“Dear people at Huckleberry’s… Please don’t ever close – we need you… I love you all for just being there. Melissa” March 1969
I’ve been reading Season of the Witch, a fantastic book on the history of San Francisco from the 1960s through the 80s. Somewhere in the middle, there’s a chapter on Huckleberry House, a home for runaways started in the late 60s. It was just a couple pages, but it stuck with me.
There was something about the story of the founder, a reverend turned hippie, who decided to help teens when everyone else had given up on them. It resonated with my own life story and motivations for building Nautilus, my non-profit.
Of course, my first instinct was to look the house up, hoping to answer my many questions:
Who were these kids?
What was it like to live in this house, in this era?
Who was the founder – is he still around?
Is the house open to this day?
While skimming through the house’s Wikipedia page, I discovered that archives on its history were available at the main library of San Francisco, including:
The ACTUAL letters exchanged between teen runaways and the house’s founder during the 60s!
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