Tag: fillmore-auditorium

Back to the Waterfront

Somewhere in the midst of my comedown and the start of my depression, my childhood friend Robbie Bridges, appeared and invited me to go on a road trip to southern California.  Robbie was the son of Harry Bridges and he and I used to play together when we were very young.  After his parents’ divorce, he’d been living back east with his mother Nancy.  He was now based in San Francisco and doing some kind of a white collar job which was nothing to do with Harry or the longshore union.

   Robbie must have known what I’d been through the past few months but my memory of our drive down the coast was that we talked as if nothing had happened to me and I responded well to this.  Everybody around me at this time was treating me with tremendous delicacy and somehow Robbie not thinking there was anything wrong with me was liberating.  At one point he asked me to drive and I did.  It was an exciting moment of self discovery to learn that I actually knew how to drive a car.  

   He told me all about the pop music he was keen on.  He was particularly taken by The Who and told me about gigs he’d been to.  I cannot remember where we stayed on this trip but I think we were away from San Francisco for a few days.

   A little bit of logical thinking was seeping into my fevered brain.  The idea of a trip to England, became something I felt I had to do.  I knew that in order to get the money for such a journey, I would need to go back to work on the waterfront.  But to do that I would have to pull myself together and make accommodations with the world around me.  For someone who, a mere six weeks earlier, had been stomping around the psychiatric wards at Napa State Hospital insisting that John Lennon was in the next room, this was something of a tall order.  But at every point on my journey of madness, I had responded to the signals around me and the fact I had two contacts in London: my sister Nell and my friend Jo Bergman, I took as just such a signal.  It did, however, require some organisation on my part.

   That I had the opportunity to work on the waterfront as a ship’s clerk was a privilege indeed.  This privilege came to me as a result of being Blackie Myers’ son.  I was aware just how sought after the clerking jobs on the front were.  For starters they paid very well indeed and it could be more than a bit interesting, particularly when you worked down inside the hold of a cargo ship.  

   Had I never worked on the front before, the prospect of clerking would have terrified me, but the waterfront was a world I was familiar with having done it a fair bit.  However this time was different.  The recent experiences I’d been through had taken me into dimensions outside the social boundaries of normal society and I realised I’d have to conform to my father’s ways.  The first thing would be to cut my hair and dress in a sober manner.  There was a huge prejudice against long hairs on the front and, after several months of being a hippie mental patient, my hair was long indeed.  My father was a very respected guy up and down the Embarcadero and I knew that it would be disrespectful of me to behave in any way which upset or embarrassed him.

Blackie with his brothers Billie and Harvey in Brooklyn(left), Blackie at his desk in the NMU, and Blackie on Market Street with a seafaring friend.

   Also it was very important to be conscientious in the work, which wasn’t really that difficult but accuracy was essential.  Blackie always stressed the importance of doing your job to the best of your ability.  The reason he always gave for this was to protect the union.  After all that was his history.  He was a sailor by trade and had helped build the National Maritime Union which was no cake walk.  Whenever they tied up a ship and went on strike they were up against all the forces that the ship owners had at their disposal: the police, the national guard, and gangs of strike breakers known as Goon Squads.  The fight to build their union had been long and bloody.  A few of Blackie’s comrades had been killed in the struggle and while he and his sailors were building the NMU on the east coast, Harry Bridges was leading the longshore union on the west coast.   

From left: Blackie Myers, Harry Bridges, Vincent Hallinan.

   The west coast longshore strike of 1934 was a crucial turning point for the American trade union movement.  The police, firing live rounds at the striking stevedores, injured many and killed two.  The union held a funeral march for the two dead men which processed up Market Street.  Thousands of people lined the street to watch.  This was a major factor which led to a general strike.

How the Hearst press Examiner reported the first days of the 1934 longshore strike.

   The 1934 strike was the beginning and the original union, the ILA, became the ILWU (International Longshore & Warehouse Union).  Their militancy improved working conditions and wages for ordinary labourers.  But it also made Harry a target.  Those that felt the working class should know their place conspired against him.  He was, after all, an Australian by birth, and the federal government would do their damndest to deport him.  But that was in the 1930s.

From left: the 1934 longshore strike, the ILWU logo, the longshoremen march up Market Street in 1939.

From left: Harry getting good news, speaking at a conference, and speaking to a large crowd in San Francisco.

 

   In 1952, the Myers family had travelled all the way from Connecticut to California because every job Blackie managed to get on the east coast would last only as long as it took the FBI to turn up and tell his employer what a dangerous radical he was.

   The last leg of our journey west was from Taos, New Mexico to Mill Valley.  All of us, Blackie, Beth, Nellie, Katie, Jimmy and I were bleary-eyed from the endless stretches of highway but when we crossed the Golden Gate Bridge and climbed Waldo Grade, the end was in sight.  Turning left off Miller Avenue at the 2am Club, we drove into Homestead Valley where a welcome party for us was in progress at Bob Robertson’s house.  Bob was an executive of the longshore union, the ILWU.  Every family friend we would know in the town we were destined to grow up in was there.  The Dreyfus family, the Hallinan family and the Bridges family along with the Goldblatts and the Cox’s.  It was such a friendly gathering of people and I instantly thought of all these folks as family.

   The reason we had come west was the possibility of work for Blackie on the San Francisco waterfront.  Harry Bridges and Blackie Myers were trade union comrades of old.  However it took some time before Black was allowed to work on the front.  With hindsight, I think the delay was possibly because Harry, with all the political persecution he was continuing to suffer, felt nervous about provoking the federal government.  After all Blackie had been a prominent trade unionist in New York and was an early target of the witch hunters.

Beth and Blackie pictured on the left in Connecticut in 1950 and on the right in San Francisco in the 1960s.

From left: Johnny Myers with Blackie in Manhattan, centre: Jimmy. Blackie & John, on the right Johnny, Blackie, Jim and Totem our cat.

   Harry was born in Melbourne, and had gone to sea at a young age, winding up working on the docks in San Francisco.  The federal government had tried repeatedly to prosecute and deport Harry, claiming he’d lied about not being a member of the Communist Party. 

   The propaganda of the post war anti-Communist era was very powerful indeed.  Hollywood fell in line with the government by creating a blacklist for writers, directors and actors who wouldn’t cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee.  The cooperation the committee required was to name names of those who either were Communists or fellow travellers.  The Hollywood Ten all went to prison, Alger Hiss too went to jail and in 1953 the Rosenbergs were executed for treason so by that time the terror in the country was pretty substantial.

The House Un-American Activities Committee featuring a young Richard Nixon on the right and J. Parnell Thomas in the centre.

Pressbook advertising for the 1951 Warner Brothers film ‘I Was A Communist For The F.B.I’

   For Americans who have grown up believing the propaganda of the McCarthy era, the image of a Communist was a ruthless person with shifty mannerisms and dishonest tendencies.  Many of my parents’ friends were actually party members but none of them behaved remotely like that.  Humour played a big role in most of those friendships.  

   Blackie had a mischievous sense of humour and was what he called a pork chop socialist.  Whatever put food on the table was what motivated him and he was always fair with others.  During the depression he found himself in a town where they had a fist fight contest with a prize of ten dollars for whoever won.  Handy with his fists, Blackie fought the guy and beat him, but then split the money with his opponent.  When I asked him if he was tougher than the other guy, his answer was: “No.  I was hungrier.”

