Alum Ben Fong-Torres Recalls the Summer of Love

Wednesday, May 31, 2017

NBC NEWS -- His interest in radio also led to journalism, which he later did at San Francisco State University as the editor of the student paper, The Daily Gater. Afterward, Fong-Torres worked as a DJ at a radio station in 1967, the year of the Summer of Love. He was also editing and writing for East-West, a bilingual Chinese-English newspaper in San Francisco.

“I wrote a little bit about music just because I was interested in it,” he said. “But also a lot of stuff about the Chinatown community and Chinese matters.”

It was around this time that Fong-Torres heard about an up-and-coming San Francisco music publication called Rolling Stone, founded in 1967 by a young man named Jann Wenner.

“It was covering the hip countercultural scene, which was pretty much what my roommates and I were involved in in the post-college years around ’67,” he said. “We would grab copies and pass it around and enjoy it.”

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