No one could have imagined how the year 1967 would unfold and the impact it would have in the nation’s history. It was an incredible time of pain and change; war and peace; progress and frustration. The first Super Bowl was played; Mickey Mantle hit home run number 500; the first black member of the U.S. Senate elected by popular vote was sworn into office; the Beatles' album, "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," was released and was certified "gold" the same day; General William C. Westmoreland told Congress that the United States would prevail in Vietnam; and, the great “Human Be-In” was held in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park drawing national attention to the Haight-Ashbury hippie scene in California and it was here that Allen Ginsberg coined the phrase “Flower Power” and Timothy Leary proclaimed “turn on, tune in and drop out.”

It was in this context that Albert Schweitzer Memorial Clinic opened its doors in 1967 in response to the growing number of young people who flocked to the Sunset Strip during the “Summer of Love.”

“It was a time of social change and unrest, especially for youth,” recalls former Board member Frances Helfman, who has volunteered at the Clinic for 35 years. Hippies, flower children, runaways and dropouts flocked to Los Angeles that year and discovered that housing and food were in short supply. This, combined with the so-called “sexual revolution” and drug use, contributed to major health problems for young people. Long lines would form outside the Clinic when it opened each day as young people waited for their chance to see the volunteer physicians.

The Clinic offered medical, psychological and job placement services free of charge to anyone who needed them. The staff was made up entirely of volunteers and the financial operations depended on haphazard donations. The Clinic moved three times during its first few months due to lack of money.

In November 1967 a reporter from The Los Angeles Times discovered that the two men running the Clinic were not clinical psychologists, as they had claimed to be. Further, one of them had a prison record. As a result, an emergency meeting (staff of 30, all volunteers) was called and they voted to ask them to resign and they reorganized the Clinic as a legal corporation.  A Steering Committee was elected and required to replace the two administrators who gladly resigned in order to avoid criminal charges. The seven-member Steering Committee consisted of Barry Liebowitz M.D., Murray Korngold (Ph.D.), attorney Philip Deitch, Lois Moss (administrator), Elly Isaacson (medical coordinator), Jack Harris (youth liaison and volunteer coordinator) and Carol Nusinow who specialized in job placement. Barry Liebowitz (M.D), Murray Korngold (PhD), and attorney Philip Deitch were elected as officers of the corporation.

The new Clinic was located in the heart of Los Angeles’ Jewish community at 115 N. Fairfax just a few blocks north of the original site. In 1968 the neighborhood had become a counterculture haven with coffee houses, underground newspapers and craft shops. The combination of elderly people and hippies produced some tension and the Clinic was viewed with a certain level of distrust in the neighborhood. Local residents frequently complained to a police force that saw it as a hangout for drug dealers and drug users. “[Clinic supporters] were not so unrealistic as to deny this possibility,” writes Clinic Executive Director Lenny Somberg in a 1971 history of the Clinic, “but pointed out that if the kids felt free of harassment at the Clinic they would be more inclined to seek help, rather than hide their problems.” A committee from the Clinic met with representatives of the Los Angeles Police Department to work out a moratorium on arrests.

“The Clinic was not only a part of the community, but reflected the culture of the times,” said Jack Harris, an original Steering Committee member upon reflecting on the early days of the Clinic, “During the month of January, the Clinic added additional services including; dental, draft counseling, abortion counseling and legal services. The hallways were decorated with posters of Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, The Rolling Stones and blacklight murals. The sounds of Janis Joplin, Cream and other bands echoed in the hallways.”

Early on the Clinic garnered support from progressive members of the Hollywood community, such as the actor James Coburn and his wife, Beverly. James Coburn was Honorary Chairman of the Clinic’s first benefit fundraiser, Phantasmogoria, which was at the Cheetah. He also appeared on the Les Crane show to support and promote the Clinic. He and Beverly donated $1,000 to sustain the Clinic, raided David O. Selznick’s warehouse at 20th Century Fox for furniture for the Clinic and sent out hundreds of letters to the Entertainment Community to raise funds in support of the Clinic. Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward were also among the first in the Entertainment Industry to donate money to the Clinic.

