Friday is April 20, or 4/20. That’s the numerical code for marijuana’s high holiday, a homage to pot’s enduring appeal and universal slang for smoking.
Festivities are planned worldwide, culminating with a synchronized smoke at 4:20 p.m.
How the marijuana-loving world came to mark the occasion is believed traceable to five Northern California men now in their 60s with bad backs and greying hair. They are the unofficial grandmasters by virtue of the code they created nearly 50 years ago as students at a suburban San Francisco high school in 1971.
“We thought it was a joke then,” said David Reddix, a filmmaker and retired CNN cameraman. “We still do.”
Reddix and his four buddies — Steve Capper, Larry Schwartz, Jeff Noel and Mark Gravich — were a stoner clique who hung out at a particular wall between classes at San Rafael High School. They dubbed themselves “The Waldos,” a term coined by comedian Buddy Hackett to describe odd people.
One fall afternoon in 1971 a non-Waldo classmate came to the wall with an intriguing tale and a crudely drawn map.
The map purported to show the location of a marijuana garden in the forest of nearby Point Reyes National Seashore. The classmate said the pot patch belonged to his brother-in-law, a Coast Guard reservist stationed at Point Reyes.
The classmate explained his brother-in-law, paranoid of exposure and washing out of the reserves, was renouncing ownership of the garden. He handed Capper the map and said The Waldos were welcome to the marijuana.
The five excited friends made plans to find the weed after school and decided to meet in front of the school’s statue of Louis Pasteur at 4:20 p.m., when two of them finished football practice.
They piled into Capper’s 1966 Chevy Impala, popped in a Grateful Dead 8-track tape and passed around joints as they drove the 45 minutes to the coast.
Paul Elias – Associated Press – April 18, 2018.
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