San Francisco Chronicle – May 20, 2007

Summer of Love: 40 Years Later
Peter Berg and Judy Goldhaft

PETER BERG AND JUDY GOLDHAFT, directors of Planet Drum, a grassroots ecology outreach program that encourages regional sustainability around the world. THEN: Peter Berg and his wife, Judy Goldhaft, were original members of the Diggers, the Haight-Ashbury community group that served free food daily in the Panhandle, operated the Free Store and so much more.

BERG: 1966 was the Digger year. Emmett Grogan walked into the San Francisco Mime Troupe when I was the assistant director and Judy had been there a long time.

GOLDHAFT: I directed things and performed in things.

BERG: We were involved with the idea of taking theater off the stage and into people’s hands. So I had evolved a concept of guerrilla theater, and guerrilla theater was to actively engage people in some action, or witness some event that would make them sort of a conspirator. [The couple had participated in early guerrilla theater pieces during the Free Speech Movement protests at UC Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza in ’64]. I had cast Emmett in a couple of small cabaret things, and it became obvious to all of us that the next step — you know, in the theater it’s called breaking the fourth wall — the next step was to have actors doing things that acted out alternatives. The label I put on that was ‘life acting.’ And by the way, Emmett was not a very good stage actor, but he was a hell of a life actor! He was a pretty charismatic person. He and Billy Murcott went on top of the building during the Fillmore riots [triggered by the September, 1966 police shooting of an African-American teenager suspected of robbery] and they saw this acting out of, one could say, revolution, maybe with a small ‘r.’ What it inspired them to do was to make a kind of manifesto for people who weren’t involved with the black struggle, that was on an equal footing. And to them it was to be communalistic and altruistic. Billy Mercott had been reading a book about (Gerrard) Winstanley, the leader of the English heretical, communalistic group — and very Christian, by the way — called the diggers. So Billy said, ‘Well, you know, dig, like to dig, dig this, man. Together they made a manifesto that they tacked up on the front door of the Mime Troupe on Howard Street, next to that journalists’ bar, the M&M. This was like [Martin Luther] tacking the 99 thesis on the cathedral door.

I looked at it, and I saw the life-actor potential in it. Which was, a group who called themselves Diggers could begin acting out a lot of the positive alternatives that the Left presumed would occur if there was a successful, small ‘r’ revolution. And for me, those were more anarchistic, than they were ideologically Lefty. It goes something like this: If you say something is wrong, then you can propose something that’s better. The better thing needs to be seen to be believed. So, we thought, if you act out the ideas — a lot of people collaborated on the ideas, ‘everything is free, do your own thing.’

GOLDHAFT: That was the Diggers’ phrase. … We opened the first Free Store right after the manifesto.

BERG: The first free store was somebody’s basement. Then one of the other people who dropped out of the Mime Troupe with us — about 20 of us left at once to do this, take it to the streets — and I went down and passed ourselves off a potential boutique operators. We were to have a psychedelic boutique at Cole and Carl. And then we got a lease to rent what then became a free store, that I named Trip Without a Ticket.

GOLDHAFT: And that was the Free Store during the Summer of Love. There were several others before that. There was one on Frederick Street, there was one a Waller street. There was a bunch them.

BERG: If you’re getting this idea of theater as the motif here, you can see that a storefront named Trip Without a Ticket, that is a free store, is an extraordinary theatrical phenomenon.

GOLDHAFT: Early on we started providing food in the park. For anybody who came.

BERG: It’s free because it’s yours.

GOLDHAFT: A lot of it was discarded. You’d go to the wholesale produce market. There were certain things they wouldn’t let them sell, and there were certain things, at that period of time, were too ripe to hold to go to market. Like ripe tomatoes, not overripe tomatoes, that they couldn’t ship to Safeway.

