Please Come Home is an archival publication that surveys the classified section of the Los Angeles Free Press, the first and largest of the counterculture newspapers that sprouted in the late 1960s. Among ads for marijuana seeds, group sex, and crash pads, desperate parents embedded messages for their runaway children, hoping to be seen in the one place they knew they would look.
At the Freep’s zenith, half a million eyes scanned these pages, but there’s no telling how many picked up the hidden threads within. Like lotto tickets and racing forms, they were a purely ephemeral document excluded from posterity. Thus, they are essential. Each page is a microcosm of its moment. Together, they constitute the sedimentary record of a cultural movement that headlines could never accurately apprehend.
