A Warrior's Journey

              A Warrior’s Journey


     In 1966 a coworker introduced me to a man she had met at a meeting of the Socialist Workers Party, a man she claimed was ‘a true radical’: Richard Aoki.  Richard and I started going out in 1967 right after he began passing out copies of the first issue of the Black Panther Party newspaper. I saw him as unusual and passionate about the Movement. I was a divorced working mother too busy to participate much, but I admired his dedication. His beliefs did not keep him from being involved with a woman with two biracial (Afro-American and Caucasian) children.
      We had a romance that lasted until late summer of 1968, but soon his political associations caused long absences. Before our relationship ended, he taught my son to tie his shoelaces and then kept watch over my youngsters when I had to go to the hospital for surgery, even mopping the floors of my small house.
      Richard lived with extreme stress in the late 1960s, a cigarette in hand and a slender stainless steel flask of vodka in the inside pocket of his jacket. He didn’t eat much and drank his coffee black. He explained that he was a revolutionary who should not have a family, but we remained friends even after I remarried and moved away. I never knew when I would pick up the phone and hear, “Hey, it’s Richard, what’s happening?”
     My connection to Richard continued for decades. The world had changed, with most people dropping out of the movement in the days of the ‘Me Generation.’ Richard reminded me that there were people who still believed, who never changed. In the decades when Richard worked as a teacher and counselor for Merritt College and Alameda College, he continued to look good and to talk about the old days and his time with the Black Panthers. But eventually, after he retired, he had issues with his health: a stay in ICU after major surgery, a vena cava repair, and a stroke.
    I made my last visit to his duplex in early fall 2008 and found him temporarily unable to walk. He got up in the night to find his meds, dizzy and in pain, and fell, bruising his coccyx. I had not realized he had become so fragile, and tried to be accepting when he sent me away, claiming his nausea was a reaction to taking pain meds on an empty stomach.
    The next year I lost five friends and Richard was one of them.  I did not get the news until the S.F. Chronicle’s obituary was published on April 26, 2009 citing complications from diabetes as the cause of his death that March 15. I felt forlorn that I had not heard earlier, but my grief would grow.
     News stories surfaced in the summer of 2012 that shook me to the core. On August 20th Seth Rosenfeld published his book, Subversives, portraying the FBI as setting up and sabotaging many student protesters in Berkeley, but also naming Richard as a paid informant of the agency.  In interviews promoting his book Rosenfeld revealed that on March 15, 2009 Richard had committed suicide by shooting himself. This is the same Seth Rosenfeld who wrote the original erroneous obituary for the San Francisco Chronicle in April 2009.              
     I read the August 20 book tour article online, read an excerpt on Amazon.com, and I watched the video on Huffington Post. I felt devastated and still do not believe it.
     When I look back on my friend of more than forty years, I see him as a product of his upbringing: his family broken up when sent to the Topaz Internment Camp in 1942, Richard returning to his old West Oakland neighborhood in 1946 to find it populated by Southern African-Americans who had come to work at the shipyards at Mare Island and Hunters Point, watching his grandfather brandish his old sword, Richard getting beaten up regularly out in the streets until he learned to fight back, and then his reputation earned him friends. I can imagine Richard when his father left home, a father whose internment at Topaz meant losing his place at UC Berkeley as a student pharmacist, finally turning to gambling and minor hustles.  I can picture Richard at the nearby junior high after being home schooled, getting in trouble before transferring to Berkeley High where he did well, graduating at seventeen. His mother and stepfather worked long hours at the family laundry, struggling to make house payments.
     Richard quickly joined the Army, making a deal at the time of his enlistment the same year to seal his juvenile records before serving a year of active duty as a medical assistant and an orderly.  Perhaps conditions were placed on his service, since it would have been unusual in the extreme for the Army to recruit a juvenile offender before the age of 18.
     Rosenfeld names one Burney Threadgill as the FBI agent who approached Richard in the year 1957, when Richard was 18. Threadgill wanted Richard to join various left wing organizations in the East Bay after picking up his voice on a wiretap on the home phone of a friend whose parents were identified as Communists.  Richard was not active politically at that time, but was recognized as a leftist by 1963. I know that when we were going together he expressed contempt for the American Communist Party, feeling it was inextricably linked to Stalin and his regime.  When I inquired about the SWP, Richard drove me to a meeting, but did not want to attend, introducing me to the chairperson and then leaving with other business before returning to drive me home at 9 PM. I gave up after two meetings since I did not agree with the concept of a revolutionary vanguard. Richard then announced his belief that the entire SWP membership was boojee while he was a real revolutionary, naming the struggle of the poor and people of color as his main concern.  In the 42 years of our friendship, he never strayed from this code, or never suggested to me or my children that his beliefs had waned. I regarded him as an encyclopedia of the Left, their organizations and their histories.
     Nobody knew the history of American progressivism like Richard. I was liberal, but too flexible for the doctrinaire Marxists of that era; my focus was on the responsibilities of a working mother. Richard knew that a family would divert his focus from his cause
    I remember taking calls from Eldridge Cleaver on my phone since Richard didn’t trust that his own phone was safe. My children answered my phone when I was in the basement doing laundry, so they took messages too, following the rules not to say names out loud. Richard took them to the Panther Breakfast Program a few times, and taught my daughter to spell her first proper noun, Huey Newton, on her blackboard.  Richard brought Little Bobby Hutton to my house once just a few months before he was shot.
      I cannot believe that Richard was a turncoat or a double agent, although as a conservative teenager, he may have been persuaded to join groups and talk about it. I believe he had a change of heart and converted to the worldview of the Left before joining the Black Panther Party.  The burden of proof is on Rosenfeld and/or the FBI to show what Richard disclosed. There are allegedly 4000 pages of documents that Rosenfeld has sued for under the Freedom of Information Act, but the FBI denies having a ‘main file.’  Something is wrong, and I suspect that Richard turned out not to have any worthwhile information, or at least not to have given it up. The man I knew would never have given any information of value. His name is on some documents, but they are non-specific, so I have doubts. I really wonder how the only activist named by Rosenfeld as informant in the 733-page text is a person of color and dead.
     What if it is true? I heard Richard deny it on tape, but at times he had an evasive way of expressing himself, wanting to be seen as revolutionary, but careful not to be too specific. He knew that there were mistakes made and excesses that brought down many of the Panthers. Anyone who read the newspapers knew that.
    Perhaps the FBI will eventually disclose the contents of the 4000 page file Rosenfeld describes. I suspect there is something very embarrassing for the agency in that file, and there are very few clear documents presented in the book. The unsavory history of the agency’s Counter Intelligence Program, or cointelpro, has been widely covered in the mainstream and alternative press. Rosenfeld himself discusses the topic in Subversives. Until I see better evidence, I will hold on to the memory of my friend’s integrity, and doubt the story of the FBI.  I know Richard Aoki lived with his history and stayed true to his code. He was a loyal friend when I needed one; that is how I will remember him.  I will stay loyal to my memory.                  
     

