After serving 22 months in the Army, Hugh Romney attended Boston College on the GI bill and ended up studying the newly emerging improvisational theater movement (created by Viola Spolin). After college, he moved to Greenwich Village to become a comedian and was initially managed by Lenny Bruce while sharing an apartment with Tom Paxton and becoming close friends with Bob Dylan.
Before long, Romney moved to California and joined Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters. But when Kesey fled to Mexico under threat of arrest, fellow prankster Ken Babbs hijacked the magic bus Further, leaving the rest of the Pranksters stranded in Los Angeles. Romney soon discovered a nearby hog farm in the mountains was looking for a caretaker. In other words, a free place to stay. He set up a commune and called it The Hog Farm, which overnight became one of the most famous of the 1960s hippie communes.
Charles Manson drove out to the Hog Farm one day in the late 1960s. He arrived in his all-black tour bus. Manson had already made contact with one of the Hog Farmers, Shirley Lake, whose daughter Diane would eventually join the Manson family. After arriving at the commune, Manson gave Romney the title to his black bus and then tried to seduce Romney’s wife Bonnie Jean (today known as Jahanara) in a nearby shed. He was undoubtedly planning on merging his family with the Hog Farm and usurping Romney as the leader of the commune. Romney managed to break up the seduction and Manson retired to his black bus with his female followers in tow. Sensing Manson was channeling the wrong vibes, Romney gathered his troops and began an OM circle next to the bus.
The OM circle is an ancient ceremony from Afghanistan that may have originated with the original Soma cults, or perhaps it was part of Manichaeism. As it traveled down the road to the Middle East, it became shortened as “amen.” I believe the original OM circle is the best way to harmonize a group of people. It initially became popular with the Brotherhood of Eternal Love in Laguna Beach, and was later taken up by Allen Ginsberg, who used it as a force field to protect himself and others during the riots in Lincoln Park during the Democratic convention in 1968.
Suddenly, Manson burst out of the black bus, holding his throat, choking, followed by his female followers who were quite alarmed. They tried to stop the OM circle, as they believed it was killing their leader. Manson began leading his group in an evil OM to ward off the vibes coming from the Hog Farmers. Eventually, Romney was able to persuade Manson to drive away and not return. The following year, Romney would change his name to Wavy Gravy and become famous as the emcee of the first Woodstock festival. Manson’s family would soon become the most famous serial killers in the world.
Today, Wavy remains a master of improvisational theater, which involves a deep understanding of spirituality (telepathic energy). Improvisation can unblock energy clogs and release deep inner insights. If you ever get a chance to attend a Wavy Gravy improvisational workshop, jump at it. You won’t be sorry.
Manson, meanwhile, died on November 19, 2017, in a maximum security prison after numerous parole hearings refused to release him. When he entered prison, Manson listed his religion as “scientologist.” He kept an E-meter at his ranch. Some believe Scientology was created by military intelligence as a brainwashing and mind control operation.
Manson was directed into Haight-Ashbury by his probation officer Roger Smith (who strangely had no other paroles other than Manson). The neighborhood had been flooded with cheap speed. A “free clinic” had been set up in the neighborhood to monitor hippies and their drug use. The clinic was run by David Smith, who had recently conducted the first major study on the effects of meth on mice and discovered it enhanced violent behavior.
Another similar data-gathering operation was set-up two blocks away on Frederick Street. Dr. Jolly West rented a house where over 30 hippies resided, and paid them $1.50 an hour (a considerable sum at the time) for interviews and testing. Personality quizzes and IQ tests were funneled to West, who could have easily culled victims for MK/Ultra experiments. West was strangely predicting the emergence of violent cults from the hippie peace and love movement, something he undoubtedly was fomenting as he’d already mastered the art of erasing memories and planting false ones with drugs and hypnosis.
The British offshoot of Scientology (The Process Church of Final Judgment) ran an operation to capture prominent rock bands into their fold and became perhaps the creepiest of all the creepy vibe masters that infested the counterculture immediately after the new zeitgeist took hold.
Ron Stark was affiliated with The Process Church and he went on to become the biggest connection for the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, which flooded the world with Orange Sunshine, while Charles Manson moved to Los Angeles and launched a series of murders seemingly designed to foment race war, but which only served to brand the hippie movement as crazed and violent, driving middle America away from a non-threatening, non-violent spiritual awakening, while disarming and deflecting that culture’s attempts to end the war in Vietnam, something that could have saved millions of lives across Indochina.