Promise of Paradise Episode 26: Dorothy Cong

Dorothy Cong was born in Ft. Bragg in 1946. She grew up on the Sandkulla ranch near Elk. Her family were among the first white settlers on the Mendocino coast and In many ways her childhood represented the life that back to the land hippies were seeking. They lived off the land raising their own food and building their own houses, but unlike the newcomers of the 1960s and 70s Dorothy’s family lived this way out of necessity. It was a life of hard manual labor with little financial stability, so she left Elk in 1963 and moved to Sacramento, then san Jose, where she experienced both the social upheaval of the 60s and the Vietnam war in a very personal way.