Somebody was the first person to say it.
Somewhere on this planet — in somebody’s parents’ basement, behind the gym at somebody’s high school, in somebody’s cousin’s car with the windows all rolled up, around the flames at somebody’s late-summer bonfire — someone first peered through the blue-gray haze of marijuana smoke and said the term that thousands if not millions of blissed-out others would come to know: 420.
Maybe you’ve heard stories about where it came from. It’s a time, 4:20 p.m., the blessed hour of lighting up. Or else it’s a date, April 20, a hallowed holiday in marijuana’s honor. Maybe it’s the number, so high and yet still all natural and good, of chemicals in THC. Perhaps it’s the penal code for a violation involving the substance, hollered into police radios as cars of coughing teenagers go wheezing by. They say it’s the old code on pagers for buying a 20 sack, or the hour of the morning that Jerry Garcia’s heart gave out, or a reference to Bob Dylan, somehow. However it came about, this particular strain of pothead numerology is just about the worst secret that’s ever been kept: Everybody knows what 420 means.
But 420, in fact, has an origin, a hometown, a joke that caught like wildfire, and a legend. It has a tidy bit of folklore with a straight-enough line from Point A to Point B. 420 has, in short, a story.
Actually, it has two.
This much, at least, everyone agrees on: In the early 1970s, the weed in Marin County, California, was terrible. That meant, above everything else, you had to smoke a lot of it.
At San Rafael High School — where, I should say, my dad and three of his siblings spent their formative years, a group whose collective comment on this story is “no comment” — it seemed like everyone was getting high. Before class, kids would drive up to a stretch of mansions located above the school and slip into an abandoned lot, where a path led to a stuccoed-over wall with a primo view of the city, which came to be simply known as The Wall. During breaks in class, stoners would head for the overgrown slope behind the school’s football field, where no teachers could sneak up on them: The Hill. During lunch, people would meet in cars in the dirt parking lot in front of campus; the patrolling counselor, it was known, could be talked into telling you who was selling if you managed to get on his good side. Eventually it got to the point where kids would sit out on the soccer field and smoke in the open: Who could tell — who would tell — the difference between a cigarette and something stronger?
Sometimes students were more audacious. Just beyond the school’s front steps stands a statue of Louis Pasteur, a New Deal creation that is one of the last remaining signposts of the cow-town vibe Marin had for most of its history. There, under Louis’s watchful gaze, teenagers would light up, not even 50 feet from the principal’s office.
Everybody knew somebody who knew a guy, some neighborhood kid whose entrepreneurial spirit or older sibling had led them to buy the stuff in bulk. Grown in Mexico and pressed into green-brown bricks about the size of a couple of chemistry textbooks wedged together, it was then divided into one-ounce baggies called lids. Fifteen bucks would get you a lid of the basic variety; for 35, you could have the high-grade Colombian strain everyone had taken to calling lumbo. If you were really lucky and had some money to spend, maybe you’d find your way to Thai stick, which would do you in with just a few hits. But mostly kids smoked the regular stuff, dried out and headache-inducing and just potent enough to take the edge off things.
San Rafael in the ’70s was a place of haze and nicknames, and both were also readily lavished upon the high school’s social cliques. Which brings us to a group of friends called the Waldos, so named for their tendency to lean together against a wall on campus (though not The Wall). For years, the Waldos have dutifully appeared each April in the nation’s broadsheets, happily staking and restaking a claim to being the founding fathers of 420. They’ve been written about in the San Francisco Chronicle, The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, the Huffington Post, and Esquire. They were mentioned again this week by the Post, with the paper recommending a triple IPA brewed in their honor by Lagunitas Brewing Company — the “Waldos’ Special Ale” — for readers’ 4/20 celebrations. They’ve done photo shoots and spoken, not altogether mournfully, of their attempts to keep their regular lives and full names separate from all the marijuana history, and their collective decision, spearheaded by Steve Capper, Class of 1972 — Waldo Steve, as he’s more aptly known — to give in and go public. They are corroborated now by no less a source than the 420 Wikipedia page.
