CELEBRATE! : Orange County’s First 100 Years : COMING OF AGE : HIPPIE HAVEN

In the ‘60s, Laguna Beach, with about 13,000 residents, was inundated by as many as 3,000 flower children. For many residents, it was an acrimonious time. For others, it was a magical mystery tour through a new age. Beth Leeds, above, of Laguna Canyon attended the Happening:”It evolved so fast we just went along with the flow.”

On a chill but clear Christmas morning 19 years ago, the scent of incense and marijuana filled the air over a lush, tree-covered Laguna Canyon landscape. As a sliver of dappled light beckoned the new day, longhaired flower children congregated near a stage in Sycamore Flats. Shortly after dawn, a young girl with an acoustic guitar walked onto the stage and began singing in a tremulous voice, joining the chirping of hundreds of birds. So commenced a three-day rock festival--from Dec. 25 to 27, 1970--that attracted about 15,000 youths armed with peace signs and flower power. The Happening, as it was called, marked the end of a colorful, though inharmonious, period in Laguna Beach’s recent past.

Between 1967 and 1971, the cozy art colony became known nationally as a haven for hippies. The city, which then had only about 13,000 residents, was inundated by a roving population of hippies that reached its peak at about 3,000 in late 1969.

For many residents, it was an acrimonious time during which they saw these hirsute, oddly dressed intruders as spoiling the city’s serenity. For others, it was a magical mystery tour through a new age.

The flower children trekked across America on soul-searching crusades and came to Laguna because of the mild weather and its climate of permissiveness, elements that had attracted artists since the turn of the century.

The hippies lived in caves above the city or in ramshackle homes in the canyon, slept on the beach, organized love-ins and, police contend, turned Laguna Beach into a sanctuary for drug users.

BETH LEEDS, WHO RAN A vegetarian restaurant on Coast Highway where hippies used to hang out, was among those at the Happening.

“It evolved so fast we just went along with the flow,” she said recently while relaxing in her Laguna Canyon home. “We didn’t know what to expect. It sort of started as an idea to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ. It was never meant to be another Woodstock.”

But as word got out, there were rumors that such superstars as Joan Baez, Bob Dylan and George Harrison would be there, and youths expecting Woodstock West inundated Laguna Beach.

With beads and blankets, bracelets and backpacks, they arrived in beat-up VW vans and on motorcycles and bicycles, strung along Coast Highway north and south of the city, looking like a band of refugees. Police estimated at the time that cars were streaming into the area on Christmas Day at a rate of 500 per hour.

Although the big-name musicians failed to materialize, Buddy Miles and a number of local rock groups performed. People danced on the grounds, participated in sing-alongs, chanted and enjoyed free drugs and free love. For three days, Leeds says, an atmosphere of peace, love and understanding prevailed.

But not everyone was understanding.

The influx of humanity caused the City Council to order the police to put up barricades on Coast Highway and Laguna Canyon Road on Dec. 26 to stop the flow of festival-goers. For eight hours, Laguna Beach was isolated from the world. Still, the hippies kept coming, hiking over the hills when they could not get through on the main roads.

Some residents panicked, says Alex Jimenez, a Laguna detective who worked during the Happening. Fearing that the festival would continue beyond its planned three days, frantic residents rushed to stores to stock up on food, causing traffic jams downtown.

Laguna officials called upon neighboring communities to help them assemble a police force of about 400 riot-equipped officers. They even borrowed a tank from the National Guard, though it never left the Laguna Beach High School football field where it was parked. Jimenez says that the law enforcement team took over the high school, where officers slept on makeshift bunks Christmas night and through the weekend.

Not wanting to incite a riot, the police were low-key, and Jimenez, now retired and living in San Clemente, says that the youths were cooperative. When police asked them to turn over their drugs with the agreement there would be no arrests, most complied. Three drug-related deaths were reported nonetheless.

