Craftspeople sold what they made through the Laundromat Co-op on Peachtree at 10th.

There were a wide variety of crafts. I made handwrought jewelry and silk screened t-shirts. Patti made embroidered jean dresses. They also worked with the Atlanta Art Institute to offer hippies classes in marketable crafts such as silk- screening and jewelry-making. Strangely a woman from my small hometown ran the store.

Middle Earth Headshop was on 8th street just off Peachtree at the Krystal, across from the FDA, whatta location.

My name is Dee and I was one of the 3 owners of Middle Earth after Bo and Linda decided they wanted out. Ron and Suzy Jarvis took the shop over and myself and a guy named Kevin came in as partners. I owned the record room upstair and also lived in the middle bedroom upstairs. Kevin had a clothing Boutique also on the second floor. Ron and Suzy had the head shop in the main room downstairs and their custom leather shop in the entry. They lived in the bedroom in the back of the shop. I later moved my shop to Atlantis rising down the street. I have been looking for pics of the shop forever. The only one I have is a picture of me and two of the hanger outers from an AJC story ’bout me. The shop was on 8th street behind the federal building and across the street from the Food and Drug Administration. There was a large parking lot across the street that would fill up on Fri. and Sat nights with all the street people, kids from the burbs and the wanna-bees.

Markets respond to demands. That’s good capitalistic economics. Ten years ago, the Peachtree-14^th  Street area had the usual shops – grocery stores, a delicatessen or two, couple of ladies’ dress shops, hardware stores, pharmacy, etc. There were always a couple of arts stores, too- small galleries, frame shops, paintings –you know, because of the art school and that crowd. A little weird, that bunch, but didn’t bother the neighbors much.

That was before 1964. That was before Haight-Ashbury. That was before the East Village. That was before “hippie” meant anything but fat. Then there was summer 1965? 1966? 1967. There was 12^th gate. There was Grand Central Station. There was Catacombs. Hippies????! In Atlanta?????? Yeah.

And a community was born. Beauty, love, freedom, alternative life style.; the street people.

Markets respond to community. Last year, Middle Earth was born and later and English Street begins. There was the short-lived Morning Glory Seed sacrificed, martyred during the summer ’67 repression. As Middle Earth, Expansion, etc. struggled to survive, downtown put over a pseudo-masquerade and came uptown in the form of the Merry-Go-Round. Asterisk was born downtown, moved uptown this summer.

They dream free exchange. The reality? $$$$$$$$

Danny Cochran is co-owner of Atlantis Rising. Danny Cochran knew the Peachtree 14^th Street area ten years ago. He grew up here. Danny Cochran knows the world of the marketplace. He ran a swimming pool company , a tavern, was into mortgages, insurance.

Chuck Monroe knows street people. The family. The needs for survival. Chuck Monroe is co-owner of Atlantis Rising.  He approached Cochran, others, talked about a place relevant to the community, evolution of an idea.

Business Reality: Cochran and Morgan pay $400 per per month rent. Shop owners will give up 10% of their take to Cochran and Morgan. How decision s concerning Atlantis Rising will be made has not been decided yet. Atlantis Rising is evolving. One shop owner states, “We’ll have equal say, we can make sure of that.” Each shop has an open-ended lease with Atlantis Rising (Cochran and Morgan) and the “management” has made numerous business loans to get shops started with low rate of interest, cost, rate, margin. The market place.

The scene: Dogs, children, chatter, congregating, color, smells, sweat, beckoning, barter, bargain, money. The market place. Atlantis Rising. “Hey man, didja see those new books on palm-reading? Dig it, we could sell all the books we can get. “Lookit these hand made. Just gottem in. Groovy, man.” “Watch my shop for a second willya? Jeez its hot in here.”

Stock, supplies, prices, Sales receipts, orders, hours, bail, lease, take, percentage, profit, money. The new market place. Atlantis Rising.

The vision. More than a market place. More than exchange of goods and cash. Hope for a meeting place in there – the tea room with its tree invites gathering, human exchange. Atlantis Rising is a business. Yes. But it is hope in the prospect of encouraging creative energy for the booths. It is a hope if a free store can exist beside shops which sell for survival. It is a hope if it continues to be the energy and spirit of a community striving to be free, if profit remains secondary to people.