But not all is well in the Waldos’ 420 dominion. In 2012, an article appeared in 420 Magazine — tagline: “Creating cannabis awareness since 1993” — titled “The True Origin of 420 — Setting The Record Straight.” 420 did come out of San Rafael in the early 1970s, the story explained, but it was another group of friends, the Bebes, who invented it.
“Steve Capper is an opportunist who wasn’t even close to making up 420,” Tom Thorgersen, described as the era’s “neighborhood Norwegian weed dealer,” told the magazine. “We made fun of the Waldos, a.k.a. ‘Wallies,’ they were the weaker link, the ones who didn’t fit in.”
“It will be nice to finally have the truth be told,” he said.
From here, things only get hazier.
Let me take a moment to make one thing clear: There’s no money in 420. Or, well, there’s plenty of money in 420, meaning weed: One report put American sales of just the legal stuff at $6.7 billion in 2016 alone, while a cannabis analyst — I know — recently estimated that the good people of the U.S. of A., some 55 million of whom are estimated to have tried the herb, fork over north of $50 billion a year on marijuana. And there’s plenty of money in 420, meaning various weed-adjacent properties: There’s 420 beer (no weed) and 420 chocolate (yes weed); on Etsy, you can find and buy a hand-painted “It’s 4:20 Somewhere” sign to hang on various parts of your dorm-room wall. But “420” the number, the term, the perpetual username add-on? There’s nothing there at all, no trademarks or royalties, because while the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is willing to help protect a number — Levi’s has its 501; Boeing has its 747 — it will do so only within the specific parameters of an application (say, apparel or airplanes). 420 the lifestyle — the bongs, T-shirts, and candles — just doesn’t qualify. And even if it did, well, your neighborhood head shop might not top the list of institutions concerned about copyright infringement.
This has done little to deter the rivals from advancing their claims to the term. It was sometime in the late 1990s, Capper says, that he first realized what had happened. He answered his phone one day and on the other end was another Waldo, Larry Schwartz, in a panic. “Steve,” Schwartz told him. “It’s everywhere.” There were 420 mugs and 420 T-shirts and 420 hats; bongs and pipes and hacky sacks and Bob Marley ashtrays featuring the numbers painted across his cheek. It was in shops in Southern California and Portland and way out East, too. It was everywhere — and it was getting real commercial, Schwartz said.
Capper, who now runs a small financial firm out of downtown San Francisco with his father, wasn’t necessarily the ringleader of the Waldos — who called and still call each other accordingly: Waldo Steve, Waldo Larry, Waldo Dave, Waldo Mark, Waldo Jeff, and so on — but he was the oldest of the bunch and he had a car, which was good for about as much. “We were friends with the jocks, friends with the greasers, and friends with the smart kids,” Capper says. “The Waldos were more the comedians than anything.”
The Waldos liked, as so many other teenagers have in the long history of suburbs, to pile into that car after school and drive. Sometimes they’d head south across the Golden Gate Bridge and into San Francisco; other times they’d go west into the outer reaches of Marin, where there were few houses and fewer people to yell at a pack of wandering boys. Once, Capper says, the Waldos got high and drove down the Peninsula in search of a group of scientists they’d read were building a city out of holograms. “The Waldos were so funny that by the time we left we had these scientists just laughing and telling us to come back any time,” Capper says. The Waldos called their drives “safaris”; “like a Cub Scout field trip, except you’re stoned,” Capper says.
Capper has known the Bebe since the two were in the actual Cub Scouts, when he was more likely to go by his Christian name, Brad Bann. In high school, they drifted apart but remained friendly; while Capper was leaning against the wall at San Rafael, Bann formed his own group under his nickname: the Bebes. The Bebes shared some part-time members with the Waldos, but in San Rafael everyone knew which group people belonged to. “We had what we called charter Waldos — sort of alternate Waldos, so if one Waldo was gone they could fill in,” Capper says. “They had the same sense of humor; they knew all our gags, all our impersonations, all our little catchphrases.”
In both the Waldos’ and the Bebes’ telling, those catchphrases included “420.” But the stories diverge from there. For the Waldos, the origin of 420 is as follows: Once class got out at 3 p.m., the friends would head for team practices and assorted meetings before rendezvousing back at the Louis Pasteur statue at 4:20 sharp to smoke up and set out on the day’s safari. The Bebes have made it their mission to dispute this.