American Union

Cecile Lusby 1874 words
American Union

My seventieth birthday has presented me with the gift of time. I have survived to an age my mother and grandmother did not live to see, and so I can reflect and count my friends and family, living and dead, as well as changes in our schools and society that shaped my life choices.
I started school in 1947 at a time when my mother’s divorce caused us to move from place to place, school to school. Every school campus had a Sunshine Class situated inside a fenced off area where handicapped children were taught. Post-polio patients got around on crutches or wheelchairs, as did those with cerebral palsy. Downs’ Syndrome and “slow” students of all ages and sizes went to that area. Their playground fence set them apart from, but visible to the rest of the campus. Little fingers and hands poked out of the diamond shaped openings in the cyclone fence. I went up to touch their hands and talk to them only to be shoo-ed away before recess ended. The times required that these children be separate.
In fall of 1952 I was almost eleven when we moved in with our great aunt at the family ranch outside of Fresno. I started at American Union Elementary, having just finished fifth grade at St. Joseph’s in Berkeley. The other students in my new class had already chosen their own friends years before. In my second week I returned from lunch taking the back way and saw a girl standing inside the yard of the Sunshine Class. I waved to her.
In the next days we talked over the hurricane fence and got to know each other. She said her name was Benetta, but I could call her Beni. She was in sixth grade too, “But I don’t know why I’m in here. Somebody mixed me up.”
“How is that?” I asked.
“Look around, Ceci. Everyone here is handicapped or slow. What are the teachers thinking?” Beni’s brow furrowed.
Once in class again, I waited for everyone to get busy with deskwork before I raised my hand.
“What is it, Cecile?” Mrs. Matheson said.
“Can I check something with you?”
My teacher motioned for me to come up to her desk, where with my back turned to the class, I broached the subject on my mind. I murmured the story of Benetta and her problem. I asked why somebody didn’t take her out of Sunshine.
“Wait now, slow down, you better show me at recess.”
When the bell rang, the other students streamed out onto the playground, I took Mrs. Matheson out the back door to the little yard next door and pointed to my restless new friend in the Sunshine Class.
“I see, let’s go back now,” Mrs. Matheson said, ushering me once again to her desk. “You know that girl just started here.”
“Yes.”
“Sometimes the colored children have to wait while we figure out where to place them. It takes time.”
“That’s easy,” I said. “She’s in sixth grade.”
“We know that many of the children who come from schools in the South are behind. They don’t get the same training or books as we do in California. They catch up eventually, but most are a year or two behind in reading.”
I listened for a minute, and then spoke up.
“Beni’s not from the South. She’s just moved here from Oakland, and I’m from Berkeley. There’s nothing wrong with her.”
This time my teacher was quiet.
“Cecile, let me write you a pass to the principal. I have to stay here with my students, but if you want to, you can go to see if Mrs. Sorenson will talk to you now.”
I took the pass and spoke to the principal as properly as I could, since this was my chance to speak up and I wanted to be heard.
“Mrs. Sorenson, if you just go over and talk to her, you’ll see she’s just fine. She talks so fast my mind can’t keep up with her. She has an uncle who’s deaf, so she knows finger spelling. She knows all the songs in her Hit Parade magazine by heart and some country songs, too.”
“All right then, I’ll look into it. You can go back to class now.” Mrs. Sorenson said.
I didn’t know what would happen, but the next week Mrs. Matheson opened the classroom door and Benetta walked in and took a seat. I was overjoyed.
Beni and I became inseparable after that. I had longed for a good friend I could share my innermost thoughts with, someone who would tell me her secrets, and someone I could say almost anything to. I invited her and another friend, Marylou Orozco over to our place one Saturday. We giggled and gossiped and sang along with the radio. Mama fixed a lunch of tuna sandwiches, but stayed in the kitchen that day. After the girls went home Mama sat me down to explain:
“Ceci, I want you to listen. You can have your friends, all sorts of friends now. But it’s time you knew you cannot be bringing home Negro or Mexican friends in seventh or eighth grade because things change in high school, and we do not mix with them socially in high school. Not at dances, and certainly not for dating.”
“Why can’t I keep the friends I have now?”
“Why? Why can’t you get your head out of the clouds, young lady. It’s just the way it is? Don’t make it harder than it already is.” My mother left the room.
This time there was nothing as obvious as a fence or a wall, but my mother had drawn her line, an invisible line. My face felt hot and yet I was shivering. Did other white mothers in our country know about this cutting off point? Was this the way everybody thought? Was it about the part of our US History book that said they used to count slaves as 3/5 of a person? The part of the book I thought was a misprint?
In the 1953 academic year Beni and I moved up to seventh grade and were still best friends. She was by this time tall and strong, a fierce tetherball opponent who slammed me down in seconds. We loved to sing together in the afternoon on the phone. While I could learn a song after the second hearing, Beni astounded me many times by having a song memorized after hearing it only once.
Beni was advanced physically as well, already wearing a bra at age eleven. I was still in my fifth grade undershirts, standing about four feet, nine inches, but in the back of my mind I knew I was on the same path to puberty, and that I would catch up. I could not race ahead, nor could I slow the changes in Beni. Never for a minute did I think of time passing in terms of eighth or ninth grade and my mother’s deadline. There was still the rest of seventh grade ahead of us.
Her family were Jehovah’s Witnesses who did not celebrate holidays, nor believe in saints, so we decided not to talk about religion to avoid arguing. When spring came she didn’t wear green for St. Patrick’s Day. At the end of April, the tether pole turned into a May pole for our May Day festival. Fresno began to heat up, and then came baseball. Before the end of the school year, Beni wanted me to go with her to the playground so she could sit and watch the boys practice. She had her eye on one boy I didn’t know, one who rode on her school bus. I saw him across the field, and saw her staring. He ignored her, and strutted around the other players flexing his muscles. He started yelling and swearing at the other boys within his earshot.
“Do you really like that boy, Beni? Listen to his language!”
“Come on, Ceci. He’s just kidding around. To me, he’s cute.”
“You’re better than that. He’s not good enough. Why would you want that ni…..?”

