Before Wormtown - Pt 4

For me, it really began on this street...

Before I ever knew that Congress Alley existed, though, the influences had already reached Grafton... that sleepy little bedroom town was having a quiet revolution of altered consciousness in the center of town, just about every night. It was the summer of love, 1967, and I had just graduated from High School.

We connected up with the crowd living down on Congress Street that summer, and provided the kind of transportation for various people that only suburban kids from middle class families could. The Y-Not coffee house, the Clark Student Union, Walter and Marie Green's place on Gates Street, Norman Schell's apartment on Congress Street, ...we were shuttling around between places like that on a regular basis, almost every night.

Everything went into a regular pot-smoking existence...

The "Omnibus" head shop used to be located somewhere up in this area of Pleasant Street, as I recall...

I saw a bumper sticker the other day that said, "If it wasn't for flashbacks, I wouldn't have any memories at all."

Well, it certainly isn't that bad. I still remember Don Pepper talking about what a great idea he had to buy a quart of LSD and dump it into the reservoir... until someone pointed out that it wouldn't get anybody off at all, it'd just make a few people mildly nauseous, if anything.

My pot smoking marathon lasted for a few years until I got married and we had a kid. From 1970 to 1977, I was out of circulation... until the divorce.

My re-insertion into the Worcester scene of the late 1970's was all about the Garden of Delights and WCUW. My sister was living on Goulding Street, next door to where Tink and Prink lived, and I spent a lot of time shuttling between there, the radio station, and the restaurant. Those were very lean years, but they sure were good years!

I recently had an e-mail exchange with Lois (Prink), who's now living in California "wine country" on forty acres (where Sonoma and Napa Counties come together in the mountains outside of Santa Rosa). She says, "...it takes a lot of money to be a hippie these days." She's still cooking after all these years.

Today, I went over to Highland Street and took a bunch of pictures to make a couple of panoramic views of the way Highland Street looks today.







If you click on the pictures, you'll get a larger image.

On that little section of Highland Street in those days was the Garden of Delights, "Mad John's" head shop, Shakey Jake's, and Theo's Restaurant, just to name a few.

The "Highland Renaissance Fair" eventually ran on the street every year, too, ...and for a while it began to look like there just might be some realization of the dream...