Labor Day 1968 in OB. The “Longbranch Riot”.
All summer the OB Rag has been collecting memories of those who lived through the 1967 “Summer of Love” in Ocean Beach and San Diego – asking our readers to send us their experiences so we can share them.
And boomers and those younger than boomers but who recall those days have been emailing us and making comments about their memories.
We have published a few but intend to publish many more at the end of August. Many of those who responded didn’t live in OB or San Diego but sent us their recollections of that summer wherever they were.
So, this is the LAST CALL for Summer of Love memories wherever our readers gathered them.
Make comments below or email us at obragblog@gmail.com – and they can be anonymous or not.
1967 – the year the counter-culture blew up and all of a sudden, young people were becoming hippies across the nation, here in OB and San Diego and LA and Southern California and the Bay Area. If you were a hippie in San Diego, you ended up in OB. It was the year OB started to become the Haight-Ashbury of the conservative city.
Two months ago, we asked a similar question of our readers – and we received a bag of responses. Here’s part of what we said then:
Were you in or near OB during the “Summer of Love” in 1967?
If so, we’re looking for you and we’d like to hear your stories of those days. The OB Rag is looking for folks who were in OB – or San Diego – during the famous summer 50 years ago and can share what they experienced during that fabled summer.
The summer of 1967 certainly changed OB. Music, clothing, fads, drugs and a new rebelliousness 
among the young were the hallmarks of the emerging counter-culture which burst upon the national – and international – scene when the fabled Summer hit. And OB was right there – it became the hippie capital of San Diego, while San Francisco became the hippie capital of the nation. …
But what happened in OB? And San Diego? We’d like to find people who remember those days. We’ll be reaching out to people who potentially were in town. We’ve already contacted a few and over the next couple of weeks, expect to be sharing what they tell us about the Summer of 1967.
If you were there – or know someone who was – contact us via our email : obragblog@gmail.com or leave a message in the comments section below.
OB certainly had its share of hippies. [See my] earlier post about “Hippie Life in OB“.
From our earlier post :
… in the late 1960s, OB became the Haight-Ashbury of San Diego. By 1967 – a year after the OB Pier had officially opened – it was already evident that Ocean Beach was morphing into the San Diego equivalent of that fabled and iconic San Francisco neighborhood synonymous with “hippie-ism”. If you were a hippie or a hippie-wannabe during this time somewhere in San Diego, you ended up in OB.
Of course, other factors contributed to the incubation in Ocean Beach of a community sympathetic and supportive of the new emerging counter-counter:
- before there were long-haired hippies in OB, there were long-haired surfers – as this community had been a center of surf-culture for years;
- OB had been a classic southern California beach-college town, where students and young people made up a huge proportion of the residents. There were no colleges right in OB, but there were plenty close by. Cal-Western (now Nazarene) was just up the hill in Point Loma. Plus OB was a bedroom community for USD – also not too far away, but especially for San Diego State, and Mesa, City, UCSD;
- Along with young sailors and other younger working-class people – predominately white – youth had become a sizable segment of the citizens of the neighborhood.
- And when the youth sub-culture developed during the Sixties in music, art, styles, drugs of choice, clothing, hair-cuts or lack of, language and politics, OB was right there, on the cutting-edge.
Now, the counter-culture did not grow in a vacuum. Something was driving it – something that swept through the sea of young people becoming more and more disenchanted and disengaged from the mainstream culture and politics.
Over just a few years, it seemed an entire generation of American young people were rejecting the values and customs of mainstream culture. Youth on a broad scale were reacting to the very uptight society they were growing up in, a society they perceived – and rightly so – as being beset with greed, war, racism, gross consumerism – and a hundred other ailments.
It was also the music – the Golden Era of Rock and Roll had ushered in a certain new wave of exhilarating and liberating sounds. And attitudes toward traditions were rocked – old ways fell by the wayside, as the youth culture took on more and more efforts to shock the screwed up sensibilities of the mainstream. For instance, during the war period of Vietnam, the wearing of military-style clothing by young people became fashionable. People wore military jackets not only to look cool but to mock the militarization of America. Marijuana – and other drugs – were part of it. Use by local teenagers of the intoxicating weed changed abruptly between the years 1966 and 1967.
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