grace-slick – Miller Avenue Musings

“A Scramble For Guidance…”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The fight to defeat Proposition 14 was ultimately unsuccessful.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To be continued…

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A Descent Into Darkness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

These murders inspired sensational headlines in the press.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To be continued…

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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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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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