(Andy Clifford, 2023)
Interview with Andy Clifford, 73, part of the original 1960’s New York counterculture and a contractor on Long Island, August 2, 2023
Clifford was a 16-year-old runaway from Long Island who went to the East Village in 1967 and entered the hippie scene around Tompkins Square. He picked up the nickname Shakespeare from his friend James “Groovy” Hutchinson, after countless readings of his poems and short stories in Jr.’s Cave next door to The Psychedelicatessen and across from Tompkins Square Park.
In the spring and summer of that year, Clifford helped run a crash pad for young runaways with Groovy and Donald “Galahad” Johnson. Groovy was murdered with the debutante-turned-hippie Linda Fitzpatrick in the tenement basement on Avenue B by two East Village residents in October 1967. Galahad was extradited to Louisiana in March 1968 on an outstanding warrant for selling seven dollars of pot to an undercover officer in New Orleans. He served two years picking cotton at the infamous Angola Penitentiary, where he was routinely beaten by other prisoners.
Clifford himself was forcibly removed from the East Village by detectives from the 9th Precinct that was located on 5th Street, while his father watched from the sideline. In the summer of 1967, shortly before the Groovy murders, Clifford spent two months locked up in a Nassau County jail at his parents request, on wayward minor charges. His own life followed the turmoil of the 1960s. Clifford ran away from New York and hitchhiked to San Francisco, just in time to be arrested at the People’s Park Riots. Several years later, he was living in upstate New York with his first wife and child. Clifford’s first wife got involved with a meth-using artist. To protect his daughter, Clifford took her and moved back to Long Island.
Clifford eventually remarried and had a second daughter. He and his wife Katrina have been married for 44 years.
As a single father, Clifford worked as a teacher at an alternative education school called the Learning Tree Free School in Westbury. Refusing to rejoin straight society, he found he had a natural talent for home renovation, which led to a successful career later on restoring old houses on Long Island, including a dilapidated, circa:1680 farmhouse in Cold Spring Harbor.
Clifford spoke with Dylan Foley in August 2023 by telephone from his home in Huntington, Long Island, about the exhilarating and turbulent summer of 1967 in the East Village with Galahad and Groovy, and how his hippie experience had a long-lasting effect on his life.
DYLAN FOLEY: What is your background?
ANDY CLIFFORD: I was born on the Lower East Side in 1951. We moved to Brooklyn, Ocean Avenue and Newkirk Street and lived there ‘til I was five. We moved to an apartment complex in Queens,where I lived until I was 14. My parents then moved to Valley Stream on Long Island. That’s when it all changed for me. I was used to the city, used to people of all colors. I never experienced racism until we moved to Long Island. I felt like a black kid in a white neighborhood. It was horrible. I was only there for two years before I finally decided to bounce. I couldn’t take it anymore. I went back to the city.
DF: Valley Stream was a white town?
AC: Elmont Memorial High School was all white..snow white. There was not a black kid in my school. It was culture shock. That’s pretty extreme. I was brought up Jewish. The kids hated Jews where we moved to. I never experienced that. I had black friends that would walk me to Hebrew school in Jackson Heights from Corona. When we moved to Valley Stream, they were drawing swastikas around our house. I never, ever experienced anything like that. I’m about 15 years old. That’s what, in part, drove me out. It’s not a bad neighborhood. It’s a pretty good neighborhood. My parents said, “You don’t know how to make friends.” Denial.
DF: Did you have an interest in hippie culture?
AC: No. It was about freedom. It wasn’t about anything but freedom, about creative expression. It wasn’t going to happen at school. at that point in time…it was the Viet Nam era, the “Leave It To Beaver” and the “Father Knows Best” era.
Later on, I was part of starting a Free School with other people. I wanted other kids to have the opportunities I tried to have. We created an alternative to public school fashioned after A.S. Neil’s Summerhill in the U.K.. A lot of kids were having a hard time. The school system was pretty bad in the 1960’s. It was all about testing, not what a kid can do. In the school we started, we didn’t test, except for the ones we were forced to do because we were accredited by the State of New York.
