A few months after the Summer of Love, Don Kracke, a partner in a Long Beach ad agency, covered the Ford station wagon sitting in his Palos Verdes driveway with psychedelic stick-on daisies, far-out polka dots and purple paisleys he'd designed on a whim. Neighborhood kids started asking for them, so Kracke cranked out 3,000 in magenta, hot pink, ochre and lime and sold them door-to-door and through a local hardware store. "I honestly thought the fad would run out by the end of 1967," Kracke recalls.
Before he knew it, Kracke was "in the middle of a real whoop-de-do." Practically overnight, his Rickie Tickie Stickies became a defining aesthetic of the late '60s. The daisy sticker in particular--a perfect and conveniently self-adhesive physical manifestation of flower power--took off in head shops from the Haight to Peoria. By the end of 1968, 90 million Rickie Tickie Stickies, at about 25 cents each, had been slapped on the LSD-infused landscape--from denim notebooks to flour canisters to VW micro-buses. "There's a picture of a soldier in the World Book Encyclopedia with one on his helmet," Kracke points out.
