Tag: Mill Valley

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 Descent Into Darkness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

These murders inspired sensational headlines in the press.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To be continued…

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Coming Down At Last

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To be continued…

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The Summer America Burned

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   A group called Americans to Outlaw Forced Housing  initiated a petition to repeal the Rumford Act and the Marin County Real Estate Board took the decision to make the petitions available through their office.  Though their spokesperson denied that the board was endorsing or condemning the repeal initiative, their supply of the petitions was seen as an endorsement.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To be continued…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some samples of Marin County grass in the summer.

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

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

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

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

Haight Stree in the summer of 1967.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To be continued

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1967-The Summer of Love part 4

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

To be continued…

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