Who needs another hippie book?

Hippies in Humbolt County. From left, Ben, John, Josie, Donovan, Indigo, Ruthanne, Ezra.

When I began writing my memoirs, I wondered about this. After my farm boy childhood, and acid-head adolescence, I spent the years that I should have been in college as a homeless vagabond. When I started putting my history down chronologically, events of my life began to jump into sharper focus. Things that had bewildered me in my youth now made some sense after the passage of fifty years.

As I strained to recall the people, adventures, and fears of those days, memories rose to the surface of a dark pool like an answer on a magic 8-ball, the kid’s fortune-telling toy. The cultural earthquake that was the sixties is still reverberating with aftershocks even now, with institutions like democracy in danger of toppling around the world.

The culture wars that are still raging have unbroken roots in the Jim Crow South, the Vietnam War, the Beat movement, and the Summer of Love. Since I lived through those uncertain days in the Twentieth Century, perhaps my experiences can throw some light on this chaotic lash up of a Twenty-First Century.

Mostly I want to tell a story of a young kid who struggled to find his way in a confusing time. I almost lost it several times, but lived to tell the tale. Cold Coon & Collards (available now) sets the stage. After years as a farm boy and Navy Brat, I ended up in the Bay Area just as the sixties were revving up. Lightbulb Coffee (available soon) tells how I went on to survive homelessness, freight-hopping, hitchhiking, and jail time, and come out on the other side as a parent and Advertising Designer.