I was having a bad time with my family. My father was from England. He had a deep British accent. All his side of the family were seemingly very proper. You do things as you are supposed to do with no explanation or questions asked. The times were changing and they couldn’t deal with that. It was a no brainer. I was going down to the Lower East Side, where I was born.
I took a trip to the city with one of my friends. I was walking around the Village and just got a taste of it, on MacDougal Street, on Bleecker, and started hearing the history of what happened down there, before me, in the late 50’s and very early 1960’s, like Seeger, Guthrie, Dylan, Baez, Ramblin’ Jack... and those people. I walked through the coffee houses. It was like Disneyland for me.
I couldn’t stay on Long Island, I had to come down here, to create some roots. At 16, it was hard to do. I tried to get jobs. No one was going to hire me. I also needed to stay below the radar from the cops….I was supposed to be in school.
DF: What did your parents do for work?
AC: My father worked in the Garment District in Manhattan, cutting dresses, cutting wedding dresses. He was a cutter. [Clifford's mother stayed at home.]
DF: How did you run away?
AC: I lived on the border of Valley Stream and Queens.I walked into Queens and caught the bus to the subway, to Astor Street in the LES. From there I walked to Tompkins Square Park. I was sitting there at 4 a.m. I saw this guy, who turned out to be Groovy. He seemed tall and wiry with straight jet black hair covering a narrow face with definitive features… We were alone at that hour, except for a stray dog walker or two. He came and sat down next to me and we started talking. Him and his sidekick Galahad were staying in the back of Ed Sanders (of the band, The Fugs) Peace Eye Bookstore on 10th Street. He invited me to come crash with them…and so I did.
DF: Groovy and Galahad ran the crash pad at the Peace Eye Bookstore, where you stayed at first. They were both 21. Groovy seemed to be a bit hyperactive.
AC: He wasn’t hyperactive. He was just energized. That’s what I dislike about schools. They label you as hyperactive and put you on drugs. Groovy was highly energized. He was like that from the minute he woke up. He was rip roaring, ready to go. He was in the park at 4:30 in the morning. I never understood the relationship between those two. Galahad and Groovy traveled almost everywhere together. They seemed good for one another in a lot of ways. Most everything was Groovy’s idea. Galahad helped with implementing them. Just the way he looked, Galahad had more of a presence about him. I think that’s why he got all the attention. He cared about things that Groovy didn’t give a shit about.
Like the TV show, The Alan Burke Show, Galahad wanted to go so badly. He never ended up going. Groovy went with me because he was at the right place at the right time…another long story.
I don’t want to use the word fragile, but Galahad did not seem to be satisfied with a lot of what he was doing. He was always looking to be part of something that was his. He wanted to own something, to own an idea. When Groovy died, he mentioned the Thing Store, on the Lower East Side. There was already a free store on the Lower East Side. It wasn’t his idea. The Diggers just came there. There was this guy Emmet Grogan.
DF: I think Abbie Hoffman set up the Free Store on the Lower East Side. The Diggers were pissed off, because Hoffman stole their ideas.
AC: I loved Abbie, but he was a showman. You have to expect that from him. Abbie did steal a lot of ideas. He did a lot of good things, but he was messed up, too. He wound up committing suicide.
When Abbie resurfaced, he came and gave a talk at a public school in Manhattan. I brought my daughter Niko. I think she was two or four at the time. I have an autograph of his from that day. I gave my daughter a copy of Steal This Book. I said “Go up to Abbie on stage and ask him to sign it while he’s lecturing.” She walks up onstage and in front of everyone, he asks her, “Are you the kid who just robbed the bank?” He didn’t skip a beat, the brother was always really fast witted...This story made the newspapers…one of the kid’s parents robbed a bank and gave a note to his kid. The kid gave a note to the teller, “This is a hold up.”
While he was underground, he helped pass legislation [protecting] the Great Lakes, where he was living. There are pictures of Abbie with Daniel Moynihan while he was on the lam.
DF: What was the vibe in the East Village when you got there? Did it feel dangerous?
AC: No, not at all. It became scary right after I left. Groovy’s murder might have had something to do with it. If you look into why the Fillmore East closed, Bill Graham closed it because people started going there and OD’ing on drugs. It started getting ugly and he shut it down.