– maude from The Great Speckled Bird

My memories of the Catacombs and Piedmont Park era are of great fondness. I went to high school and lived in Forest Park. I was a senior in 68′ and played in a band called “The Celestial Voluptuous Banana”. I use to sneak out at night when my parents were asleep and steal their car and drive up to 14th Street to frequent the Catacombs where I got turned onto a lot of great music.

Doug Merrill(rip) was the owner and I wasn’t really aware of all the supposedly illegal things going on behind the scene but became friends with The Hampton Grease Band, The Bag and many other groups. I met Steven Cole (rip) who understood the possibilities of the music scene way before other promoters actually acted on it. He predicted that one day bands would be playing huge venues to packed audiences. It was under Steve’s management that The Celestial Voluptuous Banana, Hydra, The Fifth Order, Booger Band, Radar, The Hampton Grease Band, The Bag and many others started working clubs and performed in Piedmont Park.

The Catacombs was home to a lot of different characters that have scattered to the wind but I remember a guy named Jim Nieman who was a regular there and he would perform solo with a great voice and a pretty good sense of humor. Jim also had a gig for a while on a radio station based in south Atlanta called WBAD. His show was called “The Nasty Lord John Show” and he played some very hip stuff. A special show was put together at the old Atlanta City Auditorium which was promoted through the station and the band was called “The Jeff Espina Banana Boat Blues Band and Traveling Freak Show Too featuring Eddie The Road Manager”. I went to the show which was sparcely attended but the band kicked ass and then you also had the strobe lights and smoke machines. I also got turned onto Ellen McInwayne and still have the 45 that she put out and sold from the catacombs. Ellen left and went to New York to work with a band called “Fear Itself” and I only remember Steve Cook as one of the band members.

I remember seeing some incredible music at the Catacombs including a band from DC called “Flavor” which was a three piece group that killed as did the night I saw the “Candymen” there. The Candymen was the basis for later formed “Atlanta Rhythm Section”. I can remember the catacombs just like it was yesterday and the smells of the smoke machine which was furnished by “The Electric Collage” which was owned and ran by Frank Hughes who was also a partner of Steve Cole of the Discovery Agency.

I remember performing at Piedmont Park and the crowds were incredible and receptive. The Banana was nothing more than a cover band but still, the crowds were great. During that time (68-70) you could see and hear a lot of great music in the park like the time I saw the Allman Bros. with Boz Skaggs sitting in and Chicago Transit Authority staying over after a concert at the auditorium and they would perform with Santana. Local groups got in the act as well with Booger Band being one of those groups that people would make sure not to miss. Keyboardist, Will Boware (sp?)was formally with “The Souljers” and he was not unlike Stevie Winwood in the respect that he was a child phenom. He sang, wrote and played an amazing Hammond B3 and keyboard bass. The drummer, Joel Maloney (rip) was an amazing young drummer and the guitarist, Ted Trombetta was equally incredible on guitar.

Most of my memories are great ones although I do remember being hassled by the man. Yeah, don’t stand there and keep moving. Some restaurants wouldn’t serve you and if they did then they demanded a minimum. One restaurant located at 14th & Peachtree at the time (the name escapes me), demanded a 50 cent minimum order so one night Doug Merrill took a bunch of us over there and packed out the place and we all ordered the minimum and pissed off the owners. Cops were called and since they couldn’t do much they busted some of the ones that they could figure out charges on such as minors etc.

I remember the riot on Peachtree when the buildings were set on fire and the cops were called and remember getting the hell out of there as cops were on a rampage to make arrests.

I remember the frat boys coming up from Ga. tech trying to get a piece of free love and hassling the groovy chicks with tie dyed shorts etc. I also remember some of those same frat guys driving by and throwing urine at the “hippies” standing around.

I remember thinking that the neighborhood started going down when drugs started making it’s presence. Sort of like the time one of our guitarist drank beledonna (sp?) that was laced in his soft drink. Met a lot of incredible people there and a few I still am in contact with but have no idea where Jim Nieman is or what happened to some of the great musicians I saw but they all left an impression on me.

I also use to go to the 12th Gate which was on 10th and it was a house converted into a coffee house/music venue. I saw some of the most incredible music ever including drummer Elvin Jones, Pianist McCoy Tyner, Sonny Fortune, Oregon and many others. I performed there once with a collection of other local guys and it was just a place for magic to be on a stage that had seen some of your childhood idols. I could probably go on and on but that’s pretty much the gist of a lot of my memories when music had so many possibilities and there were so many places for us to get our fix.

