Photo of me in 1965 in Providence, RI, shot with my Nikon by Linda Connor. I was on a 30-day cross-country hitchhiking trip — a “vision quest.” When I got home, I quit my job as an insurance broker and went to work as a carpenter.

1. in the ’60s
2. in San Francisco

I began by making a list of the ideas and concepts that I learned about in the ’60s. A lot! It was surprising.

Then I thought that if I’m going to take people on a trip — my trip — through those years, I should explain who I am, my background, so readers will know “…where I’m coming from.”

I’m starting with scenes from childhood. Focusing on the past is fun. It’s opening up a suitcase of memories and I’m having a good time remembering good times.I recall scenes from past years, then I run out to the computer and type a few paragraphs about the ’40s, the ’50s, a few about Pacific High School in the ’60s, a few about the Haight-Ashbury district — in no particular order. It’s not an organized way to write a book, but as I go along, the book is taking its own form.

A builder I know once told me, talking about each house he builds, “I fire the bullet and then try to catch up with it.”

I’m starting by describing growing up in San Francisco, what the city was like then, grammar school, summer vacations, high school (in the Haight-Ashbury district) and college and surfing days….

This will be the way I saw the ’60s; I’m not trying to be comprehensive or complete about the era. You can’t make a cohesive narrative about the times because the times weren’t cohesive. It will be purely what I saw happen.

If any of you experienced the ’60s directly, your memories are welcome here…

Note: I’m going to publish the book, bit by bit here. I’m not ready to make a real book out of it yet. I have two other books to get done first.

The posts will all be available under “THE SIXTIES” tab at the top of the blog, so if you want to read about the era, they’ll all be in one place.

My mom and dad were married in San Francisco in April, 1934. It was in the middle of the Great Depression.

In August of that year, they took the Suntan Special, a train that ran from San Francisco to Santa Cruz, for a vacation. According to my mom, I was conceived on that trip, and born in San Francisco in April, 1935.

I was the first-born in the family, and my parents didn’t quite know how to cope with me. I wasn’t so much rebellious as curious and energetic. Plus at an early age I didn’t believe in following rules.

At one point they took me to a psychiatrist and I remember having a great time hammering wooden pegs into different shaped holes and answering his questions about ink blots. I suspect he told my folks that I wasn’t psychotic, just high-energy. Years later, when my mom was in her 90s (she lived to be 103), she would reminisce about my stunts. “You remember when you…”

I’m writing all this stuff about early years to give you a picture of my background, attitudes and outlook on life, which all led up to my finally breaking out of the prescribed business career.

The Neighborhood

My mom and dad on their honeymoon in April, 1934 at Weaver Lake, a remote lake (then) in the Sierras. My dad and his fishing buddies had built a cabin and pier there. The lake was full of trout. I had a happy childhood. My parents loved each other. We always had food and shelter. Our family functioned. I’ve often thought how lucky we were.

There were 26 kids on our block. (The 100 block of Ulloa Street — next to the intersection of Portola Drive and Laguna Honda Blvd.) On any given day, there would be at least a dozen of us playing in the street. Kick the can, hide and seek, bike riding, roller skating, riding Flexi racers, playing football or baseball. No parental supervision at all, ever. No little league, no automobile transportation to distant soccer fields. We were on our own.

There was a cave about half a mile away; we never went very deeply into it. In wet years, there was a shallow lake across from our house and we had a raft.

There was a Catholic church across the street (St. Brendan’s) and everyone on the block was Catholic except for us. My mom was a Christian Scientist (we never went to doctors).

During World War II we had a large community vegetable garden on a quarter-acre lot next to our house, and my dad and the neighbors raised a ton of vegetables.

We went all over the city on foot, bikes, roller skates, streetcars, and busses. It was about a 2-mile walk to West Portal grammar school, a 4-mile bike ride to Golden Gate Park.

Some city kids made their first skateboards in the ‘40s by taking apart metal roller skates and mounting the wheels on a piece of wood. On our block, the Guzman brothers built a funky flat-roofed little house on metal roller skate wheels and rode it down the hill. A bunch of us then did the same — early RVs!

