It was 1963 and Ron Britt was a teenager who had just moved from the Haight-Ashbury district in San Francisco to his parents’ home on Corbett Street in Portland.
“I was in the first hippie movement here,” Ron said. “The first hippie park was Lair Hill Park, down on Barbur Boulevard, right there by Corbett Street.”
In those days, Lair Hill Park was an area with low rents and relative tolerance, Ron said. The original Italian and Jewish immigrants were moving out and artists and young people were moving in. New businesses sprang up in the area: the Psychedelic Supermarket sold drug paraphernalia, the Merchants of Warm provided counseling services to youths, and Nature’s sold natural groceries, he said.
“I was part of the movement, the radical protests,” Ron said. “Protest the Vietnam war, wear flowers in your hair, smoke pot.”
Lair Hill Park became an area with spontaneous jam sessions and communal soup gatherings.
Ron reminisced, “It was a good time to live. The world seemed like it was full of peace and love.”
In 1968, rumors that 20,000 hippies were about to descend on Portland spurred the City Council to take action. The police made dozens of drug arrests in the area.
Ron said, “Yeah, I was selling bags of weed, taking LSD and sitting on the backstop of the baseball diamond. And getting busted by the cops since I was selling marijuana.”
After the arrests, the hippie subculture moved from Lair Hill Park to other city areas.
“It moved to Washington Park, then to Laurelhurst. Then it went down to (Lovejoy) Fountain. Everybody moved down there. Then from there on it moved up to Uncle Andy’s, which was a restaurant up there (near) Portland State. And the movement just kept moving. Because you know everybody’s dealing drugs outside and the cops just kept pushing everybody out of there.
“It was beautiful at first. Then the hard drugs came into it – heroin and speed – and made it evil. I got strung out on heroin, started using hard drugs,” he said in a low voice.
Ron found help through Portland’s first methadone clinic.
“Doctor Larsen ran the methadone clinic, CODA, down there across the bridge. I was the 125th person with the program back then. And then I went to Allied (Health Services).”
He was on the streets for 30 years. After a bad cocaine episode, Ron decided to quit all hard drugs: “I decided I didn’t want to die. And so I just stopped.”
Based on his years of experience, his advice to other vendors is to keep looking up, smile and be nice to customers. Ron usually sells the newspaper on Fridays near Hotel Monaco on the corner of Southwest Fifth Avenue and Southwest Washington Street.
These days, he is no longer living on the streets of Lair Hill Park and has an apartment over Street Roots, thanks to Cascade Mental Health.
As for the Lair Hill Park area, the neighborhood lobbied the city to include it as one of the first historical districts in Portland.
Ron said: “It was all full of hippies; now it’s all yuppies. All the old hippies bought homes there because back in those days you could get a house for nothing.
“It’d take two arms and 15 legs to pay for a house nowadays.”