On the local level in the late ’60s, things weren’t much better, though evidence was of a more personal nature. Hippies—whether revolutionary, Zen master, or couch spud—encountered hostility on most all fronts. In Austin, as elsewhere, the number-one traffic violation was driving without a haircut. At the time, according to one cop, 80 percent of the Austin police force was ex-Marine, and they didn’t much cotton to all the protesting: When Abbe Hoffman spoke, 11,000 crammed into Gregory Gym. A 1970 antiwar protest drew 20,000, and tear gas wafted down Austin streets. The specter of chaos haunted the constabulary.

This behavior didn’t sit well with elders, either. After a 1969 protest, Wray Weddell, columnist for the Statesman of the day, wrote, “On KOKE, country music deejay Arleigh Duff, calling the marchers ‘Hanoi’s Little Helpers,’ mixed patriotic music with the country top 40.” The Citizen, after an incident at the Chuck Wagon closed the campus hippie hangout to nonstudents, quoted assistant district attorney Herman Gotcher as saying that long-hair radicals “use that place to fornicate their desires.” Dallas took notice and passed a law forbidding “lagging” or “sauntering.” After a 1971 protest at the LBJ Library, a Mrs. Logan Gray was quoted as saying, “We could sleep a lot better at night if we could kill them all [the protesters].” Her husband, who showed greasepaint on his knuckles, had to be separated from a protester done up in whiteface so that the demonstrator could be arrested.

You could get laid out in laid-back old Austin, so hippies generally kept to the center of town, huddled around UT. They didn’t travel too far into north or south Austin, and they never stopped at Weedon’s Sunoco on 34th—hippies and blacks weren’t served.

In the university area, at least, there was strength in numbers, much to the consternation of UT officials, who did everything they could to contain the madness. In 1969, they barred a play, “Now the Revolution,” from campus because of nudity. It went on with no nudity, but was shut down again because of fire laws. The next month, two employees of the UT Academic Center were fired for sporting long sideburns. That summer, the university made it illegal to enter the East Mall Fountain—to “maintain safety standards”—and banned the alternative publication, the Rag, from campus. But the cancer was spreading: In 1966 a third of UT coeds signed up for sorority rush; by ’69 it had dropped to 17 percent. In early 1971, UT students, in a futile yet defiant gesture, voted 6,226 to 966 to dump big-dog regent Frank Erwin Jr.

Fortunately, at the time, city leaders had other fish to fry. In 1970 Austin began desegregation of its schools—a month after Wray Weddell wrote, “Pushed into a corner by HEW and the Justice Department, school board president Roy Butler’s previously mildly stated opposition to mass busing to accomplish total desegregation is now unyielding.” That obviously took some working out. (Things got a little tense, there was always the Sixth Street porno theater, which was showing “Hippie Orgy” and “Psychedelic Sex.”) And bidness, of course, was still bidness. R. L. Hancock, an Austin utility official, announced in 1972 that the city should buy into the $289 million South Texas Nuclear Project, which, he said, would crank out electric in 1980. By then, the cost topped $2.8 billion and the completion date had been rescheduled for 1984.