No There There

He was killed by the cops but born by the times. He was DOA at Herrick Hospital in Berkeley on Thursday, May 15, 1969, or Bloody Thursday. “00” buckshot had torn through his body, shredding his right ventricle. After gripping his right side in desperation, he slipped on his blood and fell from the roof of 2519 Telegraph, the home of the Telegraph Repertory Theater. Blood streaked the roof and soaked through his green, corduroy jacket as he lay on the sidewalk. For those of us there, his red stains remain.

People’s Park is a metaphor – a vacant lot of 2.8 acres just off Telegraph Avenue. In 1967, the University of California regents, then led by the ex officio chair, Governor Ronald Reagan, used eminent domain proceedings to tear down older apartment buildings on the site of the park. These apartments housed two hundred students and area residents who could not afford or chose not to live in the university-provided dorms and housing. Yet instead of building something to replace these apartments as is legally required by eminent domain proceedings, the university left the lot empty. Muddy and trashed, the lot attracted drug pushers and the homeless. In this busy section of Berkeley, crime and assaults escalated and students and residents were afraid to go near the area between Haste and Dwight. The regents had created a community sore that festered.

In April 1969, the residents and businesses of Telegraph decided that they would organize and transform the eyesore into a park. Ads ran in the Berkeley Barb announcing a gathering of the community on Sunday, April 20. It wasn’t to be just a park but our vision of the future – a community in which the nascent ethos and culture of the sixties would be realized; a park where children and music would play, food and drink would be shared, and people would gather in harmony and good feeling. It would be both a refuge and a refutation of the commercial, the hierarchical, the bureaucratic oppression of the times – a manifestation of the potential of the new culture that had emerged in the Bay Area. Instead, it became our Alamo.

I was there – reporting on the events for Max Scherr and his Berkeley Barb – and I helped write the following announcement to build a People’s Park:

I reported on all the meetings and events, beginning with the mobilization committee held on April 15 at Michael Delacour’s dress shop; I participated on the 20th as the park emerged from the trash, and I covered the riots on that fateful Bloody Thursday, May 15. I watched and wrote as hundreds of protestors were shot by the cops using the fatal 00 shot, which was ordered by Ed Meese, the hatchet man for the governor of California, Ronald Reagan. By proving himself at Berkeley, Meese served Reagan's strategy well and paved the way for Reagan’s political ascendency as the man who would take on the sexual deviants, drug dealers, and political radicals at Berkeley.

As the injured protestors stumbled into hospitals and emergency rooms, they found Meese’s cops waiting. As they were admitted, they were arrested. Buckshot wounds for Meese were prima facie evidence of disorderly conduct.

I was shot but dug the shot out with my Swiss army knife (it was bird shot, not buckshot), applied alcohol, and let my girlfriend wrap my calf in bandages. Hobbling, I went back out to the street to document the events of that day, including his fatal fall from the Repertory rooftop.

Bird shot will break the skin but not kill. Initially, Meese denied using buckshot, but at a press conference at Herrick, the surgeons held up the buckshot that had come out of his right ventricle. Only then did the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department reluctantly admit to using the fatal shot.

His parents, Dr. and Mrs. N., were at the press conference, and Dr. N., amid tears, sobbed simply, “Why? For what? By whom?” He then grabbed Mrs. N. tightly and the two collapsed to their knees.

I still feel where the bird shot broke the skin and injured the nerves in my calf. There is a pain to this day, but this I can dismiss – it is the vivid nightmares of police firing into crowds and of him slipping from the steep-pitched roof and falling with a terrible thud right before me that I cannot.

His death haunted me, causing sweat-soaked nightmares that woke me violently. To calm down, I drank heavily and with the assistance of alcohol, tried to write my emotions. From these initial notes, I embarked on a ten-year effort to document the events leading up to his death. I have interviewed hundreds of his friends, his parents, and teachers and have file cabinets filled with my notes and transcripts. Over time, this investigation provided some semblance of subconscious peace, but the history’s many weaving threads – most painful, but some redemptive – have turned into a labyrinth. There is no satisfactory or comprehensive storyline that I can provide the reader, just so many contradicting themes and situations. I thought this would be a documentary, instead, it is just a chronicle and compilation of events and the comments of the people involved.

Now finished, I find these contradictions speak more to the times than would a contrived consistency. This multiperspectivity may, in the end, be the essence of the late sixties. This era of cognitive dissonance – when people working to replace a trashed lot with a park or protesting for peace get killed – cannot rationally be explained.

Even so, there was a palpable zeitgeist that exhilarated us. The era brought together a vision of possibilities and freedoms of expression. But Bloody Thursday was the first instance that this, our vision, would be killed by the times. Kent State and other protests would prove our vision, our zeitgeist, would be fought and defeated.

I have not used footnotes or cited my sources in this documentary, as I thought it would distract and clutter the text. However, citations and references are included in a copy that is available at the Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley. Also, I refer to people with just the initial of either their first or last name as many asked not to be named. Anyone wishing to know their full names or the full text of their interviews can refer to my Bancroft notes.

I have culled the extraneous from each interview and tried to capture, as accurately as possible, the relevant and responsive. I hope that my edits have not reflected a bias, but if recollections are imperfect or contradict one another, so be it.

As for my history, I moved from the South to Berkeley at the beginning of World War II. Henry Kaiser, an Oakland steel tycoon, had a cost-plus contract to build ships after the senseless debacle at Pearl Harbor. He had the steel but needed labor, and, in the 1940s, Mississippi and Alabama were good places to find it.