I saw her draw up next to me. I heard her gasp.
I looked up at the instant the light in her eyes went out. I had hurt my friend, and now she was up on her feet, furious.
“I heard you, Ceci. How could you say that?”
“Oh my God, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean it. Not you…”
I stammered. I had been trained never to use that word.
“I thought you were my friend, not prejudiced,” she said. “Now you? Even you? “ She looked at me. “Yes, even you.” She turned her back and walked away.
The next day she wouldn’t talk to me, or the day after that. I kept my head down on my desk. I read. Mrs. Matheson asked me what was wrong. The whole class noticed our falling out. The weekend came and went and by Monday I was beside myself.
“Beni, please. I said I was sorry. Won’t you be my friend again?”
“Will you swear not to say that word ever?”
“Of course, “ I said. We tried again to be buddies until the end of the school year and after that we had just our phone calls. It was difficult then, strained. Nothing was ever the same. Then Mama put me back in Catholic school when we moved away.
I never saw Beni again. The decades went by and I looked her up on Google. She is a business owner, an entrepreneur who founded a civil rights organization dedicated to fighting the KKK. Her program has lasted for over 30 years. She never married, and never had children. She is her own boss.
As for me I left home at 19 and the next year I ran off with a black man, married, had two children and divorced, causing my mother to cut off all communication for twenty years. My children and I grew up together, went to college, and made good lives, but I still feel a lump in my throat whenever I remember the day I used the N word. It reminds me of my imperfection and of my failure to live up to my standards. But my remorse drove me to work harder to remove racial barriers in our country. Beni’s memory mobilized me to intervene the day my daughter Morgan called after she arrived at middle school before her records did and was put in a special education class because she looked African American. I knew how stranded a misplaced child could be from watching my friend at American Union.
Strangely enough it was not until my seventieth birthday recently that I remembered the day I went to Mrs. Matheson and then to the principal, to speak up for my friend and get help for her. With that recollection I have another lens to look through to see my behavior and my character in a more balanced way. Now I can move beyond regret to remember my friend, Beni, and give thanks for the year that changed my course and set me on my path.

On not forgetting Broderick Street

Cecile Lusby                                                                                                   1655 words                

                                                                                                                                                           

 On Not Forgetting Broderick Street

   

        Housing advocates marked 2010 as the opening of the Zygmunt Arendt House and its forty-seven affordable senior apartments. Arendt, an immigrant investor, died in 1998 leaving San Francisco a gift of six million dollars, to be divided between the needy (60%) and children (40%). For the ‘needy’ portion of the charitable trust, planners decided to rebuild the red brick structure at 850 Broderick Street.  This construction went forward with no mention of the nationwide social agency once located at that address or the troubled young women who came from all over the country to stay there over the course of fifty years.

     The Arendt project involved demolishing the old structure to make a new complex with forty-seven small apartments for formerly homeless seniors. The old place held a certain fascination for those of us who once lived there. We were the Crittenton girls.  After the publication of Ann Fessler’s The Girls Who Went Away in 2006, my curiosity was renewed and I returned to look around and take photographs.  It was sad to see the building vacant and neglected. Then I saw the sign announcing the ‘future home of the Zygmunt Arendt House’.

