One Of The Permanent Fixtures Of The Summer Of Love And Running A Jewelry Stand In Berkeley To This Day
The best way to describe a person like Lee is easygoing - going with the flow and letting life go where it wants to go. Lee came from New York City in the 1960s and came to be one of the permanent fixtures of the Summer of Love in the Bay Area. She now runs her jewelry stand in front of Studio Six on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley and if one is lucky, they’ll get a chance to talk to her about a wide variety of subjects.
“I married young and had a baby in 1968,” recalls Lee, “my husband at the time was kind of a guru of things.” After having the baby, the marriage didn’t work out and Lee found herself in a difficult situation. “My friend from Kindergarten just signed with A and M records and moved to LA and I called her up. She said, “get out here!’” Lee explains. She made her way out to LA and loved California, but “LA was not for me.” She said, even then, it was very superficial and not real enough for “an old hippy like me.”
She moved to San Francisco in 1969 and “lived in a commune across from Golden Gate Park,” Lee recalls, “and I started making jewelry.” Since she was a single mom, making jewelry was a natural fit as she could do it at home. Eventually she married again and her husband had family in Berkeley so they went and moved in with his sister. “We started selling things in front of Cody’s Bookstore on Telegraph,” she explains. “We were called ‘street artists.’ Fred Cody, the owner of the bookstore, was such a wonderful man.
Cody’s Bookstore was a Telegraph Avenue institution. Founded in 1956, the company survived through the decades all the way until 2008, when poor sales caused it to close. An interesting tidbit about the store is characteristic of the area and Free Speech Movement that breathes there - in 1989 the store was firebombed as a result of showing support for Salman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses” - a book which caused officials in the Muslim world to be condemned to death. In a 2008 SFgate article, the owner at the time, Andy Ross, says “The whole staff voted unanimously to sell the book… It was a moment I was most proud of.”
With selling in front of the store, Lee continued to grow as a jewelry artist and eventually, along with other street artists, petitioned the voters to legalize street vending on Telegraph Avenue. It passed and the city expanded the sidewalks to make room for all the vendors and pedestrians. Eventually, “husband number 2,” she chuckles and her broke up. Some of the other vendors and her decided to go sell in front of Macy’s in San Francisco, illegal at the time, however “I made $900 in one day!” She exclaims, “that was A LOT of money back then!” She moved back to San Francisco into a beautiful “Victorian house in Pacific Heights,” she recalls, “rent was $300 a month back then.” Nowadays, Pacific Heights is one of the most expensive places to live in the United States, homes easily in the millions. She petitioned with her fellow vendors for legalizing street vending in San Francisco and got it.
She moved back to Berkeley in 1989 and met “my wonderful husband of 22 years,” she says, adding while laughing, “that’s number 3.” She continued to sell on Telegraph Avenue and on “July 1st, 6 years ago, the jewelry store was closing and she asked my husband and I if we wanted to rent it,” she recalls, “we talked to the landlord, who is unusual as she gives us affordable rent.” Now, her husband sells and fixes his things, like watches, in his store, Studio Six, and she sells out front.
Living and being apart of the Bay area for so long, Lee has seen many changes and many beautiful things happen. Back then, “it was all about peace and love,” she recalls, “kids walked to school together without parents because nothing bad ever happened.” She says that San Francisco has changed so much that “it feels sterile and there’s no love,” she says. She shares a quick anecdote - “My husband and I were out to eat and we were watching all these couples. They all had their faces downs in their phones and didn’t even talk to each other… no one talks to each other anymore!” She says that Berkeley, though, is not like that. “You can have real conversations,” she says. She recalls sending a customer to one of the many independent coffee shops in Berkeley and “she came back so happy and smiling saying ‘I actually got to talk to a lot of different people!”
The days of the Summer of Love are gone. The independent bookstores and record stores are closing. San Francisco is going “up and up and up,” as Lee says, both in tearing down old buildings and putting up high rises and in rent prices. Parts of California are so polluted that one can barely breathe the air. It seems that everyone is all about “Google and Twitter and computers,” Lee says and not “looking at each other and having a conversation.”
But there is reason to hope and Lee gets to see it every day. “A lot of my customers come from the University,” Lee shares, touched, “and they are so active. They are like we were when we went to March on Washington D.C. to protest the Vietnam War.” And that is reason to be excited and hope. If the young people of the Bay area, who are going to own this world, can inherit a bit of peace and love that the Summer of Love brought to light 50 years ago, then everyone will be a bit more easygoing, like Lee, the street artist on Telegraph Avenue.
Andrew Malo
A graduate of Northeastern Illinois University in Education, Andrew has taught for the past decade in Chicago, New Mexico, and Japan. He enjoys tinkering with trucks and motorcycles, woodworking, reading and computer programming.
Make Sure To Stay At:
Coyote Point Marina, a regional recreation area that provides a wide variety of opportunities: picnicking, swimming, windsurfing, bicycling, jogging, fishing, boating, and sailing. See shorebirds, colorful boats, windsurfers, and planes.