Still, the youths were orderly. When police requested that the crowd disperse after three days--the length of the organizers’ permit to hold the festival on the private canyon property--most left quietly. Leeds says about 1,000 stragglers stayed behind after the weekend, many to help clean up the site.

“We wanted to leave the canyon the way we found it,” says Leeds, who today is active in environmental issues when she is not waitressing at a Laguna cafe.

But before the clean-up operation could begin, police early that Monday morning, Dec. 28, descended from the hills like a cavalry charge. Clusters of the remaining hippies were escorted onto school buses.

“People were running everywhere,” Leeds recalls. “Some didn’t have time to gather up their sleeping bags or belongings. They just had time to get their clothes on and were taken away.”

THE HAPPENING WAS but the culmination of years of conflict between the hippies and the city establishment.

“It’s an era the city went through, and I’m glad it’s over,” says Neil Purcell, Laguna’s silver-haired, robust police chief.

Purcell’s sentiment is shared by many who remember those tumultuous times.

About nine months before the Happening, city officials responded to the public outcry by passing a host of ordinances to discourage transients from staying too long. They barred people from sitting on curbs or lying on sidewalks, and police enforced the letter of the law--even citing jaywalkers. Weathered, broken-down cottages shared by large groups of hippies were inspected and condemned, forcing the youths’ ouster.

Belinda Blacketer, an attorney and one-time Laguna planning commissioner, recalls being harassed in front of her dress shop, the Pink Daisy, along Coast Highway.

“We used to play bounce ball with a little girl on the sidewalk, and the police stopped us,” she says. “We weren’t hippies. I wore dresses and makeup. When all these young, weird people hit town, the townspeople were aghast. They tried to turn it into an armed camp.”

But the police felt they had to take some action to appease the business community, which was vehemently against the youths.

“We were madder than hell,” says Bill Thomas, a businessman who has been in the community since 1947. “They hurt business for a period of time. You couldn’t walk down the sidewalk without stepping on them. They had no respect for anybody.”

City Council meetings became forums for heated discussions and often had to be moved to the high school to accommodate the crowds. Charlton Boyd, a longtime Laguna businessman and former City Council member, recalls that one councilman suggested in 1970 that the best remedy for the city’s “nuisance” was to bomb the caves where the hippies slept on the ground amid peace signs they had carved in the walls.

But often the council resisted the pressures to take action against the hippies. Then-city administrator James Wheaton told a reporter in March, 1970: “If we have laws that let me turn away the hippies, what’s to keep me from turning around and using that same power to turn away shorthairs?”

Such sentiment infuriated the business community. About 80 merchants banned together in April, 1970, and marched on City Hall, demanding a crackdown on hippies. Wheaton responded with a hastily arranged meeting where, The Times reported, restaurant owner Jules Marine said: “We’re not a lynch mob. But we want action, and I mean action today. We want our laws rigidly enforced.” The merchants’ outburst was timed just before City Council elections, which centered on the hippie issue. The debate at community forums involving the five candidates reflected pent-up fears that had been building since the hippies started settling in Laguna three years earlier.

The three candidates who were perceived to be most critical of hippies were elected to the council that spring. Subsequently, an almost total overhaul of the city administration occurred, which helped bring about the hippies’ demise.

Much of the opposition to the hippies’ presence in Laguna focused on the unabashed drug use and drug dealing that started in 1967.

“I got a real surprise when I first came here,” says Purcell, who was a rookie Laguna police officer in 1968. “You could go out at sunset on the beach and literally see hundreds of people smoking pot. I saw it as a situation that totally got away from the community.”

It was Purcell who arrested Timothy Leary in Laguna on the night of Dec. 26, 1968. Purcell says he didn’t know until he saw some identification that the man he was investigating was Leary, the one-time Harvard psychology lecturer turned “high priest of pot” who lived in Laguna for a time in 1968.

