Looking back, I count successes and failures. The failures – creating lasting alternative communities that transcend theist/capitalist strictures of family, personality and property. The successes- a healthy, happy son with a sure moral compass; and mastery of the not-for-profit organization as a vehicle for right livelihood and progressive socioeconomic change. The price: I never made it out of the lower middle class (sorry, Dad). The reward: I never stopped being the person who stood firm in Math.

I graduated from Columbia Law School in May 1969 with charges still pending from the ’68 bust. I was one of a handful of students who had charges other than criminal trespass. Those included resisting arrest and malicious mischief, which never made any sense, given that I was arrested in the same group as everyone else and didn’t wreck anything. I guess they wanted to hang up my bar admission and they did. I was held up about nine months.

Within a month of graduating I got a pre-induction physical notice. I wanted to go in and organize. Bonnie assured me that as dumb as they were, the army wouldn’t take me and that if they did I wouldn’t last a day. She turned out to be right. At the physical I had what I considered to be a minor disagreement with one of the doctors about how to conduct a hernia examination. I’d been on a number of teams in high school and college where the examination was required at the beginning of every season, so I knew what to expect —or thought I did. As it turned out, the army doctor was just shining on the exam and I told him that in front of about 15-20 18-year old inductees. He got into my face and I told him to back off, I wasn’t in the army yet. He told me to go sit on this bench, which seemed reasonable, so I did . Next thing I knew a sergeant came by and told me I’d been ordered off the base. I said that I wasn’t done with my physical and he said, “yes you are.” End of military career.

I got a job with the New York Legal Aid Society as a criminal investigator, since I was being held up by the Bar. The following spring, Ken Cloke asked me whether I wouldn’t like to spend a year in sunny southern California defending anti-war Marines at Camp Pendleton. About a month after I said “yes,” the meeting house where I’d be working was machine-gunned and a Marine was wounded. Bonnie and I went anyway.

Bonnie and I arrived at Oceanside (the city that Camp Pendleton built) on July 5, 1969. You could still see the line of machine gun fire across the broken stucco in the front of the house. The wounded Marine had his arm in a sling. We’d hardly crossed the threshold when a couple of the original organizers handed us the keys to the place and split. The following spring, we were in Long Beach to visit a Marine in the brig up there. We stopped at a Movement for a Democratic Military (MDM) house to say hello and walked into a bust. I was trying to do a lawyer thing when they arrested Bonnie and me just for the heck of it. Next thing we knew, we were being charged with possession of illegal weapons and bomb-making material. The cops issued a press release saying they’d captured terrorists and the AP picked up the story. Problem was that the guns were legal and the bomb-making material was sulfuric acid that a couple of people who lived in the house were using to clean crud off of the brass roach clips, hash pipes and western-style belt buckles they made for sale at their head shop. After the cops maxed out on the news, they dropped the charges completely but kept the guns and drug paraphernalia. As an extra bonus, there’s an entry in my FBI file saying I was “armed and dangerous.” (It also lists me at a rather complimentary six foot-one, I might add. –I’m just under 5’11”) We worked for over a year at the Oceanside/Pendleton collective, organizing, showing Newsreel films, trying to open a bookstore, and publishing a GI paper. I was kicked out of the collective for being too bourgeois. Bonnie was given the choice of me or the collective. She chose me. The collective disbanded a few months later. We’re still married. We moved to San Francisco where I was again held up for the Bar.

In 2001, I published a novelized version of our 13-month experience at Pendleton called Bring The War Home! The print version sold out but I still have an e-book that I’m willing to forward by email free to anyone who is interested in the only novel about the GI Movement that exists. Email me at bsw@agauchepress.com.

After we left Pendleton, I continued doing court martial defense work until the war ended. This included a regular gig at Travis A.F.B. By war’s end, I’d defended G.I.s at courts martial in every branch of the service including the Coast Guard. I’d visited a dozen brigs and stockades to represent soldiers, sailors and airmen who were resisting war and racism in the military. Among other places, I was once in the Ft. Dix Officer’s Club, so I have to say that I have a special perspective on what went down on March 6, 1970 (my birthday) in the townhouse. (I’m also going to take this opportunity to say that when I left Columbia for Pendleton, I objectified military officers in a way that was contradicted by my personal experiences over more that five years in the G.I. movement and it taught me a lot about the dangers of objectification.)

In 1971, Bonnie co-founded and became the first coordinator of the Bay Area Military Law Panel of the NLG. I was a contributor to the only GI legal self-help book that existed at the time: Turning the Regs Around.

In 1972, I opened a storefront law office in the Mission District of San Francisco. In addition to my military law practice, I began representing Iranian students who were protesting against the Shah’s regime and who were at risk of deportation and torture by Savak, the Shah’s secret police. This worked out great as we all know because the students ended up being instrumental in creating a revolution that jailed and killed them.

In the late ‘70s I became disenchanted with criminal law, in no small measure because by then I had a couple of kids and I wasn’t glamorizing criminals anymore. The last straw for me was a client I’d represented in 2 prior DUI trials where I won an acquittal in the first and got a hung jury in the second. When he came into the office the third time, I told him that I’d represent him only on the condition that he hand me his license right then and there so I could tear it up. When I got home that night, I realized that I was no longer cut out for criminal defense. Meanwhile, I started doing employment discrimination, real estate and securities fraud, which as it turned out in the Mission District was happening a lot, since property values were skyrocketing and predatory realtor/lenders had figured out that stealing the homes of poor minorities was child’s play.

Another thing I did during this time was a case in which I proved that the economic value of a stay-at-home mother to a welfare family was greater that the value of a working mother to a middle-class family. It involved a mother who was murdered on the street by a former inmate of a California mental institution who was released when Reagan shut the mental hospitals and moved the patients to neighborhood (yes, read poor neighborhood) board and care facilities.