     850 Broderick was the address of the Florence Crittenton Home.  The brick dwelling on the corner of Golden Gate and Broderick housed unmarried pregnant women.  No girl could enter until she was seven months along.  In the months before entering, the girls lived at home, lingering inside for months. Once their pregnancy showed, most girls left town.  It was a relief to move to Crittenton’s and stop hiding.

     Society has changed: we no longer ‘disappear’ our pregnant teens. Urban Renewal has changed the face of the city, demolishing homes and apartments in both the Western Addition and in the Fillmore. This neighborhood was once a depressed area, but is upscale again in today’s multicultural market.  What difference would one more missing landmark make in the creation of the Arendt House? Why would anyone care about the history of that address now?

      After admission to the Home, we had a choice—to stay indoors and wait passively or go out and look around. Those of us who were fit enough for exercise soon discovered on our walks that there were very few white people nearby.  Thus Crittenton’s kept the secret of its white, middle class clients. Another rule was that we never used our last names; the director advised against forming close friendships, because in a couple of months we would move on, away from this secret. In the protocol of the late 1950s and 1960s, we all were supposed to give up our babies and leave the Home a few weeks after giving birth.

    Moffitt Hospital gave us obstetrical care and San Francisco Social Services assisted in foster care placement prior to each adoption. As soon as a Crittenton infant was born, nurses carried it out of the delivery room down the hall to a designated crib in the nursery for a couple of days until social workers drove that child to a foster mother where adoptive parents came to collect their new baby.  This practice persisted from 1949 until the 1970s, when society allowed girls to keep their babies. From that time on there was little need for seclusion or secrecy, and in time fewer women used the facility.

       History shows a number of changes in the way society has treated unwed mothers.  In the 19^th century US orphanages housed babies without fathers, and then foundling homes cared for both illegitimate children and influenza orphans after the pandemic of 1918-1919.  A single mother was expected to turn over the baby and go her own way. Settlement Houses changed that practice in American cities of the early 20^th century, sending unmarried mothers back to school to train as nurses or teachers while female staff workers provided child care for one or two years.

      By the Great Depression, the economic downturn ended tolerant attitudes and a changed society discouraged promiscuity and pregnancy out of wedlock. The post WWII era extended social condemnation of unwed mothers by viewing them as the ones primarily responsible for their fatherless babies and accordingly, their own plight. The maternity homes of the post WWII did not rehabilitate: they housed girls in a boarding house fashion until they delivered and then provided adoption services for their infants.

      The loosening of social norms in the late 1960s and the practice of private ‘open adoptions’ meant that maternity homes had to re-organize; 850 Broderick assumed the name, Florence Crittenton Services. Their new mission was to work for the needs of young women who chose to keep their babies. Over the next decade each mother shared a room with her infant. By the late 1980s the critical population Crittenton focused on was ‘at-risk’ mothers with drug histories, violent boyfriends, or more than one child.

      After getting my credential, I did some on-call counseling at the Crittenton Home in the 1990s, and found the changes after thirty years mind-boggling. There were new rules about not opening the front door without looking through the peephole to be sure it was client, and not a thug. Family arguments in the visiting room made the environment so dangerous that on occasions the police had to be called. Crittenton’s staff had a hard time controlling drug traffic on the premises. Residents screamed demands and epithets at the staff.   The Home was having a hard time dealing with the overwhelming issues clouding the lives of the residents.  I stopped going there when I got a better job.

      Then silence. Did the problems disappear? Did they escalate and implode? Where maternity homes once kept girls secluded to prevent their being recognized, a couple of decades later single moms could live with their babies in a changed culture.

       How could such dramatic changes in women’s lives go unrecorded?  In my research-by-walking-around mode, I could find no one on or near the premises, no way to do any fact checking. I began to search through library records and microfilm to track the changes of the last half-century. The results of my efforts were disappointing.

     After three hours with the San Francisco Historical Society, I walked away empty handed. I had a few pages of a Florence Crittenton pamphlet and nothing about the city’s other maternity home, nearby St. Elizabeth’s Infant Hospital on Masonic.  No articles on San Francisco’s unwed mothers’ homes now exist after decades of society requiring that girls and women be confined there.

     I also used Santa Rosa Library’s microfilm reader to go through the index of the San Francisco Chronicle from 1904 to 1959 and 1950-1980.  I found results only in the late 1940s announcing fund raising efforts and then construction in 1949. There was one article in 1951 on the election of officers for the Ladies Auxiliary. Otherwise nothing remains in that index. There are no articles under ‘Unwed Mothers’ or ‘Unwed Mothers’ Homes’, nothing under ‘Maternity Homes.’

      The lack of information is understandable: unwed mothers’ homes offered confidentiality; at a time in our history when unmarried pregnancy meant disgrace, secrecy was required.  There were no newspaper articles that might compromise a resident’s identity. A virtual blackout of information on the social practices involving the birth mothers persists from 1949 to 2000.

       Unmarried pregnant women are simply expectant parents now.  The shift was gradual, but it did happen. Should this aspect of San Francisco’s history go unwritten? A system of special and separate treatment persisted for at least forty years at this San Francisco site alone, involving most American institutions: Medicine, Education, Social Services, the Law, and the Family.  Until the passage of Title 9 in 1973, pregnant girls were expelled from high school when their condition became obvious. There were no consequences for the boys. There were no DNA tests to prove paternity and determine financial responsibility, no birth control was prescribed without a doctor seeing a wedding ring, (no birth control at all could be sold in several states on the East Coast), no reproductive choice, no legal abortions until Roe v. Wade in 1973, no ‘morning after pill’ for a sixteen-year-old after a date rape. 

