The road not taken was paved with gold

It was a beautiful summer day. We didn’t know it then, but we were “hippies,” sitting at a sidewalk cafe in Berkeley in 1967, endlessly discussing life.

It was an incredibly open society and everyone accepted a New Englander into their homes like I was a long-lost and rich relative. They would offer you a place to stay, food, anything they had. One guy gave me a motorcycle. All right, it was a Puch 250, but still it was a bike.

While trying to deal with this unusual acceptance, I would take pictures, develop the negatives and print them in a makeshift darkroom in an Oakland bathroom. I was a pretty good photographer and loved to take pictures of kids.

One of the sidewalk diners took a look at some of my pictures. He said some friends of his were starting this rock magazine in San Francisco and were looking for photographers.

Right.

I was familiar with these fledgling rock magazines in Boston. They literally cut photos from other magazines and reprinted them. The sucker who worked for these rags got paid in bylines, no money.

I knew my name. If I forgot, I could look at my license. Plus, I was making a fast $45 a week from Massachusetts unemployment, plus a few more dollars from Mad Dog Trucking, and was not looking for any more work, thank you.

I made a lot of trips across the bay to the Fillmore and the Avalon, where the nightly shows cost $2 or $3, if you can believe it. But I never looked for that magazine.

You might have heard of it.

Rolling Stone.

To rub it in, the 40th anniversary issue of Rolling Stone Magazine landed in my mailbox on Tuesday. That started a wave of nostalgia, an area I rarely visit.

I could been Annie Leibovitz, the magazine’s red-hot photographer. I could have met and shot the Stones and Beatles, Jimi Hendrix and Dylan, The Grateful Dead, the whole lineup. By now, I would have my work on the cover of Vanity Fair as well as the Stone. I would be diving into a money-filled swimming pool like Unca Scrooge, living in a penthouse apartment in New York City and have a winter house on Sanibel Island. I would never have lived in Maine and never developed this cadre of loser friends.

Just kidding.

Instead I came back to New England, started working for the Gloucester Times ($95 a week), then stupidly left there to start a photography studio on Boston’s swank Newbury Street where I lost my shirt, shoes and underwear. I could only wish I still had that $45 weekly unemployment check.

Injured and bleeding, I came across the line to Maine which had, thankfully, no compulsory car insurance. I was desperate. I begged editor Mike Brown for a job at the Camden Herald. I showed him my jazzy portfolio. If he was impressed, he never mentioned it.

He admitted decades later, “I never would have hired a long-haired hippie from Boston driving a BMW with a McGovern bumper sticker.”

All right, I spent 30 years with the Bangor News covering the Rockland City Council and the Camden school board for instead of jet-setting around the world with rock society.

It could have been worse.

I could have been hired at the Camden Herald.

Send complaints and compliments to Emmet Meara at emmetmeara@msn.com.