So one day in ’77, I settled a case and came into a year’s supply of money. (How’s that for bio candor?) Bonnie and I bought some land up in Mendocino County where I indulged myself, spending the next decade plus of vacations and weekends building a non-code, solar-powered house, which happened to employ one of the earliest versions of the photo-electric panel. We also had a gravity feed water supply that delivered uncontaminated water and a low-flush toilet. (And yes, folks, it all worked.)

In 2005, I was honored as “attorney of the year” by the San Francisco AIDS Legal Referral Panel for my work establishing that HIV+ status (as opposed to full-blown AIDS) was a protected disability for employees.

In 2001, I was diagnosed and treated for prostate cancer. In 2005, I was diagnosed with leukemia and came within hours of kicking the bucket on two separate occasions. In November ’06, I had a stem cell transplant (Without having to scrounge parts from an aborted fetus, reverend.) and have been pretty much in recuperation ever since. I couldn’t travel for a year. I couldn’t hug friends for a year. My diet for about four months was the shits. I tossed my appointment calendar. Now I get up in the morning glad to see another day while feeling good.

I’m winding down my law practice and now writing more. Most recently, a story about my step-grandmother, who commanded an all-woman underground cell in the French Resistance, was published in The Jewish Magazine. La Petite Mama can be found at: http://www.jewishmag.com/121mag/petite-mama/petite-mama.htm

So, here, as they say, is the bottom line. Bonnie and I raised three daughters who are all doing well (2 are graduates of Columbia College and one of the law school). They’re wonderful young women and are productive members of society. Bonnie and I are still married, going on 40 years. She saved my life by making sure I got diagnosed. She was there every day during my treatment. She kept track of my meds (sometimes 16 different ones in a day.) We still have very close friends from Columbia ‘68. We still have ex-Marines and other former GIs among our friends. I try not to fuck up so bad that I don’t die before I have a chance to apologize for whatever it is I inevitably do or say. And if fortune smiles on me a little longer, I’ll see you in April.

While I was a Columbia I was active in Cit Council, and it was my participation in the civil rights work through the Cit Council that was one of the propellants to my active involvement in the strike in 1968. I continue in my present life to work towards social change, towards political change, and, I hope, towards a more just and fulfilling society.

At this time, that work manifests itself in several ways. I am politically active in my community, and on the state level in Vermont (Vermont is a small enough state that citizen participation in government is a reality rather than a theoretical nicety). My professional life is as a psychotherapist, with my practice currently divided about evenly among individual therapy (I still work a lot with teenagers), professional supervision, consultation to schools and organizations, and teaching and training. Part of what informs my career choice is unquestionably my commitment to social change, and a recognition that until people feel personally powerful enough to create change in themselves and in their lives and in their communities, it just ain’t going to happen on the social level.

I find that small-town life suits me, though I sometimes feel that I am in something of a protective cocoon, because the level of problems that we deal with in our small towns does seem manageable compared with some of the rest of the world. Nevertheless, I have also come to appreciate how much of the human experience and human dilemmas is shared and far more universal at its core than it is different, even while being uniquely shaped by our own particular personal history.

Obviously, after 40 years, I can fill in lots more details, including work histories, accomplishments, what are the kids doing, and so on. This is enough for now.

Thomas Ehrenberg CC‘68

In 67-68 I was a freshman in the College. In the two years or so in high school before I arrived, I had been very actively involved in anti-Vietnam War organizing in Pittsburgh. I was initially inspired by Pacifist and Quaker ideas, but increasingly through reading Marx, Lenin, and many other leftist writings popular then, as well as contacts with left activists in Pittsburgh. As soon as I arrived at Columbia I began attending SDS meetings regularly. I was among those who committed Civil Disobedience at Dow Chemical’s offices downtown when they were recruiting at Columbia in March ‘68. The night before the April 23 demonstration that led to the building take-over, I was passing out SDS leaflets in the College dorms. I spent the first night in Hamilton Hall before we white folks were asked to leave, and helped break in to Low Library, though left with many others the first day. I eventually was arrested in Fayerweather. Others have written about the building occupation and strike, and I don’t feel I have much to add, except that I’m proud of what we did. As Bob Dylan says, “I’m not sorry we fought, I only wish we’d won,” though I do believe that our actions had a variety of significant constructive effects.

I want to mention another aspect of campus life that year, alluded to in some previous accounts, which was the prevalence of psychedelics. Along with anti-war activities, I was assiduous that year in exploring these realms. In retrospect, I would say that aside from my distress at the actions of our government in Vietnam (and otherwise), I was also deeply searching for experience of deeper reality beyond the obvious vapidity of most American society, a concern I have sustained in my main life work as a teacher of Zen Buddhist meditation. I did not bother attending Grayson Kirk’s Memorial ceremony after Dr. King’s murder (a couple weeks before the occupation). When Mark Rudd denounced the travesty and walked out, he happened to walk over to the Furnald Dorm, where he saw me in the lobby, tripping my head off. Mark quickly recognized and appreciated my state, and told me of his walk-out, which I in turn deeply appreciated and congratulated him for.

In fall ’68 I did participate in a few demonstrations, but I no longer felt much possibility of productive activity. I have never forgotten the insights of Marxism into the corruption of consumerist society, and the lessons about the web of corporate rule gleaned at Columbia through our strike experiences but also in writings for example by Michael Klare (then and still). My abiding mistrust of the N.Y. Times (more recently validated by their support of Bush’s Iraq invasion and censoring the story of his wiretapping etc.), goes back to learning how their misreporting of a mere 70 outside agitators in the buildings (they missed a 0) was affected by their publishers’ positions on the Columbia Trustees.

I deeply respected those of you who went into the Weather Underground, and sympathized with your outrage. But I felt that the rage involved then in continuing activism was unsustainable and corrosive, at least for me personally, and that this approach was not ultimately helpful. By the end of spring ’69 I withdrew from the College, encouraged by a 1-Y deferment, as I recall.

