3.32 Riffraff and Hippies

1964 thru 1967 • The Haight, San Francisco ~ Viewing the world through the plate glass windows of Sprouse-Reitz, I seldom ventured out of the store and Dad didn’t want me wandering the streets. When you have no sense of direction and are born in a box as my sister Betty claims I was, I figured it was best to stay inside anyway. Whatever ambled in that store was my sum total experience of the larger world, and I was fascinated. In the early sixties, the Haight was a middle-class white neighborhood with a smaller community of Negro families. Over the next couple of years many of the whites left and more blacks moved in. The black families moved away when the gays took over, then the transvestites and transsexuals came, then the hippies, then the drug addicts, then the black-gay-transvestite-drug addicts. My father managed the Sprouse-Reitz store from 1954 until it closed in 1968; dime stores didn’t do well in that grittier climate. Wrong stock.

1644 Haight between Belvedere and Clayton, 1968

My father was straight, white, middle class, Catholic, and German, and he treated his customers with the utmost respect—unless he saw them stealing. Sometimes the old Russian woman would stuff things in her skirt and he’d make her put everything back, then quietly escort her out. However, if it happened to be a young black kid, he’d grab him by the scruff of the neck and seat of his pants and dropkick him out the storefront door, muttering “goddam little pick-a-ninny.” I always worried an older brother would come back and break Dad’s legs, or at the very least, his windows.

In the summer of 1965, thousands of runaway middle-class kids joined the flower-power phenomenon erupting in San Francisco, seeing a whole new world through granny glasses and windowpane acid. The hippies swapped flowers, love, and sex for peyote, mushrooms, and mescaline. Teenagers from Des Moines, Dayton, and Duluth tripped on purple haze and orange sunshine, joining the spiral dance.

Then came 1967 and the Summer of Love. My dad hated shoplifters, abhorred riffraff, and detested hippies with their light fingers, dirty long hair, and love beads. They came in mainly to steal ribbon, gum, and balloons. They didn’t bathe, didn’t shave, and didn’t work. They smoked pot and dropped acid. They engaged in open sexual behavior. On a cosmic peace train, they wanted to stop the war, stoned on love, love, love. The boys in their Nehru jackets, tie-dyed shirts and paisley bell-bottoms and the girls in their flowing skirts, patched jeans, and braless tops represented everything my father stood against. My father hated the Summer of Love.

1535 Haight St, 1966

Kids often slept in front of his store. Dad stepped around them in the early morning fog to open up, muttering, “Goddam good-for-nothin’ dirty hippies.” After mopping the floors, he’d throw the bucket of raunchy cold mop-water on the young runaways sleeping against his red storefront. Later in the day he’d take his big push broom and sweep them off the sidewalk as they loitered in the slim rays of the sun.

A policeman tried to stop him once. “You can’t do that, Mr. Clemens,” he said, holding his hand up to halt my father.

“When I see shit,” Dad retorted, “I sweep it in the gutter where it belongs.” With a final push, he turned on his heel back into the store. I pretended I’d never seen him before.

to be continued…

© 2018. Catherine Sevenau.
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