Cover Story: War gives new purpose to old hippies

The '60s are gone; dope will never be as cheap, sex never as free and the rock and roll never as great.?
?-- Abbie Hoffman

In the mid-'70s, Lake Claire was a tiny, forgotten neighborhood in a state of advanced decay. The homes, largely occupied by elderly widows, were falling into ruin; yards were overgrown with kudzu. Real estate values were in the toilet. Insurance companies were refusing to renew homeowner policies.

And yet, the woebegone area — barely two dozen small streets just east of Candler Park — had a strong appeal for a certain segment of the population. The folks who began trickling in looking to put their roots down were not so much urban pioneers as fellow travelers.

Tom Burgess was lured here in 1978 when he spotted a sign tacked to a telephone pole pointing the way to a Wiccan gathering. "I thought, 'That's where I got to go to get a house,'" he says.

The one he found on Arizona Avenue cost him $5,000.

"The neighborhood was a ghetto," he recalls. "The reason I moved here was it was on the edge, there was no law here and people who were a bit different could find a home."

Today, the entry-level price tag to move here is at least a quarter-million dollars. By most people's standards, Burgess and the other longtime residents of Lake Claire have lucked into a gold mine. The delicious irony is that, here in Atlanta's hippie haven, most of them couldn't care less.

"People tell me, 'You're lucky to have found this neighborhood,'" says Doug Barlow, who moved to the area in 1977. "And I say, 'No, we built this neighborhood.'"

He's referring to the nonprofit B.O.N.D. credit union, which was created to finance mortgages on local homes that no bank would touch. Then there's Sevananda, the largest community-owned co-op in the Southeast. And the diverse collection of neighborhood shops and restaurants, such as the wildly successful Flying Biscuit. For many, the jewel in the crown is the Lake Claire Community Land Trust, two acres of land that neighbors saved from development and opened as a place for recreation and meditation.

"There's a Buddhist tradition of finding your place, and there's a real sense of place here for us," Barlow says. "I moved here for the community values; people now are moving here for the property values."

In the late '60s, Barlow and his contemporaries — call them the Grooviest Generation — set out to change the world. In many ways, they were successful, but once the Vietnam War ended, their primary rallying point was gone. Iran-Contra, the oil embargo, the snail darter, NAFTA, pot legalization — none of the subsequent liberal causes have carried the same idealistic urgency as Vietnam.

Along the way, most of the original hippies packed away their Earth shoes and Iron Butterfly albums, cut their hair, got real jobs and joined mainstream society, re-classified as Boomers.

Many of those who kept their freak flags flying and remained faithful to the hippie lifestyle turned inward, creating their own communities, growing their own vegetables, and working to change, if not the world, then at least their small corner of it.

But with war in Iraq looming, and the prospect of Americans once again coming home in body bags, the spirit of the hippies has taken on renewed meaning. Driving around Lake Claire today, it's impossible to go half a block without passing a yard sign insisting, "War is not the answer," or seeing the peace symbol displayed on the front of a house.

The growth of the largest anti-war movement since Vietnam has spurred many Lake Claire residents to dust off the protest skills and moral outrage they first developed when LBJ was in office.

And yet, while most people here are opposed to the war, they may differ in how they express that opposition.

Ted Brodek, who's taken part in most of the recent Atlanta anti-war demonstrations, has been an activist ever since his student-protest days at Emory during Vietnam.

"At that time, we didn't believe you could trust anyone over 30. That's kind of embarrassing now," says Brodek, who is 60. "Now there's more cross-generational support and coordination."

His wife, Ann Mauney, is a leader of the high-profile Georgia Peace Coalition, which recently raised more than $30,000 to print a full-page anti-war resolution in the AJC.

Others, like Tom Burgess, have seen their youthful idealism fade over the past two decades as they felt abandoned by a mainstream culture increasingly obsessed with quarterly earnings, designer-label consumerism and convenience without consequences.

"We are older hippies and I'm not as radical as I used to be," he says. "There was an innocence back then and we felt a certain camaraderie in our righteousness, but I'm not sure direct political action works. Is there any Left left? I think we've all been compromised and we should go back and read Marx."

