by a chain link fence—and the smoke billow out of the massive blast furnace chimneys at the C,F,&I steel mill on the other side of the highway.  The traffic noise never ceased nor did the work at the mill.  Looking out my kitchen window at night I could see the red glow of the molten iron being poured onto slag, or discard, piles.  And there was always the rotten-egg stench of sulfur in the air.

Snow at my Pueblo house

My house was essentially one room, although a dividing partition separated the bedroom area from the kitchen.  A small bathroom with toilet, sink, and shower was built into a corner of the kitchen.   I had furnished my home with discards, perhaps purchased at Goodwill—a bed, a table, a few chairs.  The details are fuzzy after nearly fifty years, but I remember that the kitchen area had an ancient gas stove that required matches to light its burners and oven.  The counter and cupboard combination was metal, painted white with red trim.  There was a built-in bread box with a door that rolled up and one drawer that was lined with metal had a sliding metal top.  Its intended use was as a flour bin.  It would have been perfect had I made tortillas or baked bread. 

After my VISTA year ended and I left Pueblo, I eventually found my way to Boulder where I lived for a time in a youth hostel.  While it was intended as temporary housing for travelers, there were perhaps ten of us who lived there for a longer time.   The women’s bedroom had two three-bed bunks—camp or military style.   The frames were metal with exposed springs topped by thin mattresses.  There may have been a small wooden dresser, but the only thing I recall clearly is that there was very little space between the beds.  There were more rooms for the men since they significantly outnumbered the women. 

Couples were required to sleep separately for the duration of their hostel stay.  Although, I do recall one couple who slept together in our women’s room.  The other women staying there at the time and I tried our best to ignore the coupling noises each night.  I remember this particular couple because he played his guitar and sang.  I loved his version of the Eagles song popular at the time, “Peaceful Easy Feeling.”  The woman was beautiful, with long dark hair and large hoop earrings, which I admired.  When they left the hostel, she gave me the earrings as a thank you for tolerating their nocturnal activities.  I still have those earrings, which I think of whenever I hear the song:

I like the way your sparkling earrings lay
Against your skin so brown
And I want to sleep with you in the desert tonight
With a billion stars all around

'Cause I got a peaceful easy feelin'
And I know you won't let me down
'Cause I'm already standin'
On the ground

The hostel had a massive industrial kitchen, and we often prepared meals together.  This is where I first became a vegetarian.  It is also where I learned to bake bread and culture my own yogurt. 

Several of us worked as day laborers.  Each morning, we would stand on the sidewalk outside the hostel and hope that someone would come by looking for workers.  One morning we piled into the bed of a pickup and were taken to the sewage treatment plant to lay sod.  The stench was awful so we worked quickly, even though doing so meant we would make less in hourly pay.  Then it began to snow, and we worked even faster.  After the job was done, we were paid in cash and driven back to the hostel. 

Me camping in coveralls
and long underwear

After a month or so at the hostel, four of us found a house to rent, and we moved out.  It was a small two-bedroom house, set back from the street between two bigger houses in Boulder’s hill area.  It was minimally furnished, but we were happy with the relative peace and quiet after the communal living of the hostel.  The two men shared one bedroom and another woman and I shared the other.  One of the men called himself Zion.  He was into meditation, Buddhism, and massage therapy.  He gave me the most amazing massages as I lay on a blanket on the living room floor in front of the fireplace.  (There was nothing sexual about these, but they were extremely relaxing.)  I also recall going to an ashram in Denver one weekend with Zion.  I tried to get into meditation, but it bored me, and I could hardly wait until the weekend ended!

Of course, being a hippie typically involved the use of illegal drugs.  While I smoked marijuana and ate magic brownies on occasion, I drew the line at experimenting with other substances.  LSD, magic mushrooms, cocaine, and other drugs were on offer among my group of friends, but I was not interested in completely losing control.  One Saturday afternoon we went to hear The Grateful Dead play a concert in the University of Colorado’s Folsom Stadium.  I agreed to be the “straight” member of our group in case anyone had a “bad trip.”  I loved the music, but I suspect that my friends who were “tripping” had a much different experience of it than I did that day.  I may have been the only person among the thousands in that stadium who wasn’t stoned.

I was somewhat rescued from my hippie life when I was hired as nanny and housekeeper for a Hollywood screen-writer, Lewis John Carlino, who was building a mountain retreat near the old mining town of Gold Hill.  What a change in life circumstances this was!  The house was gorgeous, and I had my own bedroom/ bathroom suite with outside deck on the lowest of the house’s three floors.  And, I earned more money than I had in the previous three years combined.  I was responsible for the care of Lew’s three children—a six-year-old boy and eight- and twelve-year-old girls—and for keeping the house clean and the children fed.  I adored the kids and loved the house and the salary.  It felt like I might have left my transient hippie years behind.