   As kids, we always enjoyed Blackie’s performances.  He was a very good mimic and did a pitch perfect impersonation of Harry, who he always called The Nose. 

  There were party members who did behave in a stereotypical secretive way but none of my parents’ friends were like that at all.  One such person was our neighbour, Dennis Brogan’s grandmother Jean.  She used to bring us her copies of The People’s World newspaper and my memory of her was that she was completely humourless.  

   The American Communist Party became a political force in the early days of the Great Depression.  President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had no qualms about dealing with Communists.  His administration had many advisors from all avenues of left wing politics including the NMU, and Blackie was one of them.  A family friend, Albert Kahn, wrote in his book, High Treason, quoting FDR just after his electoral victory in 1932: “Coming back from the west last week, I talked to an old friend who runs a great western railroad.  ‘Fred,’ I asked him, ‘what are the people talking about out here?’  I can hear him answer even now.  ‘Frank,’ he replied, ‘I’m sorry to say that men out here are talking revolution.’”

   Blackie had gone to sea at age fourteen and became an able bodied seaman.  Following the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the great depression it had caused, he was often out of work and would “grab a handful of boxcars” to get from one port to another in search of a ship to sign on.  The hiring halls in every port were referred to as Fink Halls as sailors would have to bribe the man handing out the jobs.  The pay was low and working conditions on the ships were often dangerous.  Blackie was a tough guy who during those years was both hungry and angry.  It wasn’t until he became involved with those working to organise as a union that he was able to channel his anger in a constructive way.  

   But the fights ahead were deadly dangerous as the shipowners perceived the formation of the union as a direct attack on their interests and deployed all their weapons.  The NMU organised strikes on the east coast and ports in the Gulf of Mexico and not one of them was won easily.  In addition to the brute force of the military, police and goon squads, the shipowners also had the help of press barons like William Randolph Hearst whose newspapers utilised highly effective anti-labour propaganda.  One of Hearst’s papers was the San Francisco Examiner, whose readers were told on a regular basis of what an enemy of the state, Harry Bridges was.  During the 1934 strike the Examiner described the strikers as rioters, and celebrated the National Guard and police as heroes defending decent citizens.  The fact that they were firing live rounds at unarmed workers was celebrated as protecting the interests of decent society.

   People who aren’t too clear on their history often mix up the House Un-American Activities Committee with the senate committee of Joe McCarthy but the two are separate.  The House Committee began stirring things up in 1947 while Joe McCarthy didn’t discover Anti-Communism as a cause until 1950.  Once he did, he went at it with a vengeance, grilling ordinary citizens on television about petitions they might have signed years before or meetings they may have attended.

   Blackie and Beth had been popular folks about town before he was blacklisted but after that, people they’d known pretty well would pass them on the streets of Manhattan without a glimmer of recognition.

  He told me later that he truly hadn’t seen the red scare coming.  But the signs were there.  As an advisor to the U.S. Government on labour relations during World War 2, he was sent into Germany with the occupying troops in 1945.  He told me he’d had a meeting with General Patton not long before the accident which killed him.  After they’d dealt with their business, Patton poured them each a snifter of the finest brandy and held his glass up in a toast, saying: “Now that this is over, we’re going to get you bastards.”  Black told me that he just laughed.  But soon after his return to the U.S. his passport was taken away from him.  A sailor without a passport cannot work as a seaman.

   The choreography of the cold war was designed with military precision and one of the most important weapons was propaganda.  Convincing the American public to forget about the Germans, Italians and Japanese being their enemy and to concentrate their fear on the Russians, was essential to this endeavour.  

   They were helped in no small part by the hearings held by HUAC and Senator McCarthy but also by Hollywood and those who controlled the media.  People with left wing or liberal tendencies during the 1930s and 40s suddenly found themselves perceived as highly suspicious individuals and began running for cover.  Many of them became stool pigeons and turned on their friends.  The fifth amendment, which protects citizens from incriminating themselves, was seen by the newspapers as an admission of guilt and people who took it often lost their jobs.

   But the machinations of the federal government didn’t work on my parents and their close friends and I grew up hearing fantastic trade union tales from the 1930s and 40s.

   So here I was, fresh out of Napa Hospital, preparing myself for going back to work on the waterfront and yet there were still a few hoops which I had to jump through.  True, I wasn’t over my crazyiness but was capable of putting on a reasonable appearance of “not so crazy.”  I continued taking Thorazine, but in smaller doses.  I went to the barber shop and got my hair cut short.  I started shaving regularly and dressing in a conservative way.  When Black was convinced I was okay he told me he’d had a word with Johnny Aitken who was the dispatcher in the hiring hall and when I felt up to it I could turn up for work.  

To be continued…

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“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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The Summer America Burned

Previously in Miller Avenue Musings: While incarcerated in Napa State Hospital in the summer of 1967, I tried a door which wasn’t locked and wandered away, getting on a bus which took me through the countryside.

In the summer months, Northern California is peppered with golden hills covered in long grass, bleached white by the sun.  We passed many such hills as I sat in the back of the bus watching the scenery go by.  Eventually we came to a small town, the name of which I cannot remember.  The bus driver pulled up in front of a depot and announced that it was the end of the line so I got off and had a wander around.  It was a beautiful summer’s day and the town was very pretty indeed.  Finding a bench, I sat down and watched the world go by.  I wasn’t aware of days of the week at this time but I’d guess it was a weekday as people were going about their business, shopping, delivering and all the various activities you would see in a small town.  There was a grocery store, a book shop, a cafe as well as a bank, sturdily enclosed in a solid brick building.  

   Before long I became aware of a man in a suit and tie standing near the bench I was sitting on.  He seemed to be checking a piece of paper then looking up towards me.  He then spoke.  He asked if my name was John Myers, and I answered yes.  He was a police officer and it was his assignment to find me and return me to the hospital.  He sat down and explained that a car would be coming for us pretty soon.  He was a really nice guy and we talked about his job as a cop.  Though I had some very delusional ideas, my natural ability to communicate in a conversational manner had not deserted me.  This fellow told me about his caseload which he simply couldn’t get under control because as soon as he started to make headway with one thing, another demand on his time would interfere.  As a result he had a constant treadmill of unfinished business.

   We sat on the bench talking for about twenty minutes until the car arrived to take me back.  Our conversation continued on the ride back to the hospital where he delivered me to my ward, said his goodbyes and was gone.  The man in charge of the ward was normally a very friendly fellow but on this occasion he was extremely angry with me for wandering off.  To be honest it wasn’t even something I had meant to do.  He grabbed my upper arm and dug his thumbnail into my flesh as he demanded that I promise not to do it again.  Though his grip was painful I ignored the pain and didn’t react to it.  I simply smiled at him until he let go.  I then promised not to wander off again, which, in turn, made him smile.

   In my ward there were only men.  The hospital clearly had a separate accommodation for women.  I don’t recall any of the patients who I didn’t get on with.  There was the older fellow who slept in the next bed to me as well as a slightly camp gay guy who was a bit of a hippie.  We talked about dope a lot and he had a good sense of humour as I recall.  It’s a bit ironic that I should have accidentally escaped because I really didn’t mind being there at all.

   One day my sister Katie visited with her boyfriend (soon to be husband) Lonnie.  My father Blackie was with them and we had a good visit though Katie remembers me as heavily sedated.  She also said that my medication caused me to have moments of losing muscular and verbal control.  We’d be walking about the place, talking, and my words would suddenly become garbled.  At the same time my arm and leg would go slack and I’d drag myself along for a bit.  Then I’d regain control until it happened again.  Apparently it happened several times during their visit.