    Was it all a dream? 

    When the brick façade came down at 850 Broderick, there was new housing for San Francisco’s low-income seniors at the Arendt House, and that surely is something to celebrate. But where is the whole history of the place?  What will mark the passing of a social institution intended to separate and confine women then seen as out of bounds and out of control?

     My stay was more than fiftyyears ago, and though I later married and had children I could keep, I never stopped wondering what happened to my first baby. With a lot of work I found him - after a forty-three year search. The last generation of women that society expected to give up their babies delivered them in the late 1960s and the early 1970s. By 2012, those women are 40 years older, somewhere between 55 and 70 years old at this writing; the women from the 1940s and 1950s are aged or dead by now. Ann Fessler calculated a figure of one and a half million American women who surrendered babies in the years between 1945 and 1973.  I write to remember them, to grieve for their exile and estrangement, and to bear witness.

        I send my best, bright hopes to the senior citizens who find affordable rentals at the corner of Golden Gate and Broderick. I hope they enjoy their new facility and can walk around the neighborhood as we once did. But I will remember that address all my life. I will remember my sisters, outsiders of fifty years ago and feel at my back the ghosts of the girls we were.

   

The Zygmunt Arendt House

Florence Crittenton Home for Unwed Mothers at 850 Brodrick Street

Operated from 1949 – 2007 in San Francisco

The last days of the old Crittenton Home.

      

Underground Radio

 

Cecile Lusby                                                                                                          1922 words

                           Underground Radio: A Splice of My Life

     My favorite station does not show up on the Arbitron Radio Ratings, but though it no longer exists, KSAN changed my life. KSAN was a small classical music station before Metro Media bought it. From its initial broadcast of ‘community radio” in 1968, San Francisco’s KSAN was the nation’s first major underground radio station. Its music, news, and public service announcements were slanted to young progressives in the Bay Area.

     FM Radio stations had been around for a while. Berkeley’s KPFA had started in 1949, with my father, Vince Lusby as its first Sunday morning jazz host. KPFA combined music and political programs, in those days presenting perspectives both left and right.  KJAZ began its all-jazz format in1959, the summer Billie Holiday died and ‘I Love You, Porgy’ was Nina Simone’s first hit. FM programming was offering an escape from ‘bubblegum rock’ formats on AM radio alternating three minute ‘hits’ with loud ads.  KSAN broadcast free form uninterrupted sets of music chosen by its staff, instead of a preset play list sent down from management or the hits on popular music charts. The success of albums and artists with longer songs and their experimental arrangements convinced the owners, Metro Media,  there was money to be made in this new market, a genre called album oriented rock.

       Led by Tom Donahue, striking KMPX workers moved over to KSAN, whose general manager, Willis Duff was looking for a chance to combine topicality and commercial success by blending music and satire. While most high school kids were happy with their AM top 40 stations, more sophisticated teens and listeners in their twenties were hoping for longer musical selections, sometimes six or eight minutes long, like the full length songs on albums by Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, and The Beatles after 1966. FM (frequency modulation) gave a truer tone when compared to AM’s more static-y sound and was the more likely alternative for serious music lovers.

     Music segments on KSAN were at least twenty minutes and often thirty minutes long before any ad interrupted the flow. The culture or personality of KSAN was expressed in the interplay between music, lyrics, news, and the news reporters in an often irreverent exchange. The process involved the newsman beginning his report and the DJ quietly lining up music that would touch on that subject matter. For example, one news item reported that after Richard Nixon was accused of being “out of it,” he responded, “I am hep.”  Nixon’s incorrect use of the ‘e’ instead of ‘i’ in ‘hip’ made it clear that there really was an issue. The DJ on duty would prepare a musical response without saying a word and after the news ended, would begin playing a song like Dylan’s “Something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones.”  They let the music do the talking, giving listeners the challenge of making their own connections.

      For a new station breaking ground in the election year of 1968,  news was everything. That year was arguably the most violent in our history. TV’s evening news covered the war in Vietnam, the assassinations of RFK and MLK, and the riots across the country in the wake of the killings. President Johnson’s withdrawal from the election campaign unsettled the Democratic race and that summer’s violent demonstrations outside the Chicago convention hall were televised, upsetting much of mainstream culture. Nixon’s victory and inauguration in 1969 brought an end to the New Frontier and the Great Society, leaving many of the younger generation furious or skeptical.

    In the Bay Area 1968 was a year of strikes, one at San Francisco State supported by many of the labor unions, and a newspaper strike leaving readers of both the SF Examiner and the SF Chronicle without their papers for 52 days.  We use the term “multimedia” to acknowledge that print, radio, and television all covered the news, but    when mainstream readers lost access to the big newspapers,  KQED, the local public broadcasting station began airing Newsroom every night presenting local journalists and radio people giving the TV audience a freer, local slant on the news and a substitute for print media. The alternative press flourished at this time when the Bay Area was home to at least eight underground papers: The Oracle, Berkeley Barb, S.F. Bay Guardian, Good Times, Bay Area Express Times and a feminist paper, It Ain’t Me, Babe. The Black press had the Sun Reporter and the Black Panther paper. On radio KSAN was the number one source of new music and news for the young, hip listeners of the late 1960s and early 1970s. At the center of this trend was Scoop Nisker making tapes blending snippets of news, pertinent song lyrics, and sound effects, spliced audio creations he called ‘collages.’

