Dr. McFarland

People my age and older were raised to be economical because we were all affected by 1929 and ’39, and then there came along a group of people who believed there was going to be ever-expanding prosperity. They are roughly the age of what are called the Baby Boomers, born between 1940 and 1970, or something like that.

But in the midst of those people who thought there was going to be ever-expanding prosperity were the rebels, the disbelievers, who were hippies basically. They got made into rebels over any number of issues, and basically it was because our society was extremely excessive at the time. I suppose it has always been excessive compared to the rest of the world. But at that time, I think we were at the peak of our waste – dominating the world.

I have come to look at it as psychological behavior by the nation as a whole, based on the power that the nuclear weapons had given us, to think that we were going to rule the world. So from 1945 to 1975, I think, as a nation we thought that we were going to rule the world and that this would make us ever more prosperous. I found myself very attracted to the people who were rebelling against this idea, just because I was never comfortable with it.

So when these hippies started appearing . . . pretty soon I was doctoring them because they couldn’t find anybody else to doctor them. It was kind of like when I’d been a jail doctor. You always absorb the viewpoint of the people you are doctoring to a certain degree.

When I was doctoring people in jail, or drug addicts in the methadone program, I found myself adopting some of their attitudes – which I wasn’t particularly pleased with. I mean, they were interesting and I appreciated learning it, but the basic hippie attitude, which was never well-formulated, was much more akin to what I had always wanted to believe anyway.

It was kind of an easy thing for me to make fun of our war, although I never officially protested it like a lot of people did. I sort of stood back and watched. Stuffiness, hierarchies, and rigidity of thinking are the things that I thought were being most challenged in that era. But the kids, who were runaways, were a very interesting crew, because they were frequently forced to leave home at 16, 17, and 18.

I knew one girl who grew up in Boulder and ran away from home when she was 14 and went to Haight-Ashbury, and her dad finally, I think she called home and her dad went out and got her, and the first thing he did, this was about 1966, brought her in to have her checked for VD. That conflict was occurring in Boulder in the same way it was occurring in the rest of the country. These kids would get to be 14, 15 and 16 and start having sex and also start smoking marijuana and their parents would get real mad. And they would usually take them to a psychiatrist or put them in a mental-hospital as a way of trying to control their behavior and stop them from rebelling. And that would make everything worse, so the kids would leave home.

The fight was always over drugs, supposedly, although I think it was more over sex because I think the parents were jealous of the kids’ sexual interest, activities, and freedom. So they would tighten the rules until the kids rebelled more. So the kids would just have to leave and would end up hitchhiking around the country and Boulder was a common stop.

Were they jealous because, when they were growing up, they didn’t have that freedom?

Not only that, when you’re in your forties and fifties, you’re sexually less active than teenagers. So if the teenagers don’t have to follow the rules that you had to follow, then you’re going to get mad. There was a lot of conflict going on all around the country.

Did the birth control pill have a lot to do with that?

People give it a lot of credit. That’s for people who like a technological explanation for everything. The Pill became popular about 1958 and spread. From 1958, it sort of went from being experimental to being widely used. It changed a lot of ideas, but there were a lot of other influences that changed a lot of ideas too, which was that a woman was not destined to just have kids.

I am sure that women had been saying the same thing for a long time, but for some reason or another, they decided to take action. Maybe ideas are more important than the Pill because we know today that you can achieve the same kind of birth control with condoms or diaphragms that you can with the Pill. It’s just whether you want to use it or not. People give the Pill more credit than it was due.

I think Simone de Beauvoir, with her ideas, was maybe as important as John Rock and Gregory Pinkos, the guys who invented the Pill. The interesting thing to me was how there were certain communities in the country that were sort of important stop-off places for all these hitchhiking kids – Berkeley, Boulder, Madison, and Boston. It seemed that they were always going back and forth from all those places. I think a lot of groundwork had been done in Boulder to make it an acceptable place for people to come when they were rebelling against society.

Those people would include Frank Oppenheimer, who got in flak with the university because he’d been a communist, and David Hawkins, who is still here as a very respected emeritus professor who got flak because he’d been a communist.

