reply to below

Well said Ben, you nailed it! Those were interesting times when the first welfare hippies showed-up. It's a wonder that no one got killed. You missed the part about the newcomers whining; “What do you people have against newcomers?” While their ol’ lady was fleecing the store shelves. They soon learned that they were not allowed into the local stores and even a dirt-bag hippie had to eat. With there being only three stores in town the merchants soon got wise to them. Good riddance!
Ah, but then the Back-to-the-land hippies started showing up. No matter how honest or sincere they were, they were not readily accepted. We had just been through the experience with the “truckers“, who were dirty, drug addicted, dirt-bags with no standards what so ever. The Back-to-the-landers looked and smelled the same as the trucker hippies. They had beards and long hair. They had no place to take a bath, so they smelled like goat farmers. The thing that wasn’t readily apparent was; they were honest, they were not thieves, they had no money because they just spent everything they owened on their “land“, as they called it. It was hilarious to the locals, that these people were buying land that wouldn’t even support a half a goat. But strangely, these people were buying everything in sight that had south exposure and water, where they could grow their food “organically”. These “honest” people had one thing in common, they honestly loved marijuana. Some sung the praises of L.S.D. (acid) that they said that they were using when the “back-to-the-land vision came to them.
They were so desparate to move to the new promised land that they would sell all they owned, borrow from their parents, or form welfare supported communes. (That is another whole chapter; you will have to wait for the book!) They soon learned that they could sell some of the left-over Marijuana that they grew in their gardens, to help make their land payments. I think you can guess the rest of the story.
So you were the bar-tenders at Astrinsky’s? That was the first bar that finally allowed the hippies to have a social life. Before Astrinsky’s opened the loggers used to have a lot of fun at the hippies expense at the logger bars. “Nothin’ like a good bath, haircut, and shave”, that phrase got used a lot. The hippie’s usually got smart and left before the loggers implemented their plan.
I was the refrigeration man at Astrinsky. I always tried to schedule my calls for the evening. I’ve always been a people watcher, and Astrinsky’s was like going into a foreign country, of another world.
I used to love to watch the people gather around the old wood stove, where the lady with the little regular looking pipe sat. That pipe sure did smell strange didn’t it?
Ben, they aught too pay us to shut up shouldn’t they?