In February 1968, Jack Harris (volunteer coordinator) and Leslie Kaner (patient intake) became the first paid employees – earning $25 a week.

The Clinic served 110,000 people free of charge in its first three years of operation. Volunteers provided all services, and many services were provided only at night, when volunteers were available. There was little administrative staff, because there was little money to pay them. The hours were long and the turnover was high.

Money was a constant problem. A Treasurer’s Report shows $3.25 in the bank in August 1968. A film benefit that year brought $9,500, and the Clinic coffers got a big boost a few years later when Elvis Presley showed up at the Clinic with a check for $10,000 (circa 1970). “His agent phoned ahead and said they wanted no PR,” writes volunteer and eyewitness Dr. Ronald Lawrence. “Elvis’s limo arrived at the back door of the clinic and he and his child were dressed in cowboy outfits. He spent a short time only at the Clinic. His caveat: ‘Don’t spend it for drugs or bad things.’” In 1972 A&M Records gave the Clinic its largest grant to date: $10,000 to start a drug abuse-counseling program.

Medical services focused on colds, venereal diseases; legal services consisted primarily of draft counseling; the medical and counseling department treated bad drug trips. Patients listened to raps on birth control and VD and the Clinic had a special outreach program for parolees and ex-cons. A sex information phone line was established to answer questions and concerns about sexual issues. Among the health care providers were Army and Navy reservists, many of whom wore longhaired wigs to better relate to their young patients.

As the nation began to shift out of the turmoil and cultural changes that marked the Sixties, the Clinic began to change too. There was a gradual shift away from the hippie informality that marked the Clinic’s beginnings and an effort was underway to become a more professional, comprehensive health care provider for everyone in need – not just hippies.

The Board of Directors began to pay staff salaries and the United Way made its first grant of $15,000 to the Clinic in 1973. It was reported that United Way support had been slow in coming to the Clinic because one United Way’s board member’s opposition to draft counseling. The end of the draft eliminated that opposition.

In 1972 County Supervisor Ernest Debs visited the Clinic to determine why young people sought help there instead of at County-run clinics. The County began to incorporate some of the outreach approaches of the Clinic and the County contributed medical supplies to the Clinic, heralding a new era of cooperation.

The Friends of the Los Angeles Free Clinic was founded in 1973 to provide a stable fundraising source for the Clinic. “It was ridiculous that an agency doing what we were doing had to worry about paying rent every month,” stated Mimi West, an influential early volunteer and board member who helped professionalize both the Clinic’s fundraising and its standard of care.

The Friends began an annual roast to raise money. Roastees included former attorney general John Van de Kamp, former Los Angeles police chief Daryl Gates, former Los Angeles Dodger manager Tommy Lasorda, actor Jack Klugman, producer David Wolper, producer Bernie Brillstein, A&M Records founders Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss, producers Marcy Carsey and Tom Werner, and Budd Friedman, owner of the Improv. The roast evolved into an annual dinner in 1991 which has honored community and industry leaders such as Barbara and Garry Marshall, producer Suzanne de Passe, Jordan Levin, Peter Roth and Kerry McCluggage, among other notables from the Hollywood entertainment community.

By 1974 the rent had almost doubled at the building on Fairfax Avenue, and the Clinic needed larger quarters. Mimi West spearheaded the effort to buy a new building and, with the help of banker and philanthropist Seniel Ostrow, negotiated the deal and raised the money for a building at 8405 Beverly Boulevard.

Six people underwrote the $60,000 necessary for the down payment, and those contributions were followed by frantic fundraising efforts. By November of 1975 the building belonged to The Los Angeles Free Clinic and was remodeled and ready to open.

On November 3, 1975 Executive Director Lenny Somberg (a cousin of Murray Korngold) was working in a suite of offices rented by the Clinic while the new building was being remodeled. An intruder entered and demanded the Clinic’s cashbox. Lenny was shot and killed. Three days later, despite the anguish over this tragedy, The Los Angeles Free Clinic moved into its new building, now named the Lenny Somberg Building.

Lenny had been involved with the Clinic almost since the beginning, first as a volunteer, and then as an executive director who was known to give up his paycheck whenever there wasn’t enough money to go around. He was deeply devoted to the Clinic, and his loss was a serious blow. For the next decade or so, executive directors came and went, with board members filling in the gaps.

