The Haight-Ashbury Switchboard, the Free Clinic, and more — with Jim Siegel, Linda Kelly & Steve Heilig
Fri. May 29th, 6pm
Jim Siegel has been a Haight Ashbury resident since 1972. As a teenager he volunteered and lived communally with the Haight Ashbury Switchboard, a drop-in resource center for the counterculture offering advice on how to find rides, crash pads, listings of medical resources, legal help, etc. They published a survival guide that taught you how to live in San Francisco for free. In 1976 Jim Siegel opened up the White Rabbit at Haight and Masonic. In 1978. Jim was the original owner of Pipe Dreams, which is still in business today under different owners, and in 1982 Siegel ran Distractions on Haight Street until October 2023. He’s very dedicated to preserving the Haight Ashbury neighborhood and the legacy of the counterculture.
Linda Kelly’s first concert was the Sex Pistols’ very last show at Winterland when she was 15, and she’s been a great lover of music ever since. A journalism major at San Francisco State University, Linda has served as writer/editor for the likes of Spin Magazine, Mix Magazine, Quokka Sports, Lucasfilm, Astrology.com/NBC Universal, and even penned lyrics for the Spin Doctors. After seven years in New York City, she now lives back in her native Bay Area, in the Haight-Ashbury district, blocks away from the Grateful Dead’s home in the ’60s, where she edits the Haight Street Voice, and busies herself collecting more experiences and stories to share. As Bob Dylan once told her while on tour in 1989, “You gotta do something!” Through sweet synchronicity, she had the divine, beautiful, weird, hilarious pleasure of hanging and grooving and dancing and laughing with Jerry and Bobby and a few of their colorful cohorts for a good spell in New York and California. The time spent being in that wildly unique mix of fine folks is the fodder and inspiration for this book — and for which she is infinitely grateful.
Steve Heilig’s credits seem endless — Managing Editor at San Francisco Medicine, Host/Interviewer at The New School at Commonweal, Book critic/opinion writer at the San Francisco Chronicle, Co-Editor at Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, Festival MC at Sierra Nevada World Music Festival, San Francisco Marin Medical Society, and International Drug Smuggler (it’s not what you might think, but you can read about it in the Haight Street Voice), and more. Moreover, Steve’s a great, down-to-earth guy, ubiquitous on Haight Street with his adorable dogs, and he’s conducted numerous conversations and interviews here at the Counterculture Museum.
