The Nature Boys

 Long before the more obvious cultural explosion of the 1960s, a group of Californians were cultivating an alternative lifestyle that would come to influence later movements and culture at large.  They called themselves the Nature Boys.

From the early 1900s on, they wore their hair long, skin tanned from reverence of nature and the sun. Jack Kerouac mentions them in "On The Road", telling us that while traveling through Los Angeles in 1947 he’d see"an occasional Nature Boy saint in beard and sandals".

The Nature Boys were proponents of a vegetarian lifestyle, living primarily off of fruits and vegetables. In fact, a popular Nature Boy hangout  was a a health food store in Los Angeles’ Laurel Canyon founded by German immigrants. The Eutropheon, Greek for “good nourishment”, was a bustling community center where lectures about raw foods and natural living took place...

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