I was born on an Air Force base along the California coast — Vandenberg, it’s called, not quite Southern California but a little farther past what’s known as the Central Coast.
It’s most famous as a missile test site that blasts Titans and Minutemen out over the kelp beds of the deep Pacific blue. For my parents, living in officers’ housing with their first and only child together, it was paradise. My dad, Michael Lash, was a doctor, serving stateside during Vietnam.
Both he and my mom grew up in greater Los Angeles (she in the Valley then later the tonier Westside, he in a middle-class town north of Pasadena), but they met in San Francisco in the late 1950s, when she was undergrad at Berkeley and he across the bay, a UCSF medical student.
Once on Vandenberg, my folks were far closer to their upcoming divorce than their marriage in 1962. I’m not sure they knew it then. The shore was unblemished, bursting with surf and mussels to harvest. The abundant sun, like a magician coaxing a supine assistant to levitate, drew forth abundant tomatoes, lettuce, and other more clandestine herbs — at least by my father’s mischievous retellings of those times.
Though not quite young enough to be a bona fide Summer of Love hippie himself, my dad was always receptive to the counterculture. He and my mom and a few dozen other medical students once participated in a study of the effects of LSD, gathering on the 13th floor of the Medical Science building on Parnassus Street to take blood pressure and other vital signs, then heading out to Irving Street to find munchies.
Before I was born they lived in San Francisco, then moved to Marin County after my dad left the Air Force. These pictures are from his archives, from his wanderings around the city with a German Leica M, which he considered the best 35-mm camera in the world. He didn’t use, or need, a telephoto lens. The action was all around him, intimate. “It was a crazy, wild time.”
You might recognize a couple faces and certainly a few places, but mostly you’ll see something timeless: young people, hanging out in San Francisco. As Herb Caen said, doesn’t anybody work in this town?
All photos are by Michael Lash, who lives in Santa Rosa and now has Photoshop instead of a darkroom. Alex Lash is the editor in chief of The Frisc.