   While I was leading a confined existence inside Napa State Hospital, the news, national and international, was very traumatic.  The rioting which had exploded in New Jersey sparked further conflict in other places like Minneapolis, Harlem, and Youngstown, Ohio.  The next city to explode on the scale of Newark was Detroit, Michigan.  Rioting broke out after the police raided an after-hours drinking club and the word spread that officers had handcuffed a black teenager then kicked him down some stairs.  This was the spark that lit the fuse and set the black community rioting, but as it spread, white people joined in.  While fires raged and looting escalated, Governor George Romney asked President Johnson to send federal troops into the area which he did.  By the time things cooled down, the death toll had soared to 36 over three days.  Even Dr. Martin Luther King supported the use of federal troops in quelling the violence in Detroit.  “There’s no question,” he said, “that when a riot erupts, it has to be halted.”  King sent a telegram to President Johnson stating that unless Congress acted to create jobs for black people, the rioting would spread.  “A riot is the language of the unheard – that last desperate act – when the Negro says,  ‘I’m tired of living like a dog’.”

Two reports of the Detroit riots in the Independent Journal and San Francisco Examiner.

   The violent anger of black Americans which had exploded so dramatically in Newark and Detroit rippled across the country in smaller skirmishes at many locations.  It even manifested itself in  Marin City.  In the early hours of a week night in late July, a car drove slowly past the Marin City fire station and someone in the car aimed a pistol at the station and fired a shot.  Two Highway Patrolmen cruising nearby heard the radio report and gave chase to the sniper vehicle down Drake Avenue.  Halting the car near Cole Drive, the patrolmen stepped from their vehicle.  Suddenly gun shot came from the darkness behind them.  As they turned to see where the shots came from, the sniper’s car sped off.  The two officers radioed for help and moved their patrol car 200 feet from the scene.  Then a heavier caliber rifle opened up on them from the high rise housing and the two officers exchanged gunfire with the snipers.  Sheriff’s deputies and Highway Patrol officers then arrived at speed with red lights flashing and sirens blaring.  Sheriff’s deputies reported scattered gun fire from the housing development but no one was injured.

 

News of the Marin City incident along with the latest from Detroit.

   The following night a black male teenager who lived on Cole Drive, was wandering about, brandishing a hand gun.  He shot first at a building and then at a passing sheriff’s patrol car.  The first bullet he fired passed through a wooden wall and hit two people asleep in their beds.  One was a 6 year old girl and the other was the girl’s 62 year old grandfather.  The bullet first hit the grandfather, passing through his right calf, then through the girl’s right forearm, lodging in her left shoulder, shaking her awake screaming.  The teenage shooter then fired four or five shots at the patrol car but was felled by one of several deputies on foot patrol who shot him in the left hip.  The teenage shooter and the 6 year old girl were both taken to Marin General Hospital while the grandfather was driven to a medical facility in San Francisco.  

   Marin City was where the black community lived in our county.  It sat at the bottom of Waldo Grade between Sausalito and Tam Valley.  Although it was only a mile and a bit from Mill Valley, it was a world away from that almost entirely white town.  In the north of the United States at this time, there was no segregation like they had in the deep south but there was an economic apartheid which kept black people out of white neighbourhoods.  

   The housing at Marin City was constructed during World War 2 to accommodate the workers at the massive MarinShip yards which the federal government contracted the Bechtel Company to build in Sausalito.  They turned out Liberty Ships and tankers for the war effort and needed labourers around the clock.  African Americans came north in search of well paid employment.  They came primarily from Louisiana, Arkansas and Mississippi.  But when the war ended, MarinShip closed and the employment came to an end.  Marin had always been a white county but now it had a black community within it.

Some images of Marinship, the federal government’s ship building facility in Sausalito during World War 2. It produced many Liberty ships and tankers for the war effort.

   The Collins family were the only black people to live in Mill Valley when I was growing up.  Dr Daniel Collins, a prominent dentist, actually bought his house direct from the previous owners rather than going through one of the realtors in town.  He side stepped the main gate keepers who kept Mill Valley white.

   In June,1963, the Rumford Fair Housing Act was passed by the California Legislature.  It banned racial, religious and ethnic discrimination in the sale and rental of housing.  This new law was soon to be tested by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in Mill Valley.  On Saturday, 16th November, 1963, a total of 75 persons picketed Walburn Realty at 90 East Blithedale.  Douglas Quiett, chairman of the Marin branch of CORE charged that Mrs Walburn had told a black woman she didn’t have an apartment for rent, but later showed it to two white women.  The Independent Journal reported that “Among the picketers was Dr Daniel A Collins, newly appointed to the state board of education and a Mill Valley resident.”

   A group called Americans to Outlaw Forced Housing  initiated a petition to repeal the Rumford Act and the Marin County Real Estate Board took the decision 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.

   “Yesterday’s stand taken by the real estate board on the Rumford Act,” said Douglas Quiett of CORE, “should make clear to everybody in Marin that we have a legitimate protest.  The board won’t announce its ‘official’ position on the initiative, and yet it will make petitions available at its office.  This simply means that many real estate brokers in this county don’t want a fair housing law.”  As Marin CORE entered its third weekend of picketing the realtor’s office, the dispute intensified.  But four weeks later they ended their picket after reaching an agreement with Walburn Realty.  “We have reached agreement on four of our five proposals to Mrs Walburn,” said Douglas Quiett.

The picketing of Walburn Realty in Mill Valley was regularly reported in the Independent Journal.

   However CORE now began picketing Ted Gibson Realtor at 328 Miller Avenue.  In November 1963, a black family went to Gibson asking to see a home advertised in a newspaper.  They were told the house was sold and none other was available in the price class.  A white couple, an hour later, was shown the first house plus several others in the price range, claimed Quiett.

   After three sessions of negotiations with Gibson and his attorney, Albert Bianchi, CORE decided to picket.  Gibson, said Bianchi, had agreed not to practice discrimination but refused CORE’s demand that he display a sign that he is a ‘fair opportunity broker.’  Bianchi likened the demand to a merchant being required to place in his store window a sign saying ‘I am not a Communist.’

   Meanwhile enough white people in Marin and other California counties went to their local real estate board offices to collect and sign those petitions which put Proposition 14 on the ballot in November.  That proposition was for the repeal of the Rumford Act.  In the eleventh month of 1964 it was passed with a majority of over 1.5 million votes.  

   The Independent Journal reported: “Californians have made known their opposition to state laws banning discrimination in housing, but the final word on the boiling controversy probably will come in the courts.”

   When Dr Collins bought his house in Mill Valley in 1952 for $20,000, he dealt direct with Mrs Faltin, the woman who sold it.  “By this time,” said Dr Collins, “She had begun to get calls from some of the local real estate dealers, giving her a bad time.  They were harsh with her for selling her property to a n——r.  She said, ‘Why don’t you come up and have lunch with Dr and Mrs Collins before you pass judgment on them?’  They were too much cowards to do that.  They would not confront either of us, but just began to badger Mrs Faltin.  She said it made no difference to her.  She liked us, she thought we were first-class citizens, and she was delighted to sell us her house.  And so she did.”

Two photos of Dr Daniel A Collins on the left and his son Chuck Collins on the right. Chuck was in my year at Tam High.