DF: It was surprising that the Fillmore East lasted for only two years.
AC: It wasn't surprising. I virtually lived in that place.
The West Village might as well have been Long Island. It had turned so commercial. There was nothing to fear there. That drifted into the East Village, too. St. Mark’s Place had all the shops. There was the Electric Circus, where the Diggers set up a studio for a while. It was bustling with capitalism. It was protected because of that.
DF: You slept at the Peace Eye Bookstore first?
AC: Yes.
DF: There were mattresses down on the floor?
AC: At the time, Ed Sanders was facing obscenity charges for Fuck You Magazine. Me, Galahad and Groovy were putting pages [of the magazine] together in the back room where we were sleeping. We were going to pass out copies at the Bronx Zoo for free if he was convicted, but he wasn’t convicted. That was when we moved over to the 11th Street. pad. Maybe Galahad met somebody who owned the apartment or rented it. He gave Galahad or Groovy the keys and said we could take over the lease. I think that’s how it went down.
(New York Times photo of Galahad walking on a tenement roof, while high on acid)
DF: The apartment was $35 a month?
AC: We had to raise $35 a month. We used to go out and panhandle. We also collected clothes for the Free Store. The clothes and furniture were from a lot of wealthy people who were on the scene. We’d always ask them, “Do you think you could spare some money for the apartment? We have this apartment on 11th Street where we are letting kids into, keeping them safe. There’s no drugs allowed into the apartment.” We’d almost always get the apartment rent money from one person.
There was a bathtub in the middle of the kitchen. You’d walk in the door, into the kitchen, I think. On the left, there was a bedroom, the first place I ever got laid [chuckle]. The kitchen was the biggest room in the apartment. Up against the hall wall was the bathtub. The opposite wall had windows that looked out on an alley. I think the front bedroom looked out on 11thStreet. On the other side of the kitchen was another bedroom.
The apartment was small. There were a dozen people in there at times. Most of them were transients. Hardly any of them stayed there long. They were coming and going.
A lot of the kids were from upstate New York. There were a couple of kids from Connecticut. I don’t remember anyone from Long Island, except me….but then again I wasn’t ever really a Long Islander.
DF: What were the motivations for leaving home?
AC: For most of them, it was looking for excitement. I guess most of them seemed to want to break out of their protected mold made out of white bread and mayonnaise, but most of them went back after two or three days. Most didn’t stay long. It was a one-shot deal. Most weren’t serious about it. There was more traffic on weekends.
DF: Were those plastic hippies?
AC: Yeah, teeny boppers.
DF: What do you think Groovy and Galahad’s motivations for running the crash pad?
AC: With Galahad, he wanted to help people. He would have made a really good social worker.. He was very sincere and authentic about that. I don’t remember Groovy doing that. It was Galahad’s mission to bring kids back to their parents. He also made a lot of money doing that, too, but I know that wasn’t his motivation, it really wasn't. The parents would give him money in appreciation.
DF: Like Fifty bucks or $200?
AC: Yep, yep. $50-$100 That might have been partially the reason. I’m not sure. I am not sure. I never asked him, but it helped pay the rent. I don’t think that was his motivation, maybe part of it. It helped keep the rent paid and a little food.
DF: How did you guys eat?
AC: There was rarely food in this apartment, almost never. It was always fast food, pizza or a sandwich. There was never anything formal as eating went. Grab it when we had change in our pocket. It was a lot of pizza.
Occasionally we’d go over the The Paradox Restaurant on 7th Street, just up from the Fillmore East a bit. Very cool place, the first of its kind in NYC I think. Macrobiotics. I’m still a macrobiotic vegan to this day.. They’d let us eat for free there if we worked in the kitchen or cleaning up around the place. I think Yoko Ono might have worked there early on.
DF: In a Newsweek article in October 1967, right after the murder of Groovy and his friend Linda Fitzpatrick, an ex-lover of Galahad said that he could be a fascist and also took advantage of girls under the influence of drugs.
AC: I never saw that. He was a truly nice guy.
