In the early 1970s, photographer Lee Sims snapped pictures of community barbecues, Synanon activities, festivities at the Marshall Tavern (where he bar tended on weekends) and more for the Point Reyes Light. In fact, a lot more: last year, Mr. Sims donated 7,000 of his negatives from his years at the newspaper to the Jack Mason Museum of West Marin History. Next week, an exhibit of about five dozen of those photos, from 1971 to 1974, will go up at the museum. It was an era of change for West Marin, when hundreds of newcomers, many of them hippies, came to West Marin. “I don’t think I sensed [at the time] that it was a time of a big change, but in looking back, I do,” said Mr. Sims, who finished his journalism career as a copyeditor for the San Francisco Chronicle before retiring near Half Moon Bay. “The Dance Palace started then, and the [Point Reyes National Seashore] was coming into its own.” It was also a time of change for the paper itself; Michael and Annabelle Gahagan had just purchased it in 1970. Sometimes the couple ran poems with Mr. Sims’s photographs, layouts that will be reproduced in the exhibit, which will also feature small sections on Western Weekend and Synanon. It will also explain the technology of the paper’s linotype press. Dewey Livingston, a historian and co-curator of the exhibit, particularly liked the series of pictures Mr. Sims took of the Rocca family and their house, from which Synanon, the cult that was the subject of the paper’s Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation, attempted to evict them—a piece of history he learned about through the photographs. The series, he said, also offers a snapshot from the early stages of grassroots conservation efforts. “People were getting more serious about the preservation of rural places,” Mr. Livingston said. “These are quality pictures of what the place looked like as that was happening. I want people to see not only how things have changed, but what’s similar, too.”
Exhibit features Light photos from early ‘70s
