Hippies: Where Have All the Flowers Gone?

It was the most frolicsome funeral in memory. Through San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park wended a legion of hippies, the lads bedizened with beads and scrapes, the lasses with furs and long velvet dresses. Then came the casket, a 15-ft. grey box labeled “Summer of Love,” and behind it an equally outsized stretcher on which reclined a hirsute “corpse,” clutching a zinnia to its breast—symbol of the death of the flower children. Television cameras ogled the scene as the mourners gathered around the casket and filled it with charms, peacock feathers, orange peels, bread (both edible and negotiable), flags, crucifixes, and a marijuana-flavored cookie. As the strains of God Bless America and Hari Krishna echoed from the pastel hillsides of the Hashbury, the casket was set on fire and a shout went up: “Hippies are dead: now the Free Men will come through!”

Thus last week in the mecca of mindlessness did the hippies proclaim their own demise. It was probably inevitable. Their every antic reported at length in the national and local press, their ranks swollen with thousands of “plastic” or part-time hippies, their language and life-style copied by “straight” society, the hippies of San Francisco have come to feel that hip is no longer a fun trip. As fall weather set in, the bloom went out of flower power, and last week’s “Death of Hip” funeral was an attempt to purify the movement.

Indian Givers. The Haight-Ashbury’s veteran hippies are unhappy about all the attention they have been getting, about the misuse of drugs in their community, and the rise in disease rates. Many of the plastic flower people have gotten hooked on amphetamines, and these “speed freaks”—who shoot drugs with hypodermics—are passing hepatitis around on dirty needles. Venereal disease has also spread, and too many would-be hippies have allowed marijuana and LSD to become the main focus of their lives. Some of the most serious hippies, alarmed by these developments, have given up drugs altogether. Others have fled the scene.

Since San Francisco is the trend setter in hippiedom, it is likely that the same disillusion will soon become evident in other hippie centers like Los Angeles, Chicago and New York City. Commercialism was rife last week among the “work tribes” of Manhattan’s Lower East Side: craft shops were bursting with tourists and the Group Image was busy shooting not speed but a full-length psychedelic western titled Indian Givers, in which Guru Timothy Leary plays, of all unlikely roles, a sheriff. Already a gnawing sense of malaise is setting in. Says one of the Group’s veteran members, Roger Ricco, 27: “A kid comes up and hands me a flower, and I think, ‘Nice.’ But it isn’t the same any more. Where have all the flowers gone?”