First Draft Follies: "Kids," Beer, and the 1960s, Part 8 of 8

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Part One --- Part Two --- Part Three --- Part Four

Part Five --- Part Six --- Part Seven --- Part Eight 

Welcome to First Draft Follies, an ongoing series here at the blog. This edition is a true folly and a prime example of why my first drafts are so damn long: I research what is intended to be a minor point, become fascinated by this minor point, and next thing I know, I've written an embarrassing amount of completely extraneous text.

The material is presented "as is" from the first draft of the manuscript that became the book Ambitious Brew. In a few places I added one or two words in brackets -- [like this] -- for clarification. The excerpt is long, so I'm breaking it into manageable bits and posting those bits over the next few days.

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A different music-and-drugs scene unfolded in and around San Francisco. Since the 1940s, physicians, psychiatrists, and others had been experimenting with the therapeutic possibilities of LSD, but in the 1960s, some northern Californians began investigating the drug as a source of creative work.

In 1961, Myron Stolaroff founded the International Foundation for Advanced Study, where he and others studied on the effects of LSD on volunteer participants. Stolaroff, an engineer and the first employee hired by Alexander Poniatoff (who founded Ampex Electric, a pioneer in the development of electronic recording devices), tested the drug on Douglas Engelbart; Stewart Brand, who later created the Whole Earth Catalog; Bob Sackman, who co-founded Sun Microsystems; and more than three hundred others, including faculty from Stanford and San Francisco State College, physicians, and other middle-class professionals.

The experience filtered through the minds, offices, and designs of the men and women laying the groundwork for the nation’s computerized future. Ken Kesey forged another kind of drug scene. In the early sixties, Kesey participated in university-sponsored experiments with psychoactive and psychedelic drugs. He smuggled LSD out of the lab so he could share it with friends.

His gatherings, first in Palo Alto and then nearby La Honda, attracted other young men and women interested in “alternative” thinking: Jerry Garcia and Allen Ginsberg showed up. So did Neal Cassady, Larry McMurtry, and Hunter S. Thompson (who brought along his buddies, the Hell’s Angels). Hugh Romney, later known as Wavy Gravy, [dropped in] for acid-laced venison stew, but in 1965 he headed south to a mountaintop overlooking the San Fernando Valley where he founded Hog Farm, one of the most important and long-lived of the sixties’ communes.

California’s allure destroyed San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood, a longtime hangout for beats, poets, artists, serious young men, celebrities, and drop-outs. In the mid-sixties, an influx of tourists, “topless bars” and kids drove up the area’s rents and “destroyed” its “Bohemian” character. (*20)

One resident complained that North Beach had deteriorated into a bastion of “‘commercialism.’” (*21) He and others shifted their base of operations to Haight-Ashbury, prized for its cheap housing and enlightened mix of lesbians, “marijuana users,” people of “artistic bent”; “‘hippies,’” “‘heads,’” and “beatniks”; “crusaders for all kinds of causes,” and homosexuals, “artistic gentlemen” who took “tremendous pride” in refurbishing the area’s dilapidated real estate. (*22)

[But] one North Beach devotee headed to a different San Francisco neighborhood.

[At which point I finally got where I was headed, namely to Fritz Maytag and the founding of Anchor Brewing. See Chapter Seven of Ambitious Brew.]

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Sources:

*20: Lew Bryson, “Fritz Maytag.” (Lew originally provided me with a paper copy of the interview, but it's now available online.)

*21: “A New Paradise for Beatniks,” San Francisco Examiner, September 5, 1965, p. 5.

*22: “Haight Street Hippies--Are ‘Beats’ Good Business?,” San Francisco Examiner, September 8, 1965, p. 11.

Random Rant, Econ 101, and Antidotes for Nausea

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Silly me. Somehow I thought the troops would rally 'round the president. No. Instead, we've been subjected to a week of senators and representatives strutting around the capital building playing "Mine's Bigger."

Which I wouldn't mind, except -- Rome is collapsing while they're busy comparing dicks/clits/facelifts/whatever.... I belive that most people who run for "high office" start their careers with good intentions. (*1)

But then they get comfy and get used to the free health insurance and the gym and the drivers and the other perks and pretty soon they forget why they went there in the first place. Which is why there oughta be term limits for both House and Senate. (*2)

But I digress. Point is: someone needs to be thinking beyond dick-size and where the next cocktail party is.

For an antidote to your nausea, and some clear thinking/writing on the disaster that is our economy, some Sunday-morning reading:

This from Matthew Yglesias. Tyler Cowen's response.

Lots of ponderings from Patrick Emerson, but this in particular.

And then of course there's always Krugman.

(Yes, the internet improves our lives. Ten years ago, it would have been tough to find so much accessible clear thinking on such difficult topics.) (Gee, I hope the electrical grid holds up under the weight of so many internet connections, and that somehow we can figure out how to make high-speed internet affordable for everyone because clearly digital communication/debate and digital information creation/gathering/access are The Way We Live Now. (*3))

(Oh. Wait. That would require the House and Senate to stop dicking around and do something and . . . . ) (Oh. Never mind.)

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*1: There are, of course, exceptions. I'm pretty sure Palin, for example, only wants to sit in the Senate because it's good for her, not for her constituents. I'm not picking on her, mind you; there are plenty of Palin-types out there. But she's the only obvious example I can think of at the moment.

*2: For more information on term limits, see here, here, and here.

*3: Nod to my second-favorite Anthony Trollope novel. If you can't bring yourself to wade through it (it runs about a thousand pages), at least watch the BBC production, which is spectacular.