Buster Fleming once lived in a second-story apartment that overlooked a revolution.
For $15 a month, he and his roommates witnessed the hippie counterculture movement from its epicenter - above Cal's Surplus Store at the corner of Haight and Ashbury.
Fleming arrived in 1964 but never intended to stay more than a night.
He was 18 and on his way to Australia when he decided to stop in San Francisco along the way. He met a flower child, and they agreed to get together again later at the Psychedelic Shop on Haight.
"She stood me up," Fleming said with a hefty laugh. "She was a hippie before hippie was a mainstream word. This was when psychedelic drugs, you know LSD, were being given out for free. This place was so different than anything I'd ever seen before."
That one night in the City by the Bay has turned into 43 years for Fleming.
What changed the course of his life would have a similar effect on thousands of young people who floated like logs down a river to San Francisco in 1967 as part of the Summer of Love.
But the Summer of Love has become idealized in its retold history. It was a utopian idea, Fleming said, but not a reflection of the present state of affairs.
"That's what we were striving for in '67, but we didn't have it yet," he said. "I've always thought it was kind of misleading calling 1967 the Summer of Love. Love was the idea. It was what we were searching for - this kind of perfect place. But we weren't there yet. If you're going to call it what it is, it was more like the Summer of Discontent."
As young people came pouring in from all over the country in search of this place of peace and love, their ideas and their way of life were much different than what anyone had been exposed to at the time, Fleming said. This clash of ideas and the ensuing struggle to understand and adjust led to a restless and uneasy summer for the city.
"There was a big mixture of ideologies," said Fleming, now 61. "We thought everything should be free. Free food, free housing, free phones, free everything. This kind of thinking and our way of life here really conflicted with the residents outside The Haight-Ashbury. It created this big culture clash. Here we were and we were like nothing they had seen before and they're asking, 'What's happening to our neighborhood and to our city?'"
Former board supervisor Angela Alioto was 14 during the summer of 1967. Her father, Joseph Alioto, was elected mayor a few months later and with it came the task of guiding San Francisco through this unprecedented metamorphosis.
"In those days, he would work 20 hours a day, literally, and it was tough," Alioto said. "I remember as a kid, there were always a lot of official meetings at our home on Saturdays and Sundays. We also had a (police) squad living with us because our home had been (attacked). So, in other words, I saw the serious side of it when I was at home."
For all the issues the movement helped to push into society's consciousness, from anti-war to civil rights and women's rights to freedom of speech, it wasn't heaven on earth either. At least not yet.
"The Summer of Love was not the Summer of Love that year. In the beginning, the residents resented them," said Art Agnos, former mayor of San Francisco, who was a 28-year-old social worker at the time. "These kids were spilling out into the surrounding neighborhoods and sort of camping out on their front steps or in their yards and just settling down wherever they decided to do their thing, so there was a lot of friction between them and also with the police who were instructed to keep these folks in order. In '67 people still didn't fully understand what it was all about just yet."
To Fleming, though, this neglected history of the summer of '67 is inconsequential.
What it was and how it's told today only matter to those who weren't there to experience it for themselves, he said.
The city that was supposed to be a stop on the way - and the ideology of peace and love that wouldn't let him leave - are all that matter.
He's a lifer, one of the rare spirits that has been here ever since.
"I guess there's only about 10 of us now. Ten survivors from that time period that have never left, still working in the community, still believing in the peace and freedom movement. We're still hippies," he said, taking a moment to brush the long, now-white, hair from his face. "We always will be."
