More Hippie History

We hear about the major events of the 1960s, such as Woodstock and the riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, but a lot of interesting events never made the national radar screen, because too many other events were competing for newspaper column inches. Here are some of the weirder, more obscure hippie happenings that developed out of the 60s and early 70s.

This one was a new one on me, but I just learned about a 1970 protest against the Red Barn hamburger chain in the Minneapolis, Minnesota neighborhood of Dinkytown. The protest was especially heated, because it occurred within such close proximity of the killings at Kent State. Hippies and politicos and Dinkytown were so twitchy that riot police were necessary to get protesters to vacate the site of a Red Barn. The whole affair later became known as "The Battle of Dinkytown." The protesters' "statement of purpose" even included a reference that linked Burger King to imperialism! At least it made sense to people at the time.

Another obscure hippie happening was the 1969 Zip to Zap in the small town of Zap, North Dakota. According to this article, it became the site of the only riot in the North Dakota history, when students who descended on the town for an impromptu spring festival discovered that the town's only two bars had run out of beer.

Then, there's this YouTube clip below from Vortex I, a rock festival from 1970 that was actually funded by Governor Tom McCall of Oregon in order to divert hippies from an appearance Richard Nixon would make at an American Legion convention. That's right! It was the only rock festival ever to be funded by a state government (although I think the city of Boston once used some petty cash to help simulcast a James Brown concert at Boston Garden to encourage people to stay off the streets after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.).

More Hippie Etymology, Part II

While looking on Google News, I found this 1964 article from the Time magazine online archive that I believe is the first Time magazine article to use the word "hippies." The use of "hippies" in 1964 is interesting on its own, but it's not as interesting as the story in the article. It describes a young man named William G. Alpert who testified in the trial of 19-year-old Michael Smith for negligent homicide for killing Nancy Hitchings in a car accident in suburban Darien, Connecticut. According to the article,

He himself did not drink, said Alpert, airily explaining: "I have no need to dull my senses."

Not with alcohol. Last week Alpert was arrested for the possession of narcotics. When Norwalk police stopped his blue 1958 Volkswagen, they found 1½ oz. of marijuana hidden where the batteries should be in a 3-in. flashlight in the glove compartment. And in his pocket was a tin tobacco box containing several marijuana cigarettes.

Alpert, according to the police, admitted that he had been using marijuana for about a year, and that he also kept his senses spinning by sniffing model-airplane glue and eating "goofballs" (barbiturates) and hallucinogenic peyote.

In the article, Alpert is described as part of "a fast set of hard-shell hippies ... who seem utterly glamorous to more sheltered types."

More Hippie Etymology

I have some JPEGs of old newspaper clippings that demonstrate how the categorical boundaries between "beatniks" and "hippies" were rather fuzzy in the period between 1963 and 1965. In a UPI wire service report from March 8, 1963, the writer uses the terms "arty beatniks" and "bewhiskered young hippies" interchangably. Allegedly, the beatniks had awarded a hipness prize to Muhammad Ali (then known as Cassius Clay) for his skills at poetry.



I also have a clipping from a Wisconsin newspaper that describes the "fashion scene" on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus circa 1965. The article divides the student body into three groups: fraternity/sorority members, beatniks, and the unaffiliated students who don't fit into the first two groups. Interestingly, one of the paragraphs about beatniks begins, "Hippies, as Beatniks prefer to call themselves..." The beginning of that sentence is historically important not only because it is one of the first appearances of the word "hippies" in its modern sense to appear in a local newspaper, but also because it suggests that beatniks and hippies had much more in common than previous historians of the 1960s have been willing to admit.

Hippies of the 1950s

One of things I love about Google Books is how you can search the full text of old magazines, especially the music industry trade journal Billboard. One thing I find interesting is how the use of the word "hippies" has changed over time. Since Billboard is a music trade journal, "hippies" originally seemed to be used to refer to "hip" rhythm & blues or jazz fans who had musical preferences that were too "hip" to be a reliable gauge of what would be a hit. Here are some interesting examples of the word "hippies" appearing in Billboard before the mid 1960s:

Lyric is slight, Miss Wright does what she can with it. More for "hippies" than general r. and b. market (record review from July 15, 1950)

Draper and Young also come through solidly. Strong bop for the hippies. (record review from April 13, 1959)

"There are basically three types of teenagers today, 'conservative', Ivy League type; 'hippies,' who dig the heavy rock beat, and 'jive,' who are more on the square side, espouse the Rick Nelson sound." (quote from disc jockey, September 28, 1963)