Forty-five years ago, peace, love and miscalculation in Laguna Canyon

It was billed as a one-day event of peace, love and music, but after three days, it turned out to be much bigger than expected.

An estimated 25,000 people gathered in a field of sycamore trees in Laguna Canyon for what was known as the Christmas Happening.

Despite massive traffic jams, chilly night air and insufficient food, thousands of young people, Vietnam veterans and other servicemen arrived in droves on Christmas Day 1970 for a weekend party on hundreds of acres near Laguna Canyon and El Toro roads.

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It all evoked the scene a couple of thousand miles away in New York the year before. Woodstock also ran longer than planned — to an unscheduled fourth day.

“I put that out of my mind 45 years ago,” Neil Purcell, a retired Laguna Beach police chief who was a sergeant at the time, said of the Christmas Happening. “I had to stretch my mind and dig down deep to remember what happened.”

He was addressing a full house at Laguna Beach City Hall on Thursday, telling the story to people who were at the event more than four decades ago and others who were just curious.

For Sunny Taylor-Colby, it was the best Christmas of her life. As she walked amid the happening’s potential disasters — drugs, temperatures dipping into the 30s — she felt something of an Aquarian spirit in the air.

“I was 18 then and I had a wonderful time at that event with my boyfriend Bobby Lee Gregory,” said Taylor-Colby, now a Laguna Beach resident who had traveled from her hometown of Pasadena to the coastal city that day in 1970. “I rode in on a bicycle’s handlebars and it was just great. Everybody there was calm and awesome and beautiful and kind and sweet. Seriously, we were all mellow and chill.”

Purcell, 76, who began his career in 1961 as a reserve officer in Newport Beach, stepped into the limelight the year he moved to the Laguna Beach Police Department with the arrest of counterculture guru Timothy Leary. Leary went to trial in 1970 and was convicted and sentenced to 10 years in prison for possession of marijuana, LSD and hashish.

It was a highlight of Purcell’s career, and it illustrated the silver-haired chief’s activist role in fighting narcotics.

That same year, during Leary’s trial, came the chaotic Christmas Happening, when Purcell was working as a sergeant in the Laguna Beach Police Department’s narcotics division.

Residents had been growing weary of the hippies in town and the surge of drug operations. Dealers were selling around a restaurant on Cleo Street, near hotels and along the coastline, from Main to Bluebird beaches, the retired chief recounted.

At the time, the state narcotics division was not helping local authorities, so Purcell decided to dispatch two undercover officers to the troubled areas in an effort to throw the dealers in jail.

The officers grew beards, bought wigs and purchased fatigues and Army jackets at the now-defunct Grant Boys firearms and outdoors store in Costa Mesa.

“In a week’s time, they looked just like the creeps we were dealing with,” Purcell told the crowd. “We wanted them to get in deep.”

That October, the officers told Purcell that they were picking up information about a group in town who were planning to gather drug-addled music lovers, hippies and activists for an event like Woodstock.

It was a socially contentious time. In May of that year, National Guardsmen shot unarmed college students at Kent State University in Ohio, and state police opened fire at Jackson State in Mississippi 11 days later.

Christmas Happening organizers originally wanted to host the festival at the relatively small Heisler Park but changed their plans as they envisioned thousands more people attending.

For weeks, promoters arranged for flatbeds to deliver wood for the stage and trenches to be dug to create open toilets in the canyon.

But as the free festival began to build momentum, Laguna Beach was undergoing its own changes. A new city manager from Washington state, whom none of the police force had met, was installed Dec. 10.

With growing concerns about the estimated 25,000 flower children planning to show up at Laguna Canyon, every police agency in Orange County was called for assistance. School gyms, closed for the holiday, would be the temporary quarters for more than 300 officers, while dispatchers, record clerks and the police chief would stay at the Surf & Sand Resort.

Three days before Christmas, officers began to notice long-haired hippies arriving from Kansas, Illinois and places unknown.

That Dec. 25, at 5:30 a.m., Purcell kissed his wife and left for the canyon.

“I don’t know when I’ll be back,” he told her, “but you know where I am at.”

Since 7:30 that morning, cars jammed the south and north end of El Toro and Laguna Canyon roads. The acting police chief decided to close those streets and Coast Highway to stem the surge of people.

The preventive measure did keep out one high-profile music group. By one account, the Grateful Dead were nearby but were thwarted by the canyon traffic as the road was closed around noon.

That didn’t stop people from leaving their cars and walking.

Jerry Hoffman, a Laguna resident who lives in the Top of the World neighborhood, recalled looking into the canyon from his home and watching waves of passersby and cars.

“I remember seeing a piano being driven around in a convertible,” Hoffman said, “and I thought, ‘What nuts are going around with a piano in a car?’”

The peace-promoting love-in resulted in nudity, makeshift fire pits, stolen furniture, drug overdoses and 10 arrests. An unidentified single-engine plane hovered over Sycamore Flats and released thousands of Christmas cards that included a dose of Orange Sunshine — the LSD brand of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, which was then operating the nation’s largest narcotics network out of Laguna Beach, Purcell said.

After the second day, the cold weather and lack of resources forced most of the attendees out, but about 1,500 people decided to make the canyon their new living space.

Purcell and other authorities decided to encircle the remaining participants the next morning. As the group found themselves surrounded, a plane ordered them to hit the road.

That demand, Purcell said, was met with screams, middle fingers and bare bottoms, but the lingerers left.

Nearby homeowners cheered and clapped. City crews dug a giant hole, partly buried leftover belongings and burned the pile.

“I’ll drive by that area and think, ‘There’s a lot of stuff buried there,’” Purcell, who now lives in nearby Laguna Woods, told the crowd with a laugh. “But I’m happy the way it ended. That was quite an experience for us all.”

kathleen.luppi@latimes.com

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