chet-helms – Miller Avenue Musings

“A Scramble For Guidance…”

Previously in Miller Avenue Musings: My sister Nell had visited from London with her one year old son Poggy. It was a very happy occasion and I made plans to go back to work on the San Francisco waterfront to save for a trip to London.

All through my madness I’d been high as a kite, confident and sure of myself, but now the hubris began deserting me. Doubt and darkness settled on my shoulders like ashes from above. In coming down from the tremendous high of thinking I was the messiah, here to save the world, I kept on going down into what would prove to be a total nervous breakdown. I had never contemplated such a fate and suddenly I was trapped within its walls. There was no talking my way out of this one. It wasn’t going to be better in the morning. I gradually became separate from the world around me.

There were still small slivers of light. My old friend popular music continued to look after me. The record player in my bedroom was constantly in use and I had a sizeable collection of LPs that I listened to. Before I went crazy I had purchased the album Are You Experienced by the Jimi Hendrix Experience. The Beatles record All You Need Is Love came into the Top 40 and I heard it on the radio but on my record player I listened to the Hendrix disc over and over.

The late Jimi Hendrix is mostly remembered for his electric guitar playing but as I listened over and over to that album I concentrated more on his words. The subject matter in Hendrix’s lyrics dwelt on psychological problems, things I was beginning to experience. One song was entitled Manic Depression and in it he described being unable to adapt to the world around him. Manic depression was a concept I’d known nothing about. I was, however, sliding into the grip of a severe manic depression. So I immersed myself in the wailing music of the Jimi Hendrix Experience.

The Jimi Hendrix Experience featured bass player Noel Redding and drummer Mitch Mitchell.

When I first saw Hendrix’s trio play at the Fillmore and on a flat bed truck in the panhandle, his hit on the radio was Purple Haze. Now when I listened, I heard his lyrics in a very different way. Whatever the Purple Haze was, he didn’t seem happy that it was physically surrounding him and he plaintively cried “Help Me,” a few times during the song. I didn’t wonder at the time if he too, had had a nervous breakdown but his lyrical disposition on that album’s material lead me to conclude that he had. The song I Don’t Live Today articulated perfectly my mental condition in the months to come as the emotional distance between myself and the real world grew and grew.

The image of the Jimi Hendrix Experience was carefully created and nurtured by their manager, ex-Animal, Chas Chandler.

The world outside my bubble of depression continued to turn in spite of the fact that I knew nothing about it. The Vietnam war was dividing the nation in a big way and President Johnson’s policy of bombing North Vietnam was losing him support within the Democratic Party. After Johnson’s re-election as president in 1964, Bobby Kennedy resigned as his attorney general and became a critic of the Vietnam war. I remember a good friend predicting that Bobby would make ending the war his cause as a pathway to the presidency. Maybe that is what he would have done had he lived until the next election.

But for now Johnson was committed to bombing North Vietnam though, in the oval office, he seemed to be trapped between hawks and doves. In early September he denied there was any division within his cabinet about war tactics. The press was reporting that Defence Secretary Robert McNamara was in conflict with military chiefs who wanted him to escalate the bombing but at a hastily convened press conference Johnson denied this. A reporter asked Johnson if McNamara had threatened to resign if the bombing was stepped up and the president described that as “absolutely” untrue. “That is the most ridiculous report I have seen since I became president.”

Three photos of President Johnson’s Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. Pictured in the centre photo is Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Johnson and McNamara.

But not all the criticism was coming from his own party. George Romney, the Republican governor of Michigan became critical of the war. Romney was positioning himself for the nomination to be the Republican presidential candidate in 1968 but he was not alone in that ambition. Ronald Reagan, who had become governor of California also had his eye on this prize.

George Romney was the governor of Michigan who, along with Ronald Reagan, sought the Republican presidential nomination for 1968.

In pursuit of the presidential nomination, Reagan stated that the U.S. should be prepared to use nuclear weapons in Vietnam, echoing opinions expressed by Barry Goldwater in 1964. Such talk was popular with gung-ho supporters of the war. As governor, Reagan was a passionate slasher of budgets and his recent cuts to the Medi-Cal program for the poor were ruled illegal by a superior court judge. Blackie had met Reagan back when he was a Roosevelt liberal and judged him, at that time, to be a “phony.” Of course Reagan had shed his liberal credentials in 1947 when the House Un-American Activities committee came to Hollywood. He jumped on the anti-Communist bandwagon, testified to the committee and sang like a bird to the FBI naming many names.

But that was 1947. Twenty years later in 1967 and Reagan was now governor of California. His rival Romney was out on the trail drumming up support for his own nomination and probably should have chosen a different venue for his outdoor breakfast than Watts, the area of Los Angeles which had seen serious race riots in 1965. Two articulate young black men, Tom Jacquette and Lou Smith, grilled him relentlessly on several issues, one being his support for Ronald Reagan’s cuts to the Medicare programme. The two young men put Romney squarely on the defensive.

Governor Romney with his son Mitt, his wife Lenore and sandwiched between two armed police officers as he visited the site of the Detroit riots in 1967.

In early August, nineteen Tam High students from Marin City headed for Los Angeles to attend the second Watts Summer Festival held to commemorate the riots which had occurred there. “The whole purpose of this trip,” said Lanny Berry, leader of the six-day trip, “Is to show the Negro kids how many constructive self-help programs have developed in Watts. The festival is one of them.”

Helping Berry organise the self-help trip was Douglas Quiett, also from Marin City, and now a group counsellor at Marin Juvenile Hall. Quiett, had organised the picketing of two Mill Valley realtors for CORE in 1963 as they were not obeying the recently passed Rumford Fair Housing Act.

The forces of racial separation were not going to let the Rumford Act go unchallenged. A group called Americans to Outlaw Forced Housing initiated a petition to repeal the Rumford Act and the Marin County Real Estate Board decided to make the petitions available through their office. Though their spokesperson denied that the board was endorsing or condemning the repeal initiative, their supply of the petitions was seen as an endorsement. Enough white voters in Marin and other counties in California went to their real estate board offices to collect and sign the petitions which put Proposition 14 to repeal the Rumford Act on the ballot that November. The proposition was then passed with a majority of over 1.5 million votes.

The passage of Proposition 14 highlighted a deeply engrained racial bias in the white majority of the state of California. The Los Angeles Times endorsed it, saying that housing discrimination was a “basic property right.”

The fight to defeat Proposition 14 was ultimately unsuccessful.

However, Proposition 14’s passage into law hit two major obstacles. First the California Supreme Court in May of 1966 overturned the measure and then the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in May of 1967 that California voters had violated the federal constitution in 1964 when they overturned the state’s open occupancy laws.

The Independent Journal’s headline announcing the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision that proposition 14 was a violation of the constitution.

Ronald Reagan, as part of his campaign for election as governor in 1966, had supported outright repeal of the Rumford Act. In the light of the Supreme Court’s decision in Washington, he modified his approach. Speaking to the California Real Estate Association at their conference he promised to work for repeal of the act or to change it to the point “where it was no longer discriminatory and oppressive.” Reagan denied any racism on his part, saying that his objections to the act should not be taken “as endorsement of bigotry and prejudice or the practice of discrimination.” However his words, objecting to the Rumford act, sent a coded message to white people all over the state who wanted to keep black people out of their whites only towns.

Ronald Reagan made his opposition to the Rumford Act a key part of his campaign to become Governor of California in 1966.

