While bombs, napalm, and destruction rained on rural villages in Vietnam, half a world away in San Francisco, the drugs of a new counterculture were drastically changing the personalities of thousands of people. As an international port, San Francisco had always been a place where off-beat characters had gathered. By the late 1950s, San Francisco was home to dozens of beatnik poets and writers such as Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and others. When LSD began seeping out of laboratories and research institutes, the blackclad poets who smoked marijuana, drank coffee, and read poetry suddenly transformed into wild-eyed, long-haired hippies (a term coined by a reporter from the old term "hipster"). The beats abandoned their berets, and dressed, according to authors Jane and Michael Stern in Sixties People,

[in] a riotous getup of thrift-shop Victorian shawls, low-slung mod bell-bottom [pants], and mind-blowing...