Fisheye of the interior of a plywood and vinyl geodesic dome built by teenage students at Pacific High School in the Santa Cruz mountains, California, in 1969. The window patterns were great, and made for striking photos, but the domes leaked. I’ve always thought that our work at PHS was in the aesthetic realm, not in the practicality of our designs.
In the 1969-1970, I ran a dome building program at Pacific High School in the Santa Cruz mountains (above Saratoga). The school had 40 acres and the kids built their own domes to live in. It was pretty wild, and we did have some good moments before it all fell apart in a few years — teenagers away from home for the first time in a drug-rich environment.
Martin Bartlett was the music teacher and he built the only non-geodesic dome for himself. It was constructed by standing sheets of ¼″ plywood on end, trimmed on the upper edges so they could be pulled over and joined at the top. Martin then covered it with cedar shingles, installing a circular plexiglas skylight in the center. The design was by Bob McElroy, who had built one in Big Sur.
The school — teenagers building their own homes — resonated with the press in those days. Life magazine came and took photos, and Time published an article on us. I’m working on and off on a book on the ’60s and it will include the Pacific High School story.
I somehow missed them back in the day. They were the “girl group” among the ’60s San Francisco bands. Their show at Sweetwater in Mill Valley on Thursday was awesome. Their new double CD album is a killer, impeccably produced, and with Taj Mahal, Bob Weir, Charlie Musselwhite, Jack Casady, David Grisman, and Jorma K. sitting in. Peter Coyote sings a great lead on one song. They write just about all their songs.
They never got their due recognition back in the ’60s, but listening to this brings me back to the Avalon, the Monterey Pop Festival, the wonderful feeling in San Francisco in the ’60s (before “The Summer of Love”).
There are kick-ass rock ‘n’ roll songs, beautiful ballads, Taj sings a short riff, “I don’t do what I outta, I just do what I do” (sounds about right), then the band kicks into a shit-kickin’ “On the Road,” with banjo and soaring fiddle.
It’s interesting that all the other SF groups — The Jefferson Airplane, the Dead, Quicksilver, Big Brother, Moby Grape, etc. — are long gone, and the girls have come rocketing back. If you were there then, trust me — you’ll love this album. (Order it from them and bypass Amazon.)
It was sex, drugs and rock and roll, and those were all fun. But at the core of the counterculture was a spiritual revolution, in a sense of leaving the Western religions of control, and exploring the Eastern disciplines of liberation. There was meditation. There were workshops in advanced breathing.
The counterculture represented a certain economic threat, because here were several people sharing a car, or not getting insurance, but taking care of each other, making their own clothes, using less electricity, making candles.
The Justice Department was trying to infiltrate communes. I spoke to a friend of an ex-FBI guy who said they had the FBI hippie squad. And they had to learn how to roll joints, the better to infiltrate with. Originally, the CIA intended LSD to be used as a means of control, but all these young people deprogrammed themselves from the mainstream culture, and then reprogrammed themselves with a more humane value system.
All the people I know from that time have, whatever their profession, they brought that same sense of idealism and compassion with them. Socrates said, “Know thyself”, then Norman Mailer, said “Be thyself” and the unspoken mantra of the counterculture was “Change thyself.” And the psychedelics — but not necessarily them, it could’ve been meditation or Zen or whatever — served as vehicles for people to change themselves. And that included protesting against the war, which meant that the CIA’s plan had backfired.
The full interview is available here.
The Realist archive: www.ep.tc/realist
I just ran across this article, stored on my computer, and thought, once again, how perceptive it is. No one under 70 years of age will fully understand it, but for those of us growing up in those years, it’s a look back at what could rightly be called “the best of times.”
It also sets the stage for what then happened in the ’60s.
A version of this seems to have been written by Denise Eyherabide, but there are somewhat different renditions online. Plus, I have edited it somewhat.
We are the “Last Ones.” Born in the 1930s and ’40s, we exist as a very special age group. We are the last generation, climbing out of the depression, who can remember the winds of war and the impact of a world at war which rattled the structure of our daily lives for years.
We are the last to remember ration books for everything from gas to sugar to shoes to stoves. We saved tin foil, flattened cans, and poured fat into tin cans.
We saw cars up on blocks because tires weren’t available.
We can remember milk being delivered to our house early in the morning and placed in the “milk box” on the porch.
