January 14, 1967: An event called "The Human Be-In" is held in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. It is considered the beginning of the Hippie movement, and makes the adjacent Haight-Ashbury neighborhood the epicenter of what became known as "The Summer of Love."
Of course, this was in the Winter. But as with a lot of other things about the city, the weather in San Francisco is weird. How weird is it? It's the only city I know of that has baseball weather during football season, and football weather during baseball season. And this was football season: The next day, in Los Angeles, what would later be retroactively named Super Bowl I would be played. The Green Bay Packers beat the Kansas City Chiefs, 35-10.
But on January 14, at Golden Gate Park, nobody was thinking about football.
The title was a play on the words "human being," and took its name from the "sit-ins" at racially segregated facilities in the South, and from the subsequent "teach-ins" about racism and the Vietnam War on college campuses.
The event took place 3 months after the State of California banned the psychedelic drug LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide, or "acid"), because of its dangerous effects on the human brain. The speakers included Dr. Timothy Leary, the psychologist who had been the nation's leading advocate for the drug, and popularized the slogan, "Turn on, tune in, drop out." (Popularized, but not originated: He said he got it from media analyst Marshall McLuhan.)
Leary did not illegally provide LSD. Owsley Stanley, known as an "underground chemist," did. Since San Francisco always, not just today, had a serious homelessness problem, food was provided by a group called the Diggers, including future actor Peter Coyote.
Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder and Michael McClure read their poetry. In 1955, also in San Francisco, those 3, along with Philip Lamantia and Philip Whalen had read poems at the Six Gallery, with Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady in the audience but not reading, an event that is said to have founded the Beat Generation of writing. Now, they were effectively passing the torch from the Fifties Beats to the Sixties Hippies.
Dick Gregory, the black comedian, also spoke. And music was provided by bands whose names would soon become household words, if your household had a teenager in it: The Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother and the Holding Company (with Janis Joplin singing lead), the Quicksilver Messenger Service, and The Grateful Dead -- the latter two frequently playing the same shows, to the point where they were nicknamed "The Quick and the Dead."
Over 20,000 people showed up, about as many as had appeared for any rally against the war at that point. And it wasn't all like-minded people, either: Some of them were radicals, wanting an increase in the militancy in the protests of the war; but most of the Hippies were decidedly apolitical, with an attitude of, "Man, just leave us alone, let us take our drugs, listen to our music, dress the way we want, grow our hair the way we want, and make love to each other in peace."
The Hippies were considered "leftist" by mainstream America, but there was something libertarian about it, too. But both groups were united in their hatred of war and bigotry.
With the media making a big deal about this event, San Francisco became a magnet for everybody who wanted to leave their possibly dull, possibly regimented, lives behind, and embrace a culture that was willing to embrace anybody. John Phillips of the vocal group The Mamas & the Papas wrote a song titled "San Francisco," recorded and turned into a big hit by his friend Scott McKenzie:
If you come to San Francisco
be sure to wear some flowers in your hair.
If you're going to San Francisco
you're going to meet some gentle people there.
But it's a small city. I don't mean, "It doesn't have that many people." (It had about 725,000 people then, compared to about 875,000 now.) I mean, "For a city with that many people, it doesn't have nearly enough space." And parks like Golden Gate took up even more space.
San Francisco got overwhelmed with all the new people coming in. Some of them fell victim to con artists, and lost everything. Some of them fell victim to the drugs, LSD and harder drugs like heroin, and lost everything to that. Even by the Summer of 1969, it was not just all over, but dangerously so.
As David Crosby of The Byrds (a Los Angeles-based band) said of the Hippies, "We were right about a lot of things. We were right that peace is better than war. We were right that love is better than hate. We were not right, as it turned out, about drugs."
To this day, San Francisco has the leftist/Hippie image, ignoring the fact that it's a tough, working-class, labor-union, seaport city, with an innate Catholicism (it was founded by Spanish missionaries, after all) that gives its conservatives as strong a voice as its liberals. The city still makes money off tourists coming to enjoy the old image. But the image never quite lived up to the reality. Many tried to make it so. But the world was too big for San Francisco.
The Human Be-In was a success. But the movement it inspired was a beautiful failure.
*
January 14, 1967 was a Saturday. As I said, the football season ended the next day, with Super Bowl I. Baseball was in the middle of the off-season. There were 4 games played in the NBA that day. None were played in San Francisco, although the city's team did play on the road:
* The Boston Celtics beat the Baltimore Bullets, 115-106 at the Baltimore Civic Center (now the Royal Farms Arena).
* The Cincinnati Royals beat the St. Louis Hawks, 116-105 at the Cincinnati Gardens.
* The Chicago Bulls beat the Los Angeles Lakers, 122-121 at the International Amphitheatre in Chicago. Guy Rodgers scored 39 points for the Bulls, in their 1st season of play. For their 2nd season, they moved into Chicago Stadium.
* The San Francisco Warriors beat the Detroit Pistons, 136-121 at Cobo Hall in Detroit (now named Huntington Place). The Warriors' Rick Barry led all scorers on the day with 50 points. The next day, in St. Louis, the Warriors lost to the Hawks, but Barry again led all NBA scorers with 48.
The Warriors moved across San Francisco Bay to Oakland in 1971, and became the Golden State Warriors. Despite moving back to San Francisco in 2019, they have kept the Golden State name.
And, in the last season of "Original Six" play, the entire NHL was in action:
* The New York Rangers lost to the Chicago Blackhawks, 5-3 at the Chicago Stadium.
* The Boston Bruins beat the Montreal Canadiens, 5-4 at the Montreal Forum.
* And the Toronto Maple Leafs beat the Detroit Red Wings, 5-2 at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto.
Also, Arsenal beat Manchester City, 1-0 at Highbury in North London.