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OTHER HIPPIES: What a long, strange trip it's been . . .

By LANE DEGREGORY
Published July 25, 2006

We asked Times readers if they had been hippies, and if so, how had their lives changed. Among the responses:

JANE JACKSON, 59, St. Petersburg

In the summer of 1967, Jane says, she was a USF student, protesting the Vietnam War, manning a sign-up desk for Students for a Democratic Society. She drove a '62 Ford Falcon, listened to Joan Baez and Ravi Shankar. She was determined to help bring about world peace.

Jane is back at USF, studying for a master's in social work. After 33 years as a flight attendant, she retired in 2003, then volunteered as a guardian ad litem. She drives a '98 Honda, listens to classical music and worries about her country.

"We've lost our spiritual compass," Jane says, (consider) "the war, the Evangelical right, the deficit, W (President Bush) . . . "

LINDA BRAGG, 56, New Port Richey

She was a few years behind Jim Morrison and Jack Kerouac, but in the summer of 1967, Linda Bragg hung out at their hip Pinellas Park haunt: Beaux Arts. She was still in high school, listening to Dylan, reading Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception. Too young to vote, she slapped a Eugene McCarthy bumper sticker on her dad's Corvair.

Linda's parents died soon after she finished school. With a small inheritance, she bought a 30-acre farm in Tennessee. Running water was the creek nearby and the bathroom was "a two-seater up the hill." She grew tomatoes, made batik art and gathered signatures opposing plans to build a nuclear power plant.

She hangs out at home now, mostly, with her three-legged dog. When there's a good band at Skipper's Smokehouse in Tampa, she goes.

Linda is divorced, with a stepdaughter and three stepgrandsons. She is the public relations specialist for Pasco County's library system, drives a Saturn Ion and still listens to the Beatles. Though she no longer knocks on doors for her causes, she sends money to the Audubon Society, Elephant Sanctuary and Sierra Club. Her big worries now? Insurance rates and global warming.

She's searching for true love, she says, and is writing a book on her hippie years on her Tennessee farm.

IMKE STOKES, 55, Dunnellon

She was a student at the University of Frankfurt, Germany, in 1971 - but she didn't go to many classes. Imke and her friends were too busy protesting the Vietnam War, volunteering with the German Students for a Democratic Society, piling into a VW van for road trips to Spain and Morocco. She wore long Indian dresses, velvet pants with Indian blouses and read Herman Hesse.

"Alcohol was considered base compared to the refined experience of dope or LSD," she says. Free love "was the natural way to live."

Imke works out of her home now, providing technical sales support for a Miami company. She wears shorts and T-shirts and indulges only in wine. She pays attention to politics but is no longer actively involved.

"As the times changed, and the counterculture did not manage to create its own functioning economic and social environment ... I realized my mother was right: We were not so different from the rest of society after all," she says.

"But a lot of the values we have carried over. People and animals have always been more important to me than status symbols . . . It scares me that teenagers today seem to be mostly defined by consumerism and brand names."

[Last modified July 24, 2006, 21:14:15]