Summer of Love - Funeral and Aftermath

Funeral and Aftermath

The final nail in the coffin came about in no small part due to the fact that by the end of the summer, most of the buzzwords therefrom had long since been re-appropriated as advertising slogans by the very commercialist-based culture they sought to escape. Additionally, for the entire summer, the tenderfooted and greenhorned hippie, unused to the daily realities of city life, inherently believed everyone to be `basically good'. But, once all the various types of ne'er-do-wells caught on and started following the hippies to town, that only led them to be seen as easy targets like vultures looking for carrion in the desert.

And then - after so many people left in the fall to resume their college studies, those remaining in the Haight wanted to signal the conclusion of the scene not only to themselves and their friends, but also to those still in transit or still considering making the trek as well. A mock funeral entitled "The Death of the Hippie" ceremony was staged on October 6, 1967, and organizer Mary Kasper explained the intended message therefrom as follows:

We wanted to signal that this was the end of it, to stay where you are, bring the revolution to where you live and don't come here because it's over and done with.

Disgusted, disillusioned and depressed, both the people who had missed out due to not having left their hometowns yet as well as those who were still in transit but who had yet to arrive in San Francisco, pretty much got off their train, plane or bus at the next stop, and/or found others in their locale in the same predicament, and set about trying to create their own mini-versions of the intended utopia about which they had read or seen on television.

Afterward, the few people from the scene who were still left in the city basically brought the final curtain down on the whole experience, cleaned up to make themselves presentable, headed East to clear their heads and prepared to follow the footsteps of their mothers and fathers into what surely would become their future humdrum lives as part of the Establishment in Middle America.

New Yorkers were subsequently abducted into a loud, raw and totally irreverent two-hour musical version of what the Summer of Love was all about when Joseph Papp blasted the psychedelic Hair onto an unsuspecting Off-Broadway public ten days later, beginning one of the longest runs of one of the most successful in-your-face musicals about the counterculture anybody had ever seen.

Two weeks after that, all the hippies were happily back in San Francisco and migrated over to the Halloween in the Castro party to celebrate. As the years went by, this gradually ended the reign of the children's event and began the trend of catering to adults of alternative lifestyles which continues today.