Except in Berkeley where it all started with the Free Speech Movement (led by Mario Savio -- another transplanted New Yorker) in February 1964 as a protest against Governor Ronald Reagan.
A lot of the headliners in the Berkeley protests were NOT students in the beginning. They were bums who had come out to CA to take advantage of the low tuition for a fine education and were just marking time while they waited to earn their state's residency.
They got caught up in drugs (which really didn't start on the Berkeley Campus in any noticeable way until 1963). They became hangers-on to the "Bohemian" crowd that frequented the coffee houses and poetry readings. Then, somehow they became involved with an antiwar element as VN heated up and started protesting the draft -- probably because they were vulnerable since they were not enrolled in school.
At first the high schoolers became captivated by these folks and then regular UC students joined in. Somewhere along the way they adopted the nome "Hippie" and later "Yippie", thanks to Jerry Rueben. Jerry was a little older than the rest and made a run for Mayor of Berkeley in 1967. He was soundly defeated, thank God. However Rueben was part of a "slate" and one member was actually elected from that slate to the State Assembly -- Ron Dellums. Dellums had been planted in the open district by a branch of the Communist Party just a few months prior to filing for the election. (True, true, true.) I knew the realtor who showed him his house and Dellums didn't even know that he needed money to buy a house and didn't know anything about down payments.
Dellums came back the following week with cash to put down on the property and was thrown a "welcome party" by the local organizer of the Communist Party. There were about 5 people running for that open seat and Dellums eked out a victory. From there he went on to a long career in Congress and eventually became chair of the Armed Services Committee -- Red Ron!
I counted the votes in one precinct in that election (where a lot of professors and Communists lived) and there was no spread among the candidates in that district -- solid Dellums. There was no apparent reason for that. The rest of the slate did not get such a heavy vote and there were other fine candidates who should have gotten a certain percentage of all the votes cast. There had to have been a concerted word of mouth campaign.
We still have the Dellums influence in Congress because the woman who took his place was hand picked by him and formerly worked in his office.
Hillary Rodham worked out there about that time as an intern for a local lawyer who was known as the mouthpiece of the Communist Party and she's still influential too! (Much to my displeasure.)
Very interesting first hand account. You were right in the middle of it all.
I was always under the impression that Bohemians became hippies, but it sounds like they were an older crowd.
I consider myself fortunate. I was born in 1961, so by the time I was old enough to care about anything more substantial than baseball, it was 1974. I remember thinking then that the behavior was goofy. Now I think it was irresponsible and dangerous.
Saul Alinsky (mentor of Hillary) wrote in his book that radicals needed to go and take over a state. It happened.