The 1967 Love In in Griffith Park near LA and The Great People Puddle

Easter Sunday in 1967 in Southern California was a bright, warm sunny day. The word had gone out that a Love In was going to happen. My mother and my older sister and my younger brother and I got ready to go by making some God’s eyes and putting some love bead necklaces on.

A God’s eye it’s just two sticks that are crossed and a bunch of colored yarn woven between them to make a square. I was 13 and a half and I made a God’s eye that was about a foot square out of a bunch of colored yarn and one long stick so I could carry it like a banner.

Side story alert: My older brother did not go with us. You know how a lot of teenagers rebel? Well he rebelled by going straight. His way of rebelling against the family norm was to be as straight as possible. He kept his hair short. He refused to smoke pot with us. He actually joined a very straight organization called Up With People. Worst of all is that he wanted to go to Vietnam. He was hoping that he would get drafted when he turned 18. Here I am out there protesting my little teenaged year old ass off against this goddamn travesty of trying to force democracy down the throats of a bunch of people in Southeast Asia that could care less about it and my own brother thinks it would be some kind of dandy adventure to join the battle. He did join the Navy right out of high school in 1971 but by then Vietnam was winding down. My brother got stuck on Midway Island for a whole year and there’s absolutely nothing on Midway Island. I guess it served him right in a way. It’s called karma but it’s pronounced ‘ha ha fuck you’.

The Love In in Griffith Park was one of those amazing events where as you’re getting closer and closer to the crowd of people you can just feel the energy in the air. Kind of like when that first note comes out of the amplifiers at a Grateful Dead concert and the electricity is tangible and everybody tunes in to that same one note and everyone has the same thought – “a fantastic time is now starting.” There was music, there was dancing and flowers and love was actually in the air. It’s what we called a really groovy time.

An hour or two into the event I’m sitting on a blanket when I noticed a line of people coming through the crowd. All holding hands and the one on the end had his hand out and people were jumping up and grabbing that hand and joining in the train. A people train. It came right by me. I jumped up. I grabbed the hand of the person that was at the end. I held my hand out and I became part of a ginormous train of people weaving in and out of the crowd. We weaved in and out of the trees and the hill and then one of the most incredible things in my entire life happened.

When the people train made its way out of the trees and back into the crowd, we went to the far end of the field away from the music. Where the most room was. Several hundred people holding hands in a circle. We started backing up, making the circle bigger, still holding hands. And then we all rushed into the middle and made a ginormous People Puddel and fell on top of each other and laughed and laughed.

You have to know that nobody was directing this. There was nobody in the middle saying ‘OK you go here and you go there’. It just happened. It was spontaneous. Everybody knew what was going to happen but nobody told anybody what was going to happen. Once we formed a circle we all knew it was going to end up as a big pile of people in the middle. I don’t know how we knew that. I don’t know how we all knew that but we did. Talk about being on the exact same wavelength.

Only a handful of times in my entire life have I been involved in situations where I felt that connected to the minds of fellow human beings. I had participated in some very pure LSD trips where we sat around with candle lights and incense and listened to Indian music and read the Book of Tao to each other. I came away from those thinking that I had joined completely with a few people in that process for a time. But this wasn’t a half a dozen people. This was several hundred. And it was the exact same feeling.

Four or five years ago I posted something about this on Easter. Somebody commented with a link to a freaking video. Imagine my surprise around 50 years later to see a grainy 20 minute 8 mm video of that day. And of the group of us running in and out of the crowd, running around in the woods holding hands, forming a large circle and rushing into the middle to pile on top of each other. I couldn’t freaking believe that somebody actually captured that on some old movie camera and then eventually it got uploaded to YouTube.

We did not take any pictures that day. I’m adding some stock photos I found of the event to this post. I’m adding some links to some really interesting videos that somehow survived and have been posted. Here is an excerpt from an article that describes these kind of events:

“Despite the intercity rivalry and opposing musical aesthetics, L.A. and San Francisco shared much during the Summer of Love, with accommodation made for geography. Love-Ins at L.A.’s Griffith Park were analogous to those in Golden Gate Park and were just as spontaneous and peaceful. “A Love-In was just a Sunday afternoon when the word of mouth was, ‘Everyone’s going to meet there around noon,’” recalls the L.A. musician and veteran photographer Henry Diltz. “Most of the people were on psychedelics. It was all totally lovely, never an ugly moment.”
Los Angeles: The True Home of the Summer of Love? By Michael Walker. June 2, 2017.

This 20-minute video is grainy and kind of out-of-focus but it is set to music very much like what we were hearing from the bands that day. At 17 minutes into this it focuses on the group of people holding hands coming back out of the woods. It shows the formation of the large circle. It shows everybody rushing into the middle. I have looked for myself in this video and I believe I’m just off camera to the left just before the rushing together started.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82gGAa3Nqq8

The best one minute clip overview
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjs276qhxV4

A very well done 2 minute and 20 second clip that shows the formation of the human chain that became the People Puddle at about 1 minute and 45 seconds
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2hzQLvSIFs

A pretty good five minutes 45 seconds color overview but set to some rather strange music
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AowtH3i7VOU