In the late 60's and early 70's if you were a Hippie, you had many friends because there were many hippies. All hippies were/are brothers and sisters, we know that, but sometimes friends were made in unlikely places.
 
  In the hippie haven of Haight - Ashbury, along the Golden Gate Park's panhandle was a small six- stool diner called the Pall Mall. It's owner was a flame-haired, flamboyant woman named "Love" or 
"the Mother of Haight" by the hippie community. Her real name was Paree Bakhtiar Blair. She was born in Tehran and moved to the United States as a teenager, meeting her husband, Bryce Davenport Blair, at a country club. They married in 1949.

   In 1964 she separated from her husband. Feeling the call of the counterculture, she moved to New Mexico and then to San Francisco. She attended the College of Marin, but by the "Summer of Love," she had taken over the Pall Mall.

   Her neighbors included Grace Slick, members of the Grateful Dead, Rudolf Nureyev and thousands upon thousands of teenagers who drifted into the city.

    Love  was famous for her 25-cent burgers and "lovedogs," which she gave away if she thought someone really needed it.

  On holidays, hamburgers were always free and there were lines up to three blocks long to get them.

   "She was wild, and she always spoke her mind," said her daughter, Shireen Blair of Lanham. "She read palms and tarot cards and was a huge gift-giver."But she did not smoke pot at all," "Pot was not part of her thing."

  The police used to go to her to identify dead bodies, and every one of the flower children of the Haight would go to her for advice -- because she was just a little bit older, in her 30s." She was particularly supportive of unwed mothers in the neighborhood.

   Ms. Blair left the Haight and the Pall Mall in 1971 and opened another business, Love Decorators, from which she sold Home Interiors products until 1978. She was the product line's top saleswoman on the East Coast in 1972. She later went to work for the union now known as UNITE HERE as a shop steward and banquet hostess for its Local 25. She retired because of illness in 1997 and died October 31 2006 in Silver Spring Md.
  sources : Patricia Sullivan - Washington Post Staff Writer,and Charles E. Perry in "The Haight-Ashbury: A History" see more books HERE

   In 1969 William Charles "Bill" Ayers co-founded the militant radical left organization Weatherman that was active in the 60's and 70's. Ayers was one of the top leaders.

 Bill was born in 1944 a son of Thomas G. Ayers, a Chicago philanthropist and former CEO of Commonwealth Edison (1973-1980).

  His first picket line protest was in 1965 at a Ann Arbor, Michigan  pizzeria for refusing to seat Afican Americans. Later he would spendBill Ayers 1st arrest in chicago 10 days in jail for his part in a sit-in at a local draft.

  Ayers earned a BA in American Studies from the University of Michigan in 1968. His first teaching job came shortly his arrest for the sit-in. The school was the Childrens Community, a preschool in a church basement. The school was part of the nation wide "free school movement", teachers were called by their first names and students did not recieve report cards. They stressed cooperation rather than competition. At age 21 Ayers became director of the school, and it was here that he met Diana Oughton, who became his girlfriend until her death in 1970 in a bomb construction accident.

   As Bill Ayers became more involved in the New Left and the SDS, he became a national leader of the SDS in 1968 and 1969. The groups he headed in Detriot would become the Weatherman and Ayers made decisive contributions to the Weatherman orientation toward militancy.

 In June 1969, the Weatherman took cont rol of the SDS at its national convention, where Ayers was elected "Education Secretary".

  Later in 1969, a statue dedicated to police casualties in the 1886 Haymarket Riot was blown up. Ayers participated in planting the bomb.The blast broke almost 100 windows and blew pieces of the statue onto the nearby Kennedy Expressway. The statue was rebuilt and unveiled on May 4, 1970, and blown up again by other Weathermen on October 6, 1970. Built yet again, the city posted a 24-hour police guard to prevent another blast. An FBI informant in the Weatherman group from the fall of 1969 to the spring of 1970, thought that Ayers, along with Bernardine Dohrn, were probably the two most authoritative people within the organization.

   Ayers participated in the Days of Rage riot in Chicago in October 1969, and in December was at the "War Council" meeting in Flint, Michigan.