The community had done its best to make a place for people to be who wanted to rebel. And the thing that is most interesting to me . . . I got here in ’61, and in ’62 a friend of mine came who was a psychiatrist whose name is Erlin Solar . . . and there were only four psychiatrists at that time, and two of those are still here, so those folks hang around a long time. But the custom in those days was that, if you were a little bit nuts, you would be shipped to the state hospital in Pueblo. Everybody just thought that that was the right thing to do with crazy people. If you had enough money, you could probably avoid that, but generally speaking, that was the norm.

Well, Sclar had trained under Thomas Szaz at Syracuse, who believed you shouldn’t lock up people for being crazy. And he points out, and has been saying for 30 years, that you should lock people up for breaking the law, but not for being crazy. If they do harm to people, they should be locked up, but not just if they choose to be weird. And he feels they all do choose to be weird.

Well, Sclar came here, and he worked in the Mental Health Center for a short time and began counteracting the prevailing view that you should lock up everybody (just) because they’re crazy. Pretty soon he had some judges as patients and the customs began to change. By 1967 or ’68, when all those hippies hit town, you were no longer getting locked up for being crazy.

And then a wonderful kid came to town named John Kirkland, who was known as “STP John” because he and his friends called themselves the STP Family. And I think they were called that because they would get those stickers from Andy Granatelli STP oil cans and stick them all over their clothes. Some people said they called themselves STP because it stood for “Strongest Thing Possible.” They took a lot of drugs and drank a lot, and they were basically very hedonistic and not willing to exercise any self-control.

The gals in that family used to tell me that they would try to seduce the guys to get in the shower so they could get them to take a shower. Otherwise, they wouldn’t bathe for weeks and that would annoy the women. They were mostly teenagers, and John was the leader because he was a natural leader.

He got arrested for vagrancy. Bob Miller was his lawyer, and they beat the vagrancy statute in the Colorado Supreme Court. It reversed the law that, up until then, said: If you are just standing around doing nothing, you can be arrested and put in jail.

I had a friend who was a Ph.D. in physics who was arrested under that law during that period. And so, society began to change drastically over all those issues: Drugs, sex, doing nothing, hanging out, not having visible means of support and so forth. Boulder was a community that was willing to accept people like that. It was a time of a lot of turmoil – but I came to learn that turmoil was good for people. More usefulness came out of it than harm.

The real teaching thing for me was the People’s Clinic. I’d been seeing hippies for a couple of years, and then they started being killed. They’d get shot in the mountains and things like that. Bodies would be found and vigilante groups were being formed – making a little noise and taking a few shots at people.

There was a hippie camp up in the mountains on Forest Service land, and a guy named Walter Plowoski that I knew went and took a look at it. Walter had been in Dachau and Aushwitz when he was young He told me: “I saw an awful lot of similarities between the way these camps were being run and what I saw in the Nazi concentration camps. I saw strong, powerful people intimidating everybody else and kind of taking over and running things, just on the basis of power.” And he said: “I never particularly liked that, neither when I was a little kid in Germany nor in those hippie camps I visited.”

There was always a great tendency toward fascism to arise out of that sort of anarchy that hippies were espousing. People were getting killed, and one winter – the winter of ’69, we started having meetings about what to do the next summer when the hippies started coming back. Several people said that we needed a medical clinic to give medical care. I used to argue with them and say that there were plenty of doctors in town and anybody could get medical care, whether they had money or not.

But these folks went ahead and organized a medical clinic anyway. Their names were Jim Greyor, who was a university student doing work-study under Ted Tedesco at the city; Pat Weber was a college student; and Ken Fisher, who was a high school art teacher in those days. But, in any case, those three people went out and raised money. They had some benefit concerts, which the band Zephyr did the most on, and they raised about a thousand bucks. And I said, “Alright. I’ll help you, because I’d hate to see you waste that kind of money.”

So we rented a building at 999 Alpine from Darth Smith, and we were on the third floor until some nutty girl jumped out of the window one day. So we moved down to the basement. That clinic was a huge success from the day it opened its doors – which was on June 1^st, 1970.

