 Summer of Love
"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live,
mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time,
the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn,
burn, like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across
the stars, and in the middle, you see the blue center-light pop, and
everybody goes ahh. ..." - From
"On the Road" by Jack Kerouac
It was the words of novelist and beat poet Jack Kerouac, the burgeoning
jazz scene and a desire to get out of suburban San Bernardino that
brought Pat Wilson in 1966 to San Francisco's North Beach. Living in a
fleabag hotel, he aspired to be a member of the Beat Generation -
buying books at City Lights Bookstore, going to foreign film festivals
and drinking cheap bottles of wine in a park. But he was soon living on
the corner of Cole and Haight streets and hanging out with flower
children on the streets, at concert halls and in parks.
"It was this big party with this whole love generation reaching out to
each other," said Wilson, now 62 and living in Taos, N.M.
His family didn't talk about love when he was a boy growing up in a
conservative home in the Del Rosa section of San Bernardino. Wilson's
father was a property manager for San Bernardino County and associated
with the sheriff as well as judges in town. His mother was president of
women and bridge clubs as well as active in her church.
Wilson showed his wild and adventurous side early. By sixth grade, he
was running away from home and hopping on freight trains. By seventh
grade, he was getting drunk on wine that his father and buddies made
from grapes picked in vineyards in Ontario. As an older teen, Wilson
spent more time surfing than attending classes at Pacific High School.
After graduation, he stuck out his thumb and hitchhiked from San
Bernardino to Mardi Gras in New Orleans and then to New York City,
where he and friends talked their way into the hotel where the Beatles
were staying.
Days later the friends bought one-way tickets on Icelandic Airlines and
flew to Iceland and then Luxembourg. They spent the next six weeks
hitchhiking through Europe, but after finding the weather too cold they
returned to San Bernardino.
Wilson earned an associate's degree at San Bernardino Valley College
and applied to San Francisco State.
He left San Bernardino behind in 1966 and drove up the coast in his
Alfa Romeo.
While living in North Beach, Wilson hitchhiked to the Monterey Jazz
Festival.
A married couple picked him up in their Volkswagen van and invited him
to live in their big apartment at Cole and Haight.
It was exciting to be a part of the street scene, and after taking a
few classes at San Francisco State he stopped going.
Wilson still needed to make a living, so he sold the Berkeley Barb, an
underground newspaper. He also played his harmonica on street corners
for spare change.
Wilson moved from sharing an apartment with the married couple to
living downstairs with a marijuana dealer. His new roommate made so
much money selling pot that he bought light-show equipment and hired
Wilson to run a light show at a popular bar in North Beach.
It was a pretty wild place. Wilson got all the beer he could drink and
plenty of attention from the girls. The house band would later become
Creedence Clearwater Revival.
But, the party ended in early 1967, when Wilson was drafted into the
Army and went to Fort Ord. He got out after a few months and returned
to San Francisco, where the Summer of Love was in full swing in
Haight-Ashbury.
"You would walk down the street and there would be hundreds of people
walking along with you," Wilson said. "When I got there, there were
only a few shops selling pipes and roach clips. Now there were
psychedelic shops everywhere."
To get meals, he stopped by Golden Gate Park where the Diggers, a
radical community action group of improv actors, fed people every day.
Wilson and his friends, who moved up from San Bernardino, were also
into the Hare Krishna scene.
"We didn't dress in the attire, but we went to where they had these
Krishna meetings and fed you," he said. "We would pray for an hour and
chow down."
Wilson became an aspiring photographer and spent his days in Golden
Gate Park taking pictures of beautiful women. His nights were spent
listening to music acts such as Van Morrison, the Paul Butterfield
Blues Band and Jimi Hendrix at the Fillmore Auditorium, Winterland and
Avalon Ballroom.
By the late summer and fall, the street scene in Haight-Ashbury went
from peace and love to "stick up your hands and give me your wallet."
There were a lot of rip-offs on pot deals as well as more serious
crimes such as the murder of Super Spade, a major pot dealer. "He was
this big black dude who was found decapitated in the trunk of a car,"
Wilson said.
By 1969, he was burned out on San Francisco and moved with a friend
from San Bernardino to Manhattan Beach. Wilson drove a cab for a time
in Redondo Beach, but was soon back on the road with a girl from
Boulder, Colo. The couple hitchhiked to Taos with a tent, two sleeping
bags and $30 between them.
She kept going and he stayed in Taos.
It was his home base while he worked in oil fields in Texas and New
Mexico. When Wilson came home for good from the oil fields, he bought a
home and went on to make a living as a general contractor. Although he
now leads a conservative life, Wilson is glad to have been a wild young
man partying in the 1960s on the streets of San Francisco.
"It was a time when we were looking for meaning and doing things like
marching for peace and straightening out race relations," he said.
"These days it seems like people are just looking for a place where
they can get their next tattoo."
Debbie Pfeiffer Trunnell, Staff Writer
Article Launched: 08/12/2007 12:00:00 AM PDT
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