Apart from the Collins family who lived high up on Summit Avenue, Mill Valley was just such a whites only town during my childhood there. It wasn’t until I got to high school at Tam in 1961 that I encountered black students from Marin City. The tough black guys congregated in the inner restaurant section of The Canteen, a building which stood across the street from the lower gate entrance to the back parking lot. At recess, students who smoked all went through that lower gate to light their cigarettes off campus. The white students stood around the front of the Canteen while the black students gathered inside the restaurant section. This organic apartheid between tough white guys and their black counterparts meant they didn’t mix socially.

An appreciation of recent local history was not prevalent in Mill Valley at this time. I had heard my parents say that Marin City came about as housing for ship builders during the war. What I didn’t know was that prior to world war two there were no black people in Marin County at all and that many had come north from the deep south to work at Marinship during the war. Once the war was over the employment vanished. This migration probably explained why the kids from Marin City all spoke with southern accents.

On his first day as a freshman at Tam High, a good friend of mine from Mill Valley was attacked by a black male student in the boys’ locker room. Thinking my friend had made rude remarks about him, the black fellow, who was bigger, punched him in the face repeatedly.

During my sophomore year I shared a gym class with my good friend Jared Dreyfus. At the end of class a black guy picked up Jared’s towel and walked to his locker. Jared went over to him and said it was his towel. The guy gave it to him and no more was thought of it. When Jar and I left the locker room and came around the corner, there was this same black guy with two friends standing behind him. “You called me a ni**er!” He shouted and threw a punch at Jar. The punch landed on Jared’s arm as he raised the binder he was carrying to shield his face. Jared shouted loudly: “I didn’t call you anything and I’m not going to hit you back!” The guy made his accusation again and landed another punch followed by Jar repeating his shouted statement. This went on for about four more punches. Finally it stopped and the black student and his friends walked away.

The N word was highly emotive. I recall one Sunday afternoon at the Sequoia when a group of about five black kids from Marin City attended for the movie that was on. Sunday matinees at the Sequoia were never full and this group of black kids were pretty noisy so I could hear clearly what they were saying between bits of film. They were using the N word a lot, calling each other by it. But if a white person was to use that word there would be trouble. Whenever there was racial tension at Tam High it usually started because someone had scrawled the N word on the inner wall of the Canteen.

Two hangouts for tough students at Tam High. On the left is The Canteen and on the right is C’s Drive-In on Miller Avenue.

C’s Drive-in, just up from Tam High on Miller Avenue, was where the tough white guys in Mill Valley hung out. Most greasers drove their cars to C’s and when racial tension was in the air, the white tribe would gather at the drive-in. If the fights occurred at school they were usually in the back parking lot near the Canteen. And a fight would bring cop cars from all over the county with sirens wailing.

The N word was never uttered in the Myers household. My mother Beth was a passionate anti-racist and would not tolerate such talk. She had been to the deep south as a journalist and had actually witnessed lynchings of black people so she had no illusions about where the attitudes of racism could lead.

We always knew about the Collins family being the only black people in Mill Valley but, though Chuck Collins and I were the same age, I didn’t actually become friends with him until late in my time at Tam High. Chuck didn’t speak with a southern accent like the kids from Marin City. His dialect was the same as all the others in Mill Valley. He had gone to Old Mill School at the same time that I went to Homestead. When I finally did get to know Chuck, we had a conversation in which he told me just how painful it was to hear a white person use the N word. I have never forgotten that conversation. Also lodged in my memory is the Lenny Bruce routine he performed in a nightclub in which he used not only the N word but every offensive epithet to describe Jews, Italians, Puerto Ricans and any other minority group. The point he was making was that if you took the poison out of the word you were left with just a word. However what Chuck had said has kept me from ever using the N word.

But here I was listening over and over to the music of Jimi Hendrix. I was looking for guidance in the words he sang: asking if I was experienced and somehow it seemed like a challenge. I took his words about “coming across to him” as a dare to go to England. I looked for guidance and somehow found it in the lyrics of Jimi Hendrix.

But to get the money to travel to England I would have to go back to work on the waterfront and that meant getting myself into shape psychologically. I had moved into a new phase of my craziness in which it became necessary to disguise my inner thoughts. Blackie would have to be satisfied that I wasn’t crazy anymore and that wouldn’t be easy.

To be continued…

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A Descent Into Darkness

Previously in Miller Avenue Musings: After spending several weeks as a day patient at a San Francisco clinic, I finally started coming down from the drug which drove me crazy. Coco Cutler, a family friend with an interest in psychoanalysis, befriended me.

Unlike my parents, Coco could relate to the state of mind I was in. She leant a sympathetic ear to me and it was a huge help. I soon became a regular visitor to her apartment on top of Telegraph Hill. I learned that she was plugged into the scene that Blackie’s friend Lew Welch was a part of. Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Alan Watts were among her acquaintences. But she was nothing like a beatnik at all. Prim, proper, elegantly spoken and with a physical beauty which benefited from growing old gracefully.

Coco was, like all my parents’ friends, a person of the political left and had been married to another of my family’s acquaintances, Al Richmond, who wrote for the People’s World newspaper. I never knew exactly what office job Coco did, but many times I saw her wearily climbing Telegraph Hill after a day’s work.

Sometime in 1966 I discovered a small movie theatre in North Beach which showed a lot of old Humphrey Bogart pictures which I had a particular fascination for. I saw Casablanca, To Have And Have Not, Beat The Devil and a movie which completely entranced me because the opening scenes featured Marin County locations. I’ve always found the joy of recognition to be a powerful emotion and the film Dark Passage began with an escape from San Quentin prison. We saw the fingers of the escapee gripping the rim of a barrel he was inside of, on the back of a flat bed truck. He made it rock back and forth as the truck drove away from the prison and the sound of police sirens began to wail in the distance. The barrel then tumbled off the truck and rolled down a steep hill. The escapee soon found beautiful Lauren Bacall who hid him in the back of her woodie vehicle. Seeing the hills of Marin behind all this action was terribly exciting to me and soon Lauren Bacall’s woodie was going through the tunnel on Waldo Grade. All the cars were from 1946. She crossed the Golden Gate bridge, ending up at her apartment on Telegraph Hill. At some time during a visit to Coco’s flat I must have mentioned this film and it transpired that she had seen them shoot a scene right outside her apartment.

When this film was shot there was only one two-way tunnel on Waldo Grade.

Ms Bacall’s woodie crosses the Golden Gate Bridge. We then see her apartment on Telegraph Hill.

The neat trick that Dark Passage pulled off was that we never saw Bogart’s face until he wound up having plastic surgery. With a big bandage covering his face, he staggered up the steps at Filbert Street to Bacall’s apartment on Telegraph Hill. This was the scene that Coco had witnessed the filming of. She told me she felt very sorry for Bogart who had to repeat the climb many times as they shot take after take.

On the left we see Bogart climbing the steps in 1946 and the same steps today.

Dark Passage was an intricately plotted thriller which combined good writing with excellent acting. Directed by Delmer Daves, it fell into a category that French film critics would, after World War 2, christen film noir. This phrase described Hollywood films which were absorbed by darkness and pessimism.

Darkness and pessimism were two realities that I was slowly descending into. I had been incarcerated in Napa State Hospital from the middle of July until the first week of August when my father got me discharged because of a suicidal inmate who took against me. All the time I was there and for many weeks after, I was in my own universe with practically no interest in or knowledge of what was going on out in the real world. When I got back to my parents’ apartment, I didn’t read the Chronicle or watch the news. I listened to pop music on the radio but that was the limit of my intake.

By August the race riots across the country had simmered down and President Johnson established a senate judiciary committee to investigate the causes. Michigan governor George Romney who, at the outbreak of the riots in Detroit, had asked Johnson to send federal troops to the city, now criticised the president for playing politics with the issue. Romney, though a Republican with an eye on the presidential nomination of 1968, also came out against the Vietnam war.