There was one thing that kind of shocked me. I remember the day of the Easter Be-In. We woke up really early. It was just getting light out. We walked over to Washington Square Park and were standing near the arch. We were waiting for some people in our group. We all put on blue armbands. It was Groovy’s idea–you put on the blue armband, and we’d all know we were from the same group.
As we start walking up Fifth Avenue, Groovy pulls out a pint of vodka. That shocked me, because nobody drank, but he did. It just seemed so out of character for him. It might have been because he was so hyper, like it was self medicating..I dont really know..it wasnt a regular thing.
DF: Did you think the Easter Be-In was a dud?
AC: It was pretty lame. Just my opinion.. I think it was a big media thing. People were dancing around. It looked mostly like people from the suburbs, Connecticut or Jersey. Nothing really happened. There were no booths set up. It was just a day in the park, nothing of any significance. I am surprised they still even talk about it.
(Footage of March 1967 Sheep Meadow Be-In)
DF: Was it mostly squares?
AC: Squares? I think they stopped calling people that after Maynard G. Krebs left “The Dobie Gillis Show”…(chuckling) I think we called them "straight heads “ back then. and yeh, most were. It was a weekend party. What it did was, it may have opened people up to see what else was out there aside from their own corners of the world. There was no Internet then so it was a way to communicate.
DF: I saw in the video that the guy who was pushing smoking banana skins as a way to get high was there, marching around with a three-foot wooden banana.
AC: The guy who was involved in that used to walk around Washington Square Park. He had a black cape. He used to carry a Chiquita Banana box. That guy came on the Alan Burke Show with us. That’s what the Donovan song was about, smoking banana peels. In the back of the Peace Eye Bookshop, we tried that–you’d scrape the inside of the banana peel. It never worked for me.
DF: Was pot plentiful in the East Village?
AC: No, it wasn’t plentiful like today, but we could always get it. It was very illegal. I think acid wasn’t illegal then.
DF: That’s true. Acid was criminalized on the federal level in 1968. With Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, acid was still legal when they did their first cross-country bus trips. Was there a lot of acid in the East Village?
AC: Yes. The first week I was there, I was with Galahad. We were sitting in the Psychedelicatessen. They had a big couch. We hung out there a lot. It was right next to Junior’s Cave. We were sitting on the couch, a bus pulled up and the Diggers were in it. They walked into the Psychedelicatessen and passed out sugar cubes. That was the first time I took acid, from a sugar cube from the Diggers.
I remember going into Tompkins Square Park with Galahad. I was wearing a green sweater. I felt the acid coming on. I was touching my sweater and I thought, “Oh, my God!” It seemed like a jungle.
It was Emmet Grogan who walked out of the bus and was part of the crew handing us all dosed sugar cubes.
Grogan was supposed to be on the Alan Burke Show. He didn’t show up. Instead, he sent a woman. She was called Emma Grogan.
DF: I read that in his memoir, Ringolevio. He died on the subway.
AC: A massive heart attack. I really liked that book. He talked about learning Ringolevio and everyone of his friends became a success in life because of that game. It taught them how to survive and how to be strategic about everything. It wasn’t well written, but I enjoyed that book.
DF: We have to find that Alan Burke tape.
AC: Oh my God, to see all of us again would be mind blowing.
DF: I found a tape of a British journalist interviewing Abbie Hoffman and Jim Fouratt. Hofffman kept on using the term “spades” for blacks, and at one point said, “Diggers are n—---.”
AC: “Spade” was really not derogatory…at least it wasn’t meant to be from what I recall because I had black friends that even used that term.
DF: Did you take a lot of acid?
AC: We took it pretty often. We used to go up on the roof of 622 E. 11th Street. We’d drop acid and go up on the roof and look at the stars. It was great. The acid was really pure.The dealers started cutting it with speed, from what I understand. It would get you all jittery, which is not what you want to be when you are tripping. It was pharmaceutical grade LSD. It was very good.
DF: Were there kids abusing speed?
AC: A little bit later, kids were using crystal meth. Donovan sang about that: “I can see you are wearing your crystal spectacles…I can see you have had your fun. I can see you are playing doctor…” Those are the lyrics.