I want to speak of my return to activism in the early 80s and during the past decade, while briefly filling in a bit of my other activities. After hitchhiking around New England and out West, and a winter working at a New York bookstore, in Autumn 1970 I had the chance to travel in Japan, and ended up spending three months studying Buddhist statuary, rock gardens, and art at temples in the ancient capitals of Kyoto and Nara. I was deeply impressed, but did not know how to be involved. After another aborted academic stint in Pittsburgh (creative writing and glassblowing), I ended up living back in Morningside Heights beginning of ’73 and worked in film throughout the rest of the decade, mostly as a documentary film editor. This included PBS and Bill Moyers Journal, and later (late eighties) I helped edit a documentary about Leonard Peltier and the struggles at Wounded Knee in the 70s. But I also worked in TV News a fair amount, including NBC and ABC News in New York, and then in San Francisco after I relocated there mid-78. Despite my already-mentioned cynicism about the mass media, that was still in the aftermath of Woodward-Bernstein, and the idea of investigative reporting was somewhat alive and even practiced by a few reporters. But I also amply witnessed how the news could be managed and distorted, the foreshadowing of the current mass media as a propaganda apparatus of which Goebbels could not have dreamed.

Meanwhile, four years after returning from Japan, I met a Japanese Soto Zen priest on the Upper West Side, and began everyday meditation practice. Related Buddhist study brought me back to Columbia and its excellent East Asian Department, and I officially received a B.A. ten years after high school. In mid-78 I relocated to San Francisco with my then-wife, a Barnard classmate, in part because of my interest in the San Francisco Zen Center (as well as her acceptance into Law School there). By the end of ‘79 (after divorce) I gave up film work and went to work full-time for SFZC’s highly successful Tassajara Bakery in S.F. In mid-80s I spent three years at Tassajara Zen Monastery deep in the remote mountains east of Big Sur, and was ordained a Zen priest in ‘86.

In the early 80s, before going to the monastery, I had resumed political work, first in support of the Diablo Canyon anti-nuclear power actions. I then participated in the Livermore Action Group [LAG] actions at the Livermore nuclear weapons lab in the S.F. Bay area, and in the Vandenberg Air Force Base anti-MX missile demonstrations, arrested three times for civil disobedience. This was around the time of the inception of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship [BPF] with which I was involved, and I joined in LAG affinity groups including other Buddhists.

I was impressed with the LAG nonviolence policy of doing civil disobedience while engaging all persons, including police, nuclear workers, etc. with respect, and felt I could completely participate. The attitude of demonizing individuals, e.g. calling the police “pigs,” had come to feel ultimately counter-productive and inaccurate. While individuals who commit atrocities (e.g., those who ordered the massive war crimes in Iraq) should be held accountable, I think the deeper problem has more to do with our national karma including the dynamics of class conditions and patterns of societal organization stained by slavery, racism, and the U.S. legacy of stealing the land from native peoples. The individual politicians involved are less important now than the systemic control of power by weapons and energy corporations, and the pervasive encultured patterns of thinking that support militarism and acceptance of corporate rule. I now believe real change will only come when there is a “mass movement” of citizens aware of these deeper and wider realities.

In the late 80s I began translating and academic work that has led to my writing a number of books of Zen translations and commentaries. I also worked with Joanna Macy’s Nuclear Guardianship Project, opposing nuclear power and envisioning sane guardianship of our nuclear waste that will be deadly for tens of thousands of years. In the early 90s when I returned to Kyoto for two years of translation of Zen Master Dogen (13th cent.) and Zen training with Japanese teachers, I also spoke about nuclear waste issues to Japanese groups.

After returning to the Bay Area, I began 15 years of teaching Buddhist Studies at the Berkeley Graduate Theological Union, and also started to lead a collection of small meditation groups, work I continue now with a group here in Chicago after relocating beginning of 2007 (see: ). I received Dharma transmission (Zen teaching authorization) in 2000. In my meditation groups, along with giving meditation instruction and sharing ancient Buddhist spiritual teachings, I try to speak regularly about the ethical responsibility to be aware and respond to causes of suffering in our own society, including the impact of our government, mega-corporations, etc.

During the lead-up to the Bush-Cheney invasion of Iraq in early 2003, I spoke at one of the massive, 300,000 person ANSWER anti-war demonstrations in San Francisco, and also helped organize a significant presence (a couple hundred or so) of Buddhist meditators at the rallies, working along with BPF and my old Columbia friend, fellow Zen teacher, and 68 strike alumni, Alan Senauke. I committed CD again a couple times after the invasion. And during the long devastation of Iraq and destruction of the Constitution since, I have worked with World Can’t Wait, including speaking at a couple of their large demonstrations.

In late 2005 I felt Mario Savio rolling in his grave. I learned that John Yoo, a key founder of the massive Bush-Cheney torture program whose torture memos have been in the news again recently, was a tenured faculty member at the U.C. Berkeley Boalt Hall Law School, and yet even in Berkeley nobody seemed to care or comment. Throughout the 2006 school year, as a faculty member at the related GTU, I initiated and managed a weekly Torture teach-in and vigil outside the Law School, co-sponsored by BPF, WCW, AFSC, ACLU, Global Exchange, and CodePink, with discussions of torture, the Geneva Conventions, the Patriot Act, Habeas Corpus, Guantanamo, and Abu Ghraib. The teach-ins started with my friend Dan Ellsberg, whom I had met when I included him in a book I wrote about bodhisattvas and their modern expression. Other featured speakers included Salvadoran torture survivor and activist Carlos Mauricio; Father Louis Vitale, veteran of School of the Americas protests and prison time; Joanna Macy; ACLU representatives; a Human Rights law professor from an S.F. school who had graduated first in class from Boalt Hall; and one lone prof from Boalt Hall (along with BPF representatives including Alan Senauke and myself). Some Teach-in participants wore orange jump suits and black hoods. The response from Berkeley students was sparse, certainly compared to our experience 40 years ago. And the Boalt Hall faculty, numbers of whom I spoke with, were very reticent to speak publicly about torture and seem to criticize their colleague John Yoo. Some Boalt Hall students did participate, and we at least brought attention to torture and Yoo’s role.