The summer of love was thought to be all flower children and peace. However a pair of gruesome murders occurred which contradicted that image. They involved both the Haight Ashbury community and Marin County. The dead body of known drug dealer, Willam E. Thomas, referred to in the Haight as Superspade, was found trussed up in a khaki sleeping bag on a steep cliff near the Point Reyes Coast Guard station. He had been stabbed in the chest and shot through the head.

Five days earlier the dead body of Haight drug dealer John Kent Carter, was discovered in his San Francisco apartment. He was found lying on a mattress with a dozen stab wounds and his right arm severed and missing. San Francisco police issued an all points bulletin for the arrest of Eric Frank Dahlstrom, 23, of Sausalito. Dahlstrom was well known as a motorcycle racer at tracks like Cotati and Vacaville. He had a reputation for superb skill and reckless behaviour. Officers in Sausalito immediately checked his parents’ house on Monte Mar Drive and found Dahlstrom’s car in the garage with its licence plates missing. It was nearly 11 pm on a Saturday night when the Sausalito police added Dahlstrom’s plate numbers to the APB for his arrest. Twenty minutes later on a street in Sebastopol, patrolman Charles Baker spotted a car with those same plates. He turned his red light on and pulled the car over. Knowing the APB was for a murder, the officer approached the vehicle with his gun drawn. Dahlstrom, however, surrendered without resistance. In the back seat of the vehicle officers found, wrapped in blue suede, the severed forearm of John Kent Carter.

Eric Dahlstrom was not shy about telling the story of Carter’s murder to assembled reporters at San Francisco police HQ. He said that he had killed Carter while under the influence of LSD and that he had considered dismembering the body. According to Helix, a Seattle underground newspaper, Dahlstrom was undergoing an “Olympics-calibre bummer caused, he believed, by inferior-quality acid” which Carter had sold him. Offended, he went to Carter’s to discuss it. During the discussion, Dahlstrom said, Carter shoved him. “I got shoved,” he told reporters. “Don’t nobody shove me.” The Helix account continued: “Dahlstrom grabbed up a 12-inch kitchen knife and stabbed him rapidly 12 times, most of them fatally. He undertook to dismember the body , but gave it up after neatly amputating the right arm above the elbow. He wrapped the arm in blue suede and split with it, taking also a .38 pistol, $3,000 Carter had assembled to give to an acid wholesaler called Superspade.”

At first it seemed that there might be a connection between the murder of Superspade and John Kent Carter but as time passed, investigators concluded that they were separate incidents. Earlier that week Dahlstrom had been to Slide Ranch where he kept a motorcycle. His behaviour was strange and he was asked to leave because he was “acting goofy.”

These murders inspired sensational headlines in the press.

This story, which was covered extensively by all the bay area newspapers, passed me by completely. Weekdays I spent at the clinic run by Dr. Weinberg which had a calming effect on me. I attended my sessions at the clinic for four or five weeks and when that time was up, the darkness began to claim my soul. My spirits had been fairly up beat until that time. Coco’s friendship became very important to me during this time.

On the left is Dr Art Weinberg who ran the day clinic I attended. In the centre and right are two pictures of Coco Cutler in 1943 and 2002.

Somewhere in the midst of all this, my sister Nell visited from London with her one year old son Michael who we all called ‘Poggy.’ He was a beautiful child and having him there took me out of myself which must have aided my recovery. Nellie looked terrific and had taken to the role of young mother with gusto. Nellie’s new motherhood forged a strong link with sister Kate who was so excited about young Michael/Pog. During the few weeks they were with us, Poggy began to walk, a process which started as a balancing act between his two feet. From my bedroom I would hear a single thump in the hall. Then after a pause a second thump. After a third thump I’d hear a series of them up to my bedroom door which he’d then push open.

Young Poggy was also forming his first words. While out walking with them one day, we found ourselves at the bottom of Russian Hill where Union meets Columbus. The sight of a dog across the street in Washington Square caused Poggy to point and make a breathy sound similar to the noise we made as children to simulate gun fire. It sounded like deoggggh. It bore a striking resemblance to the word dog. It was a very exciting moment.

On the left: Nellie, Pog and myself; My sister Katie; Poggy with my father Blackie.

It was also exciting for me to see how animated my sister Katie was in becoming an auntie to little Pog. Both my sisters had gone to university and dropped out after their second year. Nell had gone to San Francisco State and Katie to University of California at Berkeley.

My two sisters were very different people and until Nellie arrived for her visit it was Katie who had been such a good friend to me. Practically every excursion I took in the city after I left Napa was in her company and she looked after me.

When we were kids it was always Katie who was the peacemaker of the family. Nellie and I were the temperamental two and brother Jim was kind of neutral. Katie always looked on the bright side of any problem and usually found a happy solution.

Politics played a big role in all our lives. The society we were growing up in was gripped by the anti-red hysteria of the McCarthy era. Even being politically liberal was seen by the federal government as highly suspicious and my parents and all their close friends were far left of liberal. So we were aware of a difference to most of the kids we went to school with. Of the four of us only Nellie seemed to gravitate towards active political participation. I was interested but seeing how the federal government operated scared me. Family friends Fred Field, Alvah Bessie, and Vin Hallinan all did time in federal prison and I always worried that the same fate could take Blackie and Beth away from us. The execution of the Rosenbergs in 1953 sent a shiver through people of the left and I found it terrifying.

So the politics of the day affected each of us four Myers kids. Jim wound up rebelling against my parents’ values by joining the army. Once he was on the inside and realised what he’d done, he got himself involved in the stenography corps and never went to Vietnam.

Three photos of my brother Jim. On the left with myself and good friend Augie Belden. In the centre with our cat Totem and on the right a shot, later in life, with sister Kate and myself.

Having Nellie around made me contemplate a trip to England. All my travelling had been in the other direction, across the Pacific when in actual fact I had always longed to visit London. Blackie said that when I was well enough I could go back to work on the waterfront, so a little bit of structure entered my life. The idea of working on the front and saving enough to make a trip to England gave me a goal.

When I was in high school, Nellie was sharing an apartment on Greenwich Street with like minded socialists who were politically active. The two main issues they were most concerned about was racism and the war in Vietnam. I remember going with Nellie to a demo at the Masonic Auditorium on California Street where an openly racist organisation was holding a conference. It was night time and demonstrators were lying down in front of the vehicle exit to try and stop the people leaving in their cars. I don’t recall exactly what played out. I think an arrest was made but after some negotiation the demonstrators agreed to let the racists drive their cars out of the underground car park without fanfare.

Nellie saw a lot of the Hallinan boys during this time and was involved in many demonstrations. There were sit-ins at car showrooms on Van Ness, the Sheraton-Palace Hotel, Lucky Supermarkets and famously at Mel’s Drive-In on Geary. Nellie got herself arrested on a few occasions. Ringo and Dynamite Hallinan were often at the apartment on Greenwich Street.

Though Nellie and Katie had similar experiences with their time at university, Nellie gravitated towards politics and Katie, when she decided to drop out of Cal Berkeley, went to work in a bank in the financial district. I remember that, in addition to renting an apartment with her boyfriend Lonnie, Katie actually got herself a credit card which was quite a first for someone from the Myers family. Blackie had always been highly suspicious of the concept of credit, but I remember Katie being so matter-of-fact about the credit card and don’t recall any fuss about this with Blackie and Beth. Katie was always highly responsible with both of them and they appreciated it. It was just a decision on her part to improve the quality of her life.

Nellie did, after she dropped out of SF State, go to work for a shipping company run by the Kiskaddens who were good friends of my parents. When she eventually went east to visit family friends in and around New York, it was on one of Kiskadden’s Norwegian ships, The Torvanger, on which she made the final voyage to London. This would be the very same ship that I went to sea on after I graduated from Tam High.