Darryl Rhoades

Atlanta Weekly December 5, 1982 pg.  (courtesy Miller Francis)

Peace and love came to the Strip in the 1960’s. Then it vanished.

By Rick Briant Dandes

Rick Briant Dandes is a former Atlantan who lives in New York. His most recent story for the magazine was about broadcaster Skip Caray.

It was a crowded place 15 years ago. There was always something happening on the Strip. At any hour of the day you had to push your way down the sidewalk. The streets were jammed, blocked by automobiles full of people come to gawk or to buy The Great Speckled Bird or sex magazines or drugs. Drugs were sold openly — there were passing fashions, but marijuana, LSD and mescaline were the standbys, the constants. The sales were so frequent, the competition so stiff, that dealers would hang bags of whatever they were selling out into traffic and wave them, chanting, “Ounces of hash, bags of grass.” When you walked down the street you were constantly being talked to, propositioned or one thing or another. At night, especially on weekends, the activity on the Strip was so frenetic and dense that traffic would be backed down Peachtree south of North Avenue.

All these memories seemed like a dream the other night, when I decided to revisit the section of Peachtree Street near 10th Street where Atlanta’s hippies used to hang out. The area was, as usual these days, almost deserted. One of the few places open was the Stein Club. It’s a bar that was a popular spot in the heyday of the hippies, and I went there to talk with David Heany, the co-owner. He led me to a table by the front window where we could look out onto the empty street.

“It’s all gone,” said Heany, who has lived in the area since 1969. He went on to say that in recent years many buildings in the area have been demolished. In their place are vacant lots, construction sites and condominiums. “It’s the midtown boom,” he said sarcastically.

It was 9:00 p. m. and in the bar about 50 customers were milling around. Heany pointed to one, a social worker named Karen, he said, a regular at the Stein Club for almost as long as it has existed, 21 years. Karen sat alone, sipping from a mug of beer as she leafed through a note pad. I don’t know how Heany recognized her. She was, for all intents, incognito, like a young Greta Garbo, dressed in a’ black silk blouse and prairie-length dress. Her hair was wrapped in a scarf, her eyes hidden behind wraparound sunglasses.

“She was a hippie,” Heany said, taking me over to meet her.

“I lived down here when this entire area was overrun with young people,” Karen said. “It was a good time to be young, those years. I learned so much about life. It was exciting. I think I knew it couldn’t last forever, my youth I mean. But I still sometimes wonder what happened down here, why everyone left.”

“A harder element moved in, Heany said. “I remember when it turned into a rough neighborhood. You couldn’t walk a block without -being propositioned for anything you could imagine, drugs, sex. Whatever you wanted to buy, it was for sale. When the hippies left, the Strip became a no-man’s-land. There was a lot of arson. Businesses that had been here for a decade moved out. I remember in 1974, walking down the street and in a three-block area there were only 11 shops open. It really scared me.”

“That’s the real question,” Karen said. “How did this area go from hippie community to combat zone to middle class — which is what it is becoming.”

Heany nodded agreement. “I wish I knew what happened during those hippie years. I lived here, but I’ll be damned if I know.”

The Hippies overran a neighborhood that was steeped in Atlanta lore and history. Full of old houses, it had grown up around Piedmont Park to become a showcase middle-class neighborhood. In the earliest days of the city, however, the neighborhood around what was to become the Strip — an area roughly bordered by the park on the east, 14th Street on the north. Spring Street on the west and 7th Street on the south — was called Tight Squeeze.

“In the 1870’s, it was well beyond the city,” according to historian Timothy Crimmins of Georgia State University. “Peachtree Road didn’t follow its present course back then, it followed the route of what is now Peachtree Place to 11th Street, so it was much narrower. It was, though, a main route of commerce into Atlanta, and so as you were going out from the city, you were tunneled in through this narrow neck of road. Shanties were erected alongside the route. “Late in the 1890’s the shanties were pushed out,” continued Crimmins. “As long as there was no demand for the land, the squatters who lived there had no problems, but with the development of streetcar transportation, the entire area came within the orbit of Atlanta, and at that point it became a more desirable place for affluent Atlantans to live.”

As the trolley moved north in the early 20th century, large Victorian homes were erected by the city’s wealthy elite, and in 1906, Ansley Park was developed north of 10th Street. Soon there was a demand for commercial services, and 10th and Peachtree became the intersection where they were provided. By the early 1920s drugstores, bakeries, bicycle and dress shops fined I0th Street.

