Digger describing free food program (archival): We're trying to start a pilot program here called the Digger feed-in. You go home, you cook whatever you can cook at your kitchen and you bring it out and you serve it to hungry people on the street, you know. And if everybody does it, we'll all have a ball.
Peter Berg: The street theater that we had been doing was now going to be acted out as an alternative society where food, shelter, entertainment was going to be free, without ideology.
Narrator: The Diggers salvaged food from restaurant and super-market overflow, prepared it in their communal kitchen, and brought it, twice a day, to the park.
Judy Goldhaft: I used to go to the wholesale produce markets, and get produce for the free food that we did. Unbelievable amounts of food were thrown away. I remember once there were crates and crates and crates and crates of cantaloupes that came in They didn't quite meet the standards for sweetness, and they couldn't be sold. They stood in back of the produce market. We came there twice a week. We picked up ten cases every time we came.
Narrator: For the Diggers, the free feed-ins also served to push people to examine their own values.
Berg: We were looking for the people driving by going to work who would see people gathered in the park eating food free and that this would provoke them, provoke their idea of what they were doing by going to work.
Coyote: We thought culture is much more important than politics. Let's just start getting people living the way they want to live. You want to live in a world where you don't have to work? Let's make it. You want to live in a world where you can get food for free? Let's make it. You want to live in a house with, you know, lots of women and men and live the way you want? Let's do it. Let's make the world that you imagine real by acting it out. And if you can act it out, it's real!
Narrator: In December, the Diggers dramatized another hippie belief: that the pursuit of money interfered with a fulfilling life. They staged a happening. They called it "The Death of Money."
Berg: People dressed in animal heads took money, huge pieces of money, stage money, and put them in and out of an enormous coffin in a march down Haight Street, singing, "Get out my life, why don't you, babe?" to Chopin's "Death March." And it went, "Get out my life, why don't you, babe?"
Kasper: We certainly, on some level, thought money was the root of all evil, and thought having a lot of money was not a good thing for your soul.
Coyote: We were not living without money because we had lots of it and it made it easy. We were living without money because we wanted our time and we wanted to be authentic and we didn't want to get jobs.
Narrator: The Be-In in January 1967 put San Francisco's hippies in the national spotlight for the first time. While Beatniks wanted the world to leave them alone, the New York Times said, "the new hippies want to change the world." Newsweek wrote of their "regimen of all-embracing love;" and "non-violent, mystical and bizarre." These stories of hippies resonated with young people across the country.
Sandi Stein: The Boston Globe had pictures of Haight Street, pictures of people dancing. And, I can remember saying, I thought, "Oh, look! Everybody looks so happy!" And I'm thinking, "Oh, I'd really like to go there.
Narrator: Sandi Stein was only 13, questioning and impressionable. She anguished over the grief that permeated her Boston neighborhood because of the Vietnam war.
Sandi Stein: When somebody was killed in Vietnam they would put a flag in the window. And there was not a block that you could walk in that working class, middle class neighborhood that you didn't see flags in the windows. And my home was full of fighting, arguing. And so, I think also, that those ideas of peace and love were wonderful. You know, that looked good.
Narrator: San Francisco looked good, too, to Claudia King. At 23, she was frustrated with the slow pace of civil rights gains she'd been working on since high school in Chicago.
Claudia King: Every time an idea or something came up, it would be okay, how are you going to fund this? Who's going to do this, who's going to do that? and I was young, you know, I wanted heaven now. I really believed that it should just change and we should all just smarten up and do better. I was really ready to go to the Haight-Ashbury.
Narrator: So was Phil Morningstar, a restless teenager living in a conservative town east of Los Angeles.
Phil Morningstar: It was a semi-rural area; kind of Southern California Bible Belt and I was reading the Berkeley Barb, the SF Oracle. And I was looking at all that stuff and they're talking about crash pads, free food, and my father was very in tolerant of any views that disagreed with him. So, at fourteen, I took a walk down to the Greyhound bus station, bought a bus ticket, next stop San Francisco.
Narrator: In March, hundreds of kids on spring break flooded into the Haight.
Perry: They heard by word-of-mouth. I mean, if you went to one of the great public events, like the rock dances, you would meet people, and they would say, "Hey man, you gotta come to the Haight, man, it's really beautiful there."
Coyote: Kids were looking at pictures of kids like them, sitting on the stoops, cuppin' a joint, looking around for the cops, and saying, "Holy cow! People are living free in San Francisco." And they came out here to invent whatever that meant to them.
Selvin: Everybody had a different entrance point. Some people came in because of the sexual liberation prospect. Some people came in because of the appeal of the music. Some people came in because they were angry and scared about the draft and the war. But once you were in that vortex, once you were in that swirling miasma of social and personal change, all the doors were open.