The Summer of Love

Grateful Dead, 710 Ashbury. 1967

In 1967 I was living on Frederick Street a few blocks away from where the Dead lived. I used to walk by their place when I went down to the Panhandle to shoot baskets. Once, on the way home, dribbling the ball up Ashbury. they were sitting on the steps. Not sure if I knew who they were at the time, though I was in a smallish crowd who heard them play on the pandhandle. Jerry Garcia before the beard!  

One of them said something like, "Hey, throw it around," and held out his hands. I quickly passed it to him, and he passed it back. Smiles all around, as I went on my way.

That's how the Haight was at the time. A girl actually handed me a flower once on Haight, which I appreciated. She probably thought I needed it, and she would have been right. I was a short-haired, beardless young guy in horn-rimmed glasses who was workng as a clerk for a corporation downtown.