summer-of-love – Miller Avenue Musings

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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A Flip of the Lid, chapter 8

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To be continued. . .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some samples of Marin County grass in the summer.

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

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

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

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

Haight Stree in the summer of 1967.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To be continued

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