Small Part

 The following is a small part of a story of my life that I'm writing for my children. Since the name of our group is Reading Writing and Arithmetic Club, Lance and I have discussed that it's appropriate to put writings here, so here's some writing. Just for fun.  It's a period of a couple of years during the 60' s.

     Even though that first year in Berkeley wasn't easy for me, it was endlessly fascinating. That was Berkeley in the 60s. When I arrived on the scene, organized student protests were already underway, and about to intensify. The Free Speech Movement had begun in October of 1964 with a massive student sit-in at the administration building, Sproul Hall. The students took over the building and refused to leave. A lengthy standoff ended with the students being hauled out of the building and arrested in a huge police action. Afterwards there was a continuing police presence on campus.

     This was the norm when I arrived. There were protests and rallies, big and small, virtually every day. And of course this was impossible to ignore. And yet I continued to go to school every day and work hard at my studies every night. Timothy Leary, who had himself been a professor at Harvard University, famously said, " tune in, turn on, drop out".  I was listening but I didn't do drugs and I stayed in school.

     As the protests, and the reaction to them, intensified, I began to feel like a hypocrite and a traitor to what was in my heart. While I was never one to join any kind of group or organization, political or not, it was clear to me that the students were right, and the University administrators didn't care about right or wrong, only power.  I was vaguely aware of high school history lessons about how people everywhere had to fight for freedom of speech, justice, fair treatment and equality, Etc.  Coming out of high school I thought this was mostly bullshit rhetoric to justify wars, but now I was seeing the reality of it, in real time. Still I did not join the struggle. I was a student activist hippie in spirit only. A closeted radical hippie freak. That would change. In 1965 though, by appearance and actions I was a nerd. I didn't smoke marijuana, even though it was readily available, I had short hair, and I wore traditional clothing and shoes. Outwardly a nerd, but in my thoughts and attitudes I continued to tilt farther and farther to the left.

     To confuse the situation further, and compound my uncertainty, vis-à-vis my self image, this to was just the time of the blossoming of the hippie culture and the music scene attending it across the bay in San Francisco. This more than anything made me want to turn on and drop out. It was fresh, exciting, and it just seemed right. Of course it wasn't that simple, but I envied that lifestyle. Once again though I went with the stay in school approach that somehow seemed to be instilled in me. But many times I asked myself why I wasn't in San Francisco with long hair, bell bottoms and sandals in some nice apartment with young beautiful hippie roommates instead of the Carlton Hotel with hunched over, coughing, drooling old people. I had no answers then, but later I came to realize that I'm very goal-oriented. Once I've set a worthwhile, clear-cut goal, I just don't give up. And this will become obvious in every phase of my life.

     Even now at the end of my first year at Cal I felt I had achieved a worthwhile goal, I had survived. Once again my grades were not stellar, mostly C's the first semester, with some improvement in the spring term, at the end of which it was time to return home to my parents house for the summer.

     The previous summer, just as I was preparing to leave for Berkeley, the Watts Riots had occurred in Los Angeles. I remember seeing the flames and smoke rising from the city from my parents house, safe in the suburbs. Even then I was totally sympathetic to the black community's cause, and despised the cops. La Crescenta had been the only home I had ever known, but back at my parents' house the summer of 1966, I sensed that my time there was coming to an end. All through the summer I was anxious to get back to Berkeley. I don't remember much else about that summer except that was when I turned 21. This was a big deal, sort of a de facto coming of age. A bunch of my friends and I went to Las Vegas for the occasion because we could gamble and sit at a bar legally. On returning home my mother asked "Do you feel like a man now?"  I didn't. I felt, and probably still looked, like a kid.

     Demonstrations, confrontations, and police on campus continued to be the norm when I return for my senior year, but I again managed to keep up with my classes. That same year in 1966 the Black Panther Party was formed in Oakland to protest and challenge police brutality in that city. By 1967 there were deadly encounters between the police and the legally armed Panthers who were patrolling and monitoring the cops to prevent abuses. In my eyes this was self-defense. But these events brought about changes in gun laws spearheaded by Governor Ronald Reagan that were designed to take guns away from the Panthers.

     That summer was called the Long Hot Sumner of 1967 because of the 159 race rides that erupted across the country. The worst of these occurred in Detroit, once again a confrontation between blacks and the police because of police brutality in the black community. This didn't happen in white suburbs, but I had witnessed it from afar, in Watts 2 years before. And now, as then, I was totally sympathetic to the blacks. I saw the police, and any kind of armed authority as a threat.

     That same summer of 1967 was called The Summer of Love in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood in San Francisco, where 100,000 hippies gathered to celebrate music, drugs, free love and peace. It seemed like a beautiful thing to me. I was aware of all these events swirling around, and I fantasized joining the fray, the fight against racism, social injustice, and an illegal and immoral war. I'm not sure if I was afraid to take such bold action or I was perhaps convinced that it was futile. It certainly looked futile, nothing changed and protesters got beat up.  Whatever the reason, once again I didn't drop out and join the hippies. What I did was apply to graduate school.  I wasn't prepared to join the workforce.

And on and on, yada, yada for 55 more years or so.