In London Nellie quickly found herself involved in left wing politics and met, fell in love with, and married Trevor Hyett. Trevor was the father of Michael/Pog who was visiting us in San Francisco.

So these happy events occurred at the same time that I was beginning my descent into the deepest depression of my young life.

To be continued…

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Coming Down At Last

Previously in Miller Avenue Musings: while incarcerated in Napa, I saw my gay friend in the corridor with his arm in a sling and a bandaged wrist. I asked what had happened and he began screaming at me, calling me a freak and telling me to stay away from him.

I wasn’t aware of my father Blackie’s presence at the hospital at all, but apparently he was there that day for, within the hour, I was discharged into his care. I guess it was the fact that my friend attempted suicide, then turned on me in such a melodramatic fashion, which gave him concern for my safety.

Black was instructed that I must be accompanied at all times and take my medication daily. I was also not to smoke any weed or take any recreational drugs. Things moved quickly. I gathered what few items I had with me and soon Blackie and I were checking out of Napa and cruising down the highway towards Marin and San Francisco.

Before long we were at 929 Union Street in San Francisco. It had been about three weeks since my hospitalisation and the place was no different. My bedroom was exactly as I’d left it. Jar Dreyfus rang up and I took the phone in my room. He wanted to know every detail of my adventure so I started at the beginning and told him about staying up all night talking with Wes Wilson, then being picked up by the Highway Patrol out on 101 the next morning. I was delivering the facts in a straightforward manner, but Jared, from the beginning, began laughing heartily. As I told him each new detail, his laughter became more raucous. Why he should find my story so funny was a mystery to me, but being a natural performer, I found myself playing up to it: “Yeah but wait’ll you hear what happened next!” I’m pretty sure that I gave him a full account of the past three weeks and he howled his way through all of it. The phone call certainly lasted at least half an hour and Jared was still chortling as we wrapped things up.

A few days later I was visited by Jan Kaufmann which was nice but I was still babbling about John Lennon and seeing her as somehow attached to me which hadn’t been the case since the summer of 1965. She humoured me and it was a nice visit.

I didn’t make many excursions out into San Francisco but those I can recall were with my sister Katie and her partner Lonnie. I think my parents made a decision to fatten me up as I’d become awfully thin during my three weeks in Napa. The fruit bowls in the kitchen were full of ripe bananas, nectarines and apples. I was still convinced that I was the messiah but that delusion softened and became less urgent. Also I simply kept it to myself.

Three photos of me after my Napa incarceration. On the left, in front of SF City Hall, up on the roof at 929 Union Street and somewhere else in the city.

I was still totally ignorant of what was happening in the wider world, knowing nothing of events in the news, domestic and from Vietnam. In mid-August President Johnson made a statement about bombing raids near the Chinese border in Vietnam. He said that the Peking government knows that the United States does not seek to widen the war in Vietnam. “These air strikes are not intended as any threat to Communist China and they do not in fact pose any threat to that country.” At the same time he stated that the Viet Cong now appears less anxious to engage American forces in ground combat. Assessing the Vietnam situation at a White House news conference, Johnson said there had been a lull in both air and ground activity but added that this didn’t indicate any change in U.S. policy. “So far as this government is concerned, our policy has not changed,” Johnson said. “We are there to deter aggression.”

Two shots of LBJ leaving the White House and one of him towering over whoever he was telling a joke to.

On the same day, as Johnson spoke in the White House, Dr. Martin Luther King addressed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta, Georgia, stating that he would not support President Johnson for re-election in 1968 unless he changed his Vietnam policy. As a long time supporter of Johnson’s civil rights programmes, the statement marked a turning point for the veteran civil rights campaigner and Nobel Peace Prize winner. He had never endorsed a political candidate before and gave no indication of which one he might back in 1968.

Martin Luther King and colleagues in conference with President Johnson at the White House.

After a few weeks my parents found a day clinic through their Kaiser health plan. I was with Blackie the day we visited the clinic where I would spend the next month or so as a day patient. It was on an upper floor of a big building a few blocks from the Fillmore Auditorium, on the north side of Geary. Dr. Weinberg was in charge of the clinic. He was a short man like myself and very dynamic. He had a crew cut and his eyes were engaging. He had a physical resemblance to my school friend Tommy Harper. He wore a long sleeved white shirt with a black tie and his sleeves were rolled up. I liked him immediately. He was straight talking and the first thing he told me was that he understood that I had been behaving in a crazy manner and had enough medication running through me to knock an ordinary person out cold.

“The bad news, John,” he said, “Is that you won’t be able to smoke dope anymore. But the good news is that this experience is going to make you 4F.” 4F was unfit for military service. He also told me he was involved in the ‘Recall Reagan Committee,’ which meant that he was of the political left. Dr. Weinberg showed me around the clinic which occupied an entire floor. After the tour he said I should be there at 9am the following morning.

By this time, the need for a chaperone seemed to dissolve as I don’t recall anyone accompanying me to the clinic. I took the same buses there as I would to the Fillmore Auditorium. I’d catch a 41 Union outside our apartment to Steiner Street, then transfer to the 22 Fillmore.

The Munis were my way of getting to and from the Day Clinic.

When I first returned to the Union Street apartment, I was able to listen to KFRC again and catch up on the songs I’d missed while in Napa. Light My Fire by The Doors was number one and the Beatles had a new single in the charts, All You Need is Love. Frankie Valli of the Four Seasons sang Can’t Take My Eyes Off You and Diana Ross and The Supremes were in there with Reflections. Ever since I was a little boy popular music had been a good friend to me and in this turbulent time of my life, it continued to be.

A record I particularly liked was The Letter by a group called The Box Tops who I never heard of again. The song however was recorded later by Joe Cocker and others. I liked the lyrics for its inventive use of air and train travel in an original way.

But of all the records in the Top 40 as August became September, the one song which captured my soul and became the soundtrack to this phase of my long road to recovery was Ode to Billie Joe by Bobbie Gentry. This record had a haunting quality with its simple musical landscape and enigmatic lyrics. It evoked a world and way of life which was entirely alien to me. The song spoke of a dusty Delta day with names like Choctaw Ridge and the Tallahatchie Bridge, providing a vision of caucasian farming life in the cotton fields of Mississippi. The story mixed everyday chit-chat across a dinner table with news of a profound tragedy when Billie Joe McAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge. I connected with this record on so many levels, as it seemed to embody the precarious psychological territory I was now entering. I was not yet depressed but still exhilarated by my psychedelic experience. Depression would come later and it would be powerful indeed. Somehow this record predicted that reality. I never owned a copy of Ode to Billie Joe, I only ever heard it on the radio but it would run through my head every day as I made my way to the clinic.

Bobbie Gentry performing and the central shot is her standing on the Tallahatchie Bridge in Mississippi.

The Tallahatchie Bridge which crosses the Yazoo River at different stages of its existence.

On my first day I met the other patients, about twenty of them, both young men and women. There were several doctors on hand and often small groups would convene in one of the many rooms. One fellow I became friendly with was very preoccupied with guns. At least talking about guns and acting out the use of them. He would constantly describe how he would set up a particular brand of machine gun to mow down imaginary people. He acted this scenario out many times and was quite specific when describing his weaponry, knowing brand names and other details. I got the impression he was being funny, as he said all this with a wry smile. But it was always the same joke. Only the brand of machine gun occasionally changed.