Many families moved to housing in lower Berkeley where we could look up to the forty-story Campanile of UC Berkeley which stood as an icon of reason and intelligence. It was the tower on the hill for us from the South.

I graduated from Berkeley High and enrolled at Merritt Junior College. After graduation, I worked nights as a bartender at the Steppenwolf Bar at 2136 San Pablo Avenue. One night in 1965, the owner, Max Scherr, came in and said he had sold the bar for $10,000 to start a newspaper, the Berkeley Barb. The paper would chronicle the times – the emerging political and social scene in the Bay Area. I aspired to write and felt, as well, that something very special was happening at Berkeley and in the greater Bay Area. Max said I could be a stringer and gave me the assignment of covering activities on the UC Berkeley campus.

The Berkeley Barb met a need for this emergent community to understand what was happening with protests, with music, and with social and sexual change. This change imbued many parts of the Bay Area, including San Francisco, Haight-Ashbury, Telegraph Avenue, North Beach, and UC Berkeley.

The official UC paper, the Daily Californian, under the control of the administration, blandly covered Golden Bear football, local movies, and ads for coats and ties at George J. Good’s menswear shop on Bancroft.

In the greater community, there was William Randolph Hearst’s San Francisco Chronicle and William Knowland’s Oakland Tribune. Both were conservative, pro-war, and clueless to the cultural changes arising around them. They were unread by us under thirty.

The Berkeley Barb paid a starvation wage as Max made his fortune. Most of the money came from classified sex ads, which filled the back two-thirds of the paper. These ads seem tame now, but back then, most of our copies were purchased by procurers of these services.

Here are some of the ads that I formatted and set for Max each week:

After several unsuccessful years of fighting Max to raise our pay, the Barb staff staged a labor strike. Though Max had once been a lawyer representing Local 175 of the CIO-affiliated Transport Workers Union in Baltimore and supposedly a friend to labor, he fought our strike and hired scabs. Old Max, with the money he had made from sex ads, became the worst of capitalism.

But more on Max: He divorced his wife, Juana, in 1960 and moved in with a much younger woman, Jane Peters. As the paper became more successful, he was determined not to share it with Jane (nor, of course, Juana), and when Jane claimed status as his common-law wife of fourteen years, Max moved out and set up a dummy shell corporation in Panama to keep the ownership out of the California court system. When Jane filed suit in Panama, Max transferred his ownership to a second dummy corporation in the British Virgin Islands. This stuff was typical of Max, and, just before his death, he confessed, “I had no revolutionary base, no real class consciousness. I had a rip-off philosophy.” How money begets perspective.

It was easy to be a reporter in those days. The Free Speech Movement was the first instance of mass civil disobedience on a college campus during the 1960s. Students insisted that the university administration lift the ban against on-campus political activities and acknowledge the students’ right to free speech and academic freedom.

The brick area at the Telegraph Avenue entrance to campus, the Bancroft strip, was Berkeley City property. Only on that strip were card tables allowed to be set up to promote off-campus causes. Then, in 1964, Vice Chancellor Alex Sherriffs, with the encouragement of Ed Pauley, a regent of UC and a good friend of both Ronald Reagan and J. Edgar Hoover, decided to extend the ban to all tables with a political or social message near campus. In the words of Sherriffs, “It is not permissible, in materials distributed on or near university property, to urge a specific vote, call for direct social or political action, or to seek to recruit individuals for such action.”

On October 1, 1964, Jack Weinberg set up his table on the strip to promote CORE, or the Congress of Racial Equality, and to raise awareness of the efforts of Martin Luther King Jr. in the South.

Sherriffs ordered the university police to arrest Jack, and they placed him in the back of their police car parked in Sproul Plaza. The car was immediately surrounded by thousands of students protesting Jack’s arrest. Sherriffs’s action catalyzed the student body and initiated the Free Speech Movement.

For the next thirty-two hours, Jack sat in the back seat as students and protestors surrounded the police car. In their enthusiasm, students sought to express their outrage, and the police allowed them to climb onto the roof of the police car, where a standing microphone had been placed directly over Jack’s head. Reciprocating the support, the speakers lined up and took their shoes off before they climbed atop the car. The police coordinated the speakers and let each other know when his or her time was up. It was for the students a realization that we had a community and were seeking the right to have tables to promote causes and events beyond campus. Jack just watched from the back seat of the police car, and when he needed to relieve himself, the police provided a container and shielded the window.

Jack was booked and freed, and the eventual agreement stipulated that the university would not press charges. But less than a week later, believing that the agreement did not bind Alameda County, Meese arrested Jack for civil disobedience.

Mario Salvio later made the speech defining the Free Speech Movement:

There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part! You can’t even passively take part! And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels…upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop! And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!

During my years of research into the events leading up to Bloody Thursday and his death, I sustained myself by bartending at night. My wife, who had wrapped the bandages around my calf, divorced me, saying that she had to move on – that my preoccupation with him was psychotic.

As I publish this chronicle and leave my notes in Bancroft, I have shed my nightmares and past life and am determined to move on. I have enrolled in computer programming classes at Merritt College and look forward to an exciting career as a computer programmer.

This documentary starts in late summer 1967, soon after the university’s eminent domain proceedings that threw the residents out of their housing – many during finals week – and engaged the gears of time to grind forward toward Bloody Thursday.

[Editorial notes are included within square brackets.]