These days, Bann still lives in Marin, where he, blessed from his teenage years with the kind of clear, booming voice that launched a thousand prank calls, is the singer in a band he cofounded — the 420 Band, naturally — and a remarkably good Frank Sinatra impersonator. In 2012, he says, he decided he’d had enough of seeing his old classmates in the spotlight, and told 420 Magazine what he claims is the truth: The Waldos have been lying about 420 for all these years and in all those interviews. They had done much to popularize the 420 terminology back in the day, sure — no one disputes that it was Waldo Dave’s older brother letting the boys backstage while he worked on Grateful Dead shows that probably helped the term catch on — but the name was a Bebe invention. It was the time of a particularly significant smokeout at one of the Bebes’ houses, Bann says, followed by a recording session in which the Bebe himself tried to channel Abraham Lincoln: “Four score and 20 years ago.”
The Bebe — occasionally spelled Beeb, sometimes even by Bann himself — “is the Thomas Edison of 420,” someone wrote last year on a since-deleted Facebook page for 420; another Bebe member, Guy Perry, has replicated the claim on his personal website, which boasts that 420 was “Created In 1970 By A Legendary Teenaged Prankster.” Bann went a step further, saying that not only did he rechristen marijuana, but it was he who first gazed upon the wall-leaning Waldos and gave them their nickname, too.
The Waldos didn’t like this at all.
In response to the Bebes’ claims in 420 Magazine, the Waldos fired back. On the following April 20, Capper and Waldo Dave published a nearly 3,000-word rebuttal in The Huffington Post. “Unfortunately, as things grow in popularity, sometimes people ‘crawl out of the woodwork’ to claim they were part of it,” they wrote. “The Waldos are the only true account, supported by years of scrutiny and historical evidence. This sets the record straight once and for all.”
As for that evidence — boy. When the Waldos first started attracting mainstream attention, Capper began to worry that someone might take a shining to his artifacts from back in the day, what he says are the very earliest mentions of 420 on record and as a result hold incalculable value. So he did what seemed like the responsible thing, securing a safety deposit box in the underground vault of a Wells Fargo in downtown San Francisco. There’s a postmarked letter from Waldo Dave from the early 1970s, which finishes, “alittle [sic] 420 enclosed for your weekend.” There’s an old copy of the San Rafael student newspaper, dated June 7, 1974, in which a member of the Class of 1974 indicates that he would like to tell the graduating class, simply, “4-20.” And then there’s an old, tie-dye batik flag made in a San Rafael art class by a friend a few years younger than Capper, emblazoned with the telltale seven-point leaf and, of course, the number 420; to show she took the course, he has her transcript, which she requested from the school at Capper’s behest. “I don’t care how many stories [the Bebes] make up,” Capper says, “nobody [else] in the world has any evidence that goes back to the early ’70s.”
But don’t take my word for it: Capper has cataloged the items on his website, 420waldos.com, and says they “have been and will continue to be available for inspection/documentation by Official Press.” I have touched the batik flag with my own hand, and been encouraged to take it to a lab and have its dye tested as proof of age. (I did not take it to a lab.)
The Waldos say some guys in Los Angeles want to make a documentary. Last year, the Bebes published a trailer for what they say is their own film:
Each group insists that the evidence will vindicate their story. But there’s no financial incentive, no cannabis estate to win — just an annual round of April interviews with publications looking to tell the story of 420. In spite of a culture wherein just about the worst sin you can commit is failing to pass over the object of desire, the battle continues.
Incensed by the Bebes’ persistence, Capper and the Waldos embarked on what became a years-long hunt for a former member of the Coast Guard who told them about a mythical patch of free-range cannabis growing near the Point Reyes Lighthouse, the hunt for which inspired the most memorable of the 4:20 p.m. safaris. In 2016, they finally found him living in San Jose, homeless at 68, just before Super Bowl 50 in adjacent Santa Clara. Capper says he put the guy up in a motel for the whole week to make sure they’d have time to discuss the Point Reyes crop — and, wouldn’t you know it, when he went to pay, the total for the week with tax and all came to exactly $420.
