A slightly longer version of this interview appeared in the August 1985 issue of The Sun.
— Ed.
On Columbus Day 1970, more than two hundred San Francisco hippies set off in a caravan of remodeled school buses on a cross-country pilgrimage. In the lead bus was Stephen Gaskin. A former Marine and college teacher, he’d started experimenting with psychedelics in the 1960s and had begun holding Monday-night discussion groups at San Francisco State College on drugs, religion, honesty, and peaceful cultural revolution. By 1970, Gaskin’s most dedicated followers were ready to start a community of their own, based on self-reliance, voluntary simplicity, hard work, and faith in God.
