1967, The Daily Californian
“I don’t see that the hippies add anything to the campus community,” said special assistant to the dean of students and campus policeman James Sicheneder. Matzkin reported that Sicheneder was frequently called upon to ask hippies to leave the campus. Behind the world of “love and flowers” for the hippies stood acid and pot. Arrests for marijuana in Berkeley increased by 104 percent for adults between 1960 and 1966. In 1966, 474 people were reported to be arrested on narcotics charges. Berkeley police and campus representatives didn’t see the Summer of Love as the feel-good time it’s described to be.
A Bank of America branch manager and a menswear shop owner also were not feeling the love. The branch manager commented, “Although the hippies haven’t hurt us personally, the publicity of the hippy movement has had a little bit of an adverse effect on the area of the city as a whole.” The shop owner added, “(The hippies) harm the Avenue more than anything. We used to be jammed, but people from the area would rather not come.”
Matzkin noted, however, that while some shops were unhappy that hippies were scaring away prospective customers from outside the community, others were unhappy with the tourists that converged on Telegraph Avenue each weekend.
Although each business embraced the movement differently, they all agreed that television had been a major cause of the movement. The article explains that the movement had taken beatnik dissatisfaction and made it into a movement. “When you see a film of Vietnam, it is real — it affects you directly,” a Telegraph Avenue sandal maker said. “A newspaper just could never get anyone emotionally involved the way television can.” Matzkin noted that mass media brought to youth an increased awareness of world problems such as the constant threat of atomic war.
“The hippies have found a chance to study their lives, past and present, from a vantage point it would be hard to get any place else,” an article in a 1967 Alumni Association magazine said. “They are really lonely people. People think it’s a wild, libertine existence. But what the public sees is really the pleasures of the poor — drinking, sex and folk songs.”
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