There was a very thin delicate young woman who was super sensitive and could cry at the drop of a pin. Another patient was a tallish heavy set man who dressed in smart tweed sports jackets. He also had extremely long coal black hair and was in the process of transitioning to become a woman. One problem with this was that he had a very dark beard under his skin which he shaved close every day but his lower face was almost blue from the whiskers under the surface. This did make the prospect of being convincing as a woman somewhat questionable. He was having electrolysis sessions to remove his beard.

There was a tall man who seemed a bit older than most of the patients, possibly in his thirties. He had a copy of a paperback book about auto-erotics. Auto-erotic was not a phrase I had ever encountered before. It was, I soon learned, a fancy way of saying masturbation. I asked this guy about it and he immediately became aggressive. He asked if I would like to participate in one of his sexual sessions. When I declined his invitation he snarled at me to mind my own business. He had more than a whiff of the Tenderloin district about him and after this encounter, I regarded him with caution.

Once a week Dr. Weinberg would chair a meeting of all the patients in which any topics could be discussed. On the day of the meeting the auto-erotic guy brought a set of German handcuffs with him. He was showing them around to people and the super sensitive young woman asked about them. “Would you like to try them on?” he asked. She said yes. The cuffs were two interlocking metal pieces connected by a chain. You would put the chain around the wrists, fit one metal piece into the other then twist the chain. All eyes were on him as he put the cuffs around the girl’s very thin wrists. All went well until he twisted the chain and she screamed in agony, bursting into tears. Dr. Weinberg was immediately on his feet. He demanded that the guy leave the clinic at once and never come back or he’d call the police. Mr. Tenderloin scurried away taking his German handcuffs with him. He was never to be seen again.

Left and right two paperback books about auto-eroticism. The central pictures show German handcuffs. The ones on the left are from the Nazi era.

Political correctness was a concept which had not yet been conceived in 1967, but Dr. Weinberg was definitely not politically correct. He would always use the word ‘crazy’ rather than lofty psychiatric descriptions of psychological problems. At another one of our meetings, the man transitioning to be a woman asked if he could wear a dress to the next meeting. Dr. Weinberg said no. The trans man asked why and he answered: “Because you make one hell of an ugly woman.”

My days at the clinic continued to be interesting. Because depression hadn’t yet gripped my soul, I was a fairly upbeat patient. My friend with the gun fetish continued to act out his massacres which I confess I actually found very funny. He would mime the assembling of the weaponry in great detail and once the imaginary machine gun was loaded, he would then give a totally committed performance of blasting whoever the recipient was to smithereens with visual flourishes and audibly interesting sound effects. The trans man continued to complain about not being able to wear a dress to meetings and on journeys home from the clinic, Ode To Billie Joe was invariably running through my head.

Gradually I was coming down from my long drawn out high. I was still convinced of my messianic mission but not so stridently. At my parents’ flat, things were a little constrained as both Blackie and Beth were worried that I’d get involved in pot smoking again. Blackie told me that after my incarceration, he’d been visited by two narcotics agents who had been tracking the drug that I took. At the time I didn’t believe him as I thought he was just trying to scare me, but after reading Matthew Baggott’s article on STP, I am now more inclined to think Blackie was telling me the truth. The STP piece informed me about narcotics agents tracing the drug’s route through the Haight Ashbury district.

As I started my descent from the giddy heights of early in the summer, depression slowly began to creep up on me. My confidence, which had been so strong throughout the entire adventure, also began deserting me.

During this time, my father took to referring to young people who engaged in drug taking of any kind (so most of my friends) as “sick.” If ever I said anything weird to him he’d quickly retort: “Johnny stop that. You’re talking like those sick guys.”

At some point my parents’ friend Coco Cutler invited me to have dinner in Chinatown with her. She took me to a restaurant on Washington Street called Sam Wo. We walked through the slightly grubby kitchen on the ground floor and climbed the steps to the second floor. Coco clearly knew this place well and it later became a favourite with all my family, but this was my first visit. The waiter, recognising Coco, pointed to a table and shouted, rather rudely, “You sit there!” He was Edsel Ford Fung and his rudeness was a bit of showmanship which clearly was as popular as the delicious noodle dishes they served. They had a dumb waiter to send the dishes upstairs. I had beef chow mein and we drank lots of tea. Edsel Ford Fung gave us chopsticks with our meal, which I had never used before. Coco taught me how to eat with them which was life-changing in itself.

Sam Wo, the famous Chinese restaurant on Washington Street. On the right is Edsel Ford Fung at his retirement party.

Coco was well aware of what I was going through. Poor Blackie and Beth didn’t have a clue how to deal with me but Coco did and I found her easy to talk to. She lived in a beautiful apartment at the top of Telegraph Hill with a stunning view of the Bay Bridge. Unlike my parents she was interested in and knew a lot about psychoanalysis and, as I was moving into a phase of losing my ability to converse, she was a good person to be talking to.

To be continued…

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A Flip of the Lid, chapter 8

It was July, 1967 in San Francisco and I was now in my second day of madness, having taken what I believe was a dose of the dangerous drug STP. I was possessed by a conviction that there was someone coming to see me who I was meant to meet. Having gone to the Haight Ashbury district with my father Blackie in the hope of meeting this person, I gave up after half an hour of wading through an ocean of hippies. Back at our apartment in North Beach, I decided to go out for a walk.

I wandered down Union Street to Washington Square and turned right on Columbus, passing many Italian restaurants, crossing Broadway with its topless nightclubs and City Lights, the best bookshop in North Beach. I made my way to the mini flat-iron Columbus Tower building on the corner of Kearny. There was a Zim’s Burger bar on the ground floor which I always enjoyed eating at. But a Zim’s burger was not of interest to me on this occasion. I made my way up to the second floor and paid a visit to Bob McClay at the Tempo office. I had met Bob through my friend Jo Bergman who was working with him and Sue Cox at Tempo earlier in the year.

Tempo was a tip sheet for top 40 radio stations and it was owned by legendary disc jockey ‘Big Daddy’ Tom Donahue. Sue and Bob had produced the weekly tip sheet and Jo answered the phones and ran the office.

Three photos of Bob McClay and a visual of the TEMPO Top 40 tip sheet

Sue (now Susan Kirk) remembers: “McClay wrote the articles choosing whatever topic he deemed current and important about the music scene. I chose the new records and reviewed the latest hits and artists. We mailed 45’s from the week’s pick to over one hundred radio stations across the US and around the world. DJ’s didn’t have access fast enough like we did so we really did radio a great service. The artists benefited from what we did, getting their latest recordings on the air.”

Tom Donahue had hired Sue, she remembers, because she had “a great ear for hits and Tom knew it. As a boss Tom was exacting in what he wanted but was pretty hands off. My dear friend Carl Scott who knew Tom well moved into the office above Tempo in Columbus Tower.”

San Francisco DJ “Big Daddy” Tom Donahue pictured in centre with record producer Phil Spector and Righteous Brothers vocalist Bill Medley.

Bob McClay was also now presenting a regular program on FM Radio KMPX. I had visited him at the studio on Green Street about a month earlier while he did one of his shows. I’d never been in a radio studio before and enjoyed chatting with him while the records played. Clearly Bob had some experience in this line of work. He was much more of a disc jockey than Larry Miller who I had first listened to on the station.

In fact KMPX, which started its hippie output with Miller early in 1967, had now been transformed by Tom Donahue. KMPX, had previously specialised in foreign language programming and had sold Larry Miller the graveyard slot of midnight to 6am. His radio voice was friendly and unpretentious and the records he played were an interesting mix of folk, rock and blues which soon attracted a sizeable hippie audience for the FM station. There was at this time a big distinction between AM and FM radio. AM had a larger wavelength whereas FM stations were less mainstream.

