In October 1966, Phyllis Willner arrived on motorcycle in San Francisco as a teenage Jewish runaway from Jamaica, Queens. She quickly fell in with the Hell’s Angels, the San Francisco Mime Troupe and, most crucially, the Diggers, who were just getting their street radical thing together in the Haight-Ashbury.

The next two years would be eventful: many extraordinary highs, some really terrible lows.

Anyone familiar with the ’60s Counter-culture knows the key role* the Diggers played in its birth and adolescence; the general outline of their influential group praxis; and may even be able to recall a name or three associated with them: actor Peter Coyote and the late Emmett Grogan are the usual ones that come up, as they’ve written books chronicling their participation in that era; Grogan’s Ringolevio is the most notorious. Although Phyllis Willner’s name and image exist in contemporaneous news accounts and later histories of the era (see especially The Summer of Love, by Gene Anthony), she is one of many essential Diggers whose story — and unique, fascinating perspective and insights — has never been told at length, or in any detail, in public.

With that in mind, it gives me a great deal of pleasure to share this conversation I had with Phyllis at her home in Arcata, California in 2010. There has been some editing for clarity, but for the most part this is how the conversation went over three hours; it has not been edited down for a general audience, and many incidents and personages are spoken of without context, or only in passing. My advice to the casual-but-curious reader is to simply let these unfamiliar/unexplained bits pass. Keep reading, you’ll like the next part.

Continue reading ““For the Duration of Our Parallel Flow”: An epic interview with Phyllis Willner of the San Francisco Diggers” →