By the mid-1970s the hippies had all but disappeared. They were replaced by clients who were more diverse in age and ethnicity, and increasingly poor and desperate. In its new building the Clinic could see more patients and provide more services. The type of care being given was growing and changing to reflect the new realities of life in Los Angeles. The Clinic was responding to a whole new range of urban ills such as homelessness and domestic violence.

By 1980 Ronald Reagan was elected President, Proposition 13 was on the books, and in the face of ever increasing need for health care, social services were being drastically cut. The “Summer of Love” was long over and so were the days focused on curable venereal diseases and bad drug trips among long-haired teenagers. A new problem was surfacing in major cities; it was unusual and doctors were increasingly worried as more and more people began to die from something that would come to be named Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS).

In 1982 the Clinic joined with Childrens Hospital Los Angeles to launch the High Risk Youth Program. This partnership with an established hospital helped legitimize the Clinic as a health care provider. The High Risk Youth Program reached out to the homeless and runaway youths who flocked to Hollywood. Frequently the victims of sexual and physical abuse, addicted to drugs, and engaged in prostitution and crime, these young people were a grimmer version of the hippies who flocked to the Clinic fifteen years earlier. As the years of the early 1980s passed, the numbers of people with AIDS grew at an alarming rate. The Clinic used its high-risk youth programs to encourage safe sex and help get HIV-positive clients into programs and services where they could get help.

By 1986 it was obvious that the Lenny Somberg Building was not large enough for the rapidly expanding Clinic. After a fruitless search for a new building, the Board of Directors decided to demolish the Lenny Somberg Building and build a new building on the site. The building fund drive was spearheaded by Mimi West, Ellen Hoberman and Joel Schwartz and raised $2.3 million in eighteen months. Senator Edward Kennedy officiated at the opening ceremony for the brand new three-story Seniel Ostrow Building in 1990. The Seniel Ostrow Building was the first building in the country built specifically as a free clinic. The new facility’s contemporary mauve, teal and gray design was a far cry from the funky Clinic of the 1960s.

In 1992 The Los Angeles Free Clinic purchased a building in Hollywood and moved the High Risk Youth Program into the heart of the community that needed it most. The Hollywood Center was made possible by a gift from the Mark Taper Foundation. When it opened it was the largest free clinic devoted solely to adolescents in the region. In addition to the High Risk Youth Program, which provided medical and psychological services to adolescents, it housed Project STEP, a job preparation and placement program, and Project ABLE, an outreach and education program that sought to inform youth about HIV, drugs, alcohol, sexually transmitted infections, smoking, and other issues affecting their health.

That same year The Los Angeles Free Clinic entered into a partnership with the City of West Hollywood to operate PARTNERS Adult Day Health Care Center, serving the frail elderly and people living with AIDS. PARTNERS was the only adult day health care program in the nation that combined both populations, and it met the unique needs of the City of West Hollywood, which has higher than average populations of elderly people and people living with AIDS.

In 1994 the Northridge earthquake damaged both the Hollywood Center and PARTNERS. The Hollywood Center reopened after a few days, but the PARTNERS building was more seriously damaged. Services went on in temporary quarters nearby, but the program never fully recovered. In October 1994 two programs arose out of PARTNERS ashes: Jewish Family Services took over the adult day health care component and The Los Angeles Free Clinic opened the HIV Day Program at the nearby Ron Stone Center in West Hollywood to provide activities for people living with HIV/AIDS.

In 1996 The Los Angeles Free Clinic Hollywood Center was honored with the “Models That Work” Award, a national recognition from the Bureau of Primary Health Care. Clinic staff traveled throughout the country sharing information and assistance with other non-profit agencies seeking to develop similar services for youth. That same year Project ABLE was awarded the “Ryan’s Angel” Award by the Ryan White Foundation for its work preventing HIV transmission among youth.

By 1997 the development of new medications started to change the nature of AIDS. More and more people were feeling healthy enough to return to work. At the same time others were reacting poorly to the new medications and continued to need help. The Board of Directors voted to transition the HIV Day Program over to a new agency that could provide appropriate leadership for this new era. Being Alive took over the program in the fall of 1997.

