Tag: marty-balin

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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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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The Summer of Love – part 1

Pictured above are The Quicksilver Messenger Service

There was a song which was released as a single in May of 1967 by Scott MacKenzie.  It was entitled San Francisco (Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair).  It went into the charts nationally and also became an international hit.  All of my friends were avid listeners to the popular music of the day and yet I never heard a single one of them enthuse about Scott MacKenzie or his song.  I heard it on the radio and regarded it as a purely commercial pop record cashing in on the hippy scene in the Bay Area.  And yet whenever there’s a television or radio documentary about the Haight Ashbury in that year this is the song that’s always trotted out to accompany it.

   It was written and produced by John Philips of the Mamas and Papas.  The tune was catchy enough but the lyrics were a bit worthy with references to all the “gentle people” to be found in the city by the bay.  True there were many Be-ins and Love-ins that year which is what the song was on about.  But there was a dark side to the hippy phenomenon as well with regular reports in the Chronicle about overdosed dead bodies collapsed in doorways along Haight Street.  The name Charles Manson was unknown then but he too resided in the Haight Ashbury district at that time with his ‘family’ which, along with him, would become infamous in just a few years time.

   The summer of 1967 in San Francisco became known as the summer of love.  The hippy happening was at its height with young people from all over the United States and the world arriving on Haight Street every day, possibly encouraged by Scott MacKenzie and his wretched song.  

   For me, however, as the summer of love reached its peak, I went off the rails on a psychedelic substance and wound up incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital.  I was twenty years old and, as a result, my memories of that year are skewed by this experience.  With hindsight, I was headed for psychological trouble with or without LSD but that doesn’t alter the fact that I flipped out on acid.  And I do know from others that it was a particularly bad batch.

   Working for Bill Graham at the Fillmore Auditorium provided an exciting window on the emerging San Francisco rock scene which had, by 1967, become world famous.  I returned from a trip abroad in January and rang up Bill at the Fillmore to let him know I was back in town and available for any poster work he needed.  I had only been away a few months but things had changed dramatically.  The scene had become nationally and internationally renowned with reporters from all over the world turning up to write about Haight-Ashbury and the music it had spawned.  The two biggest bands, Jefferson Airplane and The Grateful Dead were becoming very famous indeed and there was a gaggle of new poster artists in town.  Before it was Wes Wilson, Mouse and a few others but now psychedelic artwork was everywhere and the advertising industry had begun imitating the lettering style that Wes had made popular with his poster art.  Also Bill Graham was different.  He too was in the process of becoming a celebrity. 

   I went in to see Bill and Bonnie at the Fillmore and he seemed more polished somehow.  He was certainly better dressed, sporting a snappy green suede jacket.  He was now mixing with famous people in the music business and the glow was rubbing off on him a bit.  Enjoying his suede jacket he asked Bonnie if she thought it made him look like a ‘rock mogul.’  

   He’d been back east and seen a special preview of the soon to be released Don’t Look Back, a documentary on Bob Dylan, by D.A. Pennebaker.  He gave his verdict loudly: “Bob Dylan is an asshole!  Albert Grossman steals the show.”  Dylan’s manager, Grossman, is seen in the film prodding London impresario Tito Burns to get more money for Bob.  Bill had become friendly with Grossman after negotiating with him for an exclusive deal on the Butterfield Blues Band.  

   I overheard Bill giving an interview in his tiny office at the Fillmore to a reporter from Time Magazine.  When the article came out, he was furious with the way the guy had written about him.   He felt misrepresented.

   The job Bill gave me was a poster design for a weekend show featuring The Blues Project, Jimmy Reed, John Lee Hooker and the Stu Gardner Trio.  I was very excited about doing this poster and, following my old pattern, I walked up Russian Hill to the corner store where I bought a pack of cigarettes and a Cadbury’s chocolate bar.  I started work about 8pm in the kitchen at my parents’ apartment on Union Street and worked through the night.  I drew a picture of a black male blues musician playing a harmonica which stretched off into the distance and swerved around in a liquid shape to frame the lettering.  On the top of the harmonica I drew a keyboard being played by musicians.  I had a drummer and depicted the vibrations his drumsticks created.  I also did cartoons of Paul Butterfield, Bob Dylan, Pig Pen and Jerry Garcia.  Down below was a black street scene with people dancing and in the right hand corner stood a white police officer with a billy club observing them.  The police officer was not sympathetically drawn.  He looked mean and intolerant.  I was trying to put the blues into a political context.

