George Hitchcock: The Alf, Kayak and Santa Cruz (Essay‪)‬

In 1966, along with several hundred others, I became one of the original members of the Artists Liberation Front, a wildly disparate contingent of San Francisco artists who joined together at first to protest police harassment of theatrical and musical groups in the city and later to create a San Francisco whose cultural and physical landscape would be pervaded by the arts. We met every Monday evening at Bill Graham's Fillmore Auditorium--the night the rock-and-roll hall was closed--to suggest and discuss plans to improve the quality of the city's cultural life. The meetings were tumultuous, anarchic, almost violent in their political and aesthetic biases, as the artists' egos, as much as their ideas, continuously clashed like an orchestra composed of several hundred cymbals. While all these activities were swirling around me, I found myself working closely with George Hitchcock, who I had briefly met on several occasions a few years before at The Actors' Workshop. Now we were the one-two punch of the Front's Neighborhoods Committee, with George as the chairman and me the vice chairman. The committee was assigned to ferret out the local arts in the city's various ethnic and racially dominated neighborhoods, develop and encourage the artists we found there, and have them share their artistic ventures with the people living in other neighborhoods.