LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Hippies: San Francisco
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The lifestyle hippies led predates the term. The group evolved from ancient times, some even say as far back as Julius Ceasar and Jesus Christ. But the beginning of the modern hippie began in Germany near the end of the nineteenth century. Many youth movements were formed in reaction to a more industrialized, technocratic society. Adolf Just opened a retreat in 1896 that inspired Gandhi to begin a Nature Cure sanitarium in India. Just spoke against pollution, meat, traditional education, and many other things.
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The hippies celebrated a few things such as the three-day 1966 Trips Festival, which had LSD (Lysergic Acid Diethyl amide), the Grateful Dead, strobe lights, and an Olympic trampolinist jumping from a balcony. Another celebration was the "Be-in". It was first held in San Francisco on Saturday, January 14, 1967. It celebrated life, a day of drugs, poetry, rock music, and love. The publicity surrounding the "be-in" enticed more kids to San Francisco.
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It took about a year for the fledgling "hippie" beatniks to be transformed into the now famous long-haired hippies of San Francisco. So a strict (though narrow) definition of a hippie would be a member of the young counterculture community who began living in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhoods starting around 1965. According to one author who has studied the era, there were not all that many. He estimated that there were perhaps 800 true hippies at the height of it all. This number seems awful low, though. Crowds at San Francisco rock concerts soon began to number in the thousands.
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Some of the earliest San Francisco hippies were former students at San Francisco State College[41] who became intrigued by the developing psychedelic hippie music scene. [33] These students joined the bands they loved, living communally in the large, inexpensive Victorian apartments in the Haight-Ashbury.[42] Young Americans around the country began moving to San Francisco, and by June 1966, around 15,000 hippies had moved into the Haight.[43] The Charlatans, Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and the Grateful Dead all moved to San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury neighborhood during this period. Activity centered around the Diggers, a guerrilla street theatre group that combined spontaneous street theatre, anarchistic action, and art happenings in their agenda to create a "free city." By late 1966, the Diggers opened free stores which simply gave away their stock, provided free food, distributed free drugs, gave away money, organized free music concerts, and performed works of political art.[44]
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To the untrained eye the hippies looked a lot alike. When a writer went to San Francisco around 1966, she saw them to be middle class, largely white, and entirely heterosexual. But the hippies were less homogenous in lifestyle and ideology than it first appeared. In a few years they could be divided (with fair accuracy) into three species: flower children, freaks, and heads.
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Regarding this period of history, the July 7, 1967, Time magazine featured a cover story entitled, "The Hippies: The Philosophy of a Subculture." The article described the guidelines of the hippie code: "Do your own thing, wherever you have to do it and whenever you want. Drop out. Leave society as you have known it. Leave it utterly. Blow the mind of every straight person you can reach. Turn them on, if not to drugs, then to beauty, love, honesty, fun."[51] It is estimated that around 100,000 people traveled to San Francisco in the summer of 1967.
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