We didn't call ourselves hippies, that name appeared years after the movement had started

By Kay Ebeling (email cityofangelslady @ yahoo )

First time I heard the word "hippie" was around 1970 when, as many of the females of our tribes did, I found work as a naked model. I had hitchhiked to Hollywood from Laguna Beach where I'd spent several weeks taking LSD with followers of Timothy Leary, who himself dropped in from time to time. I knew that there was a thriving job market for people who'd take off their clothes and "simulate" sexual poses for photographers who sold the photos to X-Rated magazines that filled newsstands at the time. You could zip into town, make one or two hundred dollars in a day, and go back to the commune or the tribe, or, in my case, the little room where I was living in a hut at the entrance to the path that led to the lab where they made Orange Sunshine.

The modeling job was in an office on the second floor of a Hollywood Boulevard structure, above a hot dog or souvenir shop. The man in charge said I wasn’t what they were looking for, that he wanted girls with big hips not "hippies," heh heh heh. He laughed and laughed at his joke but I didn't get it. So this little old man with an accent maybe from Israel was the first to tell me that because we were hip and new, my generation of dropouts were being called "hippies" by … the civilized world.

There is a direct connection between the appearance of hippies and the Vietnam war. A lot of the guys  with kaleidoscope eyes in the 1970s wearing handmade clothes had once been among the nation's smartest. It was people from Berkeley and Rensalier and other universities who dropped out; the kids in community colleges went on to Vietnam or hourly wage jobs to survive… like it or not.

Several incidents pre dated the birth of the hippie. A massive anti war demonstration in D.C. was infiltrated by CIA types who passed out "free acid" and caused a whole bunch of people to get sick, real sick. It may have been the birth of the expression "bad acid trip". I don't know if anybody died, but it was devastating for the anti war movement, and apparently never reported in the news. That attack using fake LSD had a major deflating effect, because at that demonstration there were plans to do big things, and instead everyone just went home sick.

I at age 20 or so had babbled my way to a paid staff job at Peace and Freedom Party offices on Western Avenue in L.A.  In 1968 there was a huge demonstration in Century City.  My job was to stay in the office that day with Jack Weinstein, a Berkeley organizer of renown at the time, taking phone calls, giving people directions to the march. I'd answer the phone and pass important callers to Jack.

I don't remember today the details of the Century City 1968 antiwar march, I just remember at one point things went South.  We went from jubilation and victory at the Size of the crowd to horrible defeat as the police showed up with tear gas, and peaceful demonstrators were getting trampled and gassed. To our white educated patriotic and, yes, privileged sensitivities, it was a shock.

Then there was Kent State and the Democratic convention in Chicago and the whole anti-war movement went south, to the point where people got exhausted, disillusioned, not sure if we wanted to even be American anymore, many left for Canada, or farther away places. 

We dropped out. We became fed up with USA because it was becoming the war monger worldwide hated criminal nation it is today. Back in 1971 there was still hope that an Age of Aquarius really could happen. Then we got tear gassed and drugged, and Vietnam went on to become Iraq, and the "forever war" in Afghanistan is still going on. we became "hippies" and did not even know it.

It wasn’t unusual for the females to fall back on nude jobs in those days for quick cash. As dropouts, getting a real job would be rejoining and supporting "the establishment" but we still needed cash. My sister danced topless as did many others. Many of us who'd Dropped Out were living on wilderness compounds or communes. When we'd run out of money, we would trip into town to take advantage of the newly created nude modeling or topless dancing jobs. As a follower of John Lennon and Timothy Leary, back then I had few inhibitions about going naked; people had sex in front of each other in some places I stayed. I'll never forget the days I spent at the Rogue River in southern Oregon. A waterfall had drawn a collection of humans my age from many places, we were all naked splashing in the ponds, for days as I remember it, an event that happened in 1969 or thereabouts.  

In 2017 I drove through Rogue River area and it was full of Trump supporting snarling new Oregonians and I have no idea where the waterfall went, just felt Very Unwelcome. I had to spend the night and it was as if that woman at the motel front desk Knew, just Knew, I was one of the hippies who used to hang out there come now to look for a lost utopia, and she treated me really bad.

The original hippies were smart, educated, and passionate about America and freedom but with a passion based on knowledge and history.  Some dropouts dropped back in a few years later and went back to college and became professionals such as lawyers or like me, journalists.  

Today's anti-government protesters listen to sound bytes telling them to hate their politicians and neighbors without asking who's writing the message.  They seem to have no understanding of world or U.S. history, and seem like they never read anything until the invention of iPhones. They believed Donald Trump. The Jan 6 insurrectionists bear no resemblance to the anti-government activists of the 1960s and 1970s.

I wonder who will be the new hippies, or if there ever will be ones. 

* TUESDAY, MAY 4, 2021

Footnote re post from yesterday

 It was like a perfect storm that my sister and I, after both being sexualized by Father Horne in the 1950s were now entering this population of "sexually liberated" women, as our dysfunction almost went unnoticed in that crowd.

 

 This song illustrates my point so well