The Summer of Love, Seattle style

The 1967 Summer of Love may have gotten its name in San Francisco, but many here might remember our own flourishing subculture: We had a hippie street scene in the University District; an underground newspaper; and the city's first alternative rock band, the Daily Flash.

Granted, our hippies were more likely middle-class kids who grew up in Wallingford or Kent. But like the barefoot nomads drawn to Haight-Ashbury that summer, our rebels dived into the counterculture head first -- for better or worse. They smoked pot, dropped acid, protested the war and danced at rock light shows.

"This is a weirdo type dance with a way-out type lighting effect," is how a Seattle police memo described one of those events in 1967.

By 1968, Billboard listed an LP by Seattle's own Jimi Hendrix as the top record of the year. He was asking kids, "Are You Experienced?" Carol Sparkman, now 59 and living in the recreational community of Lake Havasu City, Ariz., remembered the time fondly:

"We saw that treating everyone as a brother or a sister was so easy, and could make the world continue to spin in harmony. It was truly a beautiful time in life."

Today, 40 years later, Seattle Times reporter Erik Lacitis takes a look back at the era and the people who helped shape it.

The organizer

In 1967, Milo Johnstone was 28 and several years out of the Army. He bounced around various jobs and sported a Fu Manchu mustache, granny glasses, shoulder-length hair and big sideburns.

In the alternative community, Johnstone was known as someone ready to help out. A light show didn't just happen — someone had to help set up the stage and the equipment and do actual work.

Johnstone drove a 1949 Chevy fastback, which he decided to paint paisley. For good measure he glued the fiberglass cast of a woman's breasts on the trunk.

It wasn't surprising that on the streets, Johnstone's car and Johnstone himself were magnets for cops. He twice got to spend the weekend in the county jail.

Once he was arrested for desecrating the U.S. flag by using it as a seat cover in his truck. It wasn't a flag, he argued, but bunting — the kind of patriotic banner you see in political gatherings. He got a deferred sentence.

After Johnstone decided his University District days were over, he spent more than two decades in commercial building repair.

These days he looks like the 68-year-old semi-retired contractor he is — he's put on weight, his hair has thinned, he peers through prescription glasses.

Johnstone spent years researching a self-published book, "The Magic Decade: A Street Level Glimpse of Seattle During the Mutinous Sixties." All 1,100 copies were sold, and it's a collector's item.

The underground paper

The Helix was among Seattle's first underground newspapers. Its articles were wide-ranging: anti-war stories, philosophical ramblings, poetry and artwork. The Helix didn't just cover the scene, it also organized and promoted "be-ins," concerts and music festivals such as the three-day Sky River Rock Festival and Lighter Than Air Fair.

Its contributors included author Tom Robbins, later of "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues" fame.

"It was a magnet for good writers. They saw this as an opportunity to express themselves," remembers Paul Dorpat, who served as the editor. "It was a bunch of bloggists, is what it was."

These days, Dorpat, 68, is better known as a regional historian who has compiled extensive "now and then" photos and stories about Seattle.

The Helix's first printing of 1,500 copies was published March 23, 1967. "The issues were all consumed in a matter of hours," says Dorpat. "It was instantly swept up."

At its peak circulation in the summer of 1968, the Helix had sales of 18,000.

Many staffers would earn money by selling the paper on the street.

"We weren't at all concerned about money," Dorpat said. "For a number of months, all the money sat in a box at the front of the office for people to take if they needed [it]."

The last issue was published June 11, 1970.

"The era, the page, has turned," staffers wrote in a letter to readers. "The Helix is dead."

The photographer

Alan Lande estimates he has 5,000 photos from that era. It's a chronology of the demonstrations, festivals, street scenes and shows that he witnessed.

In 1968, Lande had just been discharged after four years in the Air Force. He came home with a Nikon camera he bought at the base exchange store and decided to work at the Helix, the underground paper. At the paper, his darkroom was in the bathroom, the door sealed to keep light out.

It was a great time for a photographer.

There is a picture of a Seattle businessman giving the one-finger salute to demonstrators; the Seattle cop with a flower attached to the end of his nightstick; the iconic hippies dancing naked at a festival; Tom Hayden watching Abbie Hoffman at the University of Washington.

Sure, as a photographer, he was drawn to take a picture of someone dancing wildly. But look at the edge of the photo, Lande, now 61, pointed out. Most people are just watching.

"It was never as wild as painted in the media," he recalls. "In a weird way, the '50s extended into the '60s. Most people were buttoned down psychologically.

"If you look at pictures of, say, a demonstration with 10,000 people, the majority were dressed normally, conservatively. There was only a small group who were the freaks."

The hippie

bride and groom

Carol Sparkman was 19 when she came to Seattle from Montana. She found kindred spirits that summer of 1967 in the University District. "I lived with other hippies, just various places, depending on who was partying that night," remembers Sparkman, who went by her maiden name, Carol Love, in those days.

On the Ave, she met Carl Sparkman, who was selling the L.A. Free Press, another underground newspaper. They fell in love and began living together in a communal house on Queen Anne Hill.

Barely a month after meeting, they got married. The wedding, with 200 guests, took place in Ravenna Park.

A hippie wedding at a park was such a novelty that it was covered by The Seattle Times.

"Picnickers gawked as the necklaced, bearded and ankleted guests formed a circle in a grassy area," said The Times story. "... Sparkman gave his bride a ring he had made and presented the preacher with a hippie necklace he had made."

By late 1967, the scene on the Ave was getting ugly — "pimps and stuff," Carol Sparkman recalls — and the couple left.

They moved to the Olympic Peninsula and started a horse farm. Their daughter, Susan Sanborn, is now 39 and working at an office in Baltimore. These days, Carol is helping Carl recuperate in Lake Havasu City from a massive stroke he suffered in January.

"We did so many things in our lives that I can't complain," she said. "We're just older hippies, that's all."

The alt band

In its early days, the Daily Flash played the teen dances that were dominated by bands such as the Wailers and the Dynamics. Those bands wore matching outfits and featured blaring saxophones and a p.a. system that belonged in a used-car lot.

The Daily Flash wore clashing suits and offered a music selection that featured harmonies, a 12-string guitar and folk tunes.

At teen dances, when the Daily Flash played on the same bill as the old-guard bands, it was as if someone had drawn a line through the audience.

"On one side, you had the longhaired people, and on the other, the people with short, nappy, hair," band guitarist and singer Steve Lalor said.

The band moved to Los Angeles, hoping to make it big. Its single, "French Girl," was a hit in the Northwest. But by 1968, the group had disbanded.

Lalor, 62, still plays music as a solo act at weddings and other venues, and with a new edition of the Daily Flash.

This being 2007, the reconstituted band has kept up with modern times. It has its own Web site, thedailyflash.com, where it promotes shows and sells Daily Flash T-shirts, buttons and tote bags.

Erik Lacitis: 206-464-2237 or elacitis@seattletimes.com