   All of this appeared on a light green background with the letters coming out white.  I delivered the artwork to the printer and thought no more about it until I wandered into the Fillmore that Friday night.  Being apologetic was not a quality I was used to seeing in Bill Graham but that is exactly how he approached me as I walked up the stairs.  “After all the trouble I’ve had with the police,” he said, “I simply couldn’t allow that picture of the cop to be on the poster.  It would be a red rag to a bull.  I’m sorry but the printer and I had to change your artwork.”

   What he and the printer had done was to black out the entire street scene as well as all the musicians playing.  The only bit of my work remaining was the blues player, the harmonica and the lettering.  To be honest it looked very good.  It was dark blue with a lighter blue for the harp player who was reversed out of the background with the lettering in white.

On the left is the original poster and on the right is what Bill Graham and the printer cooked up.

   The trouble with the police that Bill was referring to had occurred at the Fillmore before I came along.  I remember reading about raids on the hall by the police in the Chronicle before I knew him so I was aware of the reality he was dealing with.  The police definitely harassed him in the early days and the memory of those encounters clearly lingered.  For me the abiding recollection of my poster being changed was the diplomatic way in which Bill had explained it to me.  He was a very persuasive person. 

   Being part of the furniture at the Fillmore meant I got very used to seeing the bands up close and becoming familiar with them and their repertoire.  Quicksilver Messenger Service was a five piece unit which featured John Cipollina on lead guitar.  Cipollina had been in my sister Katie’s class at Old Mill School.   I remember being impressed by their image.  Both lead singer/guitarist Gary Duncan and Cipollina had long straight hair and wore dark cowboy hats making the band look like a gang of wild west outlaws.  For some numbers Duncan would slide his guitar strap around so that his instrument was on his back and he’d beat a cowbell with a drumstick.  As with all the bands at the Fillmore these guys were constantly stoned on weed.

   I didn’t get to know members of Jefferson Airplane until they changed female vocalist.  Originally Signe Andersen was in the band but at some point during my time at the Fillmore she left and was replaced by Grace Slick who I had seen performing with her band The Great Society.  Grace was a very beautiful woman, good musician and terrific singer.  She was also a very nice person, at least to me.  They used to rehearse at the Fillmore in the afternoons and I was always impressed that they would lug their own gear up the stairs.  Early on Bonnie MacLean had introduced me to Marty Balin and I would have regular chats with him in the foyer of the Fillmore while painting my boards.  Another local band, Sopwith Camel, had a hit record on the radio entitled Hello Hello, which Marty described as “a piece of shit.”  The fact that it was being played on KFRC irritated him.  “We’ve got to get a single out,” he said.

RCA ad art for singles by Jefferson Airplane.

   In addition to Marty Balin I became friendly with their drummer Spencer Dryden.  I remember one day taking a ride down into the Tenderloin district with Spencer in his VW Beetle.  His ashtray was heaving with roaches and cigarette butts.  He lit up an enormous joint as we sped down Geary.  By the time we hit the Tenderloin I was seriously stoned.  Spencer went into some building while I loitered on the street and was soon approached by this smiling black guy in a leather jacket.  “Hey little brother,” he said.  “You want something good?”  He opened a shiny pouch  with three or four enormous fat joints wrapped in bright yellow cigarette paper.  When he realised he wasn’t going to make a sale he moved on quickly.  Then Spencer came out and we drove back to the Fillmore.  I don’t remember why I was along for the ride but I was.  

   My favourite musician in the Airplane was Jorma Kaukonen whose guitar playing was so exotic.  His riffs had something of the Arabian Nights about them.  I never spoke to Jorma but he and Bill had a conversational rapport which was interesting.  He was regularly sitting in Graham’s tiny office just talking.  Bill didn’t shoot the breeze with many people but Jorma was an exception.