So Tom Donahue went to the management of KMPX and proposed that he would present the eight to midnight slot and that they should switch to 24 hours of the kind of music that Miller was playing. They agreed and Bob McClay was one of the people Donahue recruited to the station.

From left: Bob McClay, Larry Miller, Tom Donahue at KMPX and at KYA with John Lennon.

Though I was a regular listener to Miller’s show on KMPX I still listened to Top 40 which at this time was KFRC. I had listened to pop music stations ever since I first discovered Radio KOBY in 1956 when I was nine years old. Early Elvis, Pat Boone and Harry Belafonte hits kept me listening. 1950s pop was a very broad church incorporating Perry Como, Rosemary Clooney and the big band sound of Elmer Bernstein. That station carried me through grade school into junior high when it was superseded by KEWB. They played hits like Bobby Darin’s Mack The Knife, Poison Ivy by the Coasters and Misty by Johnny Mathis. After The Beatles came along in 1964 and dominated the charts for a long time, KEWB suddenly found it had a rival in KYA. Soul came into the mix with two stations: KDIA and KSOL. From 1966 on it was KFRC that I listened to and by this time most soul artists were making the charts: Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye, The Four Tops, James Brown, Stevie Wonder and many more all crossed over to become Top 40 stars. And up until his departure in 1965, Tom Donahue was one of the most popular DJs on KYA.

Of course Donahue was an old fashioned Disc Jockey who had “Top 40” running through his veins. Back when he was on KYA he would rattle off patter like: “It’s 2.20 KYA Home of the Hits time here at twelve sixty on your radio dial and here’s Sam Cooke with…” But now on the hip FM station, he slowed things right down with his mellifluous deep voice: “You’re listening to KMPX where we’re changing the world. That’s right man, we’re changing the world.”

From left: Tom Donahue when he first arrived at KYA in 1961, with Bill Graham in the late 1960s and a ticket for the final Beatles concert which he produced.

An extremely big man in every sense, Donahue established himself as a DJ during the 1950s on station WIBG in Philadelphia. In 1961, in the wake of the payola investigations which damaged many of the reputations of East Coast DJs, Donahue arrived at KYA in San Francisco where he was an instant hit. In partnership with fellow DJ Bobby Mitchell, he formed Tempo Productions, putting on record hops and concerts. They branched out into other businesses, forming a record company, opening a North Beach night club and investing in thoroughbred horse racing. Donahue departed KYA in 1965 but stayed on in San Francisco to oversee his many business interests which included producing The Beatles final ever concert at Candlestick Park on August 29th, 1966.

From left: Ralph Gleason with the Beatles, Paul McCartney and Joan Baez, Lennon, Harrison & McCartney going on stage at Candlestick Park.

Sue Cox remembers that she, McClay and Bobby Mitchell were all involved in the production of that final Beatles performance. “Carl Scott and I stood 50 feet from the stage on the ground and wept together when they ended the concert.”

From left: The Fab Four crossing the baseball field, a poster for the event, Sue Cox pictured with Ringo and Wes Wilson’s poster for the concert.

I never got to know Tom Donahue but met him in McClay’s office a few times. Extremely tall and physically very weighty, I would see him around town, sometimes visiting Bill Graham at the Fillmore. He made the transition from fast talking top 40 DJ to mellow presenter of folk and rock album tracks on FM radio. Having grown a beard sometime during his tenure at KYA, Big Daddy now had very long hair as well but he didn’t convince my hippie friends in Marin that he was one of them.

All my friends and I were in our early twenties and considered the age of thirty to be very old indeed. One friend sarcastically listed the three most important people in the hippie scene: “Bill Graham, Tom Donahue and Ralph Gleason.” Bill was 36, Tom Donahue was 39 and Ralph Gleason, the jazz critic on the Chronicle was 50.

Bob McClay, however, was a different kind of person altogether. He was much more of a genuine enthusiast than a businessman. Both McClay and Donahue were older than me and had been part of the beat generation. Of course smoking weed had been going on forever but it always occurred in the mysterious world of beatniks and jazz musicians. It wasn’t until the hippie era that it came out into the open. I remember a pre-hippie article in MAD Magazine in 1960 in which Wally Wood drew fabulous pictures for a hip version of The Night Before Christmas. It featured a Santa Claus with dark glasses and a very thin cigarette between his lips. It opened with: ’Twas the night before Christmas, and all thru the pad, Not a hipster was stirring, not even old Dad. The chimney was draped in that stocking routine, in hopes that the fat man would soon make the scene.

A few of the fabulous illustrations by Wallace Wood for MAD Magazine’s hip version of The Night Before Christmas from 1960.

In fact when my friend Jo Bergman first introduced me to Bob McClay we quickly discovered that we shared a passion for the cartoons of Wallace Wood in MAD Magazine. Hanging out in Bob’s office was a fun way to spend time as he seemed able to do his work while chatting. All the record companies would send them free discs which were scattered all over the place.

Among the discs which Bob gave me was John Sebastian’s first solo album called Tarzana Kid and, being a devoted Sebastian fan, I loved it. He also gave me an LP of The Mugwumps, a band which preceded both the Lovin’ Spoonful and the Mamas and Papas. It featured Denny Doherty, Cass Elliot, Zal Yanofsky, Jim Hendricks and John Sebastian and my favourite track was their vocal harmony performance of the old Coasters song Searchin’. Another gift from McClay was an LP of British Cat Stevens which I loved. I was particularly taken by I Love My Dog. An album by The Who entitled A Quick One had the terrific song Boris The Spider. McClay also introduced me to the Bee Gees with their single New York Mining Disaster 1941. I had never heard of them and they sang just like The Beatles.

From left: John Sebastian’s Tarzana Kid, The Who’s A Quick One, Cat Stevens, The Mugwumps and the Bee Gees.

Another person I encountered, both in Bill Graham’s little office at the Fillmore and at Bob McClay’s place was the photographer Jim Marshall. Although I was in the same room with Marshall many times, he never spoke to me and never acknowledged my presence. He was rather loud and opinionated. There didn’t seem to be any subject on which this guy did not have an opinion. While sitting in Graham’s office talking at him he constantly took photos of Bill. He did the same thing with Bob McClay.

While clicking snaps of McClay one afternoon, he mentioned John Philips of The Mamas and Papas. Marshall had witnessed Philips refusing to sign autographs for some fans and describing such activity as “chicken shit.” Marshall then railed against such attitudes: “That’s the price you pay,” he thundered in his overly audible manner. “It comes with the territory.” Whether or not he shared this opinion with Philips is not known. He then derided Marty Balin for describing the thrill of performing as like having sex. He was basically a show business photographer who was in San Francisco at this time because it was the place to be. I don’t recall Bill Graham or Bob McClay saying much in Marshall’s presence. I think they would just quietly nod in agreement with whatever stridently stated opinions he would offer and get on with what they were doing as he snapped pictures of them.

Three shots of photographer Jim Marshall, in the centre with Ralph Gleason and the Beatles at Candlestick Park.

So I paid a visit to Bob McClay in my now crazy state of mind. Sue had left Tempo to be Music Director at Radio KRLA and had taken Jo with her. Jo was filling time until Mick Jagger was ready for her to return to London to run the Rolling Stones’ office. I’m now grateful that Jo and Sue weren’t there as it must have become immediately clear to Bob that I was not in my right mind. I have no recollection of what nonsense I talked on this occasion but he skilfully managed to get rid of me without any unpleasantness.

Back out on the street I walked up Columbus avenue, crossing Broadway where the Condor Club featured topless star Carol Doda, famous for having silicone implants to enlarge her breasts. I knew this part of town pretty well. Whenever I was working all night on a poster, I would take a break in the early hours and walk down to Broadway, observing the hustlers outside each club. I was under 21 and looked much younger so they never tried to hustle me.

