Hippies

 “Be Here Now.” Ram Dass

    As often as not, the word “hippie” has been used pejoratively, as referring to one who is a pale imitation of a hipster or Beat, a naïve idealist or a burned-out druggie. Reactionary California governor Ronald Reagan categorized so-called flower children as people who dress like Tarzan, wear their hair like Jane, and smell like Cheetah. Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson wrote in “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”: “Ignore that nightmare in the bathroom. Just another ugly refugee from the Love Generation, some doom-struck gimp who couldn’t handle the pressure.” In popular culture hippies are associated with 1967 Be-ins in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco or the 1969 Woodstock Music Festival.  Also, the slogans “Tune in, Turn on, Drop out” (Timothy Leary) or “Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll (Janis Joplin).” In the 1983 movie “The Big Chill” disillusioned Sixties activist Sarah Cooper (Glenn Close) says, :”I’d hate to think it was all just fashion.”  Popular culture pundits suggested that hippies from this privileged “Boomer” generation often morphed into Yuppies as they shed their youthful illusions.

    Broadly speaking, hippies were part of a Sixties protest movement against rampant consumerism, the war in Vietnam, and puritanical beliefs regarding sex, manners, dress, and WASP (White, Anglo-Saxon Protestant) values.  Some alienated young people were “week-end hippies,” working steady jobs or staying in school but using consciousness-raising substances and letting-it-all-hang-out on weekends. Others, dissatisfied with urban living and nostalgic for the pastoral ideal, attempted to form alternative communities.  Merry Prankster Ken Kesey claimed that you were either on the bus or uncool. Approximately two million “Back-to-the-Landers” relocated to rural areas, either forming communes or living as homesteaders.  One such experiment took place on Pocahontas County, West Virginia, the heart of Appalachia; commune founders called their experiment the Island of the Red Hood.  Locals were generally not hostile; some taught the newcomers practical survival skills.  Nonetheless, the Island of the Red Hood was short-lived, although some members paired off and remained nearby.

    Emma Copley Eisenberg’s “The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia” (2020) describes the violent death on June 25, 1980, in Pocahontas County of two hitchhikers, Vicki Durian (26) and Nancy Santomero (19) who were on their way to a month-long music festival and camp-out called the Rainbow Family World Peace Gathering taking place in an area of Monongahela National Forest known as Three Forks, which attracted up to 6,000 enthusiasts. Annual Rainbow Family gatherings had begun in 1972, but this was the first in the East.  Law enforcement authorities and the media believed a group of nine local men were responsible, either out of animus toward hippies or because the “girls” wouldn’t “put out.” One of them was found guilty but later freed when the actual murderer was a serial killer from elsewhere.  The victims came from good families and in some ways fit the stereotype of “hippie” in their taste in clothes, music, and love of adventure but in other ways not.  In fact, their outlook on life was not much different from the author’s or the bluegrass musicians Emma Eisenberg, who had been a VISTA worker in Pocahontas County, had hung out with.

    A University of Maryland grad student in the late 1960s, I had long hair and a beard, experimented with pot, loved psychedelic rock, took part in antiwar protests, and on the surface rejected many of my WASP parents’ values.  On the other hand, I was married with two children, content with a monogamous relationship with Toni, and worked diligently toward my PhD. My friends and I discussed communal living, but I had no skills translatable to an agrarian life and valued my privacy. When a friend decided to get rid of his “straight” clothes, I scarfed up a sports jacket that last me well into the 1980s. Teaching at IUN in the early 1970s, I felt sorry for students who dropped out of school due to drugs or misguided idealism.  On the other hand, I joined a softball team of “long hairs” who loved to party. Memories of those high times are among my very fondest, and I’m still friends with several former teammates. In fact, I feel sad for those who didn’t have a little “hippie” spark of rebellion in them.