But, not quite.  The house was not completely finished when we moved in.  The contractor, Gordon, lived in old Gold Hill and sported a ponytail.  Gordon and I met at the funky 1880s Gold Hill Inn for drinks a few times, causing Lew to worry aloud that he had to treat his contractor and housekeeper well so that they didn’t join forces against him when the hippie revolution against the monied classes began.

While working for Lew, I met a new boyfriend one night in a cowboy bar in Boulder.  Michael was tall and thin with long hair and a droopy mustache.  He had a slight tremor in his hands and an awkward gait which he attributed to a mild cerebral palsy caused by birth trauma.  (He didn’t read, and I later concluded that he probably suffered from a learning disability, as well.)  Michael was one of the gentlest and kindest people I knew, and he treated me with respect and perhaps a little awe.  He lived in a converted school bus in nearby Nederland.   I had one night a week off which I often spent with Michael in that bus.  It had a bed and a minimal kitchen but no bathroom, requiring miserable late-night visits to the outhouse.

Sweet Michael

I had owned a car—a shiny gold Datsun—for a couple of years but a friend rolled it one night on an icy highway.  The insurance company totaled the car and, after a month or so sent me a check.  By the time I had paid off the existing loan, I did not have enough for a down payment on a replacement car.   So, when my posh position ended, I moved back to Boulder and purchased a bicycle.  That, and city buses, were my modes of transportation for the next year or so.  By this time, I had started graduate school at the University of Colorado, and riding a bicycle was much more efficient than trying to find a parking place would have been had I owned a car.

Boulder proved to be too expensive for me, and I moved to Denver where I shared a big old house with four other people and rode the bus between Denver and Boulder for classes and work.  My room was actually the back stairway landing above the kitchen, barely big enough for a twin bed and lacking in privacy, as I heard everything that happened in the kitchen.  Mostly what I remember about this house was how easy it was for mice to get in.  I lived in fear of those mice for as long as I lived there.

After the governess job ended, I returned to temporary labor, but this time, I secured work through a secretarial company, thanks to my high school typing classes and my experience as a secretary while a student at Baylor.  For one week I worked for a fledging computer technology company called StorageTek (decades later it was purchased by Sun Microsystems and then Oracle).  I spent all day each day typing (using a typewriter) numbers on drawings of computer components.  It was so boring and tedious that laying sod suddenly seemed like a great job.  My boss was pleased with my work and offered me a permanent position, which I declined.  Almost as boring were the weeks I spent as a secretary in CU’s chemistry department.  Typing manuscripts with formulas and incomprehensible (to me) symbols was unbelievably tedious. 

But I digress.  During the early 1970s there were occasional conversations among some of my Baylor friends about starting an intentional community.  In 1974, Ernie Lewis and Steve Townsend sent carbon copies of a letter to about twenty of us asking who might be interested.  The letter asked several questions:  where might we settle together, what kind of a community was most appealing, what skills and resources did we have to contribute, and when might we be available to do this.  In my saved personal correspondence file, I found the responses to these questions from seven of us.  Of course, there was no consensus among those responses and, to my knowledge, nothing further ever came of this idea.  Four years out of college, we had dispersed to locations across the country—from the northwest to the southeast—and were entering careers and relationships. 

Here is a portion of what I wrote at that time (complete with clauses and digressions):

My feelings on this conflict.  It would be nice to establish our own self-reliant community—food, emotional, and growth-wise—but I couldn’t personally rationalize divorcing myself from the problems of the larger community.  So maybe that would lead in one of two directions:  the establishment of a smaller community within a larger one—a group this size could surely have some positive effect on an already existing community—or it could become a fringe community—largely self-reliant, but with group members pursuing goals elsewhere.

This statement reminds me now that, while I flirted with some parts of the hippie counter-culture (like the love of music and opposition to the Vietnam war), I could not embrace the “turn on and drop out” components.  I was not interested in extensive drug use, and I certainly wasn’t willing to drop out of society.  So, after a few years of rootlessness, I enrolled in graduate school and would soon enter the Peace Corps, along with other idealistic young people who believed that it was possible to change the world.   I am reminded of the quote often attributed to Margaret Mead:  “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world.  Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.”  I have done what I can to be part of that small, thoughtful and committed group.