I did once visit one of these clubs to discuss doing a poster for them. It was lunchtime and these two hefty expensively dressed men sat at a table with me while they ate their delicious looking steaks. I had brought a layout pad with some sketches on it which they looked at as they chewed their medium rare beef. I was reminded of a Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis movie called 3 Ring Circus in which Jerry, who was starving hungry, is being talked at by a circus boss who is eating his delicious breakfast of bacon and eggs. As the boss talked he waved his bacon laden fork around in the air. Lewis’s eyes and face moved with the bacon as the boss waved the fork. Of course I wasn’t starving but it was a drag watching these two gangsters eat their succulent steaks in front of me without offering so much as a cup of coffee. My father Blackie drummed into me that you should never eat in front of people without offering to share what you had. This attitude was almost certainly a product of his experience of the depression, but these two goombahs suffered no such inhibition. I never did do a poster for them.

So I continued walking up Columbus towards Union Street. By now I was in my second day of acting strangely and Blackie and Beth must have been very concerned about my mental health. They had many close friends to turn to and I suspect that they contacted Alvah Bessie, a writer who they’d known for years. Alvah had fought in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War and been one of the Hollywood Ten who went to prison in the early 1950s for defying the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. Blacklisted like my parents, Alvah had carved out a job for himself at the Hungry i nightclub as stage manager and host introducing such acts as Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce.

Alvah’s daughter Eva was married to Fillmore poster artist Wes Wilson. I don’t remember if I called Wes or if my parents did. All I recall is Wes arriving at the apartment on Union Street and driving me back to their house in Mill Valley.

To be continued. . .

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1967 – The Summer of Love, chapter two

Pictured on the left, Bill Graham

By 1967 I had become a head. A great deal of my time was devoted to getting high with my chums in Mill Valley. When one joint had been passed around the room and reached the end of its existence someone would pull another Rizla out of the packet, sprinkle a sizeable batch of grass into it and roll another one. We would spend hours talking and laughing about ‘straight’ people and how unaware they were about their rituals and behaviours. We took great delight in considering ourselves different to the rest of society.

One aspect of the cultural changes brought about by the dope smoking phenomenon was that it provided a sanctuary for oddball outcasts. In earlier times young people who didn’t fit in would be shunned by various levels of In-Crowd but the sharing of a joint was a friendly experience which transcended such divisions. Back in 1965 when I accidentally stumbled upon a highly secretive group of friends who were turning on, there was in play a certain amount of social cross-pollination. Rich kids who lived in the leafier parts of Mill Valley would be going to Marin City and Sausalito to score their matchboxes from young people who they would never otherwise encounter. Then the federal narcotics people held a massive raid in the summer of ’65 just before my graduation with a fanfare of publicity which succeeded in popularising marijuana throughout Marin County and in turn the bay area.

The front page of the Sunday Chronicle in June 1965 announcing the big raid in Mill Valley, Marin City and Sausalito.

The fact was that young people were already ostracised from adult society by not being allowed to drink until they were 21 so the leap to smoking grass was not that big a deal. And it was a very big social change. When I first stumbled onto my friends’ clandestine pot smoking it had scared me to death. But now I was a head like everybody else.

On one occasion I was very smoke ridden and listening to Donovan singing Season Of The Witch when a friend asked if I had “heard about that Dreyfus guy?” He then handed me the Independent Journal with a front page photo of Dave Dreyfus above the headline: ‘Helicopter Crash Kills Ex-Marinite.’

I was thunderstruck by this news which clearly meant nothing to my friend who couldn’t possibly comprehend its importance to me. The Dreyfus boys; Dave, Tim and Jared, had been a part of our lives ever since my family arrived in Mill Valley in 1952. Babbie and Barney Dreyfus were very close to my parents Blackie and Beth and I remember many a barbecue up at Bootjack Camp.

Dave had decided to join the army in the early 1960s which was a highly controversial thing considering the leftwing politics embraced by all my parents’ friends. There was a political chasm between the boys of the Hallinan family and those of the Dreyfus family. Both Dave and Tim Dreyfus seemed to sidestep their parents’ politics whereas all the Hallinan boys were uniformly militant in their support of a long list of causes which included civil rights, both in the deep south as well as the bay area, and opposition to the war in Vietnam. Many a fist fight was waged by the Hallinan boys with those who disagreed with their politics. And they were all tough fighters. The use of the N word by any caucasian would ignite one of these battles which gained them a fearsome reputation throughout Marin County.

Back in 1952 their father, Vin Hallinan was a candidate for president on the Progressive Party’s ticket. There wasn’t a hope of his being elected but his candidacy was a rallying point for the left which was under serious attack by the federal government at this time. His opponents were Dwight D. Eisenhower for the Republicans and Adlai Stevenson for the Democrats. In my sister Nell’s class at Old Mill School they held a mock presidential election and Nellie was surprised to learn that Tim Dreyfus voted for Eisenhower. He even sported an I Like Ike badge with pride.

Some images from Vin Hallinan’s presidential bid in 1952. In the photo on the left Vin, Vivian and a very young Danny arrive at the polling station at Ross School to be to told by the precinct inspector that because they’d already sent a postal ballot from New York they couldn’t vote that day.

So when Dave Dreyfus joined the army, all the Hallinan boys were disapproving but Babbie resolutely refused to criticise Dave for his decision. He did his two years in the service then went to Texas where he learned to fly helicopters and became a flying instructor there. He was a passenger on a demonstration ride while attending a helicopter convention near palm Springs when the crash that killed him occurred.

Dave was only 26 years old. This was my first experience of death on a personal level and the fact that I got the news through a cloud of marijuana smoke made it all the more upsetting. The last time I had seen Dave was at my sister Nell’s flat on Greenwich Street in San Francisco. He was a very engaging and funny guy. He was gently disagreeing with Nell’s commitment to socialist principles. “But I like steak,” was his reply to her criticism of eating in fancy restaurants when so many were hungry.

Perhaps it was fear that turned both Dave and Tim away from their parents’ politics. The cold war era was a frightening time to be left wing in your political outlook. HUAC and Senator Joe McCarthy’s investigations ignited a blaze of terror across the nation, the reverberations of which are still felt today. Guilt by association was a major concern. My father Blackie told me that, after he was blacklisted, people he and my mother knew well in Greenwich Village suddenly didn’t know them at all on the streets of New York. The fear of being subpoenaed and grilled about some petition you may have signed in the 1930s meant that debate on matters political became diminished. The prosecution and conviction of Alger Hiss and the execution of the Rosenbergs sent a powerful shock wave through the families of the left during the early 1950s. One of the scarier sights would be a visit by FBI agents to your doorstep and all of our families had many such visitations throughout the 1950s.

Pictured on the left is Ethel Rosenberg being arrested by federal agents. On the right is the front page of the LA Times after they were executed.

I remember Jared Dreyfus telling me about a kid in their neighbourhood saying to his brother Dave: “When it becomes legal to kill commies I’m going to kill your mother.” Dave then proceeded to beat the daylights out of him.

On the left is a photo of the House Un-American Activities Committee under the chairmanship of J. Parnell Thomas with a young Dick Nixon standing on the right.

My brother Jim also decided to join the army the previous year rather than be subject to the draft. He waited until his 18th birthday in September, 1966 to enlist, thus avoiding the need for Blackie and Beth to give their permission. Our parents, like all their close friends, were firm in their opposition to the war in Vietnam. I had a temporary deferment because of shipping out as a sailor and the draft was a big problem which I, in my state of regular smoky intoxication, was simply not thinking about. The choices seemed to be: getting drafted, going to jail or leaving the country. One other choice as Ringo Hallinan points out, was fighting to end the war.