We are the last to have heard Roosevelt’s radio assurances and to have seen the gold stars in the front windows of our grieving neighbors whose sons died in the war.
We saw the “boys” come home from the war and build their Cape Cod–style houses, pouring the cellar and tar-papering it over until they could afford the time and money to complete building.
We are the last generation who spent childhood without television; instead, we had mental images of what we heard on the radio. “Up in the sky … look … it’s a bird … it’s a plane … it’s Superman!”
As we all like to brag, with no TV, we spent our childhood “playing outside.” There was no little league. There was no city playground for kids. We made baseball diamonds on empty lots until someone built a house on the empty lot.
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Click on “The ’60s,” above, to see preceding posts on the ’60s.
(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.
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.
Click on “The ’60s, above, to see preceding posts on the ’60s.
Part of my job as the information services officer was to run the base photo lab and edit the base newspaper. I was also in charge of public relations and dealing with the press.
There was a German photographer, Helmut Haak, who photographed troops on American air bases. He was a big, hearty, outgoing man. He contacted me about setting up photo shoots.
I would line up a fighter plane down on our airstrip, and benches for the military personnel, arranged by unit. There might be 30-40 men and women in each photo.
Helmut made a ton of money selling the color photos. Practically everyone bought one. He drove a big Mercedes and lived in a small castle overlooking the Mosel River. One night he invited us, along with my secretary Inge, over for a light supper.
He served food and white and pink champagne in bottles with his own label. He took us up into a small turret at the top of the castle and as we looked down at the river in the mist, he showed us an exquisite little music box with a moving mechanical bird.
Helmut had a 4-seat Cessna airplane, and he made friends with our base commander, Colonel Simeral (a pilot) by taking him flying. It was a spiffy little plane, and the colonel loved flying it.
F-86 Sabre Dog Interceptor
One day at the base, Helmut took me up. We took off, and were still in the flight pattern when we heard on the radio: “F-86 dogs scrambling,” which meant that at least two of the base’s fighter pilots were taking off in a hurry. Shit!
Helmut was sweating. I was worried. The F-86’s were like rockets with cockpits on top — fast and powerful. Pretty soon, the planes roared past us—phew! — and we came back in.
Helmut told me that one time, when his girlfriend was sailing back to America from Southhampton, he swooped down when the ship was leaving port and dropped a bouquet of flowers for her with a note on the deck. Romantisch!
Before I left Germany, I got word that he had crashed and died in the French Alps, not seeing Mont Blanc in the fog. The report said that he missed the top of the mountain by 3-4 meters.
I started out to write a book about the ’60s because none of the accounts I saw of the era seemed right. As I went along, I decided to document my background — which ended up taking up about half of the book. Ulp!
I’ve published the first 3 autobiographical chapters — click on “The ’60s,” above. However, I still have about 10,000 words of my story before getting up to 1958, in this order:
I’ve decided to skip ahead of these chapters for now, so we can get right into the ’60s. I’ll publish them sooner or later in some form — maybe in an eventual print edition of this book, or some kind of autobiography.
I was in the USAF ROTC at Stanford (to avoid the Korean war), and had signed up for a 3-year tour of duty upon graduation. I graduated from Stanford in 1957, and was scheduled to report to pilot training school in spring, 1958, at Marana Air Force base in Arizona.
However, after I’d graduated and when I returned from a motorscooter trip through Europe, I got a letter from the USAF saying they had changed the rules and I now would have to sign up for 5 years if I still wanted to be trained as a pilot — or take a 3-year non-flying tour.
No way was i going to commit to a 5-year military career. I wrote them and said that (in other words): you guys double-crossed me; for 4 years you said it’d be a 3-year commitment, now you’re changing it to 5. So, I want a non-flying tour and I’d like to be in information services (base newspaper, photography, press releases), and I’d like to be stationed in Europe.
Lo and behold, they gave me just what I asked for. (I figured some sergeant in the Pentagon saw my letter and decided, why not?).
When we got back from our motor scooter trip, I was told to report for active duty at Sembach Air Base, Germany, which was about 60 miles south of Frankfurt. My job was to run the base newspaper and manage the base photo lab.
My mom was upset when she saw this photo. She said I looked sad. She was right. Fish out of water, in more ways than one.