   Ayers participated in the bombings of New York City Police Headquarters in 1970, the United States Capitol building in 1971, and The Pentagon in 1972, as he noted in his 2001 book,Fugitive Days: A Memoir. Because of a water leak caused by the Pentagon bombing, aerial bombardments during the Vietnam War had to be halted for several days. Ayers writes:

 "Although the bomb that rocked the Pentagon was itsy-bitsy - weighing close to two pounds - it caused 'tens of thousands of dollars' of damage. The operation cost under $500, and no one was killed or even hurt. In that same time, the Pentagon spent tens of millions of dollars and dropped tens of thousands of pounds of explosives on Viet Nam, killing or wounding thousand s of human beings, causing hundreds of millions of dollars of damage".

In 1970 he "went underground" with several associates after the Greenwich Village townhouse explosion, in which Weatherman member Ted Gold, Ayers' close friend Terry Robbins, and Ayers' girlfriend, Oughton, were killed when a nail bomb (an anti-personnel device) they were building exploded. Kathy Boudin and Cathy Wilkerson survived the blast. Ayers was not facing criminal charges at the time, but the federal government later filed charges against him. 
 
   While underground, he and Bernardine Dohrn married, and the two remained fugitives together, changing identities, jobs and locations. By 1976 or 1977, with federal charges against both fugitives dropped due to prosecutorial misconduct, Ayers was ready to turn himself in to authorities to face other state charges, but Dohrn remained reluctant until after she gave birth to two sons, one born in 1977, the other in 1980. "He was sweet and patient, as he always is, to let me come to my senses on my own", she later said. The couple turned themselves in in 1980.

 Ayers and Dohrn later became legal guardians to the son of former Weathermen David Gilbert and Kathy Boudin after the boy's parents were convicted and sent to prison for their part in the Brinks Robbery of 1981.

   In 2001, Ayers published Fugitive Days: A Memoir, which he explained in part as an attempt to answer the questions of Kathy Boudin's son, and his speculation that Diana Oughton died trying to stop the Greenwich Village bomb makers.Some have questioned the truth, accuracy, and tone of the book. Ayers, in the foreword to his book, states that it was written as his personal memories and impressions over time, not a scholarly research project.

  Ayers book was published the day before the 9/11 attacks, and in the months before it was published he gave several intrviews to newspapers and magazines in which he defended his radical views and actions.
 Some of Mr. Ayers statements to the reporters were "I don't regret setting bombs" and "I feel we didn't do enough", and, when asked if he would "do it all again" as saying "I don't want to discount the possibility." Ayers has not denied he made these quotes, but says the reporters deliberately distorted his words. He says when he told the reporters he "had no regrets" and that "We didn't do enough" he was speaking only in reference to his efforts to stop the United States from waging the Vietnam War, efforts which he has described as ". . . inadequate, as the war dragged on for a decade."

   Ol' Hippie : There is, however, one problem in all of this. Ayers's actual comments, were made before the attacks on the World Trade Center, and just happened to be published on that fateful day.

  Ayers has maintained that the two statements were not intended to imply a wish they had set more bombs. SEE > Clarifying the Facts— a letter to the New York Times, 9-15-2001
http://billayers.wordpress.com/2008/04/21/clarifying-the-facts-a-letter-to-the-new-york-times-9-15-2001/

  In 2001 in an interview with the Chicago Tribune Ayers said "Terrorism was what was being practiced in the countryside of Vietnam by the United States" and, "We (Weathermen) weren't terrorists, the reason we weren't terrorists is because we did not commit random acts of terror against people. He also said that "I condemn all forms of terrorism — individual, group and official". And he has condemned the terrorist attacks on 9/11 "Today we are witnessing crimes against humanity on our own shores on an unthinkable scale, and I fear that we may soon see more innocent people in other parts of the world dying in response."

  Ayers was a key member of the Weathermen, a radical student group that set bombs at federal buildings and spread antiwar messages in the 1970s. Obama and Ayers have shared a few tenuous Chicago connections going back to 1996. Politico reports that "there's no evidence their relationship is more than the casual friendship of two men who occupy overlapping Chicago political circles and who served together on the board of a Chicago foundation." The article goes on to list some more links between the two, including an Obama fundraiser hosted by Ayers.

 

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