      KSAN found a loyal audience, tapping into its youthful energy through news, commentary, and community bulletins.  In the January 1971 Bolinas Oil Spill, KSAN broadcast the need for quick response, announced the rescue center’s phone number, and recruited volunteers to save sea birds and help cleanup the beach. I was there the next day, learning the technique then in use to wipe away the crude gunk off the grebes and gulls and ducks. This example was one way the station kept its listeners connected to the news stories.

      DJs also participated in interviews with musicians and contemporary authors. My listening to folk singer and writer Jeanie Darlington describe her book, Grow Your Own brought me to my local bookstore and then to a lifetime of organic gardening. I made record purchases and bought my concert tickets based on information I heard on my radio. In those years KSAN’s music and commentary was everything from breakfast to bedtime on my days off, with occasional TV breaks.  I listened every day.

     As Scoop Nisker writes, “In 1970 after guilty verdicts of the Chicago Conspiracy Trial were announced, the San Francisco Examiner had an article saying rioters in Berkeley were listening to KSAN news to find out where to go. And they were, of course, because we were giving directions.”

      The shadow side of this intimate connection between DJ’s, news reporters, and audience can be heard in the 1970 tapes of the reconfigured KMPX’s strike included on the website for KSAN Jive 95 news clips.  KSAN carried their underground competitors’  revolutionary and often scatological demands and threats, followed by KMPX’s management cutting off the broadcast and their jobs. If KSAN showed the positive side of the youth culture, KMPX’s final days showed the uglier aspects of alternative life.                    Increasing violence and profanity in anti-war and student demonstrations brought the critical attention of then Governor Ronald Reagan, whose power over the UC Regents caused Berkeley’s Clark Kerr to step down and tuition to increase dramatically after 1970-71. The Reagan and Nixon administrations marked a change of mood in the state and nation.

     In 1970 I graduated from college as a divorced mother of two, remarrying at the end of the year. In June of 1971 we bought a small house on 2 acres outside Santa Rosa, sixty miles north of Berkeley and San Francisco. We were ‘back to the land-ers’ trying to live simple lives away from the problems in the cities, but we still listened to KSAN. We grew our own food and livestock. My husband needed to earn money for the mortgage, and build his own business, but soon grew restless with responsibility and slow returns.  I worked at the local hospital as an Emergency Room secretary. We had a baby in 1973 and in 1975, a divorce.  In my bleak transition, KSAN began playing punk rock of the mid-1970s, and all of a sudden there was David Bowie and Elvis Costello—different, certainly, but easier on the ears than The Clash, the Sex Pistols, and the Ramones. The change in musical aesthetic was sudden and stark. It was all irreverence then..  KSAN avoided Disco, but more and more I lost that glow from recognizing my youth, my music, and my community. I read Rolling Stone for its coverage of music, appreciating the writing. Then in 1981, KSAN changed to a country music format without the same news. I was adrift.

     Most of the DJs moved away from the Bay Area. Bonnie Simmons programmed shows for KVRE and works even now on KPFA Thursday nights. Many of the newsmen can still be heard, with Scoop Nisker on KFOG and showing up here and there (e.g., Spirit Rock Meditation Center) to talk about Buddhism, Dave McQueen just retired from CBS news in 2009, and Peter Laufer continues to write while on the faculty of the University of Oregon in Eugene.  Terry McGovern has been a character actor on TV and in movies for decades.

       The market appeal that attracted Metromedia and Willis Duff to KSAN eventually faded, so KSAN changed to country music.  After leaving KSAN he continued doing market research. It was his job to track public tastes by auditioning would-be disc jockeys and potential news anchors in front of test audiences. He did not stop with pencil and paper scorecards; Duff used the old psychological tool of electrodes on fingers to gauge emotional response to the person trying out for the job. It was an audition by galvanic skin response or electronic market analysis.  As tastes change, markets change and Willis Duff wanted to measure the possibilities for success.  What he did for Progressive music and the marketing of controversy in news in 1968 he did by guessing that there was a demand and would be profit.  He consulted with network radio and television to oversee the selection of news anchors.  Think of the film, ‘Broadcast News,” or the new BBC series, ‘The Hour’ featuring handsome men with no experience in journalism who move up to anchor major network news, you know that truth really is stranger than fiction.

   Strange things happen when we look the other way and just let markets sort things out. Radio has become balkanized with the rise of talk radio, mostly right wing and usually AM.  KPFA is an exception on the left, and NPR’s news and interview format tries to remain neutral.  Arbitron will tell you the demographic group that any station aims for in its broadcasting strategy. Americana or roots music music is my favorite, but such a specific musical programming is called niche radio, very characteristic of this time in our country. Music stations are common on the FM dial with fixed playlists of Top Forty sprinkled with a few examples of free form alternative music. Today’s radio is an archipelago of musical genres, each station its own separate island of age, race, and ethnicity.

     What did we know then, with all our bright hopes for peace and freedom? How could we guess that by the turn of the 21^st century nearly all radio, television, and newspapers would be owned by five media giants? Which of us had any idea that radio would be controlled by corporate consultants like Arbitron, or by media analysts who no longer cared for our words and music. Community Radio, in the words of Joni Mitchell, was just a dream some of us had.

For more on this topic, there is the online article by Marcy Rein from 1970, The More Times Change: Bay Area Alternative Press, 1968 – 1998.  David Armstrong’s book, A Trumpet To Arms deals with both alternative press and KSAN.

Below, Bonnie Simmons formerly of KSAN, still heard on KPFA.

