Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair

by editor Michele Catalano

When I was nine years old, I had a little radio in my room. I listened mostly to WABC (AM), with its tinny sound and familiar voices. I had insomnia even then, and I would wake up in the middle of the night and bring the radio under the blankets, playing it as low as possible so as not to wake anyone. 

This was 1971. The Vietnam War was raging, and protests had sprung up around my little suburban town. I knew of them from my older cousin Fran, a dyed-in-the-wool hippie and pacifist. She would babysit my sisters and I while my parents were out bowling or attending some firehouse function, and she would tell me stories about protesting, teach me about the war, and guide me towards the light of peace and love. I was an eager student and absorbed every lesson, taking the talk of pacifism to my heart. 

One night I was up late listening to the radio and “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair” by Scott McKenzie came on.

If you’re going to San Francisco

Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair

If you’re going to San Francisco

You’re gonna meet some gentle people there

I had heard the song before but didn’t pay much attention to it until Fran told me stories about Haight-Ashbury and the true hippies of San Francisco. She wanted to move there and join a commune and spend her days peacefully protesting. Instead, she was going to college to be a teacher. I thought of Fran when I really listened to the lyrics and imagined her as one of the gentle people of San Francisco. She would have loved it there. I would love it there. I made up my mind then that I would leave for California as soon as I turned eighteen, maybe sooner. I was nine, I didn’t think any of it through, I just had a dream.

The song did something to me. As I listened to McKenzie’s soft singing, as I absorbed the lyrics, I felt a yearning, a real pull toward something that was bigger than me. I yearned for peace. I yearned for an end to the war. I yearned to be part of the San Francisco hippie scene. I pressed Fran for more stories, more history, and she told me about the Summer of Love, how 1967 was a spark, a revolution. She introduced me to Hunter Thomspon, an author I was too young to read and grasp, but I was enthralled by Fran’s description of him. 

For those who come to San Francisco

Summertime will be a love-in there

In the streets of San Francisco

Gentle people with flowers in their hair

I will never forget the feeling I had listening to this, a pulling in my heart, a reaching toward something light, something better. I imagined a place where hippies roamed the streets handing out flowers and singing songs of protest, songs of joy. I thought about the protests here on Long Island, how Fran was chased by cops, how she was looked down upon by the adults in her life for expressing her opinions about the war, about the United States in general.

I watched the nightly news with my parents, horrible scenes of war, listening to Walter Cronkite every night tell us about the horrors. In 1968, Cronkite would air his “Report from Vietnam” and declare the war a stalemate, influencing so many people to change their mind about the war. I was seven then, and already had the first inklings of my flower-child, pacifist nature explode within me.

And here I was at nine, craving peace, craving a hippie lifestyle. I wished to be older, to be a teenager, or Fran’s age, and able to participate in protests and maybe move to San Francisco to be part of a movement.

Such a strange vibration

People in motion

There’s a whole generation

With a new explanation

People in motion

People in motion

How could anyone not fall in love with that notion, how could they want anything less? It was a heady time for teens and young adults who wished for peace. The song uplifted me. Knowing that there were thousands of people out there who wanted the same things I did, who fought and yelled and gathered and ran from cops. Fran told me in grim tones about Kent State, an event I read about in the New York Daily news that delivered news of war every morning. I saw it on television. But Fran’s perspective was something I didn’t get from my parents or nightly news. She didn’t despair. She always found hope in people. Hope in her people.

The day after I listened to “San Francisco” I begged my mother to take me to Modell’s department store so I could buy the 45. On the way to the store, I worked up the courage to tell my mother that I was a hippie, that I believed in peace and love and light, that I would move to San Francisco some day. She was bemused at best and, to her credit, did not laugh at me. Nor did she encourage me.

I played that record endlessly on my crappy little close and play turntable. Sometimes my mother would let me play it loud on her stereo. She didn’t outwardly encourage me, but she did allow me the space to be myself, and I appreciated that.

I listened to the song yesterday and felt that same pull, that some yearning for peace. The world is not much different than it was in 1971. Now we are protesting a genocide, protesting the gestapo tactics of ICE. I look at what’s going on in Minnesota and I see the “people in motion,” I see the new generation of pacifists, of anti-war, anti-fascist teenagers and young adults. While the nation is in peril, I feel a small rise of hope. There is no Haight-Ashbury. There is no San Francisco. But there is Minnesota. There is a gathering of like minded people no longer settled in one place, but spread across the nation.

I appreciate Scott McKenzie’s sentiments in much the same way I did when I was nine. There is hope. There is a light. There is this song that buoys me, that has carried me since I was nine.