Beth Lavoie, who is helping organize local anti-war protests as a staff member with the American Friends Service Committee, says twentysomething peaceniks like herself have learned plenty from the Vietnam generation.

"There's a wealth of experience among the old-school hippies," she says, "and that goes for the ex-hippies, too. The tie-dye is gone, but the convictions remain."

The Vietnam War was stopped because of the determination of the folks who came of age during the '60s. Will they come out to help end this war as well?

It's not until you notice the carefully tended rock-and-Buddha garden in Doug Barlow's front yard that you could imagine that the occupants of this handsome, two-story house had spent a year getting in touch with themselves at an ashram in Tallahassee and another 18 months living communally with another couple in a teepee in rural North Carolina.

Barlow certainly has collected some interesting stories during his long, strange trip: bringing Dr. Timothy Leary to his campus to speak about chemically fueled mind expansion; traveling cross-country to craft fairs in a second-hand bread van; partaking in free love when that sort of thing was still available.

Just last month, as Barlow stood holding a placard at a neighborhood intersection during the recent worldwide anti-war protests, someone shouted at him from the window of a passing SUV: "Get a job!"

Despite his status as a taxpayer and grandfather, the bearded, sandal-clad 56-year-old belongs to that most rarified of American cultural subspecies: the unreconstructed, never-sold-out, first-generation hippie.

"My core values haven't really changed since 1967," he says matter-of-factly as he sips his usual breakfast, a dark green, homemade, banana-and-spirulina protein shake.

As with countless thousands of his contemporaries, college was a transforming experience for Barlow, who describes his teenage self as the typical product of a typically conservative Southern family. A year before entering the industrial management program at Georgia Tech on a Navy ROTC scholarship, he had voted for the first time in the 1964 presidential election. His choice: self-professed right-wing extremist Barry Goldwater.

But Barlow soon found himself questioning everything he'd been taught under the influence of one of his teachers. That teacher, ironically, was an ROTC instructor who showed war films in class and whose gung-ho descriptions of battle "just didn't sit right" with Barlow's Episcopalian upbringing. A year or so later, he requested a court-martial to quit ROTC.

In 1968, the Summer of Love came to Atlanta. Barlow remembers getting caught up in the vibe as thousands of hippies, freaks and wanderers moved into Midtown apartments and congregated along Peachtree and 14th streets, which were lined with coffee houses, head shops and record stores. Piedmont Park was awash in sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, with free weekend concerts by the likes of the Allman Brothers. Anti-Vietnam fervor was nearing its peak.

He was learning to tune in and turn on, but Barlow — who by then had a daughter and would soon be married — wasn't quite ready to drop out. He graduated from Tech the following year, skipping Woodstock because it coincided with finals week.

For Barlow, 1972 was the year that "everything sort of fell apart." He was a graduate student in sociology at UNC-Chapel Hill when two events occurred that led him to become a self-styled, aimless gypsy: His wife left him for someone she'd met through a free-love encounter, and he went blind.

A few months later, his sight returned after he realized he'd been given the wrong prescription for glaucoma, but by then he had embarked on his journey of self-discovery. He became a vegetarian. He met Janet, his second wife, and the two were married in a field, dressed in saffron robes. He experimented with pot, peyote, LSD and his personal favorite, mushrooms. He became interested in "self-healing" and didn't visit a doctor again for nearly 20 years.

Especially in the Southeast, the early '70s was an era when a longhair could get his ass kicked just for walking into the wrong truck stop, Barlow recalls.

Returning to Atlanta at the end of the decade, he opened a print shop and earned a living producing high-end corporate stationery. At the same time, he was running off flyers for activist groups, nonprofits and starving artists, often in trade for artwork. "I looked at it as a Robin Hood thing," he says.

These days, Barlow works at home as a freelance Web designer, but admits that he and his wife devote more time to volunteer work than paid work. Of late, he has chiefly been involved in environmental activism, but he expects to shift more of his efforts into anti-war activities. He's already planning to do work on the Peace Coalition website.