It was pretty prevalent. Not for me. I’ve never been into chemicals, except for maybe acid. Chemicals were working their way into the suburbs. I think it might not have happened if pot was legal then. People were looking to get high. Speed was easily accessible, cheap and it got you really, really fucked up. Not in a good way. Really bad, really bad.
DF: I have heard there were a large number of rapes on the Lower East Side during the Summer of Love. Were you aware of sexual exploitation at that time?
AC: No. I am sure it existed, but I never saw any of it. I bet it did. People were very naive back then. Things were changing. There was no Internet. Nobody had heard about pedophiles.
DF: In 1967, the New York Times wrote about friction between the original Lower East Side residents and the hippies.
AC: Local residents were definitely angry. They didn’t like to see their neighborhood invaded. Almost immediately after this explosion of white people coming in, rents started going up. That was the big reason why they didn’t like the invasion of their neighborhood.
DF: In the mid-1960s, developers renamed the Lower East Side as the East Village. More than 2,000 hippies rented apartments in the area in 1966 and ‘67. Rents were as high as $35 a month.
AC: I think my father was earning that much a week. I think he was making $35 a week. Realtors are renting an apartment that is the floor below Allen Ginsberg’s old apartment, a studio on East 7th Street.
DF: I’m going to guess…$4,000 a month?
AC: Something like that.
DF: When did your father come to the East Village to get you?
AC: I don’t really remember. It might have been the summer because it was hot out, maybe late summer. It was before Groovy was killed. When was he killed again?
DF: I believe it was October 7, 1967.
AC: I probably got out of the East Village at the end of August or early September.
DF: Did you stay home for a while?
AC: I went to jail. I was in the Nassau County Jail, for two months on wayward minor charges.
DF: Your uncle was a judge?
AC: My grandfather’s brother, Samuel Johnson, was a Supreme Court judge. It was his idea….douche. (chuckle)
I don’t think my parents really wanted to find me. They didn’t give a shit. I was just an added expense to them…that's what it always felt like anyway.
My uncle told them that if they didn’t bring me home and I did something illegal, they would be responsible. “If he sets fire to an apartment building, you’re responsible.” They put out a five-state warrant for my arrest. That was before the cops came to 622 11th St. I had two things happening that got me caught. One, the TV show, and my uncle's scare tactic.
I sat in the Nassau County jail for two months, or maybe six weeks. Something like that. I kept going before the judge.It was Judge Vitali. I remember his name. I went before him three or four times. The first time, after two weeks, I thought, great, I am getting out of here. I came before the judge and my mother’s standing in the courtroom. I don’t know what she saId to the judge, but they took me away agaIn. They did this to me three times and on the third time, the judge said to my mother, if you don’t have someone represent him, I am going to lock you up. That’s when I was released. He could see that she was doing this to punish me. That’s when I went home.
I went straight from the East Village to jail, from jail to home. I was forced to go to school. Then I dropped out a month before graduation. A bit later, I was part of The Free School community.
DF: What was the Free School?
AC: It was in Westbury, on the corner of Union and Grand Streets…then we moved to other buildings when the landlord sold the original house, which was on one acre. We were there for a good 12 years, a good long time. It was a great place for kids to be. We lived in the school. It was a big, old house on an acre. It was on the border of Westbury and Newcastle. Newcastle was a very diverse neighborhood. It was right next to the Westbury Railroad Station. We were the Learning Tree Free School.
DF: Did you have alternative teachers?
AC: It was all parents who were dissatisfied with the public school system. Several of the parents were teachers. My friend Ben and his wife Kathleen were music teachers. They were originally from Kansas. Other people came in and taught. It was very loosey goosey. The kids could do almost anything they wanted, within reason. There was a kid who wanted to learn magic tricks, for instance. He was really good. He learned to read because he wanted to learn magic as an example in the learning process. Kids were motivated by their interests.
DF: Did you read about Groovy’s murder in the press?
AC: I was glad I wasn’t with him that day. That really shocked me. I really could have been with him. Sent a chill up my spine!
DF: Did you meet Linda Fitzpatrick, the woman murdered with Groovy?
AC: She came later. He didn’t have any girlfriends when I knew him. He couldn’t have been with her very long. Maybe a couple of months.
