Inside the birth of the hippie movement: An exclusive excerpt from Dennis McNally's ‘The Last Great Dream'

San Francisco Chronicle​

14-05-2025

In ' The Last Great Dream: How Bohemians Became Hippies and Created the Sixties,' longtime Grateful Dead publicist and cultural historian Dennis McNally traces the unlikely evolution of American counterculture.
Best known for his bestselling biography 'A Long Strange Trip,' McNally expands his focus to explore how poets, pranksters, musicians and misfits helped shape a generation.
From Beat-era coffeehouses to the acid-fueled gatherings of the 1960s, McNally charts how San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury became a crucible of cultural transformation.
'To me, the most surprising thing is that no one has really looked at where hippie came from, although God knows there have been enough books about the era,' he said.
With sharp detail and deep research, McNally brings to life legendary figures — such Allen Ginsberg, Ken Kesey and Jerry Garcia— as well as the lesser-known locals who built what became the world's first psychedelic neighborhood.
'For what it's worth, I think my interest in bohemia came from the fact that I was in the boondocks of Maine and then upstate NY when all this interesting stuff was going on, and I pretty much missed it,' McNally said. 'So I've been scrambling to catch up on all that ever since.'
In this excerpt shared exclusively with the Chronicle, McNally recounts how local activists blocked a planned freeway through Golden Gate Park — preserving Haight-Ashbury for what came next. Musicians found both style and stage, while the self-proclaimed 'freaks' who moved in crafted a new identity rooted in peace, rebellion and radical creativity.
With the threat averted, McNally writes, the neighborhood was 'free to become something different.'
'I think 'The Last Great Dream' tracks something important because the social issues of the Haight-Ashbury, from an interest in the environment to organic food to yoga to the gentle male hippie archetype that led to a radical reorientation of gender all the way to transgender issues in 2025 – are still completely relevant,' McNally said.
He will speak about the bood during appearances at Green Apple Books in San Francisco on Thursday, May 15, and the Mill Valley Community Center on May 28.
Exclusive excerpt from 'The Last Great Dream'
One of the primary attractions of the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood was the cheapness of its rents. The large and frequently grand homes there had been carved into flats during the Depression, but the main reason for the low prices in 1966 was the federal government's interstate highway program, which had planned to extend a freeway up Fell Street along the Panhandle and through Golden Gate Park, allowing drivers to race through the city on their way to the Golden Gate Bridge. Neighborhood civil rights activists Sue Bierman and her husband, Arthur, along with a clutch of groups like the Haight-Ashbury Neighborhood Association, were having none of it.
In fact, the engineers and bureaucrats had planned to carve the city into boxes with nine freeways; by 1959, the Board of Supervisors had rejected seven. Progressive Democrats and the Chronicle's Scott Newhall united to fight against centrist development Democrats like Governor Pat Brown and Mayor John Shelley, who had the support of the Hearst-owned Examiner, labor, and business interests. As with a corresponding resistance to a nuclear power plant planned for seventy miles north at Bodega Head, citizens offered a morality-based environmentalism that would eventually become official city policy. Finally, on March 21, 1966, the Board of Supervisors voted against the two remaining planned freeways. The Haight neighborhood was free to become something different.
As the year passed, Haight Street, the main commercial corridor of the neighborhood, began to transform. Business after business catering to the students and other youth renting the flats opened their doors. The previous residents had fled to the suburbs during the 1950s; the newcomers were pursuing an explicitly anti-suburban impulse. The first store intended for them was Mnasidika, a Mod clothing shop at the corner of Haight and Ashbury owned by a woman named Peggy Caserta, which opened in April 1965.
Mnasidika was one of Sappho's lovers, and the name honored Caserta's orientation; when she'd first come to the city, she'd seen women wearing jeans arrested as cross-dressers. Louisiana-born, she worked for Delta Air Lines and sold jeans, sweatshirts, and blazers her mother sewed back home and then shipped for free on Delta. The store had what Herb Caen said was a 'coffeehouse atmosphere.' Caserta was 'energetic' and 'innovative,' and Caen approved.
By 1966, floating on LSD, she'd repainted her store with black-and-white stripes and purple swirls. The Grateful Dead would model clothes for her. The Airplane's stylish Marty Balin was her first really good customer. Bell-bottom pants were ever more popular, and Caserta began to sell a version sewn by her friend Judy Dugan, who'd created them so her boyfriend could get his jeans over his boots. Finally, she visited the Levi Strauss factory and convinced an executive that bell-bottoms would sell, even though she could only afford to order ten dozen at a time. A very smart guy, he bought her pitch and let her have them exclusively for six months. In 1969, Levi's launched the 646 line of jeans, which would make the company a very large pile of money.
Ron and Jay Thelin would open the store that would come to represent the Haight for many — the Psychedelic Shop — at 1535 Haight Street, on January 3, 1966. Their father had managed the Haight Street Woolworth in the early 1950s, although they'd come of age in Yuba City, 125 miles north. Both of them had been Eagle Scout products of an all-American upbringing; Ron acknowledged that he'd voted for Nixon in the 1962 governor's race. But in the army, he'd read Thoreau and the Beats, then spent two years in Taiwan, where he learned some Mandarin and read Zen. He 'found out that the people with the beards (beatniks) were the people who really dug Thoreau, who really dug the Declaration of Independence, who were artists.'