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Taken in 1969, this is the me that arrived in Atlanta that summer just after the Great Atlanta Pop Festival. I missed that one but was at Second Pop in 1970. Kathleen and I had been living and working in Meridian, Miss and the shock of arriving in the Regional Capital was like a couple of bumpkin agricolae stumbling into Imperial Rome at its height.What a wonderful city. Cheap rent, hole in the wall barbecue joints, jobs growing like the city’s building boom itself and a perky overall smugness of a city too busy to hate.

The girls encounter the hippie vans in Piedmont Park 1970. The park became the spiritual home for the tribe of thousands who discovered Atlanta as an oasis of tolerance and hospitality is a region that has been smarting about outside agitators since losing that damn war and just plain hated hippies.

Merry fellows at 880 Myrtle Avenue embody the good natured spirit that marked Atlanta’s hippietime. They weren’t aggressively in your face about their transcendent spiritual superiority like the S.F. counterculture. Nor like the icy irony of hippie sightings in the Northeast. Atlanta longhairs were very much “take it or leave it” about their laid back Let it Be lifestyle. Hell, they lived in a rough neighborhood. Rebellion wasn’t appreciated by some erstwhile Rebels.

This is Susan Klein, the Annie Hall of the advertising staff of Creative Loafing in the mid 1970s. The Loaf, a fiesty free independent weekly paper, had fiesty, free and independent staff members who looked and behaved in ways indistinguishable from the hippie tribe. Of course, the real tie-died-in-the-wool hippies were over at The Great Speckled Bird, the lauded underground newspaper founded in 1968 after Dr. King’s killing. By 1976, the time this was taken, the Bird was in eclipse as the paper immolated itself into political irrelevance. Hippies turned to the disco culture for sex, drugs and Ru Paul and Roll. Debbie Eason’s Creative Loafing was, for a time, healthy and profitable. It expanded to include hard core journalism (I was its first news editor). But profits were diverted from operations to ill-conceived projects and the paper was brought to bankruptcy.

The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers had this weltschmertz.

WSB-TV, bless their little hearts, tried to stem the use of pot, acid, ‘ludes and assorted chemistry in the quest of hippies to get high. This ad appeared in 1970 during Channel 2’s production of the Lester Maddox variety show. No smokin’ while the guvnah’s on TeeVee.

Any musician could draw a crowd in Piedmont Park. Hippie bands regularly played in the outdoor venues. Solitary strummers and drummers could be found in secluded nooks in the woodland over by the drainage ditch.

Long haired antiwar protestor nabbed by State Patrolman. Hippies in Atlanta were more political than most tribes elsewhere in the country. The city’s legacy as headquarters for much of the civil rights movement made politics relevant and timely for hippies. Trespassing on the grounds of the state capitol in this May 1970 scene got you apprehended by the long arm of the law. After the tribes disbanded, love beads put away and hair trimmed, hippies turned to neighborhood organizing against a ruinous expressway through the heart of the city, electing the city’s first black congressman and mayor and continuing to agitate for jobs, peace and freedom.

Piedmont Park was the center of hippie life in Atlanta for years. The city was tolerant of the misbehavior that sometimes cropped up. What did people do when they all met in the park on an afternoon? There was music, flirting, and in this 1972 photo, sunbathing.

Toni Shifalo, left, and Alton Leonard, with the uke to her right jam with other musicians in 1973. They were members of the Last Great Jive Ass Jug Band, a fixture of Atlanta’s hippie scene. I lived in their commune at Big Shanty in Decatur.