DF:The two men who committed those barbaric murders died in prison.
AC: I knew the Ramsey guy. I knew him. I said to Groovy, “Stay away from him.” Ramsey would always come looking to sell drugs or to buy drugs. Not usually pot, but speed or dope, heroin/scag. It was mostly hard drugs. I said to Groovy, don’t hang out with that guy. He’s bad news. That’s when things started going bad in the end.
DF: Do you know anything about Abbie Hoffman’s Free Store?
AC: I didn’t have much to do with that.
DF: Did you know Motorcycle Ritchie, the manager of the store? And where were the bikers hanging out in the East Village?
AC:The bikers lived by the police station. That was the precinct where they took me.
DF: When did you go to the town of Woodstock?
AC: I worked at the Free School when I was in my early 20s. I went up to Woodstock when I was still in high school. I went up there with this girl Mary Ellen.
I had gone to WBAI, the radio station and we met Bob Fass late one night..very late..past the time the buses were operating. We needed something to do so we went up to hang with Bob at the radio station It was a tiny studio. He invited us to stay in his apartment till morning which was when we went back to The Port Authority to catch a bus up to Woodstock. It was a $12 bus to Woodstock, which dropped us off at the Village Green.
Groovy turned me on to Woodstock. I went there with Groovy, this girl L.A., her sister Corinna, and there was this guy with really long blonde hair named Baltimore Bob.
We took STP, which was like a three-day trip. We went to this place in the woods called the Big Deep. It was right across the street from the Arts Students League.
There’s a beautiful swimming hole. We had tents. In the middle of the night, the cops came and arrested us. They arrested us for trespassing and being under the influence. We got arrested at the Big Deep. They locked up me and Groovy, and maybe Corinna and L.A. It was a tiny little jail out of Mayberry. We talked to each other and sang songs. Groovy kind of wanted to stay there.(chuckle)
Baltimore Bob called Galahad and he came and bailed us out. It was $50 to bail us out. We went back to the Lower East Side.
DF: After the Lower East Side, you hitchhiked across the country?
AC: While I was going to public school on Long Island, I left home again. They picked me up and my aunt paid for me to go to the Borough Hall Academy in Brooklyn and to live at a YMCA near the U.N. building.
I was tripping on the steps of the Fillmore East and I met this guy I didn’t really know. I said, “Let’s go to California.” He said okay. I grabbed some clothes. We took a bus from Port Authority to Philadelphia, to get out of New York. We started hitchhiking from there.
We almost got killed by a group of rednecks in one town. We got let off the highway in the middle of the night. It was pitch black. We walked into this town that was a ways up. These townspeople, teenagers with a pick up truck, were threatening to hurt us. We parked ourselves on a sheriff’s front porch. It said that he was the sheriff by a sign on the porch. We rang his bell in the middle of the night. He was pissed but he let us stay on his porch all night. We left when it got light. We ended up at an exit in Ohio. One way was for Toledo, one way was for Sandusky. We were there for three days. We couldn’t get a ride. There was a parking lot with old school buses. We slept in an abandoned school bus at night.
The only time the cops ever stopped me was in Washington Square Park. They took me into the park house. I gave them my friend’s sister’s number. I said that number was my parents. They called her and she said, “Yeah, I’m his mother.” I was just lucky.
In Ohio, we finally got a ride and went into Sandusky. We met this motorcycle gang. They were like hippies. They weren’t Hell’s Angels. A lot of them lived in this big house with the older woman who owned it. I stayed there for like a month. I think the Crayola Crayon factory was there.
I started seeing this girl who looked straight. Her father was a doctor. She took me to her house and I ate dinner with her parents. I don't know how that happened, maybe I used to be cute.(chuckle)
DF: Were you dressed in a hippie style?
AC: Not really. I wore jeans. I never dressed like Galahad used to dress. He had costumes on all the time. He loved costumes. Groovy used to like to dress up to, but he liked to be fancy. Galahad used to dress like he was in the movies. It brought him a lot of attention. He was tall.
DF: Did you make it to San Francisco?