I reported for active duty in February, 1958 and lived in the Bachelor Officers’ Quarters for three months until Sarah came over. We first lived in the nearby small town of Enkenbach (and had Sunday afternoon coffee klatches that included rich creamy German cakes with our landlady, Frau Elner and family and neighbors) until we moved into an apartment on the base.
The job and location were great, but I disliked the military. I hated wearing a uniform. I was a second lieutenant, but didn’t feel like an officer. I never did get the officer/enlisted man relationship right. I neither liked giving orders nor being ordered around. I didn’t feel superior because I was an officer. It was awkward.
But I liked running the newspaper, and decided to have some fun. Soon after I took over the paper—The Sembach Jet Gazette—I converted it to a tabloid and started featuring photos that the base photographer shot in his spare time, with a full-page photo on page 1.
The photographer, Sgt. Jim Tyson, who was used to shooting photos of such exciting events as the Officers Wives’ Club meetings with a 4×5 Graflex camera, also had his own 35mm camera, and was happy when I told him to go out and shoot human-interest photos. He shot artistic black and white pictures and we converted a boring military publication into something quite different.
We did an April Fools’ issue that went over well. But then we did a parody of the Overseas Weekly, which was a National Enquirer-type semi-scandal sheet newspaper put out for the American military in Europe. We called our version The Overseen Locally, with the slogan “All the News That Fits, We Print.” We made fun of a lot of the base’s clubs and practices.
It didn’t go over with the brass. I was already in trouble with the base commander for refusing to pay for officers’ cocktail parties that I didn’t attend. An American journalist in Wiesbaden told me that he had heard rumors of a court-martial, the theory being that this was a subversive act, that the Russians could use it for propaganda. (Puhleeze!) It all blew over, but it didn’t endear me to the base commander.
Here’s a video made for the occasion. I was the shelter editor for several incarnations of the Catalog, including The Whole Earth Epilog.
“Meet the creators of the Whole Earth Catalog and the community they inspired. This video history of the Whole Earth culture covers 50 years of collective innovation in just 38 minutes.
“Whole Earth Flashbacks” takes you on a dazzling journey through time, from the first Whole Earth Catalogs to the Co-Evolution Quarterly, the Whole Earth Review, the Hackers Conference, the Well, Cyberthon, Wired, Burning Man and the 10,000 Year Clock, to name but a few.
These projects have one thing in common: they gave access to tools and ideas to help people bring their dreams to life — and change the world together.
This video retrospective features many creative minds and thought leaders: Stewart Brand, Jay Baldwin, Stephanie Mills, Lloyd Kahn, Ted Nelson, Doug Adams, Steven Levy, Andy Hertzfeld, Howard Rheingold, Jaron Lanier, Wavy Gravy, Kevin Kelly, Larry Harvey, Danny Hillis and Steve Jobs, in order of appearance.
Whole Earth Flashbacks was created by Fabrice Florin, with the help of over 60 community members…. Our video premiered at the 50th Anniversary of the Whole Earth Catalog on October 13, 2018, at Fort Mason in San Francisco.…”
https://vimeo.com/album/5479545/video/294878432
(In the 2nd row of the above collage, 2nd from left, is a fisheye shot of me in my dome at Pacific High School in 1968.)
1960, me (at left) and my Stinson beach lifeguard friends in Mill Valley about to take off on a surfing trip to the Point Reyes Peninsula in my 1937 Chevy (with square-cut gears) truck. This was a few years before everything started to change.
In 2017, there was a media blitz on “The 50th Anniversary of the Summer of Love.” There were TV shows, magazine and online articles, and museum exhibits on what supposedly took place in San Francisco in the summer of 1967.
I read all these stories and articles, watched the films, went to the exhibits, and was puzzled. This wasn’t the way I saw it, and I was there. There were a bunch of things wrong with all this coverage:
“The Haight-Ashbury was a neighborhood. The ’60s was a movement.”
–Ken Kesey
Kesey nails it here, as he did so often. The media has focused on the Haight-Ashbury, since it’s been so well documented, and it’s easy to interview people who were there.
But the ’60s was about much more than the Haight, it was about a lot more than rock and roll and smoking pot and living in old Victorians in San Francisco.
It was nationwide, arguably worldwide, and it encompassed a staggering variety of subjects and events and changes.
My first thoughts were that these versions didn’t reflect what really happened.
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