During and after World War II, there was a lot of pressure for housing in the area, and many of the buildings were eventually zoned as multifamily residences. In the 1950’s, however, there was a wholesale northward exodus of residents. This effectively set the stage for the 1960’s, creating an area with relatively inexpensive housing around a commercial strip where the market had declined, leaving empty, low rent storefronts.

The counterculture had I its origins in San  Francisco at about the same time the civil rights movement peaked in the South. By the time the hippies appeared in Atlanta, the Strip was where the “life” was, in the words of many who lived there. Filmmaker Gary Moss, who later chronicled his experiences on the Strip in a movie entitled Summer of Low, remembered leaving the University of Georgia and moving to the area in 1967. “I knew something was happening, even if I didn’t know what it was,” he said. “I had friends who

lived on 9th Street, and I’d visit them and see an entirely new attitude in how they talked and looked. I was fascinated, and found myself being drawn into the life. It was just very exciting to be down there. We had freedom, and to some extent we had drugs, mainly marijuana. It was a playful time, sad, of course, we were learning about love and sex.”

In 1967, the number, of hippies living in the neighborhood was still small, perhaps a few hundred. (By August 1969, according to a Community Council of Atlanta report, the number of hippies living in the 10th Street area was estimated at 3,000.) Yet they had great visibility, making themselves instantly recognizable by characteristics that seemed intended to stun — long hair, for example, and instead of conventional dress, fantasy garb as different and unique as could be found: old hats, long dresses and shawls. In a way, dress was a nonverbal dialect created by hippies as a way not only to recognize each other but to keep at bay the curious in straight society.

The new community took seed at the Mandoria, an art gallery owned by David Braden (“Mother David”) and Kathryn Palmer, a jeweler. In late 1966, Braden and Palmer moved their gallery into a two-story house at the corner of 14th and Peachtree streets, across from what is now Colony Square. In the basement of the house was a music club called the Catacombs (“A place for peace and creation,” read early ads). Above the Mandoria, Braden rented out beds to people coming into Atlanta, many of whom were runaways.

“There was a verbal network, and word got out that there was a place to stay at Mother David’s,” recalled Anna Belle Illien, who purchased the gallery from Braden and changed the name to Galerie Illien. “Beds were rented in shifts, there were so many kids. I heard there was once as many as 50 people upstairs at one time.”

Braden eventually landed in prison (serving a seven year sentence for marijuana sale, his arrest was generally regarded as the area’s first political bust), but the scene kept on growing. It was centered at 10th Street around new hip establishments like the Twelfth Gate (a folk-music club operated by a young minister, Bruce Donnelly), the Middle Earth, Grand Central Station, the Merry Go Round and Morning Glory Seed — Atlanta’s first “head shop.”

Along with the clubs, other expressions of the scene began springing up. One of the most important was The Great Speckled Bird, a weekly newspaper. Its first issue came out on March 15, 1968, and the paper rapidly became the voice of the community. About the same time. Dr. Joseph Hertell, a former national director of the American Red Cross, was teaching Sunday school at Rock Springs Presbyterian Church when he “noticed a good many of my students spending time at the Twelfth Gate cafe. My wife and I went down there, met Bruce Donnelly and saw that the club was spiritually oriented — he held services every Sunday It was a very warm and pleasant atmosphere.”

Dr. Hertell asked Donnelly if he could help in any way and the minister told him, “There is no place for sick kids to get help. When I have a sick youngster on my hands, I can’t get any help — not even from Grady.” That’s when Dr. Hertell and Donnelly opened a clinic in a back room of the Twelfth Gate (the clinic later moved to Juniper Street).

Music was everywhere back then. Nasty Lord John, a disc jockey at WBAD in Hapeville (Atlanta’s first true progressive radio station), was also a musician, a drummer in a band that played at a club called the Scene, and listeners followed him to the Strip. “His radio show turned me on,” said Darryl Rhoades, a longtime local musician. “I wanted to see him. When I was in high school, he was a topic of conversation. Music was a big reason to go to 10th Street.”

At the Scene, Twelfth Gate and the Catacombs, bands like the Bag, Hampton Grease Band and Dr. Espina’s Banana Boat Blues Band and Traveling Freak Show were big attractions. Rhoades himself played in a band called the Celestial Voluptuous Banana. Concerts in Piedmont Park were common, with local bands playing alongside The Allman Brothers, The Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Cream.

