Santa Barbara Current

Santa Barbara Current

Eringer's News Revue

Summer of Love

By Robert Eringer

Aug 11, 2026
∙ Paid
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Remembering San Francisco’s “Summer of Love”

For one extraordinary summer in 1967, a few square blocks in San Francisco became the unofficial capital of an international revolution.

A revolution of hair. Of music. Of clothing.

Of consciousness.

Most of all, of peace and love.

And an audacious notion that love might accomplish what governments never could.

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My own memento from the ‘sixties, purchased in 1968 from a “head shop” in Westwood, LA

In the mid-1960s, Haight-Ashbury was one of San Francisco’s cheapest neighborhoods. The once-grand Victorian houses had grown shabby. Rents were low. Students, artists, poets, musicians, and runaways, moved in because they could afford to.

The movement that followed was a chemical reaction.

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