Now in Chicago, along with leading a meditation group and teaching East Asian religion and culture to undergrads at Loyola Univ., I am connecting with activists here (working most directly with the local BPF), who for example has helped organize forums on the dangers of war on Iran. I will lastly mention a vigil I am leading the Saturday right before the Columbia ‘68 reunion in Richmond, VA, where I guest teach at a Zen group annually. Held at the site of the auction houses that were the center of the U.S. slave trade in the first half of the nineteenth century, this will be a meditation vigil to witness to the legacy of slavery. Any of you in the area are welcome, see: .

I look forward to our 40th reunion, and our re-examination and celebration of the events of ‘68. But as terrible as the Vietnam war and the forces of racist repression were then, the Iraq occupation and U.S. current foreign policy, as well as the class repression and attack on the poor and middle class here now seem much more dangerous. At the same time that things seem much worse now, in some ways we perhaps have advantages over the ’68 situation. Two thirds of the American people are against the Iraq occupation, and we are still here, with our experience since the 60s. As a Buddhist, I believe that awareness is transformative. Nobody knows how to stop the occupation or change our current corporate rule. But given our collective experience, I come to our reunion hoping for ideas and inspiration about how to help respond to the present situation, and already have received that from reading others’ stories.

At Columbia I had edited the occasional SDS newspaper, Hard Core, and was invited by Mark Rudd to the Chicago national SDS office to edit New Left Notes, the national SDS newsletter. During this period the group that controlled SDS was transforming itself into what became the Weather Underground, and I soon moved back to New York, convinced that although the times demanded strong action, I couldn’t be that literally a warrior for change. Having discovered my hippie side, I started a moving company, Keep On Trucking, and with the help of friends as needed moved people in and out of apartments in the Columbia area while I continued my political activities, which included work with the December 4rh Movement and the Dienbienphu Family among others.

In 1968 I along with everybody else, believed that anything was possible, that not only could we change the world, but that change was just around the corner. I have not become more conservative as I have grown older—my world view pretty much unchanged—but have less confidence in our ability to affect immediate change on a grand scale. So much of what I have done since then has been focused on smaller stages where I have felt that I can make a difference. The only time I felt that late sixties rush again was in 2003, as hundreds of thousands of people assembled to prevent the invasion of Iraq before it happened—hope was truly in the air, but was smashed by the total indifference of those in power. As Dick Cheney recently said when asked about the huge majority that wants the war to end, “So??”

By 1974 my soon-to-be-wife’s child custody dispute moved me to Berkeley, CA. Here I became involved in the People’s Food System, which I wrote about in one of the chapters of The History of Collectivity in the San Francisco Bay Area, and was the chief founder of the organic, whole grain Uprisings Baking Collective. Health foods were something new for most people then, and worker owned and managed collectives were a new way of doing business. We had a storefront for eight years, but most of our business was wholesale, delivering breads to farmers’ markets, health food stores and main-stream supermarkets all over the Bay Area. I started out as a baker, became a delivery driver and route organizer, and spent a lot of time in the office keeping things organized and the accounting straight. For well over a decade we included little label-sized leaflets in our loaves, which we called talking bread, advising buyers of demonstrations, forums and other actions by local political groups. I coordinated 3 rather small national conventions of the Whole Grain Education Association, an association of organic bakery cooperatives across the county, and contributed to their book of recipes, Uprisings: The Whole Grain Bakers Book. Although we never really prospered Uprisings was a presence until the hearty competition in a low-margin industry, with a multitude of bakeries suddenly offering whole grain and organic choices, conflicted with our disorganization and forced us to close in 1997.

In the late 1970’s my wife introduced me to horseback riding, which I have continued to this day. Up until a few years ago I participated actively in endurance riding, which involves rides of 50 or more miles per day, and I still volunteer at these rides. I have been President, Secretary and Board Member for the past 15 years of the Orinda Horsemen’s Association, a cooperative that leases, from the local water utility, 500 acres adjacent to regional parks and reservoirs, where we pasture 38 horses. For the last 13 years I have edited, designed and published the newsletter of our local equestrian trail advocacy group.

The last six Labor Day weekends I have organized a multi-day ride and camp-out in the East Bay hills, that over the last five years has raised $85,000 for Bay Area trails, 2/3 of which has gone to the Bay Area Ridge Trail, a planned 550-mile ridge-top trail encircling the Bay, of which we have competed over 310 miles. This year, 2008, for the first time we have added a 5-day through hike of the Ridge Trail in the East Bay to our ride, covering well over 50 miles of trail from Castro Valley to Martinez. I have served on the Ridge Trail Board since 2004 and am Chair of the Trails Committee. Lately I have spent more time hiking than riding, this year completing the 21-mile Ridge to (Golden Gate) Bridge hike on the Ridge Trail..

I have also been very active in local volunteer trail building and trail maintenance programs for many years, working not only on the Ridge Trail, but also on the Pacific Crest Trail, the John Muir Trail and many other trails around the Bay Area.

For about 4-years I actually earned some money as the Business Manager for a user-interface consulting firm, where I was involved in all areas of management, including accounting, human resources, visa procurement, retirement planning and project management. For the last year, 2007-8, I have been working part time with Inkworks Press, a collective Berkeley print shop whose clients include many of the environmental, solidarity, anti-war, union and feminist groups in our area. An original founder of Inkworks lived 2 doors down from my third floor on 115th street apartment when I was in New York, and one of the printers worked for Liberation News Service, mere blocks from Columbia when I was there. Going even more full-circle, for the last 8 years I have lived in a studio apartment owned by next-door landlords, who helped write the pioneering Who Rules Columbia? in 1967.

Five years ago I was diagnosed with Type 2 Diabetes, and I have learned a lot about nutrition in that time, and have in that time controlled my blood sugar in normal ranges. I have spent a lot of time advising others on the American Diabetes Association message boards, where I was the first person with 10,000 posts, and there is an army of people with diabetes marching for a “Meeting at Morris’ Home” from all over the country, a virtual gathering that has drawn just under 2,000 posts.

