Topic spans: 1964 - 2006
Hippie Society: The Youth Rebellion
Flowers and free love. Antiwar marches and acid tests. In the mid to late 1960s, youth across North America and Europe began to "turn on, tune in and drop out." Fed up with the establishment — parents, schools, police — they went looking for a new way of life. To Toronto's Yorkville and Vancouver's Kitsilano district they came, preaching peace, love and non-conformity.
14 television clips
8 radio clips
Welcome to the future: Less work, more play
Broadcast Date: March 24, 1968
In 1966, Lou Gottlieb, former member of the folk singing trio The Limeliters, purchases a 30-acre ranch in Sonoma County north of San Francisco. He calls it Morning Star Ranch, and it becomes a place of communal retreat for Haight-Ashbury youth suffering from burnout, boredom, or police pressure. In this CBC Television clip, Gottlieb explains that Morning Star is a preview of the lifestyle of the future.Gottlieb believes that someday soon machines will be doing most of the work that people do now. Those who don't want to work won't have to. And Gottlieb's not the only one who thinks so. Young people come from far and wide to live on his ranch. A hippie named Rick appears in this clip, defending life on the ranch to a former teacher. For him, the future starts now.
Welcome to the future: Less work, more play
• The Limeliters — Glenn Yarbrough, Lou Gottlieb and Alex Hassilev — were formed in 1959 and disbanded in 1965. The trio's biggest hit was 1961's A Dollar Down.• Morning Star Ranch was also referred to as "the Digger farm," and it supplied apples and other organic fruits and vegetables to the Diggers for their free-food programs and events.
• In March 1967 Bryan Wilson, an Oxford don, pointed out that hippies were trying to rebel against and escape from affluent society but were also completely dependent upon it for survival. The subculture was sustained by parental allowances, odd jobs in the straight world, drug sales to people from outside the scene, and unemployment insurance.
• In 1969 London Observer reporter Rudolf Klein claimed that this dependence was precisely why the hippie movement started in California —it was just the sort of rich society that could afford to support a large number of dropouts.
• Klein, too, believed that hippies were harbingers of what was to come. He wrote, "Hard work is becoming less necessary...rising incomes may lead to the rejection of traditional work-oriented, advancement-oriented, achievement-oriented attitudes."
Welcome to the future: Less work, more play
Medium: Television
Program: The Way It Is
Broadcast Date: March 24, 1968
Guest(s): Rick , Lou Gottlieb
Producer: Don Shebib
Duration: 5:59
Last updated:
June 28, 2005
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hippie · Yorkville · flower children · 1960s
Welcome to the future: Less work, more play.
The CBC Digital Archives Website.
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
Last updated: June 28, 2005.
[Page consulted on Nov. 21, 2009.]