Narrator: In April, the hippies sought to ease growing tensions in the city, presenting an optimistic vision of the coming summer to the local media.
Ron Thelin at press conference (archival): The Haight-Ashbury community has created a council for a Summer of Love in San Francisco. Within the Haight-Ashbury population, there are many strata of imaginative and creative energies whose spirit extends throughout San Francisco and the world. The people here today represent ...
Stan McDaniels (archival): Our purpose is to provide an atmosphere which is more healthy than the kind of atmosphere that the city government and the newspapers have tended put out about the influx of young people to the city. And, see, we don't believe the young people who are coming here are the sort of thing that has been associated with vagrants. In fact, we believe in them. We believe that they're here, as a matter of fact, for a spiritual purpose.
Kid with Levine (archival): They're going to be bringing a lot of energy with them, a lot of enthusiasm. And they're going to be doing creative things and providing for themselves.
Levine (archival): The coming in is going to cause difficulty and might cause turmoil and might cause very real frictions but the important thing is they're going to all go back to their towns and when they do they're going to turn on everybody and this thing is going to be all over the country.
Charles Perry: By the time the beginnings of the flood were becoming obvious in the late spring, the Oracle was telling people, "Please don't come. Please stay home and do hippie things in your hometown. I mean, we're going to be out of dope. There's going to be food shortage. There's not going to be a place to stay."
Narrator: The anticipated summer onslaught was becoming a national story. In late May, Look Magazine sent a young writer to live undercover as a hippie in the Haight.
W. M. Hedgepeth, Writer: Before I had got the assignment, I had just paid peripheral attention to the hippie movement. I was just a straight-looking person, who happened to wear an eye patch as a result of an automobile accident. And wore a tie, suit, that kind of thing. But then after that, after Haight-Ashbury, I decided what in the world I want to wear a tie for again.
Narrator: Within hours of his arrival on Haight Street, William Hedgepeth had been offered free food, clothing, shelter and LSD.
Hedgepeth: It would have been completely phony to go out there and then be a total spy and just report on these people. I mean, there was just no sense in that. You know, I mean, this is participatory journalism, you know. It's a dirty job, somebody's got to do it. So, I figured that I was taking these drugs on behalf of the American people, in order to tell them the truth. It seemed to me then that the new phenomenon of hippies was part of a religious movement. They were completely sympathetic and loving, in fact, toward others. They handed out flowers to tourists and naysayers, and people who demeaned them. I was so entranced with it that I thought, well, this is a perfectly good alternative universe to me. I mean, you don't need money, you know, don't need anything. I can, I could stay here if I wanted to. It was as benign an expression of the finer angels of people's nature than I have ever seen before.
Narrator: In June, a siren song on top-40 radio reached into every corner of America, beckoning the young and the curious to join the pilgrimage.
Charles Perry: And that was the vision. There was, you know, every day, you saw scores and scores of people, maybe hundreds of people showing up, just gaping that this was the great place. And this was where they were going to be.
Berg: We were being delivered an audience by people coming to San Francisco, so we welcomed it. We encouraged it. We saw it as a staging area for transforming society.
Sandi Stein: In June, I went out my window, ran away from home. I had two pairs of pants and a couple of T-shirts and I think I stole $20 from my mother. Went into Boston and a friend of mine walked up to me and said, "Hey! There's a guy with a convertible that wants to go to San Francisco, and he wants some people to go with him. You wanna go?" And I said, "Yes. You bet." There was a whole generation moving and this great sea of youth moving across the country. There were hippie way stations, you know, that were full of people like us, you know, doing similar things.
Narrator: At dawn on June 21, the official beginning of the Summer of Love, several hundred hippies gathered on a hilltop near the Haight to celebrate the Summer Solstice. It was an affirmation of their connection to the natural world -- a connection that was becoming harder to maintain as the Haight-Ashbury population swelled. In fact, many of the original hippies had already begun to flee the city for communes in the countryside or to pursue a spiritual quest. But with schools now out for the summer, young acolytes and thrill-seekers continued to swarm into San Francisco. After hitchhiking across the country, Sandi Stein was finally dropped off on the corner of Haight and Ashbury.
Sandi Stein: It was like arriving in Wonderland. Like, you pushed on the mirror, you know, like Alice pushing, pushing, pushing on the mirror and then finally you come through.
Claudia King: Everybody was talking this love, peace, you know, racism was supposed to be really unhip. I mean there's all these things that were, you know, not acceptable for a few minutes, you know? It was just the little short time, but it was really just like something that shimmered,
Phil Morningstar: I kind went crazy when I went there. You could go in Golden Gate Park and sit up on Hippie Hill and meet a group of people, say hi, and just start smoking with them and the next thing you're at their place, partying with them, and you're sleeping with one of the girls. It was great!
Claudia King: You might see people making love on the street corner and have to walk around them and say "Hmm, hmm." It was just, I mean, it was out there!
Sandi Stein: I heard a voice behind me say, you're going to need some shoes. And probably a coat." I said, "I don't know where I'm going to get one." She said, "Well, I do." And, she stood up and she said, "My name is Angel." And I said, "I'm Sandy." And, she said, "We need to go over to the Free Store." What in the world is a free store?
Selvin: The Free Store, what fun that was. I mean, just the idea was liberating, a place where they gave you things where money was no longer the relevant issue.
Goldhaft: At that time, people didn't have garage sales. People, if they moved -- and people moved around a lot -- didn't have anything to do with their stuff. When we opened up a free store and said, "Okay, bring your stuff here and we'll redistribute it for you." Everything came into the Free Store. Everything.