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 annoyance at all the lame krap floating around now about 1967 in the Haight-Ashbury district, “The Summer of Love,”just about turned to repulsion of late. Yeah, strong word, but man is it bad! We went to the deYoung Museum in San Francisco (an architectural catastrophe) Friday for their exhibit. $25 entrance fee! Most of the exhibit consisted of posters and yes, the posters were magnificent, but the exhibit was mostly ’60s drivel.

The “hippie clothing” was awful. No elegance, no simplicity. People with bad taste and too much time on their hands; bad colors, mishmashes of design. A truly awful crocheted bedspread commissioned by Bob Weir. Two rooms of flashing video montages of blurry dancers — senseless, dumb; not trippy — sloppy.

And the clincher: when you leave the exhibit, they funnel you into The Summer of Love Gift Shop. I kid you not. T-shirts, hats, trinkets, a poster of lame buttons — all made in China.

These curators are giving the ’60s a bad name.

The “Hippie Modernism” exhibit at the Berkeley Museum was way better.

As is the exhibit at the California Historical Society. Really good b&w photos, tracing the ’60s from the Beats-on. $5 entrance fee.

There was a conference this weekend, some 45 presentations on the era, mostly by college professors.

Sorry, I’ve been brooding over all the distortions, all the weren’t-there, don’t-get-it pontificators.

“The Haight-Ashbury was a neighborhood. The ’60s was a movement.” -Ken Kesey

PS The “Summer of Love” (1967) was in actuality a disaster in San Francisco.

Usually when I see a list of quotes, there might be one or two that I like. Here they are all zingers:

• “I’ve always been very careful never to predict anything that has not already happened.” — Marshall McLuhan

• “The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.” — Dorothy Parker

• “Decisions are made by those who show up.” — Jennifer Pahlka

• “If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.” — Albert Einstein

• “Not long ago what we have today was so implausible that nobody bothered to say it would never happen.“ — Marc Andreessen

• “The first 90% of a project is a lot easier than the second 90%.” — Tim Sweeney

• “If you don’t like change, you are going to like irrelevance even less.” — General Shinseki

 — Kevin Kelly

This is from Recomendo, a weekly newsletter from Kevin Kelly,  Mark Frauenfelder, and Claudia Dawson that “…gives you 6 brief personal recommendations of cool stuff”: https://recomendo.com/

Also from Recomendo:

Unlocking phone:

If you bought a phone that’s locked to a specific mobile carrier, you won’t be able to use it with another carrier until you get it unlocked. AT&T says they will unlock phones you’ve had for two years, but the process is so arduous that it’s never worked for me. They make it difficult on purpose, I suspect. But I’ve unlocked phones using an unlocking service on eBay and paying $6 per phone. I gave them the phone’s 15-digit IMEI (International Mobile Equipment Identity) serial number and a day later they sent me an email to let me know it’s been unlocked. I have no idea how they do it, but it works. — MF

This lovely painting is on the wall of the Santa Cruz Museum Of Natural History, a wonderful small museum with displays of the former inhabitants of the Monterey Bay Area, as well as local flora and fauna. It’s at 1305 East Cliff Dr., Santa Cruz, CA 95062.

What a beautiful life California inhabitants had before the Europeans arrived!

I wrote this article 27 years ago, so to bring the first sentence up to date, “It was 48 years ago…” Egad!

Its purpose was to describe the impact of the Whole Earth Catalog on a number of people, including me, and the birth of west coast publishing in the late ’60s. I ran across it recently and thought it might be of interest in helping people connect some of the dots — especially younger people, who may have heard of the WEC, but don’t understand its significance.

It was 21 years ago, a cold, dark, early December evening when I walked into a semi-vacant storefront in Menlo Park, California. A sign out front said “Whole Earth Truck Store,” but there was no truck, no store, just an army-camouflage VW bus and Stewart and Lois Brand and a ton of books piled around in the back room. I was a dropped-out San Francisco insurance broker turned builder. I was about 10 years older than the inspired and visionary kids who were moving and shaking up America at the time, but I’d got the message and in a few years preceding that evening had latched onto many of the elements that were fueling the cultural, metaphysical and epochal revolution of the times.

I had just built a homestead, then a geodesic dome workshop in Big Sur, was tending a garden, listening to rock & roll, making weekend trips to Haight Ashbury, reading The Owner-Built Home, Organic Gardening & Farming Magazine, The Oracle, The East Village Other, The Dome Cookbook, The Green Revolution, getting food by mail from Walnut Acres, listening to Buckminster Fuller and Marshall McLuhan, discovering B.B. King, Ali Akbar Khan, Buddhism, Alice Bailey, astronomy, astrology, prisms and Ashley automatics, learning about ferrocement, wind electricity, solar heating … what a time it was!
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