   About a week before the family moved in, Dr Collins received a call from a representative of the realtors, passing on the message that they would buy the house at a good profit for him.  He told them that the only offer he would consider would be for them to double the price he paid.  He received no further calls.

   “I saw myself at that time getting $20,000 net profit, free of tax,” said Dr Collins.  “And I could go somewhere else and buy a house.  But they weren’t that brave.  They were just a bunch of bullshitters, a bunch of cowards looking for a sucker.  They weren’t willing to pay the price of their prejudice.”

   But I was thinking of none of this.  Not the racist practices of Mill Valley realtors.  I wasn’t even aware of the riots in Newark or Detroit.  Or the snipers in Marin City or the daily death toll from the war in Vietnam.  I was just taking my doses of thorazine and thinking that John Lennon must be in the next room.  Each day passed with a similarity to the day before and the day after.

   One morning I saw my gay friend in the corridor with his arm in a sling.  The wrist on that arm was heavily bandaged.  I asked him what had happened.  He glared at me malevolently then he began shrieking: “Get away from me you freak!  Don’t you come anywhere near me!  Get away from me!”

   I shrank back from him, stunned by his outburst.  The bandage on his wrist looked like he had slit his wrist.

To be continued…

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Being Taken Into Custody

Previously in Miller Avenue Musings:  It is the summer of 1967 in Mill Valley where I have stayed up all night talking with poster artist Wes Wilson.

As I left Wes and Eva’s house on Locust Avenue it was a beautiful summer’s morning.  The sun shone brightly in a clear blue sky.  Taking a left through their garden gate, I walked up the hill to Blithedale where I turned right, heading in an easterly direction.   

   My madness had evolved.  I was now convinced that I was a messiah, put on this earth to solve all the problems of humankind.  If that seems a slightly tall order for a drug crazed twenty year old hippie, it was.  But in my fevered state of mind, it all made perfect sense.   Important people would be landing at the airport in San Francisco and driving north on Highway 101.  My thinking was that I must meet them at the highway.

   At the junction of Blithedale and Camino Alto, I cut through the railroad tracks where I had walked to and from school at Alto and Edna Maguire so many times as a kid.  I was excited by the idea of meeting all these people who clearly had the best interests of the planet earth in their hearts and minds.  Amongst their number was, I felt certain, The Beatles, or at least John Lennon, if not all four.  I had the entire LP of Sgt Pepper dancing through my head at this time and felt certain that they would be part of this mobilisation.  Another tall order, I grant you, but making perfect sense to me in my ridiculous state of mind.

   I walked along the tracks until they met Lomita then turned right and headed for the highway.  At the overpass, I positioned myself on the sidewalk overlooking the northbound traffic.  The rush hour had begun and the southbound traffic was one huge slow moving mass but I was totally oblivious to it.  I kept my gaze focussed on the horizon where the highway snaked to the left at Richardson Bay.  I was in a very calm state and kept a beady eye on the traffic.  I must have been there about an hour because a Highway Patrol officer had spotted me 45 minutes earlier and when he saw me again, he stopped to talk to me.  My state of mind was to accept everything I encountered and the Highway Patrol officer was very friendly as I recall.  I told him I’d finally had a good trip on acid and probably babbled something about the caravan of vehicles coming from the airport.  He told me he would be taking me to the county jail in San Rafael and that he’d have to handcuff me which I accepted.  I then sat in the back of his vehicle as he drove us north to the county jail which was underneath the San Rafael courthouse. 

   I had been booked into Marin County jail the previous year when I was arrested in Mill Valley for being in a car where marijuana was found.  I spent one extremely miserable night in the communal male cell and it had been a bleak and depressing experience.  This time, however, they simply put me in a room where I waited until the ambulance guys got there.  Before too long they arrived and I was strapped onto a stretcher with wheels.  

   The guy who sat in the back of the ambulance with me as we drove north towards Napa must have heard many a mad person quack on about saving the world.  Perhaps he secretly hoped that one of them would reveal a great truth, for he pumped me with very specific questions all the way to Napa.  Sadly I cannot recall his questions but I definitely formed the opinion that he was hedging his bets in case one of these crazy patients turned out to be the real messiah.

From left: a California Highway Patrol car, the Marin County Court House and the entrance to Napa State Hospital.

   Ever since childhood I remember that the word ‘Napa’ was synonymous with crazy people.  My father Blackie had a vast vocabulary of slang nicknames which he used to describe practically all things.  A mental hospital would be a laughin’ academy in his colourful lexicon.  Yet most of the people I befriended there were surprisingly normal seeming.  I was given a bed in what looked like an ordinary hospital ward.  The guy in the next bed on my right was very nice and we became friends.  We never discussed why we were there.  To be honest I had no idea why I was there.  It was just an interesting experience I was going through.  I accepted everything that came my way.

    Almost immediately I was given medication which I think was Thorazine and the nurses would come to me with pills several times a day.

   The staff were very friendly and I soon learned from them that their already difficult jobs had been made much harder by the budget cuts introduced by the recently elected California governor, Ronald Reagan.  Reagan had targeted mental health and higher education for his budget cuts and the impact was being felt.  

Ronald Reagan, elected as Governor of California in 1966.

   His election as governor the previous year had been the first step in what he and his financial backer, car dealer Holmes Tuttle, saw as the road to the White House.  Reagan’s victory in California was a sign of what was to come in America.  His speech in support of Barry Goldwater in 1964 had put him on the political map.  The senator from Arizona ran unsuccessfully against Lyndon Johnson for the presidency and advocated the use of nuclear weapons in the war in Vietnam.  Reagan made similar statements once he was in the governor’s mansion.  So now, with actual power, he set about his attack on university students and the mentally ill.

Three faces of Ronald Reagan.

   A committee called Marinites Interested in the Mentally Ill made a report.  Its members observed overcrowding and unrealistic patient loads at three state mental hospitals serving Marin County.  The group toured Mendocino, Sonoma and Napa hospitals and now that Reagan’s budget cuts were beginning to bite, they planned to make monthly inspections.  The Marinites complained that dismissal of institutional and treatment staff was detrimental to patient care.  At Mendocino they noted that outings to the beach, an effective therapy for patients, would no longer happen since the dismissal of an automobile maintenance man.  The loss of janitors had meant trained technicians switched from patient care to cleaning up with brooms.  A registered nurse was pressed into service pushing a food cart, “when she is needed by patients,” the report stated.

   At Napa hospital, the paperwork had increased by 500% due to new programmes like Medicare and Medi-Cal yet the budget cuts got rid of so many office staff that psychiatric workers were doing their own stenographic work as well as their main jobs.  One of the psychologists whose caseload had increased overnight from 130 to 230 complained: “I’m no longer a psychologist.  I am a caretaker.”

A newspaper article about the Marinites and the leafy entrance to the hospital.

   So the staff at Napa were overstretched.  One economy measure was to close the laundry one day a week, but this meant they couldn’t provide the optimum number of bed and diaper changes for their patients.  I don’t recall a staff member being unfriendly but they were all overworked and a bit distracted.  My time at Napa was interesting and I don’t remember any boredom or depression on my part.  It was all an enormous adventure and I was enjoying it.  

