Tag Archives: hippies

VALLEY OF POT by Peter Nolan Smith

August 1972 was five years past San Francisco’s Summer of Love. A college friend from Crane’s Beach and I had hitchhiked from Boston to the West Coast in 45 hours. A mutual girlfriend, Marilyn, was working as a topless hostess on the Barbary Coast. Three months’ tips paid a year’s tuition. After a few hugs […]

$148 LEVIS by Peter Nolan Smith

My mother dressed my older brother and me in jeans for most of the 1950s and early 1960s, however when the hippies adopted the tough western trousers as part of their unofficial uniform, Cardinal Cushing of the Boston diocese banned Levis on his evening rosary program. A fierce Catholic my mother obeyed the Pope’s representative […]

Woodstock 50

On the weekend of Woodstock I was washing dishes at a South Shore hotel outside of Boston. The radio stations reported that hundreds of thousands of hippies were gathering for the Woodstock Music Festival. The announcers were somewhat astounded by this phenomena of a half million young people pulling off the impossible. The creation of […]

Going Up Country – Thai Style

Back in the 60s during their Woodstock concert Canned Heat had a small hit GOING UP COUNTRY. “Going up country, baby, do you want to come along?” After Altamont longhairs abandoned the rip-offs, bummers, and downers of the big cities to establish Aquarian communes in the hinterland offering free love, organic food, and reefer to […]

A PAINTER PAINTING A PICTURE by Peter Nolan Smith

Hitchhiking was the only way to travel between Boston and Montreal in the early 1970s. The trip was a scenic 400 miles on I-89 slanting across New Hampshire and Vermont to Lake Champlain then north into Quebec. On one trip in August of 1971 a longhair driving a van said that he needed money for […]