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to fill with the disenchanted, the hopeful, and the visionaries.
    Some might say that the lure of drugs and sex brought many there, and that is likely true, but many were in search of a place where others shared their beliefs and convictions.
    They became known as hippies, flower children, and peaceniks, and by the summer of 1967, in the Haight-Ashbury district, they numbered nearly 50,000 strong.
     
    Alex Conley’s first full day in Haight-Ashbury was a flurry of activity. He had awakened early, dressed, and quickly used the upstairs bathroom before, as Chick had put it, the mid-morning rush. He vowed, while washing up, to have a leisurely shower later in the day when the house had emptied.
    He found that early in the morning the house was his alone. Its occupants were still sleeping when he took to one of the three porch chairs, pen and paper in hand, and started writing his first article for the Baltimore Sun. He was soon joined by Jezebel who, with a mighty effort, jumped onto his lap.
    Alex had nearly finished his writing when he heard commotion from inside the house. It was nearly ten o’clock and the place was beginning to stir. A female voice called Jezebel’s name and the cat looked up at Alex apologetically before hopping off his lap and making for the door, leaving him to assume that Jezebel’s stomach trumped her affection.
    The Hope sisters, at about the time that Alex would normally be sitting down for lunch, served a nutritious breakfast of hot oatmeal and fruit. The breakfast meal lacked the formal air of supper. Most of the male houseguests ate their breakfast while standing about sleepily. The women of the house gathered in the kitchen, in high spirits, discussing their plans for the day.
    He looked for Sarah but could not find her in the crowd. Chick, drowsy and disheveled, approached him, once again reading his mind.
    “She’s probably at the free clinic. She assists the staff when bad trips are involved.”
    Soon the oatmeal vanished and joints were lit up and passed around. Alex politely refused when one would come his way. Though he enjoyed his first taste of marijuana yesterday, he thought it too early in the day to lose his perspective on things. Besides, he did not want Sarah to think of him as a pothead, since he had yet to see her indulge in any manner of manufactured or natural narcotic.
    Suddenly, the question of her sobriety became a topic of utmost importance to him. He cornered Chick in the foyer.
    “Never saw her partake of the weed or acid. A select few don’t need outside stimulants for a high.” Chick took a long hit off his nearly smoked out reefer and exhaled a great plume of smoke.
    “I’m not one of them,” he said with a grin.
     
    As it turned out, Chick was not a morning person either. He had told Alex to wait for him while he went upstairs to freshen up. It was close to an hour later when he reappeared in the foyer. By then most of the houseguests had vacated the premises, and Chick did not look any fresher than an hour before.
    Alex had used the time wisely. Sitting on the floor by the front door with his Woolworth’s binder in hand, he had finished writing five pages of rough draft for his first article. At some point during the day or evening, he would fine tune it then send it to the paper by one of the two nearby Western Union offices. Upon receipt, the unlucky worker, assigned to decipher Alex’s admittedly sloppy handwriting, would type up the pages and relay them to Maxwell Bestwick. There, if not lost on his desk’s paper mountain, Bestwick would use one of his many red-inked pens and edit the composition to his satisfaction for publishing in the paper’s Sunday edition.
    As Chick and Alex were leaving the house, they ran into Skip and Benny hanging out on the porch. The two free spirits, who bunked in the same bedroom as Alex and had lived at the house for over a year, were debating the merits of walking Haight Street in search of drugs or loitering at the