On this day in 1966 Ken Kesey in Union Square promoting the Trips Festival

Ken Kesey and others pulled up to Union Square to promote the Trips Festival – organized by Kesey, Stewart Brand, Roman Sender and Bill Graham at the Longshoreman’s Hall between January 21-23 1966. KRON-TV was on hand to document the promotional event, and the original footage can be seen online courtesy of the San Francisco Bay Area Television Archive. View the incredible original footage here.

Type Tuesday - Butler Brands Paper

Today's Type Tuesday features Butler Brands Paper's Campania series. 

Butler Brands Paper was distributed by the Sierra Paper Company, one of the first paper companies I have seen from our collection located in Los Angeles.

The Campania series was named after one if Italy's oldest provinces and was offered in seven colors, including white. 

Below is the Campania series offered in grey.

Jaime Henderson

Archivist

jhenderson@calhist.org

Anna Halprin: Dance as a Healing Art

“Before I had cancer, I lived my life in service of dance, and after I had cancer, I danced in the service of life.” –Anna Halprin

Anna Halprin Surrounded by Dancers in Circle the Earth, c. 1980s

Courtesy of the Museum of Performance + Design

The pioneer avant-garde dancer Anna Halprin knows a thing or two about the circle of life. At 95, she has enriched the lives of people all over the world with her approach to dance as a way to achieve personal and community empowerment—be it for peace, health, life, or death. “I am a cancer survivor.... Cancer is like enlightenment at gunpoint. One must face it and do something.”

The Trips Festival Explained

The Trips Festival was a transformative event that helped mark the beginning of the hippie counterculture movement in San Francisco. Organized by Stewart Brand, Ramon Sender, Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, and Bill Graham at the Longshoremen's Hall for January 21-23, 1966, the event brought together the city’s diverse underground arts scene, including rock music groups, experimental theater performers, dance companies, light show artists and film producers

Courtesy of http://rosamondpress.com/ 

Over 10,000 people, many taking LSD, attended the three-day event. Although the event included music, it was not billed as a concert per se. Rather, it was promoted as an immersive and participatory multi-media experience. Virtually the entire Bay Area’s avant-garde arts scene was involved, including the San Francisco Mime Troupe, the Open Theater, the Dancer’s Workshop and the San Francisco Tape Music Center. Yet it was the performances by emerging rock music groups the Grateful Dead and Big Brother and the Holding Company which captured the attention of attendees. It was the first major performance by the Dead in San Francisco, and the combination of the band’s music, the hall’s sound system and the visually captivating light shows over the three days that created a format that would soon dominate the city’s music halls. Bill Graham took over the Fillmore Auditorium for good just two week later, and his first weekend was advertised as the “sights and sounds of the Trips Festival.” As Tom Wolfe says in the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, “the Haight-Ashbury era began that weekend.” The world would never be the same.

49 Years Ago: The Human Be-In

The “Summer of Love” in 1967 is generally thought to be when everything changed in San Francisco. As with most historic moments, there were many precipitating events which were bellwethers of things to come.

The Human Be-In, Golden Gate Park, 1967 January 14, photograph by Gene Anthony, courtesy, California Historical Society, CPA-SOL_005

One of these early events took place 49 years ago today in Golden Gate Park on January 14, 1967. Known as the “Human Be-In,” tens of thousands of mostly young people came to the park’s Polo Fields on a beautiful day to hear music by the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and others, and chanting, poetry and wise pronouncements by the likes of Allen Ginsberg, Jerry Rubin, and Timothy Leary. This “Gathering of the Tribes” caught the attention of the national media, drawing increasing media attention to the growing hippie counterculture in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco. Within a few months, hundreds of thousands of people would make their way to the city to be part of the growing scene.

Yet the “Human Be-in” wasn’t the beginning of the Haight-Ashbury era. The hippie counterculture actually kicked off with one year earlier with the three-day Trips Festival at San Francisco’s Longshoreman’s Hall. To learn more about the Trips Festival, join the California Historical Society in celebrating its 50th Anniversary next Friday, January 22, 2016.

