Are you old enough to remember when everything was light and love?

[Binkie The Clown]

[LakeArenal]

1. I was on Haight-Asbury when Scott McKenzie was singing :

https://m.

Is that when you mean?

[Binkie The Clown]

7. Wish I could have been there, but I was in the Air Force and had to watch from afar. nt

[LakeArenal]

8. This video is a pretty good representation p

We dressed more like the girl in the dress most of the time.

That weird painted face shit was at concerts where we were all on acid or
MDA.

[safeinOhio]

2. And how about Hair?

[MenloParque]

3. SF native here

Born and raised in African-American neighborhood in San Francisco, Hunters Point. You may recall Candlestick Park...I grew up my just minutes from there.

I have vivid recollections of the “Summer of Love”. My family, and most of HP highly disliked “hippies” for the filth and drugs they brought into Hunters Point and the Mission District. Violent crimes like murder and rape increased throughout the city, garbage, prostitution. Oh yes, Golden Gate Park and the Haight were very colorful...but indeed a dark underbelly festered in surrounding neighborhoods brought in from the influx of those from all over the country who wanted to be in the “city by the bay”.

Many remember the music, but most living in SF recall the crime, strung out junkies, underage girls raped in Golden Gate. Those watching on tv saw flowers in girls hair dancing on Haight, but those old enough who lived in the city had a very different take. I remember the Hippi-kits of flowers, headbands, and flutes being sold on the corner for new arrivals. I remember seeing “hippies” past out in my schools playground with needles still in their arms. Vivid memories like an LSD flashback.

[Binkie The Clown]

12. Wow! Thank you very much for the does of reality.

I think there are times when we need it, and apparently this is one of those times.

[BComplex]

4. Makes me sad to think how idealistic we all were back then, and how very right wing everything

turned out.

There's still a little ray of hope. All the marches for civil rights brought us, ultimately, 50 and 60 years later, Barack and Michelle Obama, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

[judesedit]

5. Well, I'll tell you. It actually seemed like it for a few days at Woodstock.

At least half a million people together in unbelievable conditions. Little shelter, little food, lots of rain, but singing and dancing and music all day and half the night. No fighting at all. A major highlight of my life. Hard to think that some of these people became rw tools. But, it's nice to think that an atmosphere of peace and love is possible with liberal, caring, fair-minded people as the majority. We just have to drown out the noise a little better.

[Donkees]

6. Lawrence Welk Winter Show from December 1967

[abqtommy]

9. I was born in 1949 and there hasn't been a time yet when EVERYTHING was light

and love!

[Fla Dem]

10. No. When WAS everything actually Light and Love?

In the 60's
We had the Vietnam war escalating
Agent Orange,
JFK was assassinated,
MLK and Robert Kennedy were assassinated,
Bay of Pigs invasion fails,
Cuban Missile crisis
Richard Nixon is elected President
Vietnam war protests
Of course we didn't have the social networking capabilities we have now or the 24 hour TV news channels. So while there was coverage of all these events, it certainly wasn't the constant rehashing and reporting of events we have today.

There were good things in 60's for sure;

Peace Corp created
Beatles release their first single, "Love me do"
The Voting Rights Act is signed into law
Star Trek airs it's first season
The first manned Apollo mission, Apollo 7, is launched by NASA
Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin become the first men to arrive on the Moon during NASA's Apollo 11 mission
The Woodstock music festival takes place in New York ...There's Your Light and Love.

Not an adult when a lot of that was going on, but I still was very much aware of a lot of the high tension events that had an impact on us. Kennedy assassinations, war, protests/riots, etc. So not sure I would call it a decade of "Light and Love".

Pretty much what every decade is. Good Stuff and not so Good stuff.

[sinkingfeeling]

11. Yes. Groovy times.

[hunter]

13. My parents were artists working in Hollywood when they met in the 'fifties.

OMG did they have some fabulous friends, and still do!

Pacifist, LBGTQ, beatnik forerunners of hippies, even a few celebrity hippies.

As children me and my siblings didn't speak of it, especially at school.

Some neighborhood children were banned from visiting our home because their parents feared they might be exposed to a random uncovered breast or same-sex couples engaging in very mild public displays of affection. Girls kissing girls. Boys kissing boys. It's safe to do that in our family.

My dad's mom and her sister ran wild in Hollywood when they were young adults. They were born in San Francisco, my great aunt before the Great Earthquake, my grandma just after, but they considered San Francisco a stodgy and oppressive working class city compared to Hollywood. Which San Francisco may well have been in the 'twenties and 'thirties. Their dad, who may have been bored by the California dairy industry, foresaw a future where the movies, airplanes, and rockets would become hugely more important industries than cows. Sadly he only lived long enough to see glimpses of it, but his daughters lived his dreams.

My mom's dad was a buddy of Sally Rand. As a girl my mom got to hang out with Rand's nice ladies backstage because it wouldn't have been seemly for her to be in the audience with her dad.

My mom was very well trained in avoiding appearances of unseemliness. Her mom was a welder in the shipyards. Her mom must have been a very talented welder because they kept her on when World War II ended, doing the sorts of delicate work men were supposedly not good at. No job too small... or unimportant.

Personally I have many wonderful San Francisco stories and quite a few sordid ones.

Once upon a time in San Francisco my only true ex handcuffed her girlfriend's boyfriend to a urinal and was beating the crap out of him while I was standing outside guarding the door and deflecting very drunk guys who had to pee really really bad.

Drunk guys are morons. By the screaming they thought there was some kind of rough sex going on behind the door and by the drunk-guy-code-of-honor decided they'd just as well go out the back door to pee.

I have some very bitter stories about fake hippies who were just vile Libertarians or granola eating Evangelical Christians underneath their tie-dye t-shirts, but I do continue to exist in a lot of light and love.

[Binkie The Clown]

14. Thanks for sharing that. :) nt