Hitch-hiking across the country for the first time in 1972, I ended up in Ann Arbor.
Amazing.
The law had just recently been changed so as to allow college students legal residency to vote where they went to college and Ann Arbor had elected an "all-freak" city council, which promptly made weed a ~$5 misdemeanor which the cops then did not bother enforcing.
Now, I grew up in the more crowded East, and wasn't used to towns the size of Ann Arbor having such a substantial "big city" downtown, which comes about because towns out then there served a wider adjacent populace.
And so it was with JOY in my heart that I came across a wide circle of hippies openly smoking dope in the amazingly wide sidewalk (8-10 feet wide in my memory) smack dab in the middle of downtown AA while Mr. and Mrs Jones had to walk AROUND them. :biggrin:
Yee-haw!
Then my ride, a professional groupie, got me backstage at the Ann Arbor Blues Festival, where I was "introduced" to none other than Miles Davis. He looked right through me and did not really even acknowledge me, but still.
BONUS FACT: While still in HS, The Univ. of Mich. sent me, unsolicited, an offer of four years free and full tuition if I attended. It just came in the mail. I didn't even know what or where Ann Arbor was, and both my parents and I totally disregarded it.
Turn out that the U of M was trying to bootstrap their status then and had apparently mass mailed these out to every single National Merit Scholar that year.
My father was determined that I go to a really "good" school, and I was determined to go to a small one. Neither of us knew anything about AA or the U of M, so I went to Swarthmore instead.
:awe:
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