People used to stand in line for hours to be able to take a shower, which was hard to come by in those days. The VD Clinic, which I started, ran from noon until 2:00, six days a week all summer long. I got my eyes opened by patients who came into my office. I had seen two young women who were bright and very normal in every other way, who both got gonorrhea, knowing they were going to get it. The guy told them he had gonorrhea, and they said they didn’t care. It was almost as if nobody had any concept of what gonorrhea was at that point. They thought it was easily treated, easily cured, and that was the end of it. VD became a big problem in those days and the people who had it used to teach me a lot about how to deal with it.

If somebody had VD, there was a willingness to share that. They were will to talk about it in front of twenty or thirty other people who were waiting their turn in this clinic. That kind of openness has not existed, in my experience, since then. People want more privacy with their problems than they wanted at that time. Everybody was so eager for information and they were trying to be one big family — this kind of effort to be communal.

The clinic was going to be called The People’s Free Clinic, which was a kind of Chairman Mao kind of name. Nobody had any qualms about discussing their sexual contacts, partners, or their diseases in front of ten or twenty other people, who were all of the same general, young, hippie backgrounds.

Did you fund The People’s Free Clinic through donations?

Oh, yes! The thousand bucks went for the rent. When that was gone, people kept putting money into it. It was all funded completely by donations for two years.

Jim Patterson was the first Director, and he used to sleep in the place . . . Which was against the rules because the Fire Marshall wouldn’t allow sleeping, and so forth and so on. He would take money out of the donation cans in order to eat. He used to get in trouble with the Board of Directors because he would use this money in order to eat while they weren’t paying him anything. So it made pretty good sense to me that if you were going to have a Director, he at least ought to be able to eat. But they wanted him to turn the money in and get it put on the books and get paid back. They felt that there should be an accounting of what was going on.

I was just standing there watching all these conflicts and learning from them. Jim has been a fairly successful solar entrepreneur in recent years. I see him every now and then. All kinds of contributions were made. The community really poured in a lot of money into the clinic, in a very spontaneous fashion. People donated refrigerators, food, and what not. And after about two years, Linda Gore became the Director, and she had wonderful political connections with the three Country Commissioners, because her dad had been an important Democratic politician who had been leading the anti-war effort. By 1972 or so, the whole community was pretty much anti-war, and so (although) he was dead by that time, (Linda Gore’s father) was looked upon as a prophet. So these three County Commissioners, who were, I think, Wally Toevs, Maggie Markey, and Joe Smith, gave money to the Clinic without any strings attached, which was kind of a precedent setting event.

The Clinic still has that precedent, although I think everybody watches it more carefully nowadays. They basically don’t ask people whether they can afford it or not. They tell them, if they can afford it we’ll treat you, but (they) should seek treatment elsewhere. In those days, (if you were poor) you couldn’t get treatment anywhere unless you passed some kind of means-test and proved that you didn’t have any money. The welfare system was very oppressive.

If the Health Department had been doing their job right, the People’s Clinic would have never even started because they were given money which they could have used to have funded either a VD clinic or a drug program, which was a big problem in town. And they chose to use the money to pay their employees and give them raises – which I suppose any bureaucracy would have to do. But they didn’t make any effort to start any programs to treat VD or drug- problems. (All of which) is why the People’s Clinic arrived. It has been a huge success because it met the needs of the community in a very spontaneous, ecological way.

As VD and drug problems disappear, they have taken on other problems – like pregnant women who don’t have enough money to deliver and things of that sort. It has been a huge success that I was glad to play a part in, but I certainly didn’t have any real role in starting it, because I didn’t believe it was necessary.

What I learned was that all those kids were coming in and telling me that they couldn’t get in and see doctors, and the doctors were telling me, “No, I see everybody that comes in the door.” What was happening was, those kids were very frightening to the receptionists if they came in with long hair, bare feet, or dirt. The doctors could have solved the problem if they had really looked into it.

It was very interesting to look at the social turmoil and what came out of it. I think the community is much more sophisticated as a result. I could trace a lot of things to that – the most obvious one being the 1971 election in which four incumbent councilmen got defeated. And that has never happened before, or since. In that year, four thousand college students voted. That has never happened in any election since.

Was SDS at all instrumental in starting the People’s Clinic?