Along the way my marriage dissolved but my stepson, who I helped raise for many years, now has a 4 year-old daughter and a pair of 3 month-old twins, all of whom I am very much in touch with.

A few weeks later I changed my mind. Lets look at our obligations and finances and see if this trip will really fit into our schedule of grandparenting, visits with far flung children, our niece’s wedding, a long planned bicycle tour, I argued. Having just declared her candidacy in an upcoming city council election, Jan conceded it might be too much. But what really had made me back out was reading the bios accumulating on the website. Among the participants in this conference, my credentials were severely lacking in moral clarity, consistent commitment and creative innovation. I didn’t want to have to apologize or to brag.

At a party celebrating the success of “Focus the Nation: Global Warming Solutions,” an all day teach-in drawing 4000 attendees at the traditionally conservative University where I teach, one of the student organizers said to me, “I hope some time in the future, this group will get together to celebrate what we did today, like you are doing at that Columbia reunion.” How to tell her I wasn’t going? When a friend wrote from Chicago of his plans to attend, even the disheartening sniping on the website couldn’t keep me from ordering tickets on Travelocity with Jan’s immediate approval.

This shilly-shally recalls foggy memories. In or out of the building? In, then out, then in again, until the bust.

In 1968, I was a second year Acting Assistant Professor of English, closer to students in age and outlook than to most faculty colleagues. I’d entered the Stanford PhD program in 1963 after graduating from Columbia as an undergraduate, joining the Peace Corps and getting kicked out after ten weeks of training for being “too intellectual” and having the “wrong attitude toward authority.”

That was my first bit of political education—the recruiter, a Harvard professor, had stated that the Peace Corps wanted people who wouldn’t like the military and who questioned authority. I thought I was being good, but the culling of recruits was done by the CIA. Graduate school was a reprieve from the draft notice I’d received–forcing me to attend an example of the “Channeling” performed by the Selective Service system at the time. Stanford felt more like prison than privilege, and building an anti war movement and taking drugs were where the real education occurred. I liked discovering precedents for both these activities in literary and philosophical classics, but I had trouble mastering the professional skills that would allow me to finish a PhD thesis.

At a 1966 poetry seminar in the Free University of Palo Alto, I found Jan, my partner who shared my love of words and my inclination for action. We moved in together a couple of weeks after meeting, and she immediately organized a rent strike which forced the University to allow women the right to live off campus. A year later we married.

There was a bull market for English faculty in 1967 and the job at Columbia materialized largely because I was liked by my undergraduate teachers. This should have been an honor beyond my wildest fantasies, since as an undergraduate the institution was the church of my salvation from lower middle class life in the Bronx. But the blessing uttered by Dean Truman at my graduation, “Keep the Faith,” rang hollow by the time I got back.

I taught Humanities and Composition and a course in Shakespeare’s history plays whose value I found not in force of language or theatrical structure but in exposing the evils of war-mongering political leaders. When students took over the hallowed halls, I was both horrified and exhilarated. I found Rudd’s and Gold’s and JJ’s oratory alternately spellbinding and repugnant, but when Michael Klare and Richard Greeman and Paul Rockwell delivered their impeccably researched indictments of Alma Mater, I heard the real voice of reason, in contrast to the legalistic deliberations of the Ad Hoc Faculty Group which ignored the opportunities of action. After alternating for days between meetings of the strikers and the faculty, I turned my back on Philosophy and brought my sleeping bag into Fayerweather. Jan joined us there every night after coming home from teaching at Robert Louis Stevenson School for gifted underachievers downtown.

The summer of 68 we lived in a tent at Total Loss Farm, a commune near Brattleboro Vermont founded by some of the Columbia strikers and a Boston contingent of writers for Liberation News Service. Between gardening vegetables and cavorting naked in the Beaver Pond, I was trying to wrestle my notes on Innocence and Experience and the pastoral tradition into a presentable thesis chapter, but it wasn’t coming together.

Playing the role of academic during the following school year got more strained, and so did that of radical reformer. I didn’t think the increasing militancy of the antiwar movement would achieve its ever widening revolutionary goals, and I saw that much of its energy was being expended in faction fights. Instead of joining the Weathermen or pursuing experiments with open marriage, Jan and I spent the next summer in search of fun as a couple of backpack tourists in Europe and North Africa.

Upon our return, the English department let me know that without a PhD or any publications other than a literary analysis of the work of R. Crumb in the Columbia Spectator’s Connections, my contract wouldn’t be renewed the following year. I decided to resign after the Fall Semester and go out with a splash of a course called “Pastoral and Utopia: Visionary Conceptions of the Good Life.” It had a large enrollment of Columbia and Barnard students who were required to develop their own assignments and grade themselves. Often under the influence of drugs, I oscillated between feeling like a guru who could lead a group of followers to create a pastoral utopia of our own and a loser incapable of meeting the challenges of adulthood.

In Spring 1970, deciding to leave our rent-subsidized apartment on Amsterdam Ave, Jan and I liquidated most of our earthly possessions. We fitted out a Ford Econoline Van for a trip to Canada, where we found camp counselor jobs for the summer. Crossing the border, we felt a huge burden lift. We decided to have a baby and use our meager savings to buy property, live close to the land, and escape a crumbling civilization. We ended up on the coast of B.C., near Lund, a remote fishing village at the northern end of Highway 101. Property prices were low enough there that we could purchase some acreage. It turned out the woods were full of back-to-the-landers like us, émigrés from Toronto, Montreal, London and New York. Two other Columbia strikers also arrived and have remained there, until the present day.

The struggle for our nuclear family’s survival in the woods replaced the struggle against the evils of war and injustice, forcing me to work for most of a year in the nearby largest pulp and paper mill in the world. But our fellow bush hippies shared a desire for small, sustainable and self-sufficient community. Together with neighbors we were able to develop playgroups for children, a local school, a food buyers coop, a summer camp, and a regional district land-use plan centered on watershed “shires.” Later, my wife and I founded a local satellite of a junior college, which thrives today. Friends started a network of government agencies that provided services to the local population and steady employment for outsiders with college degrees.

