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Graphic: Voluntary Peasants

​For those who were too young or weren’t born yet, have you ever wondered what it would have been like to be in the first wave of hippies that crested in the late 1960s and early 70s? So have I.

Now you can get a real window on that world, perhaps a clearer window than ever before. Actually, it’s more of a total immersion in that world rather than just a window on it, because Holy Hippies and The Great, Round-the-Country Save-the-World School Bus Caravan is written very much from an inside viewpoint.
Holy Hippies is Book Two of Stiriss’s “Voluntary Peasants Trilogy,” penned by former UPI journalist turned hippie Melvyn Stiriss. Toke of the Town also loved Book One, Enlightenment: What’s It Good For when it was released last December.
The trilogy is the first comprehensive, inside story of The Farm, the biggest, most successful hippie commune in United States history, located at Summertown, Tennessee.
The Farm won the “alternative Nobel Peace Price,” the Swedish-based Right Livelihood Award, “for caring, sharing and acting with and on behalf of those in need at home and abroad.”
The place really was a haven of good vibes; I visited several times during the late 1970s and early 1980s, and got a warm welcome each time. I remember being struck by the fact that the sentries at the front gate of The Farm didn’t shake your hand — they hugged you.

Photo: Melvyn Stiriss
Melvyn Stiriss: “The Farm collective was our attempt to create a utopia.”

Voluntary Peasants Trilogy Tells The Story of S.F.’s Monday Night Class and The Farm

When a ragtag band of hippies set out in a 20-bus caravan from San Francisco in 1970 looking to reinvent society, they rode into the history books with a psychedelic, very weird yet very American tale of idealism and do-it-yourself utopia.
And right there in the midst of things was young writer Melvyn Stiriss. Tom Brokaw once said of himself, “In the sixties, I was a young up-and-coming reporter, and I came right up to the edge of what was happening, and I backed away.” 

“At that time, I too was a rising young journalist,” Stiriss said. “I came up to that same edge as Tom, only I went Wheeee! Over. And that has made all the difference.”
“The fact that I am a trained, experienced journalist placed me in a situation that was both enviable and uniquely challenging,” Stiriss said. “I never entered the hippie world with the idea of writing about it. I was never just a fly-on-the-wall, unattached observer. I was in deep, sometimes over my head.”