My road to the hippie lifestyle started when I was in junior high. At that time my road was just an deer trail in the woods. The superhighway came later. My mom played Simon and Garfunkel and Joan Baez, too. We watched Hootenanny on TV and I loved the New Christy Minstrels, the Chad Mitchell Trio, and Peter Paul and Mary. Those sensitive folk singers set me up. They sang of injustice with songs like “Follow the Drinking Gourd”, “This Train is Bound for Glory”, “Barbara Allen”. You know what I’m talking about. Well, some of you do anyway.

The times dictated that we either wore our hair long or in a ratted bouffant. I chose the long because it reminded me of Jane Asher (Paul McCartney’s girlfriend) and because I identified as an artist, a fringe beatnik. I liked period clothing inspired by movies such as Dr. Zhivago and Tom Jones and because I lived on the Great Plains, I admired Native Americans. It didn’t hurt that my dad and I regularly went out in the newly plowed spring-time corn fields looking for arrowheads and other artifacts. My mom helped, too. She organized Mes-Kwa-Ki Indian pow wows at the art association and they came to dance and display their handicrafts.

In my last year of high school my girlfriends and I got in my car, drove to deserted country roads and smoked pot. It was the kind of pot that was not much more potent than oregano. It had fancy names like Panama Red or Acapulco Gold but there was nothing fancy about it. It was anything but fancy.  I think it was grown in backyards or maybe even harvested the plants that grew wild in the ditches in Iowa. It was otherwise known as wild hemp. We called it ditch weed.

Then off I went to Hawaii to live with my mom’s younger sister and her husband and go to art school at the University of Hawaii. The art school was stupid and vapid to my way of thinking, but counterculture was in full swing and one girl I knew was wearing the hell out of the phrase “far out.” Everything to her was Far Out. Far Out this. Far Out that.  It really annoyed me because it seemed so contrived but it didn’t take too long before I was saying it, too.

Then I discovered Indian bedspreads and I started making granny dresses out of them. (I can still smell how they smelled). My best creation was a hybrid muu muu with flounce sleeves and a big flounce along the hem.

Lynn wanted me to go to Woodstock, but I had no idea what that was and anyway I didn’t have any money or courage, so I didn’t accept his invitation. I can only imagine what that would have been like if I had gone. I think I might have hated it because I can’t stand chaos and want things to be at least tidy if not downright clean. Woodstock was not tidy. It was a mess.

Back in Iowa City, going to a much better art school, we smoked weed and visited the 8-1/2 foot tall Black Angel in the Iowa City cemetery. We’d get a little bit high and then go out there in the dark to enhance the scary mystical quality of it. There was a story going round that if you kissed the statue on Halloween night that you would die if you weren’t a virgin so, of course, I did not kiss it, but not because I wasn’t a virgin. I was, but I didn’t want to take any chances and besides I wasn’t superstitious.

I joined the New Pioneer Co-op and ate soybean stew and went full-on vegetarian. I baked my own bread and granola because there was a good oven in the basement of the house I lived in. Everybody I knew was going organic and because my dad had helped me learn how to cook, I jumped on the bandwagon to try the new thing. Back home we had iceberg lettuce, white bread, frozen broccoli, Campbell’s soup from a can and Franco-American spaghetti. It was the good ole Midwestern way, but I thought it made health sense to be as pure in eating as possible. When we went grocery shopping, I wanted to buy whole wheat bread and my dad said, “No. It has too much flavor.” That didn’t deter me and I’ve eaten this way ever since.

My mom didn’t like the way I dressed. She said “you’re so pretty and those clothes are so unattractive.” I liked my tattered bell bottom blue jeans where the hem dragged on the ground. I liked the black secondhand Salvation Army coat with the double-breasted row of buttons up to the Nehru collar. We didn’t wear makeup, but we wore platform sandals. Back in high school you tried to straighten your naturally curly hair, but we hippies loved our super curly hair and honestly, I wished my hair was curly, too. Boys had to wear their long hair underneath a ball cap, or they would get beaten up by the good ole boys who encountered them. Now all this is taken for granted and the good ole boys have embraced long hair and ponytails. The world turns upside down and then back again.

I even auditioned for a part in “Hair” (“It is the dawning of the age of Aquarius!”)  but wasn’t chosen. By this time drugs like mescaline, peyote buttons, and LSD were everywhere and some people abused these things and got really screwed up.  But again, because I had no money I didn’t take part. I think that saved me because I had only a particle of sense. Once my boyfriend gave me some LSD and we stayed up all night watching the vibrating texture in the wood paneling. I had no reaction to the mescaline he gave me, but it freaked him out so I spent the night rocking him in my arms. No, thank you.

Out in the country outside of Iowa City my friends converted a rented church into their version of Alice’s Restaurant while my other friends lived in an unpainted farmhouse at the end of a muddy dirt road. We all slept in the vestibule of the church while the wood stove glowed orange and a snowstorm howled outside.

Of course, we protested the War in Vietnam. Then in Ohio in May of 1970 four college students, who were protesting the invasion of Cambodia, were shot and killed by members of the Ohio National Guard who fired into the crowd. This caused so much hubbub that the University of Iowa administration told the students they could go home early. I went home. I protested but I wasn’t interested in getting arrested or hit over the head or even killed.

All this made such an impression on me that I’ve been political in one way or another ever since.

I’ll always be a hippie deep down inside if not right out there on the surface. Once I left Iowa and went to San Francisco my hippie behavior dwindled away. Making a living became the most important thing. Even so I’ll always be a hippie at heart.

Postscript: I want you all to know that I don’t use AI to help me write.