After I graduated from high school I opened a leather shop in North Miami with David Tobias (Norland class of 69) as we ran our leather business throughout high school working from my home and my fathers furniture store (where groups of our friends occasionally did LSD all night and more than occasionally smoked pot as we all worked) where one night we put Sally Heck (Norland Class of 69) in a big furniture box. We thought that was very funny – Sally was enraged and didn’t think it was funny at all. This new leather shop in North Miami also had an “Ecology Information Center” in it to alert people to the ecological problems facing society at the time. Later that year I started classes at Miami Dade Junior College, where I took a variety of courses including one on Hare Krishna taught by the Hare Krishna devotees.
“Hippie” by Barry Miles–1969 – It was the year of extremes, of violence and madness as well as achievement and success. The Rolling Stones’ experience encapsulated it all. Brian Jones became the first of many rock casualties when his drug taking made it impossible for him to function as a member of the group and he was thrown out. No one expected him to die, but he did shortly afterwards as the result of careless behavior at a party at his country house. At the concert swiftly dedicated to his memory in Hyde Park, London, the Stones performed for half a million people on a beautiful English summer afternoon. It was an idyllic day with no trouble. But when they tried to repeat it in San Francisco, at the Altamont Speedway six months later, they inadvertently presided over a murder as Hell’s Angels ran amok and stabbed a man to death right in front of the stage. This was the year that hippies realized once and for all that the Hell’s Angels never did believe in love and peace, and were not about to change. In August, despite two downpours, the Woodstock festival had demonstrated how the communal spirit should work. Most people agree that the actual experience was horrible, but ist was that shared experience that created the so-called Woodstock Generation. However, the happy communalism of a circulating joint and shared spiritual experiences on acid resulted in big-time drug dealing. And wherever there are millions of dollars to be made illegally, there are also beatings and murders as people carve out their territory.