10-Year-Olds Getting Stoned

We would go into the “cloak room” of our classroom (out of teacher’s view) at West Portal grammar school, take deep knee bends until we were out of breath, then put thumbs in mouths and blow until we passed out. We got in trouble once when I failed to catch Fletcher Pence as he fell, and he cut his forehead.
Read More …

Just a few words about the ’50s in general, in that they were the prelude to the ’60s. If you want a comprehensive picture of the ’50s, a good book is The Fifties by David Halberstam.

The ’50s in the United States was an era of prosperity and optimism. World War II was over and America turned its war-time production facilities into consumer production.

The GI Bill paid for veterans to go to college, and provided low-interest loans for buying homes. (The benefits went mainly to white veterans.)

A Wave of Prosperity

It was a time of plenty. There were jobs, with benefits; unions were strong. People bought large homes in the suburbs, along with labor-saving appliances.

The “baby boom,” referring to the population growth that occurred between 1946-1964, with its peak in 1957, added 50 million babies by the end of the 1950s; it was the highest birthrate in American history.

It turned out to be an era of consumerism; it was an era of conformity.

The Man in a Grey Flannel Suit, by Sloan Wilson, was written in 1956, and followed by the movie with Gregory Peck and Jennifer Jones, about conformity and the struggle of an individual to escape devotion to material culture. The Organization Man, by William H. Whyte, published in 1956, depicted the empty life of people working for corporations, who sacrificed individuality for corporate safety.

I read these books with interest when I was in college (1953-’57), and, early on, worried about conformity, the blandness of business life, the dullness of the business world.

“The Best Minds of My Generation”

Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Gary Snyder, Joanne Kyger, Laurence Ferlinghetti, Dianne Di Prima and Michael McClure are some of the most prominent names associated with what Kerouac titled the Beat Generation. (It seems to me it wasn’t a “generation” at all, but a very small group of artists, mainly poets and writers.) The term “beatnik” was coined by San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen, apparently taking the “nik” from the Russian satellite Sputnik. It seemed sarcastic; “beatnik” was a watered-down stereotype.

As with the ’50s, I can’t write about the beats with any authority or expertise. But these were the artists of most interest to me in the ’60s, before the hippies came along. Especially Kerouac, Snyder, and Burroughs.

The Beats grew up during the depression and rejected consumerism and convention. Many of them expressed their alienation from “straight” society in vocabulary borrowed from jazz musicians.

I picked up a copy of Howl by Allen Ginsberg at City Lights bookstore on one of my lunchtime walks when I was an insurance broker in the early ’60s. “Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! spectral nations! Invincible mad houses! Granite cocks! Monstrous bombs!”

The Beats were saying things that no one else was. They took drugs, believed in free sex, despised materialism, and pioneered new methods of expression.

The most influential books for me then were Kerouac’s On the Road, and William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch.

But to me, there was something dark about many of these artists. Some kind of resentment, whatever you might call it. I was drawn to the poetry, the rejection of the dull and materialistic ways of the era, the notion of expanding one’s consciousness, the improvisation, yet…

Darkness of the Beats

It seems to me that the word “beat” was used both in the sense of having the beat of music, and at the same time as in “beaten,” or down and out. There seemed to be threads of nihilism and pessimism running through much of their art. Society sucked, and there wasn’t much you could do about it.

Poet Jonathan Greene just wrote me: “Back in the day there was a claim the term for the Beats came from beatific.”

The Beats seemed to put you down, or to put you on. It was subtle. At a Fillmore concert one night, Peter Orlovsky was walking around with Neal Cassady, and came up to me and said, “This is Neal Cassady, the model for Dean Moriarty in On the Road,” as if he were talking to a tourist.

It’s hard to pinpoint it, but I often felt as if the Beats were making fun of me. I wasn’t as hip; I wasn’t as cool; I wasn’t an artist.