After nine years some of the appeal of rural life and of membership in the extended family of the village gave way to a desire for return to the metropole. We wanted to get closer to our aging parents, to provide our two children with a wider range of life choices, to take on some of the challenges that we had left behind. The war was over and so was the cultural revolution. For me a prime motivation to leave was the desire to complete my unfinished dissertation on pastoral literature. Stanford, the University which had rescued me from the draft, allowed me to return and provided us inexpensive family housing. Jan got a job as assistant dean of Graduate Housing, based on her community organizing experience in Lund. I discovered the joys of poring through obscure medieval poems and taking up interdisciplinary threads that produced some minor scholarly discoveries. Reflection on my past since the Columbia strike led to the conclusion that pastoral’s affirmation of innocence and rejection of city life arises out of the young person’s reluctance to take on the familial and social burdens of maturity. Once I grasped that, I was able to solve the conundrum about the structure of the Edmund Spenser’s The Shepheards Calendar that had stumped me for fifteen years. My dissertation, later a book, was titled Youth Against Age: Generational Strife in Renaissance Poetry.

The realist outlook that superseded activist politics and rural exile was uneasy. Within six months of our return to the U.S., Reagan was elected President, making clear that the country had moved 180 degrees in the opposite direction from where we were trying to push it and that the state was under corporate and military control with a Hollywood figurehead. The most hopeful political cause at this time was feminism. We moved from Palo Alto to Claremont where Jan got a job as Dean at Scripps, a woman’s college. I took a lot of responsibility for the kids, taught as a part-timer and organized a conference called, “He She or What?” to push for the adoption of a gender-neutral personal pronoun. My writer’s block was gone and I was publishing scholarly articles, but now there were no jobs. I got some training and started a little tree trimming business. Jan lost her position due to murky political dynamics, and in 1984 we found ourselves with two children and without housing or jobs.

Stanford again came to the rescue with an offer of a lecturer’s position in English which included developing a curriculum and coordinating a track in their newly revived Western Culture Program. My qualifications were based both on what I had learned at Columbia as an undergraduate and on what I had unlearned there during the sixties. The Program was to change the canon by incorporating previously neglected voices–African-American, Asian American, Latino, Gay and Lesbian and female–and was to critique as well as lionize Eurocentric male classics.

For four years I worked as a colleague with some of my old professors and brilliant young faculty members from many departments. Most of us were convinced that we could fight for justice without disrupting the orderly functioning of the university, that we could advance knowledge and advance our careers at the same time. The cold war was winding down, personal computers were showing up, and inside academia at least it seemed like progressives were gaining dominance. There were minuses however. I would never get tenure at Stanford and rents were going through the roof. With a cold eye, Jan observed the consequences of Reaganism: the middle class was in decline, the rich were getting richer and the poor were getting poorer. The question was which side will we be on? She went to law school and worked for the Santa Clara county counsel. When the county was sued by a right-wing foundation trying to overturn its affirmative action plan for hiring women in skilled trades (Johnson vs. Transportation Agency). Her job was to write the draft Respondent’s Brief and work with the attorneys researching and editing their arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court. Her side won.

With Jan about to graduate from Law School, our kids aged 17 and 12, and me turning 44, utopia was looking like the place we could buy a house and create a foreseeable future for ourselves. Jan agreed to go to wherever my search for a tenure track job led, even Jacksonville Illinois or San Bernardino. There was only one offer, and when we drove down to check out Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, and saw the green, green hills, it felt like we’d died and gone to heaven. We’ve been here for twenty years, but we still feel our hometown is Lund B.C. where we spend a month every summer with children and grandchildren.

We have remained involved in causes consistent with the visions of forty years ago. In addition to her home based law practice, Jan has spearheaded several election campaigns fighting sprawl development and has served on the City Council. I’m treasurer of our local chapter of the Sierra Club.

My essays, “Shakespeare’s Pacifism,” “Holy War in Henry the Fifth,” “Moses and Machiavellism,” “The Prophet Disarmed: Milton and the Quakers,” have been cited and reprinted and led to an invitation to write a book, Shakespeare and the Bible, published by Oxford University Press in 2000. All of this work, produced in the 1990’s, centers on the connections between war and religion, a topic at the time I had no idea would be a central preoccupation of the 21st century.

Cal Poly owns ten thousand beautiful acres of land that few people were aware of. In 1996, I sat in front of a bulldozer while leading a campaign to save a riparian corridor of ancient oaks. A few years later the University funded my bioregional “Cal Poly Land Project,” which includes a website, an interdisciplinary course, and the production of a book: Cal Poly Land: A Field Guide. Since 2002 my Composition courses—“Writing About Place” and “Writing about Sustainability”—and literature courses—“Ecolit: Reading and Writing the Landscape”– deal with environmental issues.

The most encouraging political development I’ve experienced in this benighted era has been the activation of Cal Poly students, mostly in engineering and business, around the sustainability issues that they realize they wont be able to escape in the future. Working and playing with them, sharing some of the lessons of the sixties, appreciating the difference between their pragmatic strategies and earlier apocalyptic radicalism, has refueled the old flame.

After our marriage we moved to Washington, DC. I had never finished my graduate work after 1968 and I was not particularly interested in being a chemical engineer.

I got a job as a truck driver and Deirdre entered the PhD program in Philosophy at the University of Maryland.

I tried some union organizing, but got fired for being a communist. The case went to the NLRB, but they ruled that it was okay for the company to fire a communist. I got another driving job but after three years the company went bankrupt and me and about 10,000 other workers lost their jobs.

One thing that bothered me about living in Washington was that the American Nazi Party would stand on the median strips as commuters drove into the city and hold up racist and anti-semitic posters. So one Saturday morning when they planned to have a meeting in their Arlington Headquarters, we organized about 50 people to let them know that this type of behavior was unacceptable. Several of them were hospitalized. After this they packed up and moved to West Virginia.

By this time Deirdre had finished her studies and was looking for a job in philosophy. Our first two children were born during this time.