"Right now, we're seeing one of the biggest revivals of radicalism in history, due to the peace movement," he says. "We'll always be a minority in an economically motivated society, but there will always be a counterculture swimming against the tide."

Charlie Pope has an admittedly simple view of what is important in life: food on the table, a roof over our heads, work for our hands, a relationship with nature, peace with our neighbors.

Sitting on a picnic bench with his hair pulled back in a ponytail, Pope is overseeing the Saturday night drum circle next door to his house in Lake Claire. In the soft light of a full moon and the flickering of the modest bonfire a few yards away, it's difficult to tell if any of the 50 or so neighborhood residents and teenage visitors are flouting the event's "no booze or drugs" policy. Presumably, Pope is prepared to offer a gentle reminder if the need arises.

He suggests that most of the kids who show up here twice a month to pound on hand-beaten drums and noodle-dance in the moonlight probably don't carry much of the hippie philosophy back with them when they drive home. But that's OK, Pope explains; there were also a lot of "weekend hippies" on the streets of Berkeley, Calif., when he moved there in the late '60s.

"There are more true hippies now than there were then," he says, a seemingly counterintuitive statement. The difference, he explains, is that the subculture is less vocal, less organized and certainly less threatening to mainstream America than it was 30 years ago.

In a way, the same could be said of Pope himself.

Having grown up in Atlanta during segregation, by the mid-'60s he had settled into a promising career path as an engineer at Lockheed and become a productive member of the great American middle class. That's when he first read Alan Watts, the Zen scholar whose writings helped introduce Eastern mysticism to a receptive young audience.

As Pope delved deeper into Buddhism, with its emphasis on pacifism and self-enlightenment, he began to question the values of the consumer culture and, of course, the escalating war in Vietnam. Needless to say, his days at the world's largest weapons contractor were numbered.

"Being a responsible member of society means realizing that what you do matters," he says. "And any way you sliced it, I was supporting the military-industrial complex."

He quit his job, moved to the left coast, sold his van, bought a bike, got involved in radical politics, tended a garden and "attempted to live a lifestyle that's more in sync with the Earth," he explains.

Although Pope shies away from any details about his adventures in the '60s drug scene, he allows: "I'm a decent human being who wasn't trying to hurt anyone, but I considered my relationship to LSD to be sacred."

Returning to Georgia in the late '70s because he was homesick for the South, Pope went to work for MARTA, whose drug-testing regimen required a lifestyle adjustment. He wound up buying a mid-sized house at the end of Arizona Avenue in 1985 for $28,000.

Eight years ago, he built a tool shed in the back yard. Then, deciding it would make a good place to live, he moved in. He's since equipped it with running water, book shelves, a sleeping bunk and a computer station.

"Everybody needs their own sacred space," he explains. The house, decorated with dozens of Buddha statues and images, is occupied by his son and several friends.

Now 58 and nearing retirement, Pope seems mellow and affable. He's not an activist or even an emphatic speaker, but it's clear that certain subjects stir strong feelings. "We have to teach our children to be good gardeners and attune themselves to nature," he says. "The food we eat is the bounty of the Earth and we're raping the shit out of it."

As a pacifist, he opposes a war with Iraq much in the same way he opposes any military action, and he certainly isn't wrapped up in the details of Mideast politics or U.N. resolutions. "I try to avoid TV, magazines and newspapers," he explains. "It's mostly just trash."

In his view, Pope's contribution to the betterment of the world is his work with the Lake Claire Community Land Trust. In 1985, when MARTA put several vacant parcels next door to his house up for sale, Pope joined Tom Burgess and several other neighbors in pooling their money to buy the property. The idea was to keep it out of the hands of developers and open to anyone who wants to visit.

The group landscaped the site, creating winding paths, arbors and small clearings. For years, drum circles and other gatherings have taken place in a gently sloping basin carved out of a hill overlooking DeKalb Avenue. Pope and crew have also built outdoor restrooms, a sweat lodge, a covered music stage and a pen for the goats and emu that live on the property.

To help create a place like the Land Trust that brings meaning to people, to care for growing things and to live a good life — these are accomplishments in themselves.

