I was filling out a profile form for a site the other day, and one of the questions was “ “the greatest influence in your life?”. Without hesitation, I typed in “The Hippie Movement”. That surprised me, so I started thinking about that answer.
It all started with the Beatles. I was a Beatlemaniac from the beginning. I even was lucky enough to go see them perform in Las Vegas in 1964. As the Beatles changed, I changed in my ways too. I was exposed to the ideologies of far eastern religions. I read “Siddhartha” a story of Buddha. I read about Lao Tsu and his ideas which are part of the Taoist beliefs. I found that these writings gave me a feeling of peacefulness. I was also more comfortable with non-conformists.
The last year of college I started hanging out with the hippie crowd at the University of Arizona. I was surprised that they seemed to accept me. All my life I had been shy and usually only had a small number of friends. At that time, the hippies hung out in Louie’s, one of the university’s cafeterias. There were always a few of the group in their usual corner at any given time. Individuals would come and go during the day. All of a sudden, there were lots of friendly people who seemed glad to see me when I joined them. That is where I met my first love. The group often attended music concerts held around town. That was a banner year for concerts in Tucson, AZ. I was able to see The Doors, Jimi Hendrix, The Buffalo Springfield, and The Young Rascals. It was fun to sit on the grass at the baseball stadium with my friends and enjoy those performances.
I had always been a totally Christian, church-going, shy and introverted person. Now I was being friendlier and found that hugs were a normal way to greet friends. I graduated college at the end of that year without once losing my virginity or taking drugs. My friends accepted me and never tried to intimidate me into doing things I didn’t want to do.
After college, I moved to Rapid City, South Dakota to live with my boyfriend. I admit that the virginity thing didn’t last, and I did smoke pot for a while, but I never took LSD or any other hallucinogens or hard drugs. I’m grateful for that still. We were in a beautiful area. We drove around the Black Hills and saw Mount Rushmore, Deadwood, South Dakota, an old 1880’s locomotive coming around the bend spouting black smoke, and went through Lead, South Dakota which is famous for it’s gold mines and gold jewelry.
I got the opportunity to work again that summer as a counselor in the Camp Fire Girls Camp in the mountains outside Las Vegas, Nevada. I had been exposed to the mindset of the hippies and found I was really feeling at peace with nature. So, I left Rapd City, temporarily, I thought, to share this with the little 4th grade girls for a month. Unfortunately, my boyfriend was going through changes of his own and I wasn't invited back. I ended up teaching my own 4th grade class in Bisbee, Arizona.
That was a tumultuous year in the history of the United States. Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were assassinated. There were riots in Chicago during the Democratic Convention. The hippies I knew were liberal in their political views, so these historical events were viewed from that perspective. I am still liberal in my political ideals, but I have never been a radical.
In the 70’s I joined an Ecology Club in Santa Fe, New Mexico. There were quite a few hippies in attendance. I was really impressed at how the men took part in the care of the babies, and didn’t expect the women to do it all. Due to the concerns expressed in those meetings, I encouraged the small elementary school were I taught to pick up litter around the school for Earth Day. I'll never quite forget, though, how the vice-principle jokingly called me an Earth Mother, and the other teachers snickered at that.
I am 61 years old now, but I am still a liberal in my political beliefs. I am still concerned about conservation. I started recycling cans, newspapers, and glass years before the city distributed recycling bins.
I often wonder if I ever would have married and had children without my exposure to my hippie friends.
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