Travel

11/05/16

New York Times: Crossing America, By Rail, To the Summer of Love

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New York Times Sept. 6, 2016:

A few days after first grade ended, in June 1967, I boarded a train pulling out of Union Station in Chicago with my parents, younger brother and baby sister. My father, a University of Chicago Ph.D. candidate, had decided to bail out of academia and move to San Francisco, where he planned to devote himself to writing poetry and where, coincidentally, the Summer of Love was about to commence.

The counterculture meant nothing to me then, but that summer in San Francisco was to be historic. Over the next few months, tens of thousands of young people across America left their own cities, parents and schools and hitchhiked to the area around the corner of Haight and Ashbury Streets to tune into drugs and music, and tune out of "square" society. They converged there, having heard about free food and free love. In that summer of 1967, Haight-Ashbury transformed into the epicenter of the counterculture movement.

Read the rest of the journey here.

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