Jim’s decision to deal with it by enlisting was complicated. In part it was an act of rebellion against my parents and their politics, a fact he would admit to me later. But it was also to confront those three choices. Once inside he made a decision to sign up for the stenography corps and, luckily, he served his time in Korea and Germany.

I too was against the Vietnam war but never fell in with a particularly political crowd so didn’t participate in any of the big demonstrations which were prevalent at that time. The cycle of my life seemed to be getting a bit of poster work and doing my best to grind out something decent. Then when I’d finished I would put out my thumb and head to Mill Valley where I would smoke myself into oblivion.

Among my friends who I would turn on with was a very odd fellow named Matt. Early in 1967 he somehow got this cabin at a place called Slide Ranch out in the wilds along the Pacific Coast Highway. There were two routes to reach Stinson Beach: one across Mount Tam and the other along the coast road which you would pick up above Tam Valley. So if I was hitching to Matt’s place I’d need two rides: one from the city to Tam Junction then another out the coast road. It took a few trips to get used to where exactly it was as there was a steep dirt road which descended on the ocean side of the highway. It came down past Matt’s cabin on the left then continued down around to the right stopping at a house at the bottom.

I had first met Matt the previous year when he was living on a houseboat in the marshes of Larkspur. It became a regular hangout for me and was where I developed my passion for The Lovin’ Spoonful. With a head full of ganja I listened to their first LP over and over. It was not long after I had returned from my voyage on the Torvanger. That trip had transformed me from the loud mouthed little guy I was in high school into a slightly introverted fellow who’d been out in the world. So I returned a changed person and found a very different Mill Valley to the one I’d left behind only a few months earlier. The pied piper of marijuana had come and taken a considerable number of the children away. Tam High was practically unrecognisable to me. A great majority of the boys had long hair and most of the girls sported serapes. A large number of the students were smoking weed.

Someone who personified this dramatic change for me was Peter Perdue. I had known Peter in my senior year as he was a friend of my brother Jim’s. Peter was a slightly comical figure who was constantly seeking ways to be entertaining for his friends. He had a vague resemblance to the comedy star Jerry Lewis and would physically flap around in a similar manner. When I’d last seen him his hair was short as was every male student at Tam High but now his hair was long and expertly cut to make him look like Sonny Bono of Sonny and Cher. In fact he dressed in bell bottom trousers and his girl friend of the time, Adrienne Inge, looked and dressed just like Cher even though her long hair was ginger instead of dark brown.

Peter was positively evangelical about the sociological changes which were happening. He would read drug related interpretations into all of Bob Dylan’s lyrics, telling me that Mister Tambourine Man was, in fact, a drug dealer and he told me that the name The Lovin’ Spoonful was a reference to shooting up drugs. He seemed to feel that the hippy phenomenon (it hadn’t yet been christened that) was something akin to a political movement. I sifted a great deal of Peter’s opinions on this subject through a filter of skepticism. But he was a very entertaining person to be around.

His relationship with Adrienne was about to hit the rocks as she became smitten with an older guy named John Parker. John was the elder brother of Gregg Parker who, like Peter, was now a senior at Tam. John had been busted for marijuana possession and was on probation. This didn’t stop him smoking weed, far from it. Adrienne lived with her mother Eleanor in a small house on East Blithedale at the corner of Nelson. Eleanor was an interesting old dame who did not like the business of pot smoking one little bit. This was tough on her as Adrienne made no pretence about getting loaded on a regular basis. Her mother made every attempt to become broad minded on this subject but then she would get a bit drunk and go crazy throwing all reserve out the window. I would have long conversations with Eleanor across her kitchen table but one time I turned up while she was drunk and she pretty much threw me out of her house.

Peter Perdue meanwhile was going through agonies over losing Adrienne to John Parker. So it was through John Parker and Adrienne that I met Matt as they would go to his houseboat for their assignations.

But now, in 1967, Matt was no longer in Larkspur on a houseboat but all the way out at Slide Ranch which was a seriously remote location. When I would visit it’d be for a few days. Whoever had money would finance a visit to the grocery store in Stinson where we’d buy jars of peanut butter, loaves of white bread and bottles of milk, cheap food which went a long way. I was charmed that a band making the rounds in the bay area was called The Peanut Butter Conspiracy. However I never actually heard them play.

Matt had worked as a carpenter but at this time didn’t look or behave like he had a job at all, also he seemed to keep himself stoned on weed around the clock. He was highly intelligent, articulate and a disarmingly honest person which, at this time of my life, I was not. So much of what was going on inside my head frightened and embarrassed me. I think my biggest problem was that I didn’t have a girlfriend. Bob Dylan expressed my state of mind succinctly in his 1965 song It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding): “And if my thought-dreams could be seen, they’d probably put my head in a guillotine.”

I was now 20 years old and still living at my parents’ place in North Beach. Hanging out with Matt and our circle of friends was an enjoyable way of not thinking seriously about my future.

I soon had another assignment from Bill Graham which was a poster for a one-nighter on a Sunday at the Fillmore with an impressive lineup: B.B. King, Moby Grape and the Steve Miller Blues Band. I decided to go for an Arabian Nights look and started with a tall chimney out of which came a swirling fog, within which I drew the lettering in a wavy pattern with the names of the bands along with the date and time. Behind the chimney I drew an evil looking genie who was beckoning to a bald headed man in the foreground holding an equally bald headed child. The significance of these images was lost on me as I was just letting whatever my hands drew make their way onto the poster board. To the right I depicted a woman, presumably the child’s mother and behind her another genie with a slightly noble look on his face. The bald headed child had a long extended arm which stretched around towards the mother.

A slightly skewed view of my artwork for the BB King poster.

I remember how Bill used to examine Wes Wilson’s posters when he would deliver them on a Friday afternoon. After perching a ladder against the wall above the staircase, he would staple about eight of the posters up in a row then stand back. He would stare at them and extend his right arm towards them with his thumb straight up. He would then rotate his thumb down to the 9 o’clock position and keep staring. I think he was trying to formulate an opinion of the work Wes had done and as that work was something outside his control, I believe this bothered Bill. Wes, in addition to Bill, was also in the process of becoming famous and was chalking up some very impressive commissions including the poster for the very last performance of The Beatles at Candlestick Park the previous year.

Wes would arrive with a friendly smile on his face. Bonnie and Wes were highly conversational people but Bill was almost always busy and shooting the breeze wasn’t his style. Though I had never heard Bill express an opinion on Wes’s posters, he clearly had them and his confidence in matters to do with graphic design was clearly growing.

I went in to see him in his little office to get paid for my latest poster for the B.B. King show and he suddenly became very cold and business-like.

“What have you got on this poster?” He asked. “There’s a genie and another genie and a martian. And a little martian. I don’t like it.” He wrote me a cheque for the artwork and said: “Come back when you can do something I like.”

I was stunned. His words wounded me tremendously and immediately. Bill had always liked my work but now he was telling me to get lost. I walked away from the Fillmore deeply traumatised. I’d been fired. If I had been at all professional I would have gone back to the drawing board and ground out some good spec art work and taken them into show Bill but I was not that person at all. Instead I took refuge over in Mill Valley getting stoned with my friends. I was too mortified and embarrassed to tell them what had happened with Bill so I just kept it to myself.

I was, however, still able to walk into Bill’s concerts for free which I did, usually in the company of our friend Augie Belden. Augie was always in search of a good time and he had a VW beetle which could take us into San Francisco to go see shows at the Fillmore and Winterland and on one occasion we saw a rather extraordinary performance at The Matrix featuring a band we’d never heard of called The Doors.

To be continued…

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