BERG: Our adversary, we felt, for consciousness, was the popular media. Because the popular media were broadcasting and distributing information about what was going on in the Haight Ashbury and that’s what people began seeing and coming to observe. So the media, without any representation from anybody in the Haight Ashbury, was giving this image of what was going on. Because indeed, there was this extraordinary phenomena happening. People were walking down the street six deep. Kids were coming in from all over the United States wearing rainbow-colored clothes and psychedelic scarves around their neck, and suddenly everybody is smoking pot. And if you drive through the Haight you’re smelling it. People are sitting on the sidewalk, they’re dancing on the sidewalk, they’re stopping the traffic. I lived there, so I saw this going on. My model was North Beach. So I wasn’t surprised at the beginning, at the first stage of it, like, when Janis (Joplin) and her crowd would come bangin’ down the sidewalk. You would see the Further people [Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters], psychedelic cars or whatever. What I was surprised at was the absolute, utter volume of it. When it started coming after a new song would come out — ‘It’s a Warm San Francisco Night,’ ‘Flowers in Your Hair’ — or some band, or something would be on the news and the next day, 1,000 people would show up. Then the Beatles came to visit. And the music itself, our own music, was making its own San Francisco sound.

People were teeming through the Haight Ashbury. And we realized at a certain point that we could do a theatrically oriented event in the street that would block up the traffic, i.e. cause a riot. It was a possession of the territory. In anarchist history, there’s this phenomenon of making a real event occur. So the Paris Commune in France in 1870-something, was an example of taking the heights — I think it was Montparnasse — and holding it as a liberated territory. Well, we saw the opportunity to take the Haight Ashbury as a liberated territory where this credo, ‘everything is free, do your own thing,’ would hold sway, rather than things and their prices. That’s a line out of Julian Beck, by the way.

We had them [the Julian Beck Living Theater] at the Straight Theater at an event called “The End of the War,” and they really could not understand what we were doing. We had naked performers there, and they were walking around in jock straps, because part of their Paradise Now show was, ‘We can’t walk around without our clothes.’ And people were saying, ‘Take it off! We all are.”

GOLDHAFT: We found them huddled in the balcony, saying, ‘What can we do? What can we do?’

BERG: Julian Beck was really an extraordinary theatrical person in his day. In fact, I always thought he might have anticipated that this would happen, that the theater would leap right off the stage and go out among the people.

GOLDHAFT: It was an incredible time of surplus. We opened the Free Store, and things poured into it, just from people, from anybody. We would get a call from Potrero Hill. Somebody had passed away and their entire household of goods was available. Would you please take it away? People didn’t do garage sales then, they just gave things to us. Cars. Land.

BERG: The cash part of it was either from individuals getting welfare, or the fact that after I made a poster titled “1 % FREE,” a lot of the merchants on Haight Street decided that it referred to them. And some of them saw it as extortion. It was never intended for that. It was just one of those things that happened. There was a woman who owned the bead store on Haight Street. I walked in to see her one day, and she said, ‘I’m paying the rent on the Free Store. Every time it comes up, just bring me an envelope, or tell me, and I’ll pay the rent.’

We were involving people in events on the street, or involving them in events in the park. Talk about instant and amazing phenomenon. You could print something on an 8-and-a-half-by-11 piece of paper and in three hours 5,000 people would show up for an event in the Panhandle or Speedway Meadow.

GOLDHAFT: We knew a lot of people were coming to San Francisco. We knew that they needed basic human goods. We also did the free medical clinic as well. It started in the Free Store. We also considered that we were providing a university of the streets. We knew the people would go back to where they came from, but we thought that if we could show them that society could be different, that they could go and recreate their own society when they went back.

BERG: Later, when I was traveling around the U.S. in the ’70s, I remember every time I’d come into a household that was communalistic or back to the land, there would be an area called the free box. And people would say, ‘that’s the Digger thing.’ They got that from us. But I think more than imitating it with a free box in the corner, was that people got interested in new experiences through us. And that’s what we deliberately tried to do. The whole Digger thing was set up as a kind of an interactive, participatory event, to kind of recruit people into a lifestyle. Did you know the free food was served behind an orange frame? Yeah, it was 12-foot square. It was called the Free Frame of Reference. And the reason was, traffic coming past it in the morning, when we were serving breakfast, at Oak Street, would see this event taking place within a picture frame.

GOLDHAFT: Somebody said, if you put something in a frame, it’s art.