By the summer of 1969, young people from all over Georgia and the rest of the South were coming to Atlanta. Many of them joined communes, which were characterized by their informal living arrangements and the sharing of property. This eventually created problems, according to Mary Huffaker, a social worker in the community. “Every single commune I know anything about failed because they would accept anybody and everybody,” she said. “Obviously. you’d get freeloaders who were happy to sit back and watch everybody work except them. The fact is, communes couldn’t work if everyone didn’t pull his own weight — and the nature of human beings is that they don’t.”

(old French embassy on 14^th)

Eventually the police became a major factor on the Strip. Tension had always existed between hippies and the police. Fulton County Assistant Police Chief Lewis Graham, then an Atlanta homicide investigator, recalled a “strong dislike of them on the force. The average police officer saw traditional values disappearing — kids with long hair, beards and their up-front attitudes. Most officers wouldn’t allow themselves to believe that many hippies were good kids with educations. They were simply classified as bums, identified by how they dressed, how they looked.”

Nonetheless, a kind of peace existed between hippies and the police for a while, and at least one officer was different — Ray Pate, who was assigned to community relations on the Strip. Pate was never given instructions on what to do or where to work. “I had no hours,” he recalled, “but I worked 9:00 p. m. to 5:00 a. m. in the park, at the clubs. I tried to identify with the youngsters. I wanted them to realize that cops are human, too, that they could depend on me if they needed help.”

The problem in the early days, according to Pate, “was mainly with shop owners who saw the values of their businesses depreciating. People were being driven to bankruptcy.” At times, pedestrian traffic in the area was so heavy that people walked in the streets. Tour buses included the Strip as a sideshow in their journey through Atlanta.

Some area store owners do not blame the hippies for their problems in the 1960’s. Mike Roberts of the Hard ware and Supply Company said, “In my opinion, it wasn’t the hippies who ran the area down. I think the area was already in decline by 1965, when shopping centers in the suburbs were built.”

By all accounts, the winter of 1969-1970 was a turning point in the history of the Strip. Pate remembered that “in late 1969, things took a nose dive. It was a cold winter. Everyone stayed indoors. The streets were relatively empty, and by spring it seemed almost like a small child had grown up and turned mean. Maybe the kids realized they had to survive somehow, find food — and soon. But it wasn’t the same and I couldn’t put my finger on why.”

Dr. Hertell also sensed a change in the neighborhood. “Disillusionment had already set in,” he said. “The love, the fraternity, the beauty and the warmth was souring.” Dr. Hertell and others believe that the increasing drug traffic up and down the Strip — and the change from marijuana to harder drugs like amphetamines and heroin — led to the community’s downfall.

With harder drugs on thy streets, the police cracked down on the community. Pate explained, “In 1968, we were flooded with crowds of exuberant, music-loving kids. We couldn’t do things the old law-and-order way with them •— the media would have killed us. But in 1969, with the criminal element moving in, well, those were our kind of people, so we flooded the area with helmets and nightsticks.” In 1970, Police Chief Herbert Jenkins declared, “I’m convinced 10th Street is no longer a hippie community. It’s just a stopping place for outlaws and criminals from all over the nation.”

The police raids were awesome, in a chilling kind of way. On weekends, police would arrive on the Strip after midnight in school buses. They would stream out of the vehicles in riot gear and move down the street in formation, stopping in front of each storefront while several went in and cleared the kids out with billy clubs.

One of the biggest events of this period occurred on the night of October 4, 1971 That was when a policeman was shot in Piedmont Park on “hit-up hill,” an area near the pavilion used by drug peddlers. A man who lived on 11th Street at the time remembered being awakened “by all the light and noise. I looked out the front door to see throngs of people screaming and running up the hill to Peachtree. Overhead, herding them like cattle, were helicopters with bright floodlights and loudspeakers blaring. The police entered every apartment on the park that night and turned them over.” (Soon after that incident, horse patrols were instituted by the city as a way to deal with policing the park.)