That year the Clinic also launched the CRADLE project, a partnership with Cedars-Sinai Medical Center to provide prenatal care for high-risk youth at the Hollywood Center. The project was in response to growing concern that young women with positive pregnancy tests were not getting the care they needed.

At the same time Los Angeles County was in the midst of a budget crisis. The Department of Health Services faced unprecedented service cuts and clinic closures, leaving tens of thousands of people without access to primary care. In response the County sought to partner with community clinics to see County patients. The Los Angeles Free Clinic entered a Public-Private Partnership with Los Angeles County, enabling us to provide greater continuity of care to clients with chronic conditions. This partnership permitted the Clinic to be open on Saturdays for the first time in many years.

The Clinic celebrated in 1997 with a spectacularly successful yearlong 30th Anniversary party. The fundraising campaign, which was chaired by Warren Littlefield, Sam Fischer and Jeff Sagansky, raised $5 million – much more than its original $3 million goal.

An endowment gift from longtime supporters Mimi and Bernie West allowed the Clinic to open a pediatric dental clinic to provide care to children who have no other access to dental care. Another endowment from longtime supporters Barbara and Garry Marshall went to support the work of the Hollywood Center, and an endowment from Cheryl and Haim Saban for women’s health helped fund the Women’s Wellness Clinic for menopausal women.

In 2001 a variety of changes signaled new beginnings at the Clinic. The Board of Directors made a commitment to investments in the organization to ensure that The Los Angeles Free Clinic’s vital role as a safety net health and human services provider for Los Angeles was secured for the future.

Years of shrinking public dollars and an ongoing state and county budget crisis over the previous decade had changed the way all agencies were delivering health care services. The Board’s vision brought the Clinic into a new era as a strategic partner with Los Angeles County when a third site was opened in 2002. The Hollywood Wilshire Health Center is a unique arrangement that brought the public and private sectors together as a model for the type of health care delivery system envisioned for the new century.

This collaborative venture increased the Clinic’s ability to see patients by one third and inaugurated a bold experiment that has become a model of care delivery, cementing the Clinic’s relationship with Los Angeles County by being mutually beneficial and extremely cost-effective for all concerned. Most importantly, it marks a huge boost in service for our clients who are now able to visit a single location to be seen by a primary care physician at the Clinic as well as receive public health services such as vaccinations for children — all for free.

In 2003 services were further expanded at the Clinic’s two other sites: The Hollywood Boulevard site now provides treatment to entire families as well as an expanded Ob/Gyn program, and the Beverly Boulevard site has begun providing comprehensive treatment to people with diabetes, asthma and hypertension. And in becoming a managed care provider, the Clinic has eligibility workers who meet with patients individually to facilitate their application to programs such as Medi-Cal, Healthy Families, and Healthy Kids. As a consequence, today all of the Clinic’s sites serve as the medical home for thousands of people in Los Angeles County.

With ongoing expansion as a provider of medical managed care, in 2005 the Clinic initiated a new strategic plan to ensure the agency would continue to serve the needs of the community in the years ahead. New developments include the establishment of a model disease management program for diabetes, with plans to address other chronic conditions as well. In 2006 planning commenced for the Clinic’s 40th anniversary in 2007 with an ambitious fundraising campaign that generated $17.2 million for capital expansion project to develop a new Wallis Annenberg Children and Family Health Center as well as the establishment of a substantial endowment to ensure fiscal viability for the Clinic in the future.  The Wallis Annenberg Children and Family Health Center opened its doors on September 17th and provides an additional 20,000 patient visits per year with expanded prenatal and gynecological services.

In the spring of 2008 The Los Angeles Free Clinic received an extraordinary $10 million endowment from philanthropists Cheryl and Haim Saban. In April 2008 the Clinic was renamed The Saban Free Clinic in honor of the gift, which was the largest in the Clinic’s history

Forty-three years after first opening its doors, The Saban Free Clinic now provides 90,000 patient visits annually, operating with a $14 million budget, a committed staff of 160 and between 400 to 600 volunteers working at Clinic sites throughout the year, each making a critical contribution to the Clinic’s ongoing success.