No. Well . . . In a way. They had opened the Freedom Center, which was down on Walnut Street in a building owned by Hank Roberts, who is (owner of) Hank Roberts Flies, who makes flies for fly fishermen. They were using empty buildings next to his fly store. The Freedom Center was started by SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) in ’67 or ’68, mainly to share things . . . like people would bring in old clothes and other people would come in and pick them up. It was kind of an exchange. Dick Moscowithz, who was a doctor and who was one of the leaders of SDS and was not practicing medicine, (he was going to the graduate School of Philosophy), would see people in there as a doctor, and that first put the idea into the community of free medical care.

So, in a way, SDS put the ideas into the community, but they had, by and large, sort of been exhausted and washed-over by the time large numbers of hippies started appearing. They were more organized in an anti-war protest. They were exhausted and had been driven off-campus, probably because of their success. The university brought in S.I. Hyakawa, who was a very inflammatory speaker, and he enraged the crowd to the point where John Butney threw a chair at him. So SDS got themselves thrown off campus, and I thought that it was a staged provocation, because Hyakawa was so good at that sort of thing.

Who was John Butney?

John Butney was one of the leaders of SDS, and he was a kind of hot-tempered guy. He just got mad and threw a chair. Hyakawa will basically be remembered for defusing the rebellion at San Francisco State. He got elected to the Senate from California as a result, because a large number of people were concerned about anarchy.

Ed Meese was a county attorney in those days and making a lot of noise about how we ought to lock those people up. One of our district attorneys went to hear Meese speak . . . Bill Weiss is kind of an average, liberal, Democrat, and came back and told me how nice it was to hear Meese speak, because he was the first attorney general in fifty or sixty years who had ever been a county attorney, or district attorney, and had the experience of prosecuting criminals. So a guy who ordinarily would be strongly opposed to Meese was kind of enchanted (with him) because they both had the same background.

Hyakawa, with his book, Language, Thought, and Action, did as much as anybody to try and make people aware of how words count. When he was finally given a political job after all those years, it was restoring law and order. I still think law and order is an important function. It just should be done with justice, rather than with repression. It turns out that people who want law and order always want to repress somebody’s rights.

Here was a rebellion done by young people. I used to argue with my dad and say, “Don’t you realize there’s a revolution going on in this country?” And he’d say, “No. It’s just a rebellion.” And I’d say, “What’s the difference?” He said, “A rebellion fails and a revolution succeeds.”

I was kind of miffed by it and went to the dictionary – and that’s the way it was. But that rebellion will eventually be successful as those people grow older and eventually begin running the country.

I felt badly, at the time, that I wasn’t able to go out and help them more. I had never been particularly rebellious, except within my own family, but I saw they were right. They didn’t get much help from people who were older than they were. I saw my role as simply doctoring sick people. But I’m not going to let that kind of era happen again, if I can help it, because the young people took it too hard, you see.

They became suicidal in large numbers over that issue. And it always used to be that the rate of suicide would increase with age, until people in their ‘70s had the highest rate of suicide. All of a sudden, it began to reverse and teenagers became the second highest suicide group in the country after the 70 year olds. I was watching all that happen and the most common cause of death among my patients was suicide.

Do you have any explanation for that?

I think it was just high expectations and difficulty in satisfying them. What kids are promised and what they find out as soon as they go look for themselves – a certain percentage of them felt like suicide. I see this turmoil as coming around again. Every twenty years we tend to go to war because we’ve got a fresh crop of young people and we think it’s time to punish them by sending them off to be killed. I’m going to put more effort into it this time, because last time I was just kind of bystander providing medical care.

This time, I’m going to be a lot more active, because the stakes just keep getting higher. The chances of nuclear war are more. The chances of obliteration are more. We probably had the capacity to kill everyone in the world in 1967, but everybody didn’t recognize it. Now everybody knows it. You can’t really afford not to act on your knowledge.

If you know things are going to happen and you don’t do something about it, you get mad at yourself. You get frustrated at yourself. And since it’s not easy to do something about it, all this extra knowledge creates a lot of frustration and difficulty for people because we have to get more of the power into the hands of the people and out of the hands of the people who have traditionally run the government. From the time of George Washington on, a few rich people have run the government. George Washington probably made more money out of being President than anybody since.

Education will accomplish the goal in the long run if we don’t kill everybody first. You can’t resist educational efforts for long. Nobody has been able to.

Copyright 2026    S. Byron Gassaway