By then, the community was in chaos on all levels. Dr. Hertell’s clinic was treating more and more heroin addicts, and it eventually came under police surveillance as a result of its methadone program. “The police said I was responsible for more methadone being out on the streets than any drug pusher,” Dr. Hertell said. Its work with addicts also brought the clinic into contact with motorcycle gangs. “The bikers were power hungry,” said Dr. Hertell. “They came to me one day and said, ‘We want the clinic open tonight.’ I said I wouldn’t do it. Well, they took over because of their violent nature.” Mary Huffaker said that such incidents finally caused the clinic to close. “We didn’t know how to deal with violence.”

Along with hard drugs, the Strip was spawning an increasing number of pornographic bookstores, X-rated movie theaters and strip joints. Prostitution was on the rise. Gary Moss, who left the area for a few years, remembered coming back in 1972. “That’s when I realized the scene had grown dark and ugly,” he said. “I ran into an old friend with whom I had lived in a commune, and we Stopped and talked for a minute. She indicated to me that occasionally people came by and gave her money for sex. I sensed she was burned-out inside. She said she had had a vision in which trees burned down like match sticks.”

The Strip was literally burning down. A shop named Atlantis Rising had been firebombed, and The Great Speckled Bird house on 14th Street was destroyed in a fire. As early as July 1969 the Atlanta Fire Bureau reported 26 “significant” fires in the area causing $800,000 damage. At the time. Chief J. I. Gibson said it “looks like the work of an arsonist.” Indeed, arson grew rampant along the Strip. Houses were frequently burned as vengeance in bad drug deals. And a fire investigator said, “We hear that one small store owner paid well to bum up his unbreakable lease.” Many businesses, unable to get fire insurance, were forced to relocate.

Rumors persist to this day regarding the decline of the Strip during the early 1970’s. At the time, it was common knowledge that the Colony Square project and the planned MARTA station at 10th Street would change the face of the area. Many people in the community believed — and still do — that the Strip was intentionally allowed to deteriorate, thereby lowering land values, permitting real estate speculators to purchase plots at deflated prices before reselling them to developers at huge profits.

Many of these rumors center on former Mayor Sam Massell. He and other members of his family own land in the area, and Massell is familiar with the charges against him. “One rumor,” he said, “was that I was bringing the hippies into the area, importing them, in order to run down the values of the property, or that I had gotten options on lots, then allowed the property values to run down and buy in. Well, of course, if you had options on land, you’d have them at current prices, not run-down prices. Secondly, if you didn’t have the option, anyone could get the same option and buy it when land value decreased. And thirdly, if you did allow the land to run down, look at what it takes to build it back up.”

Unquestionably, land speculators in the area did make money. Some lots were sold in the early 1970’s, when land values were deflated, and a few years later they were resold at a profit to developers. However, no decisive relationship between the decline of the Strip and profits derived from it can be proved.

The real story behind the passing of the hippies from the Strip probably lies elsewhere, but nobody really has any clear-cut theories. Any discussion of the community by people close to it is, inevitably, suffused with a sense of wistful regret. As Dr. Hertell put it, “1967 and 1968 were beautiful. The kids were so filled with love, and it was so sad because what the hippies believed in was impossible. I knew it was impossible, and I felt like saying, life is not like this, life isn’t this way. They had a dream, and I’ve lived long enough to know that the dream wasn’t going to come true.”

But there was more behind the rise of the hippies than simply a dream. In their way, they mounted a strong protest against society. For many Americans, the Vietnam War represented a failure of the system, and the hippies were out to change it. As Charles A. Reich wrote in The Greening of America, an enormously influential book that articulated the hippie ethic, “There is a revolution coming. It will not be like ‘ revolutions of the past. It will originate with the individual and with culture, and it will change the political structure only as its final act It will not require violence to succeed, and it cannot be successfully resisted by violence. This is the revolution of the new generation.”

That sounds quaint and overblown today, but it was a potent message when it was first delivered. And across the country, it drew young people? pie to places like the Strip. They thought they were joining a revolution, but it’s my guess that in the long run they were just loose, on the run and lost. When I think honestly about the Strip, I remember that most of the people there were incredibly young. They were teenagers. So many of the girls were pregnant, and the boys seemed desperate. But they didn’t have any bona fide political convictions to back them up.

A friend of mine recalled an incident that pointed up the contradictions that haunted the Strip. “One day,” he said, “everybody on the Strip, went ga-ga over a car that was driving up Peachtree. It was a new Lincoln Continental, one with an arch in the back trunk hood for a spare tire. That would have been properly disdained in any truly revolutionary environment for good political reasons. On the Strip, the flower children rubbernecked and whistled.”