AC: The guy who I started out to San Francisco with from the Fillmore, he went back after a couple of weeks. I stayed there in Sandusky, Ohio for a month. I started hitchhiking out again. I got a ride to Topeka, Kansas. I realized that I was the middle of the country, dead center.
This is very funny. I’m hitching out of Sandusky again and I can’t get any rides. I went across the street, where I was sleeping in that bus. I found a piece of cardboard. I had a duffle bag with some clothes from the YMCA. I had a Magic Marker and I wrote “Moon.” I got one ride after another. It was a game changer. This woman and her boyfriend let me stay in their apartment overnight. He had a small plane. I remember going to this small private airport that had lizards all over it. There was nobody there. There were a few private planes. We flew to Boulder, Colorado. I spent the night at the college sleeping in the lobby of one of the buildings where the students were.
I started hitching in the morning and I made it to Route One. I think I was in L.A. I went up Route One and started passing the Santas–Santa Barbara, Santa Monica, Santa Claus..yeh, there’s really a Santa Claus..who knew... Eventually, I made my way to Berkeley, where I knew someone. I spent the night on Telegraph Avenue, and then I found the guy I knew, who was close to the park. It was a regular suburban house with a bunch of people living there. I got a job working in the Berkeley Hills for a photographer, helping a carpenter to build a photography studio for him for extra money. I was walking up to the main road one day and I see a tear gas canister come rolling up the street at me, and I think “Here we go again.” I had no idea what was going on, but I heard that it was a big riot. All you have to do is look up the “People’s Park Riot,” that’s when I was there. They put me in a police van and they brought me to the police station with a shitload of other people. They walked us into the police station and there was a sign over the holding cells that said “People’s Park #2.” I was there overnight and they let me go the next day. I was in Berkeley for a month.
Skipping way ahead…right after that, I went to jail again on Long Island, but this time it was a drug bust, pot hash and acid.
(Clifford as a young father in Woodstock)
DF: When did you get married the first time?
AC: I must have been 19. My ex-wife and I had a kid named Niko and moved upstate NY to Tannersville, two towns before Hunter Mountain, the ski resort area. She decides she doesn’t want to be married anymore. Meanwhile we have a two-year old kid. Oh, great. She was seeing a speed-freak artist and was shooting speed with the guy. I don't do drugs, unless you consider the ganja a narcotic.I wasn’t leaving Niko with her.” Me and Niko got into my gold-colored Honda hatchback and drove back to Long Island.
This was the second time I started at the Learning Tree. When Niko was two to five years old, I took care of her as a single dad. That’s what I did from about 19 to 24.
DF: Did you have a teaching degree?
AC: Nope. I had dropped out of high school. I helped the kids learn what they wanted to learn. We took them camping a lot. We camped near the Baseball Hall of Fame as well as at North Lake in Haines Falls, and up in Maine near the Allagash waterways. It was always a memorable adventure for the kids…and the adults that shared the experiences!
DF: Did you transition out of the hippie lifestyle when the times changed?
AC: No. I was on probation. I was forced to be on probation for five years, which really sucked.It ruined a lot of things for me. There were things I wanted to do, which I couldn’t do. I had to abide by these guidelines, which were ridiculous. I was facing five felonies and five misdemeanors.
DF: What was that from?
AC: That was from the sales and possession of pot, hash and acid. I got arrested on the Island. I sold to the same undercover cop five times. That is illegal in and of itself. Wasn’t I supposed to be arrested the first time? The charges ended getting squashed in the end when I did probation. I got on the Y.O. treatment–the youth offender treatment. It was called the Rockefeller Program. It was expunged from my record. It’s not even on my record anymore.
The Free School eventually ended. [A teacher named] Pepper started a pre-school from there. She is still running it.
DF: What line of work did you move into?