   The other band I became very familiar with was The Grateful Dead.  Bass player Phil Lesh and I regularly had a chat as he was a fan of the EC horror comics of the early 1950s and had seen my cartoon of the Old Witch in a comic strip I had done for one of the psychedelic newspapers.  On an evening at the Fillmore I would often go up to the band room and just hang around.  I did an awful lot of hanging around at the Fillmore.  One afternoon up there I saw Pig Pen and Bob Weir leafing through binders with plastic window pages containing black and white 8×10 photographs of good looking women.  

   Like Jorma in the Airplane, I truly enjoyed watching and listening to Jerry Garcia play the guitar.  He seemed to physically propel himself forward with each note he played which was hypnotic to observe.  Garcia was probably the most friendly person on that scene.  He seemed so approachable.  I never engaged Jerry in conversation but he’d always say hello to me.  

   The look of the Grateful Dead was something to send shivers down the spines of most middle class parents.  Very long hair on guys who didn’t really have the right kind of hair to be that long with the exception of Bob Weir.  The Dead had the Haight Ashbury lifestyle written all over them.  One of the funniest numbers in every one of their sets was when Pig Pen (aka Ron Mckernan) would come out from behind his electric keyboard and sing Good Mornin’ Little School Girl.  He had a terrific blues voice and the sight of him with his long hair and beard singing: “Tell your mama and papa, that I’m a little school boy too,” was such a contradiction that it made me laugh every time.

Members of The Grateful Dead, from left: Jerry Garcia, Phil Lesh, Bob Weir, Ron (Pig-Pen) McKernan, Bill Kreutzmann

   Bill Graham kept a cowbell and drumstick in his office and when the Dead were doing their second set of the evening he’d bring them out and go to the side of the stage behind the amplifier and accompany them rhythmically.  I never saw him do this with any other bands.

Bill Graham at the side of the Fillmore stage accompanying The Dead with cowbell. From left: Bob Weir, Pig Pen and Bill Graham.

   The band room was guarded during gigs by Dicken Scully whose brother Rock was one of the Dead’s two managers (the other was Danny Rifkin).  Dicken was tall, thin, wore glasses and had long blond hair.  He was a very nice guy to me but was very strict about who got beyond that door.  Lots of people tried to get past Dicken but unless he knew you had a genuine connection to one of the bands playing he was resolutely firm in denying access.

   One thing that hanging around the Fillmore did for me was to feed the fantasy of becoming a performer myself.  I was much too shy to get up on a stage and sing but it was an aspiration which grew as I clearly had the talent and a good singing voice.  On long walks home from the Fillmore I would compose my own songs.  My route home took me down Geary to Van Ness.  I’d then turn left on Polk Street and walk however many blocks to Union.  Then I’d turn right, going up and over Russian Hill until I reached my parents’ apartment.  The walk took me about forty minutes which was just long enough to write a song and once inside I’d scribble the words down on a piece of art work.  I had a big professional drawing board in my bedroom and was constantly doodling.

   Hanging around the Fillmore was not like having a social life for all my real friends were across the Golden Gate Bridge in Mill Valley.  Every opportunity I had to go there was seized upon with enthusiasm.  My mode of transport was hitch hiking.  I’d put my thumb out on Lombard street and within half an hour I would be walking down Miller Avenue.  I’d make my way to one of many houses where, invariably,  I’d get loaded on weed with my friends who were all indulging in this activity.  As I’d walk in, I’d be handed a lit joint and away we’d go.  The music on the record player could be Dylan’s Blonde On Blonde or Revolver by The Beatles.  A lid of grass sat in a plastic bag on a table surrounded by packets of Rizla cigarette papers.  We’d roll skinny little joints, light them and suck the smoke deep into our lungs.  We would then hold our breath as long as we could and finally release the smoke in a mighty dizzy exhalation.  Much of the conversation which followed was whispered by people holding their breath.

   This was the way of life I had embraced.  Being loaded meant that everything was either interesting or funny.  The smallest detail in a work of art became something enormous and recorded music seemed that much more exciting.  One negative side of being stoned so often was my tendency to talk about creative things I might do rather than actually doing them.  

To be continued...

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