   Outside the walls of Napa State Hospital there was a lot going on in the world.  In Vietnam the Viet Cong launched a huge rocket attack on the enormous US air base at Da Nang, killing 13 and wounding 173 others.  The rockets, fired with deadly accuracy from a nearby mountain, set the air base ablaze, destroying three barracks and a score of aircraft worth an estimated $48 million.  War on the streets of the USA erupted in Newark, New Jersey as National Guardsmen and police battled black rioters firing rifles and submachine guns.  For the first time the guardsmen were using live ammunition which brought the death toll to 16 people killed.  Later in the summer, rioting would also break out in Detroit, Michigan.  I, however, was aware of none of this.  If I was going to save the world it was going to have to be without knowing what the hell was going on in the world.

Two newspaper clippings. On the left the Viet Cong attack on the US Air Base in Da Nang and on the right the rioting in Newark.

   That I had been picked up by the Highway Patrol on the overpass was reported in the Independent Journal, the afternoon newspaper in Marin County.  The news item about me was tucked away on page eleven under the headline: ‘Admitted LSD Taker Is Held.’  The article was wrong about the time of day.  The reporter must have misheard the Highway Patrol officer and written it as evening whereas it was very early in the morning.

   One subscriber who saw the story was Nona Kaufmann.  Mrs Kaufmann was alarmed to read about me and brought it to the attention of her daughter Janice.  Jan and I had dated at Tam High and I knew her mother fairly well.  The Kaufmanns lived in Strawberry on the other side of the highway.  

   I had first met Jan one evening in the back seat of a VW Beetle driven by Mark Symmes.  Mark, who was accompanied by a young woman in the front passenger seat, drove us up Edgware to the junction of four corners where there was a big space to park.  I have no memory of why I was in the back seat next to Janice, who I did not know.  I also don’t recall who the young lady with Mark was, but once he’d parked the vehicle, they began making out.  I turned to the young woman on my right and instantly found myself in a passionate embrace.  This was the start of a pretty steady relationship which lasted the rest of my time at Tamalpais High.  Without realising it, I fell in love with Jan.  The reason I didn’t realise it was that I was constantly putting on a front as a lady’s man at school with much flirtation.  I wasn’t aware that I subconsciously put Janice on a pedestal while other women were, I felt, there to be treated in a cavalier fashion.

   I remember Jan asking me what I was going to do with my life and it concerned her that I had no idea.  I remember her father Stephen becoming alarmed at the fact that I bought an expensive sweater for her at Christmas from J Magnin’s in San Francisco.  “This seems serious,” Jan quoted Mr Kaufmann as saying.  

   When I went to sea right after my graduation it was actually my first proper time away from home and I returned, a very changed person, to a Mill Valley which had been transformed.  Most young people were now smoking marijuana, in stark contrast to what the place was like only a few months before.  The short haircuts which were part of a uniform look for young men was no longer the norm as most guys had long hair.  One school friend who had previously looked very collegiate, now resembled Sonny Bono of Sonny and Cher.  He talked of the hidden drug messages in Bob Dylan’s lyrics and how the name “The Lovin’ Spoonful” referred to heroin use.  He spoke enthusiastically of all this as if drug use was a political movement.

   I fell out of touch with Janice during this period.  At the time I was picked up by the Highway Patrol, she was a student at UC Davis and was shown the I-J article by her mother on a weekend visit home.

   Jan visited me at Napa which must have been very strange for her.  She was directed to my ward where she found me surrounded by a group of men, all eager to talk to someone.  These guys apparently were pretending to take their medication rather than actually swallowing the pills.  They offered handfuls of tablets to Jan.  Two of them told her they behaved crazy to avoid being put in jail.  Jan and I wandered through the restricted outdoor area followed, she remembers, by “this posse of fellows.”  Though these guys were not taking their medication, I clearly was, as Jan remembers me as medicated but delusional.  I talked about saving the world with John Lennon and John Sebastian.  This crazy notion took quite a bit of time to fade from my conscious mind.  Looking back on it, I’m truly grateful to Jan for visiting me at the hospital.  She was and still is a good friend.

   One thing I didn’t know at the time was that my father Blackie was there at the hospital almost every day of my three week incarceration.  He did make appearances when others visited, like my sister Kate, but I had no idea of his presence on a day to day basis.

   I was a very passive patient who, when instructed to do something by the staff would oblige.  On occasion strange impulses would appear within me like suddenly taking all my clothes off and standing naked in the corridor.  This didn’t happen often but when it did, a staff member would arrive and gently tell me to put my clothes back on, which I did.  I remember being locked in an empty hall where I walked up and down singing my pretty near perfect imitation of John Lennon doing Day In The Life from the Sgt Pepper album.  

   There was no radio at Napa, so the three weeks I spent there I didn’t hear the Top 40.  I missed the fact that Light My Fire by the Doors climbed the hit parade as did the ghastly San Francisco by Scott McKenzie.  I never heard Up Up and Away by the Fifth Dimension or Don’t Sleep in the Subway by Petula Clark.  I was stuck with Sgt Pepper going through my head.  

   In the hospital every door to the outside world was locked and in that way, all of us patients were prisoners.  I got into the habit of trying every door in case it wasn’t locked.  One morning I turned the knob on a door leading out into the garden and found that it opened.  I walked out and closed the door behind me.  I found myself on a neatly trimmed lawn.  I walked across the grass and kept going.  I passed administrative looking buildings and eventually came to a street.  I turned left and walked until I arrived at a bus stop.  I don’t believe I was there long for very soon a bus arrived.  I got on and for some reason I wasn’t challenged to produce a ticket or money.  So I found a seat in the rear of the bus and sat down, looking out the window and watching the beautiful scenery go by.  I had no idea where I was going.

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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The Summer of Love – Ch 7 – Going Off The Rails

During the Summer of Love in 1967, I flipped out on what I have always assumed was the drug LSD.  I truly went nuts and was picked up by the Highway Patrol out on the Tiburon Overpass and incarcerated in Napa State Hospital for 3 weeks.  In attempting to write about this experience many years later, I’ve done a great deal of research into the hippie phenomenon of that time and came across a drug which had its heyday in that summer of love.  It was called STP.

   The only thing I knew about the drug STP was what some hippie guy said over the microphone at a concert up at the Mountain Theatre which featured Eric Burdon.  This guy announced to the audience: “Eric Burdon is on STP.”

   This made no great impact on me at the time.  STP was the famous name of a car engine oil product but was borrowed for the monicker of this particular drug.  Years later, after reading an online article entitled: Learning about STP by Matthew J Baggott, I started to wonder about the drug that had knocked me off my rocker all those years ago.  This exhaustive essay started me thinking that maybe it was actually STP and not LSD that sent me off the rails in 1967.  I do know that another friend who took the same drug as I did, also had a very bad experience with it.

   STP, according to Baggott’s article “had a chemical structure like a hybrid of the stimulant amphetamine and the psychedelic mescaline.”  He went on to explain that it appealed to local acid producer Stanley Owsley as it could be “a gateway drug for ‘speed freaks’ to switch from addictive amphetamines to nonaddictive psychedelics.”

   It was Owsley who produced the first batches of STP which were devoured in the Haight Ashbury district.  The underground newspapers The Berkeley Barb and the San Francisco Oracle praised the new drug as a legal alternative to LSD (California had outlawed LSD in October, 1966).  Owsley even distributed it free at the Summer Solstice celebration in Golden Gate Park on 21st June, 1967.  It was after this event that the adverse reactions to STP began to appear.  According to Baggott: “The first case of STP intoxication seen at the Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic was a nineteen year old man who sought help after being up for two days.”  On that same evening, more than twenty three STP patients were treated at the clinic.  The clinic ultimately saw thirty two patients and another thirteen were treated at the SF General Hospital over the next few days.  Dr David E Smith, the Haight clinic’s founder, believed that for every patient who sought treatment, another thirty nine were riding out bad trips in the community.