L to R: Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Allen Ginsberg, Freewheelin' Frank and Marcetta at the Human Be-In, Golden Gate Park, 1967 January 14, photograph by Gene Anthony, courtesy, California Historical Society, CPA-SOL_006

L to R: Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Timothy Leary, at the Human Be-In, Golden Gate Park, 1967 January 14, photograph by Gene Anthony, courtesy, California Historical Society, CPA-SOL_007

The Human Be-In, Golden Gate Park, 1967 January 14, photograph by Gene Anthony, courtesy, California Historical Society, CPA-SOL_008

The crowd at the Human Be-In, Golden Gate Park, 1967 January 14, photograph by Gene Anthony, courtesy, California Historical Society, CPA-SOL_009

Winding down at the Be-In, Golden Gate Park, 1967 January 14, photograph by Gene Anthony, courtesy, California Historical Society, CPA-SOL_010

Type Tuesday - Patterns and Repetition from Typefounders of Chicago

A great cover from the Typefounders of Chicago, but the real fun is inside!

Jaime Henderson
Archivist
jhenderson@calhist.org

The Sierra in the City: Lawrence Halprin and Levi’s Plaza

Levi’s Plaza Fountain, 2015

Courtesy of Alison Moore

In 1973 Levi Strauss & Co. left its cozy quarters at 98 Battery Street in San Francisco for the bold, upright world of the new Embarcadero Center, a series of four skyscrapers located near the city’s waterfront. Within a few years, however, Chairman of the Executive Committee Walter Haas, Jr. began to feel that all was not right. “The highrise at Embarcadero Center was not our style,” he recounted in an oral history, “I’d get in the elevator and people didn’t know me, and I didn’t know them.”

On This Day: Construction on the Golden Gate Bridge Begins January 5, 1933

Anton Refregier, Building the Golden Gate, 1948

Photograph by Carol M. Highsmith; courtesy of the Library of Congress

1938: The American Institute of Steel Construction hailed it as the “most beautiful steel bridge built in the United States last year.”

Type Tuesday - International Typeface Corporation specimen booklets

The final installment in our selection of International Typeface Corporation specimen booklets. 

Jaime Henderson
Archivist
jhenderson@calhist.org

1966: A Year that Changed California, and the World.

With the start of 2016, the California Historical Society is turning its attention from the Centennial of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition to the 50th anniversary of the critically important year of 1966 in California. It was a year that put into motion powerful—yet diametrically opposed—forces that transformed the State and country, then and...now.

One set of forces was the rise of a "counterculture" in San Francisco. In early January 1966, the city's youth scene was well on its move from the "Beat Generation" neighborhood of North Beach to the cheaper Western Addition, near the intersection of Haight and Ashbury Streets. In fact, it was only a few months earlier, in September 1965, that the word 'hippie' was used for the first time in a West Coast newspaper. The term was used to describe young people who had begun congregating—with unique, identifiable customs and interests—in a coffee shop in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood.

CHS's next exhibition, "Experiments in Environment: The Halprin Workshops, 1966-1971 (January 21-May 1)" about the famous interdisciplinary workshops led by Lawrence and Anna Halprin (he a landscape architect, she an avant garde dancer), opens on the exact 50th anniversary of an event that would catalyze this nascent hippie culture and launch it with a dynamic power that would soon transform youth culture around the world: The Trips Festival.

The Trips Festival combined music by the Grateful Dead, dance performances by Anna Halprin (whose studio was located right off Haight Street), innovative light displays, and more over three days from January 21-23, 1966.

Yet it was on this very day 50 years ago that another set of forces—perhaps even more powerful than the cultural might of the hippies—were set in motion. On January 4, 1966, actor Ronald Reagan announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination for Governor of California. Shortly after a press conference in Southern California, Reagan released a half-hour film that was aired on television outlets throughout the State. The film captures many of the themes—fiscal responsibility, limited government, welfare reform—that Reagan would use to win the White House less than 15 years later and user in a new era of American politics. In the 1966 election Reagan defeated former San Francisco Mayor George Christopher for the Republican  nomination and incumbent California Governor Pat Brown in the general election to win the Governor's Mansion. Part of Reagan's campaign, as seen in this campaign film, was a reaction to the cultural excesses and anti-war sentiments of the hippies—and a pointed rebuke of the University of California's handling of student protests and the Free Speech Movement.

The rise of the hippies, and the rise of Ronald Reagan, together, yet apart, in California in 1966. Happy 50th Anniversary...

Experiments in Environment: The Halprin Workshops, 1966-1971 opens at the California Historical Society on January 21. Join us for the opening celebration, and several other events marking the 50th anniversary of the Trips Festival. Learn more about the exhibition and related public programs at experiments.californiahistoricalsociety.org