Domestic Flight

                                                                       

Domestic Flight

     Good housekeeping? What, the magazine? Housekeeping, the novel by Marilyn Robinson?  Or do you mean cleaning house, Martha Stewart’s favorite topic? Sorry, but I never enjoyed it. By my twenties I understood the saying, “Housework is never noticed until it isn’t done.” My daughters clean regularly to feel better about their surroundings and themselves, which is a mystery to me. I prefer detachment, mind over matter.

       For forty years now I have lived in an old hatchery, a real redwood tribute to family and fertility, a conversion my second husband had almost completed on the day he walked out.  I finished the exterior with my own DIY shingling job and found it more satisfying than other chores, certainly more fun than housework.  Under the topic ‘More Fun’ I would also include traveling, knitting, gardening, reading, writing, you name it.

    Perhaps my aversion to domestic maintenance is connected to my Anglo ancestors and their bookish disregard for household routine. Consider this quote from Quentin Crisp, by his own account “one of the stately homos of England” and author of The Naked Civil Servant as he described maintaining his flat, “There was no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years, the dirt didn’t get any worse.”  Closer to home, the American comedian Phyllis Diller said, “Housework can’t kill you, but why take a chance.” and “I’m eighteen years behind on my ironing.”   My guru Phyllis also said, “Cleaning the house before your children are grown is like shoveling snow in the middle of a blizzard.”

      Much of the comedy at the beginning of the Women’s Movement was based on a resistance to the notion that women should be happy with housework. Women in the 1960s were not expected or really welcome in the marketplace.  I view those comediennes who first mocked housekeeping and the traditional views of women (Diller, Totie Fields, Joan Rivers, and later Roseanne Barr) as pioneers. Back then, unfortunately, many of their jokes mocked women themselves, their bodies, or their status as housewives.  What their humor offered then was another point of view, resisting the life of the household drudge. The dutiful housewife sends her children outside rather than risk their “tramping dirt in the house.” She does not listen to them or cuddle them; she is cleaning.

      On weekends I like Book TV and recently watched a speech by Cambridge scholar Ha-Joon Chang, who said, “The washing machine has changed the world more than the Internet.”  He was referring to how appliances and other technical advances have improved the daily lives for half the planet: women.  I suspect that many men have benefited from these home advances as well. Consider that great American soul, Henry David Thoreau, who lived simply in a state of nature, but still found doing his laundry so distasteful that he left Walden Pond every week to take a bundle of soiled clothes to his mother for her to wash. Was this transcendence?

      For another example of a man’s view of the laundry, I recently read a review by Rachel Aviv of Peter Trachtenberg’s The Book of Calamities: Five Questions About Suffering and its Meaning, where the author disclosed that once “he attempted suicide because at the moment it seemed more appealing than folding laundry.” Modern life has wrested hours out of every day once taken up with scrubbing and sweeping, duties that now require only minutes.

      I would add the obvious corollary that clothes dryers have changed the world as well. I refer here not just to finishing the laundry, but also to the use of the dryer as a substitute for ironing. Very few women iron anymore. Now they use hand held steamers or the dryer to fluff their clothes to rid them of major wrinkles. I iron perhaps two or three times a year now, but then that’s just me. Millions of women count every minute away from the ironing board as blessed.

      As a child I watched my working mother rush through her tidying, tossing any stray items into a hamper or onto a clothes hook in the closet, saying “Out of sight, out of mind,” and that became my maxim.  I can count all the homes of my childhood and the apartments of my twenties by the secret hiding places I made, laundry being my first ‘dirty little secret,’ with ironing a close second.  At my worst I used a screened porch for this task, a space reserved for an old washer and a dirty clothesbasket. I didn’t want my children wearing dirty clothes, so I did laundry frequently.

      My husband believed he could speed things up by creating a drain where the landlord had not. Instead of hiring a plumber, my spouse drilled a hole in the floor, bent over, and inserted the washer’s drain hose into the new aperture. This project was probably the masculine equivalent of ‘out of sight, out of mind.’ However, when bamboo began to sprout through the gap and the heater vents, he decided it was time to move to the country. This is the same ex who left while building my place, but that’s another story.

      Early motherhood extended my inattention to domestic duties.  Hiding my freshly laundered clothes was my greatest flaw as a housewife.  This practice frustrated my daughters, but they eventually learned to retrieve and to iron, then to hate ironing, and finally to go to the cleaners or use a dryer to ‘fluff their stuff.’ More than once over the years I dedicated an entire room to contain my family’s clean, but un-ironed garments. When it was clear that certain items had not been worn in six months or more, I bagged them up and took them to the Goodwill. I saw this as a good thing. I felt clean, organized, and charitable.

      When my children were in elementary school I set up the ironing board in front of the TV and we all watched PBS for our edification, or Soul Train for their footwork, and the distraction kept me from noticing how awful ironing was. The children were safe with me as I held court there beside the clean clothesbasket. If I began the same duties in solitude, I would daydream, get weepy, or mutter to myself as I suspect generations of women did before me. So I began listening to my radio’s mix of news and music as I worked.  Now I have changed my loyalty to NPR—such loyalty that I cannot bear to be distracted by ironing and all the disciplined dedication that it requires.

      Ah well, let us change the subject and move on to closets. Let me peek inside …perhaps not.  Very few readers are old enough to remember Fibber McGee opening his radio closet, but I can still hear the clickety-clatter and clashing cymbals as all the contents came crashing down in those old broadcasts. My closets are not that bad or that congested.

