Most residents of the region were unaware or uninvolved in the early awakening of the hippie movement inaugurated by 1967's Summer of Love in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury neighborhood.
As thousands packed their peace signs and love beads into VW vans and fled their own reality for an alleged Eden by the bay, the vast majority were locked into the all-too-real world of military service, working, going to college or just trying to launch a life.
Rod Hontz, of Valparaiso, graduated from high school in 1966 and was attending Kentucky Wesleyan University studying management in 1967. That summer was his first working in the dining room at the Portage Point Inn in Onekama, Mich., where Chicago residents came by steamboat across the lake to spend a week or two.
"There were six guys and 16 girls, and you had to be 18 to work there and no one was over 22," Hontz said. "I did have long hair, but underage drinking was as wild as it got. You could buy Old Milwaukee for $3.99 a case. It was a good summer. They didn't hire ugly girls for the dining room, so I felt like I'd died and gone to heaven."
Whiting's Kathy Winsberg was in graduate school at the Art Institute of Chicago. Now the owner of Full Circle Art, she said she and her friends were more beatniks than flower children in 1967.
"There was not a lot of disrespect for 'the man,' but we dressed the way we felt," Winsberg said. "We were the people who invented black and sandals and Levis and T-shirts. No makeup. We wanted to avoid mirrors and get on with life and do art. I think I was a pre-hippie just like I was a pre-baby boomer. I wasn't part of the sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. Well, rock 'n' roll, but I didn't even know about the drugs."
Porter County developer Bob Coolman was "navigating the South China Sea courtesy of Uncle Sam and the Navy. We did some rockin' and rollin', but it had nothing to do with the music." Coolman spent most of the year off the coast of Vietnam as a quartermaster with the Navy, but it was a summer of love in a different way.
"I met my first wife in the fleet's home port in the Philippines," he said. "She worked as a hostess in the enlisted men's club in 1967."
It was a busy year for Lansing Police Chief Dan McDevitt but it had nothing to do with the events in San Francisco. He was working in the mill and attending the St. Joseph College extension in Indiana Harbor, now Calumet College, part time. He enlisted in the Navy in May and spent much of the summer at boot camp at the Great Lakes Naval Base near Chicago. He eventually spent 17 months in Vietnam as a medical corpsmen.
For Pat Puffer, of Valparaiso, 1967 was a time to work and hang around with friends. She was working at the Porter County Credit Bureau on South Washington Street in Valparaiso to earn money to pay for her 1965 Chevrolet Impala Super Sport.
"It was white with baby blue interior and bucket seats," she said. "My dad had a fit because I bought it new. My friends and I used to travel to Michigan or go into the city and enjoy the freedom of being that age. We did a lot of things, but we basically stayed out of trouble. I never smoked anything or did any of that stuff. I was just a good, corn-fed Indiana girl."