"People need to redefine their priorities," Pope says. "Keep it simple."

When Marilyn Rosenberg and Norm Glassman began house-hunting, the couple was looking for an inexpensive intown location near a MARTA line.

"We always tried to live near where we worked because we didn't have a car," Rosenberg recalls. "That was a choice — something about living simply."

Glassman, an electrical engineer, fell instantly in love with a tiny, eccentric, handmade house on a large, unkempt lot near the south end of Nelms Avenue. It boasted vaulted ceilings, an elaborately tiled kitchen floor and a small block of marble set prominently into the facade with "AMATA" carved into it in bold, Roman letters. The mystery word — in Buddhist text, meaning "immortality" and used as a synonym for Nirvana — would prove inspirational.

"When we moved here, we wanted to plant trees and take care of the Earth," Rosenberg says.

Today, their homestead seems part artist's loft, part dorm room. The kitchen cabinets are apparent surplus from a high-school chem lab; the homey furniture is either handmade or early thrift-store; the window curtains are old blankets; mismatched coffee cups and dishes are stacked along hanging, DIY shelves.

Rosenberg recalls the day her son, Noah, brought home a playmate who looked around and declared, in that frank way children have: "Wow, you're really poor."

She says: "I told him, 'We're not poor. Noah is home-schooled. His father made his bed by hand. We don't have to live this way; we do it because we choose to. We're really rich."

Much of the family's early efforts went into the empty land around the house. They wanted to grow their own food, so they cleared the brush, terraced the hillside, planted a vegetable garden and built a chicken coop. Then Glassman decided he wanted to share his bounty with others, so he built a large, split-level addition to the house that contains a huge kitchen, several small bedrooms and an indoor dance studio/gymnasium complete with a regulation-height basketball net.

Over the years, other structures sprouted up: a lumber barn, tool sheds, a grape arbor and a small shack designed for solitude that Rosenberg notes is the same size as the Walden residence of America's original hippie, Hank D. Thoreau. Glassman became a co-founder of the Land Trust, and the adjacent property blends with his seamlessly.

But Amata's primary focus has always been on creating a workable community. Almost from the beginning, the couple opened their settlement to friends and other fellow passengers of Spaceship Earth. Over the years, Amata has served as a temporary home to a diverse roster of artists, handymen, craftspeople, activists, computer programmers, students, teachers, Sevananda clerks and, until recently, an exotic dancer.

When guerilla environmentalists came to town to hang off cranes at Home Depot headquarters to pressure the company to stop selling exotic wood, the group stayed at Amata.

Residents, who come through word-of-mouth from across the Southeast and stay an average of two years, are expected to share chores, eat meals together, hold weekly meetings and help out in the communal kitchen.

Rosenberg, however, is quick to correct anyone who refers to Amata as a commune. Although they don't call themselves landlords, she and her husband own the property and collect a modest rent. A few years ago, out of concern for the environment, they reluctantly laid down the ground rule that tenants must work within a six-mile radius.

Likewise, Rosenberg, who grew up on a farm in south Georgia, and still works as a maternity-ward nurse, has issues with the "H" word.

"I never connected with the term 'hippie,'" she explains. "I always thought it suggested someone without a job."

She also says she's grown more conservative as she's waded into middle age, an admission echoed by many longtime Lake Claire residents. But don't start printing up those Christian Coalition membership cards any time soon; these folks' use of "conservative" doesn't exactly match up with Pat Buchanan's.

"I started out as a vegan, but now most things go around here," Rosenberg says, adding a chicken drumstick to boiling water as she makes soup for herself.

Although a former Vietnam War protester, she concedes that has mixed feelings about the current crisis. After hearing Colin Powell's presentation to the U.N. Security Council, Rosenberg is almost convinced that war may be necessary. It's a view, she admits, that isn't shared with the other, mostly younger Amata community members, who are fervently anti-war.

"I no longer believe all corporations are evil, I'm in favor of school vouchers and I'm conflicted on welfare," she says. "It's not black and white any more.

"Life is complex."

scott.henry@creativeloafing.com