Two photos inside the Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic and one of their posters warning about STP. The eagle eyed amongst you might spot the photo from my Yardbirds poster on the wall in the photo on the right.

   Joining up with colleague Frederick Meyers, a UC Medical Centre pharmacologist, Smith and he held a press conference in June to warn of the dangers of STP.  In the press conference, Meyers and Smith stated that the greatest danger was that “giving chlorpromazine, the drug usually prescribed as an antidote for bad LSD trips, intensifies the potentially fatal side effects of STP.”  This fact inspired a sensational headline in the SF Chronicle: “A Warning on New Drug – STP Can Be Lethal.”

Two articles in the press about the dangers of STP and a photo of the Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic.

   But as all these events were unfolding down in the Haight Ashbury district of San Francisco, I was sitting at my drawing board up in North Beach trying to think of ideas for posters.  I quickly executed the logo of my signature as Tom Connell had suggested for I was pursuing my poster business idea with him.   In addition to regular weed smoking, I was still pining for a good experience with LSD and it wasn’t long before I found myself across the Golden Gate Bridge in Marin County where I acquired a capsule of acid.  

   There was a drinks party I attended at the Dreyfus household in Mill Valley.  Babbie and Barney Dreyfus knew how to throw a good bash and their house up in Blithedale Canyon was packed with interesting people, all getting plastered.  I found myself in conversation with Jared’s new partner Val, a good looking young woman from London.  Having now lived most of my adult life in London I am seriously embarrassed to report that I was insisting on doing bad imitations of English accents in her presence and she was patiently correcting me, insisting that no such accents existed.

   I don’t believe that Jar and Val had yet married but they soon did and went onto have two sons, Adam and Christian.  In the early to mid 1970s we had a good visit in London where I first met the boys and she probably doesn’t remember correcting my ghastly British accents.  

   After the party was over I stayed the night, crashing on their sofa and decided to take my capsule of LSD.  It was a very mild dose which, nonetheless, kept me up all night.  There was, adjacent to the Dreyfus living room, a large porch enclosed by windows with views of the sizeable garden below.  There were a few whicker chairs and several large plants in pots which I spent a good deal of time exploring.  For some reason I had the Jimi Hendrix single Purple Haze pounding through my head.  I guess I had been listening to it a lot and I very much liked that the instrumentation conjured up an image of large iron machinery at work.

The Jimi Hendrix Experience performing in the panhandle of Golden Gate Park. I witnessed this show from the street above.

  So this music played in my head over and over.  When the sun came up I heard Jar’s dad Barney coming downstairs for his breakfast before heading to the city for a day’s work at his office.

   The previous year Barney had helped me out of a jam when I had been arrested in Mill Valley for a marijuana offence and he dispatched one of his lawyers to sort things out.

   Not long after Barney had gone, I left the Dreyfus house and walked downtown.  I felt good.  It was said by people in my circle that one should let at least twelve days pass between LSD trips so your system could be cleansed of the drug.  So I was content that I would not be taking any acid again until such time had passed.  The sky was blue and the sun shone as I walked down West Blithedale towards the Bus Depot.  I made my way onto Miller Avenue and just past Brown’s Department Store, I stuck out my thumb.  Hitch-hiking was the way I commuted between Marin and San Francisco.  Before long I got a lift all the way into the city.

   Back at my drawing board in North Beach I sketched ideas for posters along the lines that Tom Connell and I had discussed.  It was on the second day of my LSD abstinence that a close friend from Mill Valley turned up at my parents’ apartment.  He had some acid and wanted me to take it with him.  I knew that I should wait out the full twelve days but he showed me two chunky white tablets. I wavered.  On a whim I decided to take it.  I got us glasses of water from the kitchen and we swallowed the pills.  The now familiar swirling visuals set in immediately. We decided to go to Mill Valley.  As we left the apartment, we stood for a moment on the steps leading down to Union Street.  I said to my friend: “We are gods visiting this planet.”  This marked the beginning of the madness which consumed my soul in the coming weeks.  We got in his VW Beetle and drove over to Marin.

   We went someplace on the lower slopes of Mount Tam where a group of our friends were sitting under a tree surrounded by hills covered in the long grass, bleached white by the summer sun.  In one of my mother Beth’s books she referred to “the warm hills of Marin” and it was this long grass which made that image so right.  I don’t remember which friends were there or what I said to them but I’m certain it was something weird.  The swirling visuals of the acid we’d taken wore off pretty quickly but the state of mind I found myself in persisted.

Some samples of Marin County grass in the summer.

   When I returned to North Beach in the evening I had become convinced that I was waiting for someone to arrive.  I looked out my bedroom window onto Union Street and watched strangers come and go as the darkness settled over Russian Hill.  I was in the grip of a premonition that someone was coming to see me.  It was now dark outside as I descended the steep staircase to the front door and opened it.  I stood at the top of the steps leading down to the street and gazed below.  I was jittery and nervous about the arrival which I felt was imminent.  The street lights came on.

   I stayed out in front of the apartment for about half an hour then came inside but decided to leave the front door open.  I climbed the stairs and sat down on the top step.  After awhile my mother Beth appeared and asked why the front door was open.  I said that I was expecting someone but she protested that any visitor could ring the bell and that it was dangerous to leave the front door open at night.  I walked down and closed it.

   The next day I expressed a need to go to the Haight Ashbury to meet the person that I felt I was meant to meet.  My father Blackie decided to accompany me.  I can only guess that my folks sensed that something was not right.  Perhaps they were humouring me, going along with my notion that someone was coming.  

   I wasn’t used to being accompanied by Blackie anywhere at this time.  We took a couple of buses to get to Haight Street which was packed with hippie pedestrians and it’s safe to say that Blackie was completely out of his element.  He hated long hair on men and he didn’t like the drug culture.  After all, the hippie phenomenon was barely two years old at this time and I think it had taken his generation by surprise.  When I was growing up, drug activity was a thing you’d read about in newspapers and it was something which was always happening on the other side of the tracks.  Not in our lives.  But ever since the big bust at Tamalpais High School in June 1965, it had invaded the American middle class in a big way.  Puff the Magic Dragon had clearly arrived and taken a sizeable proportion of the children away.  And now clearly I was one of those children.

Haight Stree in the summer of 1967.

   Blackie and Beth were not at all typical American parents and the irony was that I really never had much to rebel against in my family because my parents were such rebels themselves.  Both my folks had turned their backs on their religious backgrounds: Beth was an American Irish Catholic and Blackie had a Protestant father and a Catholic mother.  They had each gravitated to the political left and devoted their lives to furthering the cause of socialism.  When the anti-red witch-hunts began in the post-war period, they paid a heavy price for their beliefs.  Blacklisted out of his trade as a merchant seaman, my father was unable to hold a job down for more than a few months on the east coast as the FBI would turn up, informing his employer that he was a dangerous radical.  This was the reason my family drove across the country as it was implied that he could get work on the San Francisco waterfront through Harry Bridges and his longshore union the ILWU.

   Whatever the reasons, the work on the waterfront didn’t materialise until we’d been in Marin County for almost four years.  Blackie worked on the Golden Gate Bridge, he delivered dry cleaning and whatever else that brought the groceries home.  