Purcell recalls that, while on patrol, he came upon a battered station wagon in the middle of a street. He says that there were a man, a woman and a youth in the car, and that the youth in the back seat was causing some sort of commotion.

Purcell smelled the odor of marijuana in Leary’s car and called for a backup unit. Once help arrived, he confiscated two marijuana butts as evidence and made the arrest, he says, noting that he also confiscated a number of drugs from Leary’s wife, Rosemary, and their son, John.

All three were taken to jail on possession charges, then released on bail the same night. Rosemary and John were ultimately acquitted, but Leary was sentenced in March, 1970, to 1 to 10 years in prison by Orange County Superior Court Judge Byron McMillan. Later, however, Leary escaped from the men’s prison at San Luis Obispo and remained a fugitive in Algiers, Afghanistan and Switzerland before being extradited to the United States in 1973. He served more than 2 1/2 years in prison in California before being paroled in 1975. Today, at 67, he lives in Beverly Hills and is a lecturer and president of a computer-software company.

Leary’s arrest in Laguna received national attention and fueled fears about the city’s growing drug trade, which, police say, was centered in a two-block radius in Laguna Canyon.

While the transient hippies--the runaways and rovers--lived in inexpensive hotels or in the caves in what they called Indian Village, a neighborhood of resident hippies emerged in ramshackle houses at Woodland Drive and Roosevelt Avenue in the summer of 1968. The locals called their two-block community Dodge City.

Andy Wing, a longtime Laguna artist who lived in the area, says the hippies’ arrival startled him: “I looked over on a vacant lot next door and saw a group of 50 people sleeping in bags,” he says. “They just wandered in and there they were.”

But they brought a communal feeling to the neighborhood. He says the hippies held weekly picnics with “a rare feeling of joy and camaraderie.”

The feeling was enhanced by a street-bazaar atmosphere in which drugs were omnipresent. Wing told a reporter in 1971: “I used to see kids running up and down the paths with garbage can liners full of kilo bricks of marijuana.”

The neighborhood had but one entrance, a dirt street, and it backed up to the brushy hillside. Its overgrown paths concealed hiding spots where lookouts watched for local police. Purcell claims that residents trained watchdogs to react to the scent of oil on undercover officers’ guns.

According to testimony presented in 1973 to the Orange County Grand Jury, which was investigating the drug scene in Laguna, hundreds of grams of pure LSD were brought to Dodge City, where it was buffered and cut into individual doses. A single gram of LSD could be cut into 3,500 doses.

Dodge City wasn’t the only area where drugs were prevalent. In the caves of Indian Village, the sharing of pot, pills and peyote was a nightly ritual. But the caves were difficult to reach at night and thus safe from police raids.

“There is something special about the atmosphere at Indian Village,” Virgil Kret wrote in The Times in 1970. “The caves were whittled out of the sandstone by centuries of wind, and despite the sight of the city far below and the sounds of traffic and passing aircraft, it has a certain timelessness about it.”

Citing health and safety problems, Laguna police often raided the caves during the day, sending the dwellers on their way.

But during blissful times, the community thrived.

Hippies from Indian Village and Dodge City convened at love-ins held in a vacant lot in Laguna’s Top of the World neighborhood, where local rock groups would perform with such superstars as Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Tower of Power.

Corky Smith, a former hippie who is now an archeologist living in Laguna, says the gatherings were informal but festive. Drugs were passed around like tea and crumpets at a British garden party.

Smith says he took LSD a few times, but one bad trip at a July 4, 1970, love-in ended his experimentation. He and a friend went to the party where Dodge City leaders were passing out Orange Sunshine, a special concoction of orange juice laced with acid. Orange Sunshine was a home brew designed by the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, a close-knit organization that was influential in Laguna’s drug underground, according to Orange County court records.

Primarily because of the drugs, Charlton Boyd says, “a sigh of relief rose from parents when the movement phased out in Laguna.”

It was just such a sigh that this community breathed when the hippies were bused out of town that late December day in 1970.