I then got a job working for Metrobus in DC. It was 1976 and Metro rail was about to open so they were hiring a lot of workers; many of them were veterans of the Vietnam War and /or the 68 rebellions. One friend’s brother had been killed by the police during the rebellions and another had help lead the rebellion on the Kitty Hawk which forced it to return to port during the Vietnam War.

In 1978, Metro launched a major attack on our wages and benefits. We knew this was coming from the actions of Metro over the previous two years. The union leadership was ready to make concessions to the company, but the workers were not. When Metro refused to give us a pay raise that was due under our union contract, hundreds of workers showed up at the next union meeting. The union president walked out of the meeting. We took over the meeting. We spoke of the need to shut the system down if were to fend off this attack. We took a vote to strike the next morning. There were no nays.

The city was in chaos for the next week with the bus and rail system shut down. The strike was declared illegal and I and several of my friends were held in contempt of court. (I got fined $100. At Columbia we got put in jail for 30 days for being in contempt of court. They were more afraid of what the workers would do if they put us in jail.)

After the strike I got fired as you would suspect, but we won most of our demands. I got my job back after a six month suspension.

By this time we had two more children and Deirdre was getting ready to go to law school.

We continued to fight the day to day exploitation of workers on the job. We slowly moved many workers to the left. The union took a stand against apartheid in South Africa. It spoke out against the wars in Latin America in the 80’s and both Iraqi wars. Many of our members marched in support of the Jena 6. I eventually became an Executive Board member of the union, then Financial Secretary and then President.

Deirdre finished law school (we had our last child the week before she took the bar exam) and got a job with the Federal government after working as a clerk for a year with the DC Court of Appeals.

In the early nineties, Deirdre got a job teaching at American University. Today she is the chair of the Law, Justice and Society Department at AU. She also wrote a philosophy book called “The Case Against Punishment”.

I am still working at Metro

The Columbia strike changed my life for the good. I meet my wife and developed a revolutionary outlook. I came to understand that imperialism with its racist and sexist practices had to be destroyed, not reformed, and replaced with a communist society. Forty years ago I thought the process would move along a little quicker than it has.

Currently: I work as a civil rights investigator for the Human Services Agency in San Francisco, conducting investigations into allegations of discrimination by both clients and staff of the Agency. You could say that everyday is like “Rashomon” with many compelling versions of the same story. Aside from work, I play Appalachian Mountain dulcimer, garden, cook, write songs and limericks, enjoy dancing with my sweetie, and generally try to keep things together. I am married to a lovely man and documentary filmmaker, David L. Brown. We actually met in 1981 leafleting in SF. I was giving out mimeographed leaflets for the Abalone Alliance against the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant, and David was giving out finely printed two-color posters about a ten-part series he was producing on nuclear weapons, war and power, with speakers, films, and discussions. Needless to say, I tossed away my leaflets, and the rest is history. The main lesson, I suppose, is don’t skimp on your leaflets.

I am just recovering from a horrendous bout of poison oak, from the woods near San Luis Obispo, where we screened David’s film, “Of Wind and Waves” on legendary surfer, glider pioneer, and inventor of the modern catamaran, Woody Brown (no relation) (ofwindandwaves.com). The film won the Audience Award for best feature length film at the San Luis Obispo Film Festival. We just returned from the Ashland Film Festival, where we also screened “Of Wind and Waves.” For all you film buffs, we drove Les Blank (“Garlic is as Good as Ten Mothers”) up and back to Ashland, and we got to hang out with and do a video interview with “brother” Albert Maysles (“Gimme Shelter” “The Gates” “The Running Fence” “Yanqui No!” (on Fidel and Che)). Seeing “The Gates” on the Christo’s Central Park gates, I totally identified with Jeanne-Claude. It’s a wonderful film. Al talked about peoples’ last will and testament – that we all decide who gets the “stuff” but we fail to write or record our lives and legacies. So that inspired me to dive into the life story project, against my better nature.

I love being part of the Bay Area’s progressive independent filmmaking community, and being part of a filmmaking “family.” We like to say that, instead of having children, we had documentaries every few years – films on nuclear power and war, on nuclear downwinders, on healthy aging (surfingforlife.com) and on a group of radical seniors who opposed the Iraq war before and since (“Seniors for Peace”). Check out dlbfilms.com.

Back to the Strike: During the strike, I was in Fayerweather for about a minute. Not being a particularly forceful young woman (or was I a girl?), and not having a boyfriend or pals there to latch onto, I just didn’t feel comfortable, and had to leave. I was at my apartment on 109th and the Drive the night of the bust, and heard on the radio (was it WBAI?) that the bust was imminent. I rushed up to the campus and teamed up with Gerald, a friend of a friend from Rochester (since deceased), and then we met a Columbia grad student, Larry, whose arm had been broken by the cops. After people were marched out of the buildings by the cops, and the bust was over, I took Larry home to my apartment and tore up a pillowcase to use as a sling for his arm. Of course, in the meanwhile, at my apartment, a short-term Nichiran-Shoshu (sp?) roommate, whose name I don’t even remember, was at that very moment entertaining two cops (from the bust, she said) whom she was “shakabutu-ing” and trying to get them to chant in front of her altar. Larry and I started hanging out together after that. It turned out Larry’s cousin was Allen Ginsberg, so we got to meet him on campus after the strike.

I was at the graduation at St. John, and left with WBAI playing “The Times They Are Changin’) (which I play today on the dulcimer) and went to the alternative graduation on campus. That summer, I was living on 113th Street, working at 125th and Lenox as a social worker, having turned down Lindsay’s teaching training program, since I was afraid I would be taking a space from some unknown guy who would then have to go to Vietnam.