   It may well have been the severity with which the federal government came down on Vin Hallinan for defending Harry in his 1949 court case which delayed his employment on the waterfront.  Vin was first sentenced to six months for contempt of court and later to eighteen months for income tax evasion.  I now wonder if the board members at the ILWU figured that letting Blackie work on the front would further provoke the government.  After all, before he was blacklisted, Blackie was a very prominent and popular trade union leader who regularly featured in the media.  I remember Black telling me that he simply didn’t see the red scare coming.  One day he and Beth were well known folks about town in Greenwich Village and the next people they knew well would pass them on the street without a glimmer of recognition.  They went from minor celebrities to pariahs practically overnight.

   One thing which always surprised me about Black was that none of the hardship thrust upon him seemed to make him an outraged person.  He’d get cross about political things he didn’t agree with and phony politicians would always inspire one of his colourfully caustic comments, but he was not a bitter man at all.

   So here he was, accompanying his twenty year old son, who was  in the early stages of a psychotic state, on a cockeyed visit to the centre of the hippie scene in San Francisco.  Haight Street was throbbing with long haired freaks of all ages.  Lifeless looking young people sat on the sidewalk as hippie drug dealers whispered coded pitches to passing strangers.  Young men and women sold copies of the San Francisco Oracle, a hippie newspaper.  A steady refrain of: “Spare change?” echoed throughout the atmosphere.  After about half an hour of wading through this long haired horde, we gave up and made our way back to North Beach.

On the left a shop called Head Quarters followed by photos of three different people selling The Oracle and an Oracle cover.

   To be honest I didn’t understand my conviction that I had to meet someone, so what the hell Blackie made of it, I have no idea.  Once back in North Beach I had a phone call with Tom Connell who told me that he had secured the financing to proceed with the poster business but I was in another zone altogether.  He asked if I had thought of new ideas for posters and it was not something that I was even thinking about.  All that seemed important to me was meeting these people that I was meant to meet.  Tom told me that he had found a few other poster artists willing to do the work and, as he sensed that I wasn’t in my right mind, he said that he was going ahead with me or without me.  In my right mind I’d have been very upset by this and would have tried to mend the situation but in my frenzied state it was totally irrelevant to me.

   I went out for a walk, taking Union down to Columbus.  As I got to Washington Square I turned right.  

To be continued

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1967-The Summer of Love part 4

The Beatles launching their LP Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Some person said: “If you can remember the 1960s, you weren’t there.”  I have no idea who made this statement but from my point of view it’s wrong.  I was there and I do have very clear memories of a lot of it and in 1967 I was a 20 year old hippy poster artist who went crazy on LSD and wound up in a mental hospital during the Summer of Love.  So if I can remember it, anyone can. 

   That summer in the bay area, was very eventful.  Large outdoor rock festivals began happening, a manifestation of the fact that lots of young Americans were adopting the hippy way of life, albeit for a short time.

   Haight Street in San Francisco was throbbing with hippies and head shops.  What my father Blackie would describe as guerrilla capitalism was everywhere with long haired drug dealers on every street corner whispering coded pitches to passing strangers.  A good friend of mine went there to score a lid of grass and had to follow the dealer up to his apartment.  Once inside the guy pulled a gun on him and demanded all his money. My friend extracted a meagre ten dollar bill from his wallet insisting it was all he had.  He lived.

   On Haight Street the sidewalk was packed with long haired young men and even longer haired young women.  A constant refrain of ‘Spare change?’ could be heard up and down the street from weary looking young people.  Psychedelic posters for dance concerts at the Fillmore and Avalon decorated many windows and the Zig-Zag Cigarette Papers logo adorned posters, T-shirts and coffee mugs. 


   But the most defining event of that summer was the release of the Beatles’ LP, Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band.  This album instantly became a hit with everybody I knew.  Each house I entered, for the longest time, had this record playing.  On the front cover was a colour photo of the four Beatles wearing brightly coloured old fashioned marching band uniforms, standing in front of a big collage which featured pictures of a wide variety of characters including Karl Marx, Marilyn Monroe and Edgar Allan Poe.  

   The music seized your attention right from the start: the rock band opening of the title track with George Harrison’s bee-sting guitar notes and Paul McCartney’s athletic vocal.  It proceeded to take you on a journey of many different musical styles with full orchestral backing and new surprises each time you listened.  And the lyrics were so very good.  The words to She’s Leaving Home, Fixing a Hole and With a Little Help From My Friends were intelligent, sensitive and they made you think.  McCartney’s lyrical optimism was countered artfully by Lennon’s cynicism.  Also for the first time these guys seemed to be reflecting on what it was like to be a Beatle.  Lyrical references to newspaper taxis and silly people who don’t get past their doors, gave shape to the Beatles’ recent history of an entirely unprecedented celebrity which they’d been living through for the past few years.  And here they were in the midst of the hippy era seeming to be more relevant than ever.

   This was the very same foursome who provided most of the soundtrack to my teenage years.  Their music and lyrics spoke directly to me and my generation about the agonies and joys of young love, lust and all the satellite subjects which concerned their audience of acne-ridden adolescents.  From their arrival in the USA in early 1964, I, along with millions of young people all over the world, followed their musical output devotedly, learning each of their songs by heart and singing them out loud with my friends at surreptitious drinking sessions.  

   But unlike other showbiz fads, they simply didn’t fade away.  They got better.  Rubber Soul was their first LP which illustrated the point that they were definitely not a flash in the pan.  Their talent was something special which stood the test of time.  Then in 1966 they produced Revolver which continued to break new ground with songs like Eleanor Rigby, Taxman and Got to Get You into My Life.  During that year they also found themselves mired in controversy.  John Lennon gave an interview to the London Evening Standard in which he predicted that Christianity would die out and said that “we’re more popular than Jesus now.”  This caused no controversy in the UK and the interview was not published in the USA until late in the summer.  In June Capitol released a compilation LP entitled The Beatles Yesterday and Today with a cover photo featuring all four wearing white coats and covered with decapitated baby dolls and pieces of raw meat.  They were all laughing and looked like crazed butchers.  The band said it was a protest against the Vietnam war.   As soon as it was released it was immediately withdrawn by Capitol and replaced with a new photo.

On the left is the photo the Beatles’ wanted and on the right the one Capitol Records chose.

   When the Lennon interview was reprinted in the USA that summer, it ignited a huge furore in the southern bible belt which rippled across the country.  A disc jockey in Alabama organised a public burning of Beatles material and all this occurred just as they were about to embark on an American tour.  The press conference which kicked it off was an uncharacteristically sombre business.  Previous Beatles press conferences had all the colourful anarchy of a Marx Brothers movie but this one was weighed down with seriousness.  John Lennon, looking pained, reluctantly apologised for causing offence.

Beatles burning in the Bible Belt, a very sombre press conference and a message for John Lennon.

   On top of this, they had to flee the Philippines in a hurry after they’d snubbed the first lady, Imelda Marcos, who had invited them to tea.  They were clearly unprepared for the angry public reaction.  So after their final concert in Candlestick Park in San Francisco, they decided to stop touring and just work in the recording studio.

   The Beatles were worshipped in a way which was not entirely healthy and I was as starstruck as everybody else.  The hysteria generated by their initial American success in 1964 seemed to have morphed into a slightly different form of hero worship but it was still idolatry plain and simple.  I remember sitting around a house in Strawberry which I visited regularly and discussing the Beatles as if they were gods.  The house was owned by a woman who was older than me and had two young children.  She was separated from her husband and several of my friends and I would gather there regularly to smoke weed and listen to music.  She was a guitar playing folk singer who was managed by Frank Werber.

