TRANSCRIPT:

But it is generally agreed that on a per capita basis, Bellingham’s hip community ranks high if not at the top in the Northwest.

Mayor R. W. Williams says simply: "I’d say we certainly have more than our share.”

Frank Kathman, publisher of the Bellingham-based hip newspaper Northwest Passage estimates there are probably 6,000 to 8,000 "long-haired people in Whatcom County.”

Most are concentrated in Bellingham’s South Side— the old town of Fairhaven and Happy Valley, which runs from Bellingham Bay up through Fairhaven along an eye of Western Washington State College.

The hip community is sizable enough that one of its members who entered next falls mayor’s race more or less as a joke is beginning to take his campaign semi-seriously — particularly with the advent of the 18-year-old vote.  Bellingham’s "finest hippie mayor candidate” is Jerry Burns, printer, poet and college lecturer whose trademark is a red headband holding his long hair. 

MANY CITIZENS have viewed with alarm the influx of hippies, registering complaints with the city about older homes in established areas being turned into communal pads.  Law-enforcement officials have expressed concern over a growth in drug use.  However, hip-community leaders say there is not much "hard stuff.”  Kathman said: "This is not the atmosphere for it.  There is no concrete and asphalt to escape from.”

Kathman believes the hip community is growing but spreading out more through the county.

Williams believes it is smaller than a year ago.  However, he added:  "I don’t know if there are less or I’m just getting used to seeing them."

They mayor makes a distinction:  "There are hippies and there are long-haired fellows, including students.  there are some with long hair and beards but they are clean and there are others who look like they just crawled out from under a rock.”

He believes his efforts to tighten administration of the county’s food-stake program a year ago cut into the hip population.

A GROWING number of members of the hip community are becoming self-sufficient. Many, in an effort to be even closer to the tranquility of rural living, have moved non farms in the Wickersham Valley—near dots on the road such as Acme, Clipper, Van Zandt.

Kathman, has made a home in an old Northern Pacific depot at Wickersham with plans to raise goats and organic vegetables.

Jeff Margolis, who taught constitutional law at the University of Massachusetts and is a dissertation away from his doctorate in political science, is running the general store in Van Zandt—a far cry from his one-time political-heavy role in Students for a Democratic Society.

The hip community includes many degreed persons who grew weary of big-city living and gave up professions to return to the land and Bellingham and Whatcom County’s leisurely pace.

They were drawn by a variety of factors — the beauty of the area, the college atmosphere and its pool of young, the rural pace, its reputation as a good place for hip people.

Members of the hip community consider Bellingham — on a relative scale — as open and friendly town, conditioned over the years to any oddities of youth by the presence of Western Washington State College (NOW  WESTERN WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY).  However, some fear the growth of the hip community has brought about new polarization with the established community and relations are going downhill.

Getting here was an accident for many. They view this as a terminus on the road to Canada. Some who couldn’t get into Canada for one reason or another stayed.

Others came because a friend relayed the "mecca” word, which is growing. One long-haired youth said: "I was in Costa Rica and I met this guy who told me what a great place Bellingham was for hips.”