I think a lot of what made them distinctive was drugs: marijuana, speed, heroin, yage, and peyote. Later, LSD, opened up the “doors of perception.” Drugs gave then an insight, a different take on reality, and set them apart from “straight” people.

With the musicians and artists that came along in the ’60s, it was entirely different, as if a window of sunshine opened up. No more bitterness, no more sarcasm…

Click on “The ’60s, above, to see preceding posts on the ’60s.

Old-School Typesetting

We went into town (Kauserslautern) twice a month to deliver typed-up text and photos to the printer. Printing was by the “linotype” process, where the words were produced on lead “slugs.” The typesetters were guys with green eyeshade visors, working on mechanical-looking keyboards.

They input the text, and slugs were created from a hot pot of lead. The whole process seemed medieval. (This was the stage of newspaper/magazine printing before the IBM Composer and later the Macintosh.) The slugs were then lined up in “galley” trays (hence the term “galley” used in later methods of printing), which were used to stamp the words onto paper.

The secret service on the base had a spare 35mm fixed-lens Leica that they let me use. I started developing and printing in the photo lab, learning from the sergeants and airmen who ran the lab, It was the beginning of my lifelong passion for photography.

Journalism

After I’d been on the job for about a year, I went to Wiesbaden for a week to work on the news desk of The Stars and Stripes, the big military newspaper for troops throughout Europe. This was an exercise that was available to information services officers. I loved the newsroom — my heart was (is still) in journalism — but I just couldn’t write copy fast enough. There went any career in journalism.

However, to my surprise, we were given an award for the best newspaper in the USAF in 1959. I sent the notice of the award to our base commander, who had been on my case for running an “alternative” newspaper — with a note saying, “It’s interesting that we got this award at the time we were being criticized by some base personnel for the quality of the newspaper.”

Germany was still in a semi bombed-out state in 1958. There were neighborhoods in Wiesbaden and Frankfurt that were still rubble. Living was cheap for Americans with the almighty dollar.The base had its own supermarket (commissary), chain store (BX), bowling alley, gym, officers’ and enlisted personnel clubs, and housing. If you stayed on the base, it was like being in a small American town, not in the middle of Western Europe. A lot of Air Force personnel never left the base.

Click on “The ’60s,” above, to see preceding posts on the ’60s.

Kerouac Calling

(Or maybe, more accurately, “Cassady Calling.”) I read On the Road by Jack Kerouac in 1959 while still in the Air Force, and boy, did it resonate. Here I was stuck on a military base, chafing at the whole military milieu, and reading about these two free spirits —Kerouac and Neal Cassady — stoned and careening across America in pursuit of adventure (and enlightenment).

My best friend on the base was Mike Phillips, a military police lieutenant. Mike was an intelligent, elegant guy and we hit it off somehow. But when I loaned him On the Road, he gave it back in a hurry, like it was the work of the devil. Hey, come to think of it, that might be just about right.

I managed to get myself declared as surplus (a category where the USAF had too many officers), and got out a year early. We chalked up the days remaining in Roman numerals on our window, erasing one each day. I was sick of the Air Force and homesick for San Francisco.

Free at Last

I was discharged after 2 years of service. I shipped our VW bug to New York. After I was processed at a base in New Jersey, we picked up my brother Bob, who was getting out of the Army at that time, and with Sarah and me in the front, Bob in the back seat, and 8-month-old Hans Peter Kahn behind Bob in the window well, we drove 3000 miles across a snowy America for less than $50 in gas. Cross-country for less than $15 a person travel expenses!

I remember an incident early in that trip that made me feel as if I were finally home: As we pulled onto the Pennsylvania Turnpike, heading west, I stopped at the toll station and asked, “How much?” The toll guy handed me a ticket, smiled, and said, “Pay my brother at the other end.”

After two years in Europe, especially Germany with its formality and rigidity, there was something so American and friendly about the ”my brother” phrase… Home at last.

We arrived in San Francisco in January, 1960. Home sweet home. Totally.