AC: Building. I’ve been building for 45 years now, renovations and restorations. I’ve bought, renovated and sold my own houses. We bought our first house, a piece of shit, but it was in Cold Spring Harbor. I was very into good schools for my kid. The reason I looked into Cold Spring Harbor was that it was one of the top 10 high schools in the country. We bought a piece of shit on Woodbury Road, right by the Cold Spring Harbor railroad station.I renovated and restored it, adding 2000 square feet to the back of it. We sold that and bought another house in Cold Spring Harbor, ripped that apart and lived in it while we renovated. We couldn’t afford two mortgages. We lived in the houses we renovated. After we sold the second house, I bought a Circa:1680 farmhouse on two acres, about five minutes from where John and Yoko lived. I got it for $600,000. The only reason why I got it was that it was an historic house. You couldn’t rip it down. An engineer I hired wouldn’t even walk in the house. It was really bad. We sold that house for $1.4 million, but I spent a lot of money fixing it up. It was not a big win, but it was enough to buy another house…and the experience of working on a house that’s over 350 years old was worth a lot in of itself. The house I am in now was a foreclosure. It was another wreck I rebuilt, but it is one acre of land..and a gorgeous acre now that I’m almost done with it. Here we stay.
DF: Do you have other kids, besides Niko?
AC: My wife and I have Jolie. She was living in Brooklyn with her boyfriend, now husband. She was looking to buy something and found out if she went across the river to New Jersey, it’s much cheaper. She found a condo, which they bought at a great price. She can get to Manhattan faster from Jersey than Brooklyn. Twenty minutes and she’s in Midtown. She went to SVA. She’s a photographer. Jolie works at DKNY’s corporate offices, off Times Square, where she’s a digital photo art director.
My daughter Niko started Girls for Change, helping girls around the world better educate themselves. The U.S. government sent her on a goodwill tour to work with girls in impoverished areas. She’s into what I was into, helping people. Niko went to Tufts University.
DF: Do you consider “hippie” to be a derogatory term?
AC: No, but it does sound funny now. It became so commercialized. Back then, it was a badge of courage.
DF: How did the turbulence of the 1960’s influence your life?
AC: It was huge, HUGE! It didn’t just influence me. it became part of me, like people who were dedicated to the lifestyle. We made things happen that were new and innovative. Finally able to step out of the box we felt slotted into.
People that were serious, who were trying to make things happen, most of them went on to do other things that were similar later in life, except for people like Jerry Rubin, Abbie’s pal, who ended up working on Wall Street. A kind of sell out.
What mellowed me out, or rounded my edges, was that I was always sort of a spiritual person. I connected first with a center in Manhattan with Swami Satchidananda. They turned me on to meditation. I connected to Ram Dass for obvious reasons later on. I went up to the Omega Institute of Holistic Learning in Rhinebeck, the first time I heard he was going to be there. I’d drive up the Merritt Parkway and you’d pass Millbrook, before you’d get to Rhinebeck. That’s where Leary’s house was.
I spent a full week with him there in Rhinebeck. I became friends with Ram Dass. For five years after that, I went up there for five days, staying in a tent or renting a little bungalow. A lot of very cool people went there. He spoke a lot about being with Timothy Leary and how it affected his life.
His name was Richard Alpert and he was a Harvard professor with Timothy Leary. They got kicked out of Harvard for experimenting with acid.
We went out by the lake, where he was giving a lecture. He asked if anyone had any questions. I got up and said, RD, I remember somebody asking what Tim thought of you stopping the use of acid and switching over to meditation. Tim said, “I respect that, but you can walk to California or you can fly. I prefer to fly.” He cracked up and laughed his ass off. “That’s Tim,” he said. He admitted that he did acid on occasion still, and he smokes the ganja every day. He said that was because of his stroke. He was in a wheelchair by then.
Meditation softened my edges. I didn’t feel as anxious. Every once in a while, I’d feel like I was having a panic attack, not even that long ago. I went back to what RD taught me. It really helps me a lot. It lets you see the bigger picture. That’s what came out of the movement. That’s what the big softening up of the edges was for everybody.
Did you see the interview with [Digger] Peter Coyote on YouTube? It’s called “How the Counterculture Failed.” The interview actually was how it didn’t fail.
I’m 73 now. I was born in 1951. My mother turned 100 this past April.. I hadn’t talked to my father since I was 19. He died when he was about 83-ish…I heard that through the grapevine. Life can throw you some hard curveballs, but it's all part of the journey…Namaste motherfuckers…(chuckle)
