“California dreamin’ on such a winter’s day.”
That lyric from the Mama and Papas’ hit song, California Dreamin, could have been playing on the radio in my 1960 Alfa Romeo as I drove south from Seattle, through Oregon, and on to San Francisco at the end of 1967. Having completed Air Force “boot camp” in Texas a few weeks earlier, I was on my way to Monterey, California to study Chinese Mandarin at the Defense Language Institute situated on a hill above that city’s famed Cannery Row.
After the Christmas holidays I had time to kill before reporting for duty at DLI, so I decided to spend a few days in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Long hours behind the wheel and the setting sun forced me to call it a day and pull off the highway 30 miles short of San Francisco.
The next day I made it into San Francisco, where I bunked in a budget motel on Lombard Street, dined in a “coffee house” on Union Street that was far “cooler” than the “coffee shops” like Denny’s that I had frequented back in Seattle. And at a theater just across the street, I saw The Graduate, the movie that launched Dustin Hoffman’s cinematic stardom.
On the other side of the Bay, I did an uneventful “drive-through” of Berkeley. I had no idea of what I’d experience there just a few months later.
(Eric Fischer Flickr Photo)
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