   It was at this time that I realised that Mill Valley was becoming a place where people from the rock and roll scene were moving in.  Wes Wilson and his wife Eva had a house with a long garden on Sycamore. Bill Graham and guitarist Mike Bloomfield moved into Mill Valley.   Mike had left the Butterfield Blues Band and started his own group called The Electric Flag.  I once saw his bass player, Harvey Brooks with a big smile on his face, wandering, along Sunnyside near the Post Office one morning.  I also heard a remark which chilled my soul.  The woman in Strawberry was talking about somebody who was “shooting smack with the Electric Flag.”  Nobody in my immediate circle was doing anything like that. It scared me.

   I guess that I made a distinction between smoking grass and what I considered to be hard drugs.  Somehow I didn’t consider acid to be in that category but through my limited experience with it I knew how powerful it could be.  As the summer arrived I became more and more determined that I should have a good experience with LSD.  I had become convinced that the reason I wasn’t able to have a good trip was to do with my egotism and that I needed to work on myself.  This was not an easy prospect as I had always been a little guy with a big mouth and an even bigger head.  The particularly bad trip I’d had the previous year while at the Fillmore was all about loss of control.  I felt I had to hold onto my control and was absolutely terrified by the fact that it was oozing away from me in dramatic fashion.

   While all this internal drama was going on with me, out in the real world the Vietnam war was, by this time, raging.  The daily news had a stream of stories about military action in Vietnam as well as many about students burning their draft cards and huge demonstrations against the war.  The police tactics against anti-war protestors became increasingly violent and just as blood was definitely flowing over in Vietnam so too did it flow on the streets of America.  David Harris who was married to Joan Baez went to prison for refusing to be drafted into the army.  I know a movie producer in Hollywood who pretended he was gay, which he wasn’t, and avoided the draft that way.

   My sister Nell was no longer in San Francisco but living in London with her husband and their newborn son Poggy.  Nellie and the Hallinan boys had been very active in demonstrations in the city but now had taken her left wing activism to England.  The Hallinan boys all remained very active in civil rights and anti-Vietnam war demonstrations

   Back in 1965 both Kayo and Ringo Hallinan recruited a small army of tough fighters to form the front line of an anti-war march from Berkeley to Oakland which the Hell’s Angels had announced they were going to break up.  Not realising who was in the front of the march, Sonny Barger, Northern California president of the Angels, waded into the crowd thinking they were dealing with pacifists.  Barger, shouting abuse, as he pushed his way through the crowd, reached up to pull down a banner.  “As he pulled the banner down,” said Ringo, “Kayo hit him with a right fist on one side of his jaw and I delivered a left hook on his other.  He went down like a stone.  The Angels kept coming, thinking we were a bunch of pacifist wimps.  They suddenly found themselves surrounded by a lot of tough guys bent on pounding them.  I remember the looks on their faces as they suddenly realised they were in trouble.  And they were.  We kicked their asses until the Oakland police attacked us and drove us back.  Barger lied about that day on many occasions.  How they kicked the commies’ asses.  It was a fine moment.”

Conn (Ringo) Hallinan on the left before the fight and his brother Terence (Kayo) Hallinan seen punching a Hell’s Angel.

   But I stayed away from the big demonstrations as so many turned violent.  One day I was hitch hiking out of Mill Valley to the city and got a lift with a young man who was on his way to an anti-war demonstration in Berkeley.  He was quite candid in telling me that his motivation was nothing to do with the war but rather it was to meet beautiful young women.

   I went to a party in Berkeley and met a guy about my age who was joining the marines the next day.  I asked him why and his answer was chilling: “Because I want to kill somebody,” he said.   I was so startled by this that I asked him, if it was completely legal, would he kill me?  His answer was yes.  Now it just happened that I met this guy rather than one of the thousands of young recruits who had no such agenda and were simply doing what the government was ordering them to do.

   The whole situation was something I was just not thinking about.  My way of dealing with the possibility of being drafted was to smoke another joint.   And yet my brother Jim was now in the military and having done his basic training he would be having a stopover in Seattle for a few days en route to Korea.  I thought about flying up to see him.

   Several guys from my Tam High class of 1965 went into the service and found themselves in Vietnam.  Corky Corcoran, Ed Smith and Les Taylor all served over there.  Another who was a year younger than me was Ernie Bergman.  

   Corky, who I had known since 7th grade at Edna Maguire, joined the army in the summer of 1966 and became a paratrooper.  Never having been on an airplane before, he was flown to Fort Lewis in Washington where he did his basic training then it was off to Fort Benning in Georgia where he attended jump school.  By 1967 he was in Vietnam with the 173rd Airborne Brigade.  “We went through the Brigade Jungle School in Bien Hoa,” said Corky, “To prepare us for the upcoming months in the Dak To area of the central highlands.”  His job was as a radio teletype operator, part of a 3-man team working from a jeep filled with communications equipment.  “We were constantly on the move,” remembers Corky.  “ There were some scary times indeed but I made it home in July, 1968.”

Corky Corcoran on the left as a soldier in Vietnam and on the right with his wife in more recent times.

   Les Taylor had grown up in a military family, having lived in France, Germany, Turkey and several locations in the USA before arriving at Tam High in his sophomore year.  By the time he got to Vietnam he was a qualified helicopter pilot and his initial training began while he was still a student at Tam.  On one of his early missions as co-pilot in Vietnam, ferrying men to a combat zone, his commander froze at the controls and he had to take over and fly the copter into the landing area.

Les Taylor in two different military uniforms and on the right a more recent view if him.

   Eddie Smith and I had been friends since 6th Grade at Alto.  He didn’t go into the service until late in 1967 and went to Vietnam the following year.  He said that more American GI’s died between ’68 and ’69 than at any other time in the war.  Ed: “I was on a mortar platoon out in the field most of the time. But when we were in base camp, it was just as dangerous.  The Vietcong and the regular North Vietnamese Army were shooting mortar rounds and rockets at us all the time.  I had plenty of close calls but luckily never got wounded.  It was scary as hell and I had nightmares for quite awhile once I got back to the states.”

Ed Smith on the left in Vietnam, middle back in Marin after his service and a more recent photo on the right.


   Ernie Bergman who was in my brother Jim’s year, joined the Navy in his graduation year of 1966 but didn’t get to Vietnam until April 1967.  His first day in Danang was traumatic as he was assigned to be a stretcher bearer for the hospital triage centre where the wounded were brought to see if they could be saved.  “What a shock to my whole being!” Says Ernie.  “I saw soldiers and marines with all kinds of injuries, lost limbs, large wounds, lots of blood, lots of horror.  One guy I was carrying looked like he was on the wrong side of a claymore mine and had 1000 little pockmarks all over his body, face and uniform.  Just before I put him down he started shaking so I called the nurse over.  I was looking directly into his face and he died right there.  Holy Shit!  This is REAL!  If anything, that first day in Vietnam at the triage center probably had more emotional and mental effect on me than anything else I experienced in my 30 months overseas and in Vietnam.”

On the left a picture of Ernie Bergman in the Navy and on the right more recently at the US Congress in Washington DC.

   So while I was smoking weed, dreaming of tangerine trees with marmalade skies, staying up all night to the sound of Larry Miller on KMPX, these guys were experiencing hell on earth in Vietnam.  The ride I was on didn’t have much further to go.

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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