Lou Gottlieb

Lou Gottlieb never intended to start a revolution when he threw open the gates of his Morning Star Ranch in 1967.
But what happened on Graton Road during that Summer of Love began a process that transformed the rural west county into a countercultural breeding ground and stamped all of Sonoma County as a friendly haven for the nascent back-to-the-land movement.

Now, every time you see a ponytail on a businessman, a pair of Birkenstocks in church, a tie-dyed T-shirt in line at the bank, you can lay at least part of the blame -- or the credit -- on Lou Gottlieb.

At fewer than 32 acres, Morning Star wasn't even close to being Sonoma County's biggest commune. But it was the best known, and the most notorious.

Hippies in the Haight-Ashbury dreamily referred to it as the ''Diggers' Farm'' and used it as a retreat from the hot-wired pace of San Francisco. Parents, police and politicians pounded out an ever-quickening drumbeat of demands that the ''hippie haven'' be shut down.

And Gottlieb, who already had attained national celebrity as the wise-cracking bass player of The Limeliters folk trio, fanned the flames with his quick wit and insatiable appetite for publicity.

By the time he deeded the land to God in 1969 and then left for calmer climes in 1972, Morning Star was indelibly etched in Sonoma County lore, and the west county would never be the same.

Of course it wasn't all Gottlieb's doing -- the '60s brought upheaval around the world.

But here, the bearded beatnik was a lightning rod -- a pied piper to wanderers and dreamers, an evil Svengali to those who clung to the status quo.

He bought the land in 1962, when he and Glenn Yarbrough and Alex Hassilev were at the peak of their popularity as The Limeliters. He originally considered it an investment, a beautiful slice of the west county that could be further sliced into a subdivision.

But in the next few years, the 6-foot-4-inch doctor of musicology underwent a philosophical transformation. Declaring property ownership the leading cause of the ills of the world, he threw open the gates to his ranch.

It began as a trickle: a couple of musician friends, a few young people from San Francisco interested in starting a big garden to supplement the food they were handing out in the Haight. Word was circulating in the city of the farm in the bucolic hills of Sonoma County.

In those same hills, though, other words were circulating. Hippies. Nudity. Free love. Drugs. The apple ranchers and small farmers who lived near Morning Star were not happy with the goings-on at their neighbor's place.

Gottlieb invited the neighbors to visit, insisting he had nothing to hide at what he called ''utopia.'' Time magazine and Playboy featured the ranch in their stories about the Summer of Love. The Press Democrat ran a six-part series on ''The Happiness People'' of Morning Star.

While most of the stories described gentle people living in harmony on Gottlieb's land, they also described substandard housing and plumbing and raised the specter of drugs. Within a week of the newspaper's final installment, county officials announced a ''crackdown'' on the ''hippie haven.''

The court battles went on for four years as the county futilely tried to get compliance from Gottlieb, a decidedly round peg that officialdom wanted to fit in its rigidly square hole. Finally, with $14,000 in fines hanging over his head, he deeded the ranch to God -- a final act in Gottlieb's theater of the absurd, a final outrage to the disbelieving ''straights'' of Sonoma County.

Gottlieb left -- although he continued to pay the taxes for God -- and Morning Star became overgrown and silent. But its short heyday had put the west county on the countercultural map. Plenty more hippies moved into the neighborhood, some of them heading over the hill to Bill Wheeler's wide-open ranch on Coleman Valley Road.

They began to blend into the community, turning summer places along the river into year-round homes, putting up what became known as ''Class K'' housing, planting gardens, finding jobs.

Gottlieb went back out on the road with a revived Limeliters act, using the ranch as home base. While there, he could usually be found in his studio playing his piano, right up to the days before he died in July 1996 at age 72.

A few days later, more than 300 people showed up at Morning Star for a memorial service. They gathered under some redwoods and sang songs and drank wine. Some took off their clothes. Some smoked pot. It was just like the old days.

Except nobody batted an eye.

-- Chris Coursey

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