Then and now: Sonoma County locals share photos and memories from the Summer of Love

We asked the question: were you there in the Summer of Love? And readers answered, sharing candid memories and captured moments from 50 years ago. Here are some of the responses we received.

Click through the gallery above to see images from then and now.

Cindy Albin:

Cindy Albin was married to Peter Albin, bass player for Big Brother & the Holding Company, from 1965 to 1989. In 1967, she attended the Monterey Pop Festival wearing a shirt fully covered with buttons promoting the band, that 'I gave out to anyone that wanted one,' she recalled.

Jerry Bruno:

Two weeks before their graduation in June 1967 from Capuchino High School, Jerry Bruno, second from right, and his friends had this picture taken. They weren't a rock band, but they wanted to look like one. 'We were a group of friends creating an 'album cover-style' photo for fun to salute the San Francisco sound,' said Bruno, who now lives in Sonoma. He plans to gather with the surviving members of the group at their 50th anniversary high school union in September.

Thea Evensen:

'The summer of 1967 was full of anti-war protests,' said Thea Evensen of Santa Rosa. In June that year, she joined hundreds of protesters as they marched through the Century City district of Los Angeles, as President Lyndon Johnson hosted a political fundraiser inside the Century Plaza Hotel. Evensen included a photo of the protest taken by the LA Free Press. 'Later that summer, seven months pregnant, I rode down Haight Street in San Francisco with some friends, amazed by the summer full of social unrest and change. It was exciting to be a part of it.'

Jerry Neagle:

'I am awash in memories, not only of that summer or '67, but my entire glorious adventure there, from my arrival in San Francisco in the early summer of '65, when things were just getting going, to my departure in the fall of '69,' Jerry Neagle of Santa Rosa.

'I'm sending a snail-mail package to you via the post office. In it are a couple of dozen photos taken all on the same day on Hippie Hill, a beautiful spring day in March '67,' he said.

Amid the peace, love and music of that year, there was a darker undercurrent, Neagle said.

'Maybe I should mention that it wasn't all some la-de-da fairyland of happiness, The Hippie world was at least partially a microcosm of the society from which it sprang,' he added, explaining that some people who knew who dealt in drugs met a violent end.

Typically, the brightest spots had to do with music.

'I went out in a burst of glory, spending the last six months or so as equipment manager of Santana, doing their first road trip, which included Woodstock. (Yes, I appear in the movie, briefly onscreen during their set.)

'We returned from the road trip in early September, '69, by which time I couldn't wait to get back to real life. I moved to Novato.'

Stanley and Judy Anderson

Newlyweds Stanley and Judy Anderson, now of Santa Rosa, had just graduated from college when this picture was snapped in San Jose at a goodbye party in their honor. Married just over a year, the young couple was moving to Seattle, where Stanley had landed a job with the Seattle Repertory Theater. Not everyone under 30 in the Bay Area was in to free love and acid rock in the mid 1960s. 'We felt like the sexual revolution was beginning, but we got married,' Judy said. 'We settled down right before all that. Maybe we were the last normal couple.' They went on to pursue a life in theater and acting. Stanley has performed in TV shows like 'NYPD Blue' and 'The Practice.' He had a recurring role as Drew Carey's dad on 'The Drew Carey Show.' The couple moved back to Northern California in 2012. Their young love from that Summer of Love has lasted 51 years.

Paula Chiotti

Paula Chiotti now had already been living in San Francisco for two years by the time the call went out across the country to come to San Francisco. In the epicenter of the counterculture, she lived the dream. 'I went to concerts at the Fillmore and Avalon most weekends, and saw many concerts in the Panhandle with local bands,' she remembers. 'I saw Janis Joplin walking down Haight Street one time. There was so much excitement in the air. People would walk down the street and smile at one another. It was a very unique time to be alive and live in San Francisco.

The photo was taken a few years after the Summer of Love, in May 1971. But it captures the lingering hippie vibe. It was taken at a street fair on Polk Street. She was living in a flat on Caselli Avenue with five other people. Their $120 rent, which they split six ways, amounted to a paltry $20 each a month. 'I feel so bad for young people today who cannot enjoy the city the way we did,' she said, now living in Santa Rosa.

Julie Brigden

As the pretty young hippie wife of David Freiberg of the psychedelic band 'Quicksilver Messenger Service,' Julia Brigden was well-known in the SF music scene in 1967 simply as 'Girl.' She is shown here with Pig Pen of The Grateful Dead. During the Summer of Love she was pregnant with her daughter Jessica and living in Diamond Heights with Quicksilver bandmate Gary Duncan.

'Our litte crowd was representative of the psychedelic awakening,' said Brigden, who now lives in Santa Rosa. 'We were young and innocent and believed that everyone's motives and beliefs were on the same page. We were hoping to create a new world of unity and peace. It was such a hopeful, albeit naive, time. Once The Summer of Love emerged and San Francisco was flooded with kids from around the country, things changed. There were so many new influences. Destructive drugs came with the crowds and the mood turned dark. Most of our original crowd, including most of the local bands, escaped to the countryside. In the end there was no ''60s Mindset.' There were many splintered factions. The Hell's Angels, the tweekers, the red necks and the flower children. They were all represented. Our innocense faded. I still hold to much of what I believed and learned during that period. I feel very fortunate to have lived through, and survived, the era — the good, the bad and the ugly. Ultimately for me, it was a magical time.'

Jere Barry

Jere Barry of Santa Rosa can speak with some authority on the Summer of Love. She was in the right place at the right time. 'In the summer of 1967, I worked at the Phoenix import store on Haight Street, a few doors down from Masonic Avenue,' she wrote. 'The store was filled with exotic items from all over the world and local creative handmade goods like jewelry, pipes and alternative independent publications. There was also as a free shelf in the front of the store for clothing and fresh bread ... brought in at different times during week. There was always music, bright colors, sharing and kindness. There is a love that I experienced that that continues to live now in my heart.'