    Perhaps it is better to discuss the kitchen, which is an area where I can truly say that I have shown improvement over time. This was not always the case. Since my culinary skills have not increased over all my years of cooking, I burn a pot every now and again. I always soak it. Why linger over the dishes if you have to toss dinner in the garbage? I say scrape and toss the scorched contents, soak the pot, and make a quick salad. My first husband had a problem with this rule, and, come to think of it, so did the second. Hmmm, I think I’m discovering something here.

     Men of my generation did not help with the dishes, and did not cook, either. So why should I have revealed where I put the soaking pot?   How long it had been there? Please.  I chose the oven for the first day or so.  When I suddenly encountered it after an unplanned delay, the odor was always a surprise. Then I would take it outdoors to toss the stuff not already welded to the sides of the pan into the garden and return to scour it. This process left just the burned residue, which in turn called for another soaking, another hiding place. One needs to be resourceful when choosing a different spot… the back porch, maybe.

      When I went to deliver my son in 1964, the hospital stay was five days, and my mother-in-law came over to help by cleaning my house. She discovered a sequestered soaking pot after it emitted a low belching sound from the bottom of the storage shelves on the back porch, and saw its bubbling and frothing away as the sign of growing bacteria and all around negligence.  There was no end to the story. The pot was still waiting for me when I got back home with the new baby.

     I am a responsible, daily dishwasher, and also have a novel way of washing the floor. I recently scanned through a November 2010 issue of Good Housekeeping, and found an article on Jamie Lee Curtis and her super-organized home. She is systematic, but still manages one bit of kitchen cleanup the same way I do: she scrubs her floor by using damp white cleaning cloths under her dancing feet. I did this forty years ago, telling my children what fun it was and then suddenly we were all together in the kitchen skating around on ragged old towel scraps with the radio up, laughing at each other’s moves.  With the children grown, cleanup is once again a solitary venture, which may be a clue as to why any social being would hate being confined to the domestic front. Females are not homebound anymore.

       When I was a kid, I only had to help my mother out—to play a small part in a larger team. When I married at twenty, a whole mountain of household maintenance tasks fell on my shoulders, in addition to my job and then childcare. I developed a rash after a few months of washing dishes, a dermatitis that erupted under my wedding ring and spread upwards.  After one dermatologist described it as dishpan hands, the allergy grew worse and worse. The light began to dawn on me that something could be wrong with my life when the rash approached my armpits.  Years later I got a prescription for hydrocortisone ointment, but in the mid 1960s I was amazed that right after separating from my husband, and tossing that wedding ring down the toilet, the rash disappeared. Possibly it was a better ointment, possibly it was removing the ring that I suspect caused the outbreak, but my cure worked for me.

     As my children went out into the world, I worked toward completing my first goal of becoming a teacher, then switched to school counseling before I retired. I was able to develop a life of reading, traveling, gardening, and having some fun along the way. So in the end, I was not a household drudge. My children turned out to be good people even though I lived my life with a nod to domestic maintenance, not as a slave of it.

for a Dancer

For A Dancer

In November, 1950, all Woolworth’s novelty fabrics went on sale. Mama found a piece of orange tulle left over from Halloween and sent me to find thread to match. She haggled with the sales clerk as soon as I was out of earshot, buying a yard of ivory satin from a larger remnant. My mother counted the change from her two dollars, but it was not enough to buy a pattern.
“What did you buy, Mama?”
“Never mind. It’s a secret. After dinner tonight, I want you to pack up your clothes for the good will. That old swimsuit, for instance.”
“But it still fits. “
“Just put it all in the bag. I’ll figure it out later.”
Fridays Mama usually stayed up late reading, sleeping in late Saturday mornings. I took my bath and was heading off to bed when I noticed her studying my bathing suit and tracing the outline on the new material. Once in my bedroom I heard the sound of her scissors knocking against the kitchen table. Next morning the floor was slippery with satin scraps, and my swimsuit was back on top of my dresser.
That night I woke to find her working on the project again. Seeing me, she spoke sharply: “It’s time you were in bed, little girl.”
When I stirred in my sleep, I heard the whirring of her old sewing machine. She began again right after Sunday dinner, with another early bedtime for me. I woke up after midnight to find her bent over the table, her head on her arms, asleep by the machine next to rows and rows of orange ruffles. Her cigarette had left a long grey cylinder in the ashtray.
My ninth birthday arrived a week later and I opened the box to see my mother’s handiwork wrapped in white tissue. I was proud, but speechless.
“It’s a tutu, honey. It’s what ballerinas wear,” she said.
I wanted to ask if there were shoes as well, but I knew better. I put on the tutu after pressing the satin against my cheek, and Mama, who loved to dance, led me through the five positions as I followed in my bare feet. We whirled and swayed to her Nutcracker record on the phonograph. Crashing on the couch, we went through the ballet book my father gave me, looking together at photos of Maria Tallchief and Alicia Markova.
That Christmas Mama had sat us down to show us her budget—her bills and her income. We learned there that children learned the Santa Claus story, but that it was parents who bought gifts. Mama reminded us that our father was absent, and so our presents would be what she could afford on her salary. Stevie cried.
For Christmas 1950 I got ballet slippers, but there was no money for lessons. Four years later when I was thirteen, my Aunt Nellie paid for a beginners’ class that lasted six weeks. I was lacking whatever passion Mama had for classical dance, so I didn’t press for more instruction in such an ordeal of discipline. Six weeks was quite enough for me in 1955, when dancing changed with Elvis’ gyrations and James Brown’s bold moves.