BERG: John Cage. … We inducted people into these liberating experiences. When Judy says university of the street, that university was liberate yourself. So when you came out the other end of the pipe, everything is free, do your own thing, would be your creed, wherever you went. It wasn’t ideology, it was an experiential phenomenon.

This is 2007, and it’s been longer from now to then, than then was from the ’30s. It’s an incredible thing to consider. Since time has speeded up a lot in our era, that makes it really antique. And there are people today who lived through it who tend to renounce it. Like, we were wrong-headed, or we didn’t know the effects of drugs, or we thought because we acted it out it would happen but it didn’t. That kind of thing. I don’t know where that spirit of renunciation comes from. I am not like that. I’m not interesting in talking to the current consciousness as though something about this previous consciousness was wrong. It was what it was. And in way, there were things achieved, and achievable then, that aren’t now. It stands as a record of having actually occurred. Like the Paris Commune.

One day I was talking to Gregory Corso, the poet, and he said, ‘You know, today’s the first day of the rest of your life.’ And I said. ‘What?’ and he said, ‘Didn’t you ever realize that? Today’s the first day of the rest of your life.’ It was first time I ever heard, or anyone had ever heard it, because it was original. Within two years, it was on a Bank of America billboard. You know, ‘Bank of America, because today is the first day is the rest of your life.’ So was this an effective period of time? Did things flow forward from it? The fact is it tended to make a lot of things acceptable, in themselves, that were not acceptable otherwise. I think women’s liberation, although it wasn’t a theme of the ’60s, was possible because the ’60s were possible. Everybody enjoying recreational psychedelic experiences today — which I don’t have to tell you, all you have to do is go to Candlestick Park.

I’m talking about this very liberated spirit, where people thought they could start over fresh. And because of that, I believe a lot of things were let loose. Like the first openly celebratory gay publication I remember was a newspaper that came out in the Haight Ashbury. And there was an implication that you could be gay and it was OK, in the ‘everything is free, do your own thing’ mentality. And certainly acceptance of multiculturalism was also part of that. If you went those events in the park, you saw everybody. And when the Diggers evolved into Free City, we did events in every major neighborhood of the city that had an ethnic imprimatur, like Chinatown, Hunters Point, those were the neighborhoods we did events in. There was a black Free Store in the Fillmore. It was an African American who started it.

GOLDHAFT: Everything that the quote ‘hippies’ were doing, or wanted to do, has become part of the culture — everything from alternative medicine to alternative birthing situations, organic food, local food.

BERG: Human relationships with nature, rather than institutions. Somebody walking around barefoot, who’s eating organic food, with flowers in their hair, is reflecting a lot of nature phenomena, not just goody-goody, nicey-nicey, peacy-lovey. The Nature part was a big component in the back to the land movement.

GOLDHAFT: Very anti-industrial.

BERG: What I did as a result of that was to live for awhile in a very, very remote rural commune, Black Bear Ranch. And the experience I had there with Native Americans who lived nearby, and with coping through nine feet of snow in the winter, was quite an experience. Gathering wild food, growing our own food, visiting other communal groups, made me yearn for a nature relationship that was not institutional. When the U.N. had its first environment conference in 1972 in Stockholm, I went there. I billed myself as a representative of North American land-based communal groups. And I brought a video camera and showed footage of communal groups. I was in the milieu of people who were not allowed to stay in the conference because it was actually for representatives of nation states, institution. It made me begin thinking of what is the natural area that includes people, and came up with the concept of a bioregion, and Planet Drum Foundation, from 1973 to present, has been promoting this idea that you are part of the place that you live. And that’s that the way to maintain and protect natural systems and a guide for sustainability. Gary Snyder was one of the participants in forming Planet Drum.

GOLDHAFT: The theater pieces that I’ve continued to produce are based on human relationships to natural systems. They’re essentially bio-regional theater performances.

BERG: That period was real, and it was extraordinary, so it should be incorporated, I would think, in the Bay Area’s avant-garde tradition.

GOLDHAFT: The ideas for the rest of the continent spring out of the earth here. The Aloni Indians said, we dance here on the edge of the world.

— Jesse Hamlin