Including Ephemera, Broadsides, Posters, Street Sheets, Collections, etc. for the
San Francisco Diggers, Communication Company, Free City Collective,
Kaliflower Intercommunal Network, Free Print Shop, Planetedge Manifestation,
Earth/Life Defense Commune, &c.
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Cat. No.: DR-003 Full record BibCit: n.d., ca. 8/28/1968. Broadside. Legal size. Collection: SOLA-o. Abstract: This Digger sheet attacks the benefit for the Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic at the Palace of Fine Arts as a “huge fascist rock money trip,” turning the idea of charity back against the liberal machinery of foundations, bureaucrats, celebrities, and managed dissent. Beginning with Peter Watkins’s film Privilege, the piece reads the benefit as a similar spectacle of social control: rebellious youth culture repackaged as a harmless public ritual under the supervision of the very institutions it should be resisting.
The sheet is especially important for the Digger critique of “free clinics” that dealt only with symptoms rather than causes. A truly free clinic, the writer insists, would have to be part of a larger transformation: free food, free shelter, twenty-four-hour areas free of tension and paranoia, and a social atmosphere where people could “go” rather than be processed. The final call—“Free the Palace”—is not simply a protest against one benefit but a demand to break out of the “dead forms” of institutional benevolence and return Free to the street.
Note: The benefit for the Free Clinic was scheduled to happen the weekend of August 30, 1968. It was apparently a disaster due in large part to neighbors of the Palace of Fine Arts and the SF Recreation and Parks Department. See "Haight Clinic Dies," Berkeley Barb, Sept. 13, 1968, p. 7. Possible author of this piece: Arthur Lisch of the Diggers who was notoriously confrontational. See "Free Moe Free Arthur Free" by Marvin Garson, San Francisco Express Times, July 31, 1968, p. 12.
Cat. No.: DR-010b Full record BibCit: By Stephen M. Pittell. n.d., ca. 9/1/1968. Leaflet. Collation: 3 sht; stapled; additional typed note. Collection: SOLA-o(LH). Abstract: Father Leon Harris of All Saints Church sent me this excerpt in 1974. It comes from "The Current Status of the Haight-Ashbury Hippie Community," published in September 1968 by the Haight-Ashbury Research Project, a U.S. Government undertaking directed by Stephen M. Pittell, Ph.D.
The report treats the Diggers as the central source of organized service activity in the Haight-Ashbury during the crucial period from late 1966 through the spring and summer of 1967. It describes them as a loosely organized group of “Utopian hippies” whose work was not merely expressive or theatrical, but practical: free food distribution, crash pads, a Free Store, baked bread, recipes for making bread, referrals, and informal aid for newcomers and runaways. The report emphasizes that many of the services associated with the Haight-Ashbury scene either began with the Diggers or were strongly influenced by them.
The report also traces the Diggers’ relationship with All Saints Church. It states that Father Leon Harris cooperated with the Diggers in their earliest efforts, providing use of the church kitchen for free meals and office space adjoining the rectory for their headquarters. After the original Diggers began to leave the Haight, Harris appointed a committee of church members to continue assisting Digger-related services. This committee eventually became known as the Community Affairs Office, or CAO.
The excerpt then describes a transition from the original Digger operations to the CAO. During the summer of 1967, the Digger headquarters—now called the Community Affairs Office—expanded its work to include a recreation center in the church basement, a free pancake breakfast three days a week, and a Hip Job Co-op. Even after free food distribution in the Panhandle stopped, the CAO reportedly continued to distribute up to 1,000 pounds of bread per week and maintained several of the original Digger projects.
Note: The report’s interpretation, however, seems to have troubled Leon Harris. In his attached note, Harris objects to Pittell’s statement that “the CAO has now replaced the Diggers in many of their functions.” Harris calls that wording misleading because it suggests that the Diggers were no longer a Digger project, even though many of the activities being described were continuations of work that Diggers had initiated. He clarifies that this was “a Digger operation at all times,” though many of the original Diggers were not active in all periods, and some later activists were not necessarily known as Diggers.
The document helps untangle the continuity between the All Saints Church office, the Digger Free Bakery, and the Community Affairs Office. It shows that the April 1967 “split” or departure from All Saints was not the end of Digger activity there. Instead, the relationship continued and changed form, with Harris and the church becoming important institutional supports for free food, referral, recreation, and other neighborhood services rooted in the original Digger impulse.
Cat. No.: DR-004 Full record BibCit: 3/12/1969. Broadside. Letter size. Collection: SOLA-x. Abstract: Friar Tuck is making an appeal to the community (in 1969) to support a letter to the Beatles to allow the showing of four free films at the Straight Theater on the Vernal Equinox. The letter looks back to 1967, when the Haight was still imagined as “a truly beautiful street” and “a very together community,” and describes the intervening collapse into a street whose “energy has been on a downhill slide.”
Note: Interesting note: Friar Tuck in 1969 was operating under the name "free frame of reference" three years after the first Page Street free store by that name.