JJ: Speaking of my relationship to politics being more personal than political, I met John in a reading room of the Columbia library, during my junior year (after transferring to Barnard from Penn, but that’s another story). It was months before I realized that my John (pardon the pun) was actually the famous, or infamous JJ. John said that I was the first person to turn him on to pot, but I still find that hard to believe. We dated that year, and spent a lot of time listening to records (what ever happened to David Blue?). John would come by my apartment, and then head up to visit with Hannah Arendt, who lived upstairs. I remember going to the New Moon and Moon Palace, where John would leave pictures of Chairman Mao under his plate when we left. I also would make him go to the Ideal, and he had to be civil, if not downright charming, to the owner, whom he grew to like, but first saw as a Cuban gusano. I also made him come pick me up at my uncle’s on Central Park West, which he hated doing. He lived in the rattiest flat ever, as I recall. Curiously, John had grown up spending time on Fire Island with my cousins, one of whom recalled that John had always taken more than his share of the lox at brunches. We dated throughout that year, and drifted apart, after I went off to Europe. Of course I made John send me a postcard in Greece, just to get his goat, since I knew how he felt about the government there.

A few years later, when I was in grad school, I got some very indirect communication from John. We ended up spending a lot of time together while he was underground – setting up meetings through friends, meeting in odd places like Times Square and unknown apartments, movie theatres (we saw “Superfly” a few times), not being able to talk in my VW, for fear that my bug was bugged, me having to hide under blankets so people in his various places didn’t see me, and I didn’t see them. Things were better for him (and me) after he got his own apartment – that was a very sweet time. John was always pushing me to be political – the free school bust, the TV station takeover, shooting practice in Vermont, and on and on. The last time I saw John was in the mid-seventies, when I was on Cape Ann. It was actually a difficult meeting, our last meeting. He had a family with him, I think I was jealous, his kid peed on the afghan I had just finished crocheting, his partner criticized my dulcimer playing, and, sadly, that was it. I’ve always felt regrets about that last encounter. I am glad and gratified that he’s scattered over Che.

Back to Aftermath of the Strike: Assuming that the revolution was imminent, I couldn’t really think about a career, and went off to Paris, to work as the librarian for Columbia’s Reid Hall. The next year, I came back to NY, and went to Columbia Grad School in English for two years. When, as part of my fellowship, I was asked to teach freshman English at Columbia, I panicked, thinking, “These boys are paying a fortune for college, only to get me as their instructor,” so, I bolted. I volunteered, and then worked, at a free school in an abandoned storefront (94th St.?) (Elizabeth Cleaner’s Free School), where, at first, I was known as “Jane Macrame” (teaching macramé), but finally taught everything from Emma Goldman to Native American studies (what did I know?). We did agit-prop theatre, and went to schools in the area acting out the robotic-nature of the educational system. The biggest challenge was trying to reign in a group of very creative and very stoned kids. I got arrested as part of the school’s participation in the squatters’ movement, and we ended up writing a book for Random House about the school.

Bolting NYC, I dropped out of grad school, moved to Cambridge, then Cape Ann, played dulcimer, did Tai Chi, yoga, and massage, waitressed, carved candles in a touristy storefront, stayed in a tipi, lived in various collective houses, took on a Sufi name, and, I suppose, all but broke my parents’ hearts. In Cambridge, I took part in and was arrested in a well-orchestrated takeover of a local TV station. I think we had a statement from the Viet Cong that we wanted read on the air. The plan was so well arranged, that we had people calling the other stations in the area right at the moment we “took over” so that the station had to switch from their ruse of “temporarily off the air” to “out-covering” all the other local stations. It was all very clandestine, and very exciting.

Trying to “get straight” after too much sex, drugs, and rock and roll, and feeling like a casualty of the sixties, as well as feeling oppressed by my own liberation, I started shaving my legs again, and moved out to San Francisco in the late seventies. I worked as a legal secretary (my motto: “Legal Sec’ts, we service attorneys”), and then as an activity director in a senior center, where David called me alternately a “geezer pleaser” and the “dean of fun.” It was only after years of working for various non-profits, and having “no profit” to speak of, that I started to work for the City, hoping to eke out a bit of a pension for the upcoming “drooling years.”

Growing Up: I spent the first seven years in relative luxury, living on the upper West Side (101st and West End), going to Ethical Culture School, summering at the Jewish bungalow colony etc. Then, my father lost a bundle of money in some business deal, and, as part of the downward mobility, we moved to a non-Jewish section of a town on Long Island. Only later did I learn (after calling him about watching the holocaust series on TV) that the reason my father, a lawyer, was unable to make things work for himself was that he had been part of the liberation of Dachau, and that it left its mark on him in the way of paralysis – all he wanted to do was stay at home and play the piano. We moved in August, and that first “chalk night” – the night before Halloween, someone chalked anti-Semitic sayings all over our sidewalk – “Dirty kikes – Go home to Brooklyn or wherever you came from – etc.” It was very embarrassing for me, and I never felt “at home” in that house. My mother always blamed the Corrigan “bullies” who lived next door – although we never really knew who was responsible. My mother, a social worker, who nevertheless was sort of a snob about class issues, was totally offended that they thought we were from Brooklyn, rather than thinking we were from Manhattan!

One story comes to mind about my family’s fear of differences. I was asked to a party by a blond “waspy” boy, and for days my mother went on and on about it. I tried to reassure her that I was in ninth grade and not about to marry the boy. When he finally came, with his parents, to pick me up in their station wagon (not a very “Jewish” vehicle), he came to the door and our dog ran out of the house up to his car, since his dog was in his family’s car. When he and I got in the car, his father said something like, “Our dogs should mate – they would have cute puppies.” I guess I had been so “brainwashed” by my mother that, instead of saying, “Oh no, they can’t mate, my dog’s female too” I said, “Oh no, they can’t mate – my dog’s Jewish!” Needless to say, I spent the whole party hiding in the bathroom.

I wasn’t quite a red-diaper baby, but did grow up with some political sensibility and feelings of being an outsider, always. I grew up sitting in at the local Woolworth’s, wearing black armbands on May Day, sneaking into the Village with my girlfriends to hear folk music at the Gaslight and Café Wha, and 99 cent hoots at Town Hall, etc. etc. My first anti-Vietnam demonstration was when I was at Penn. We were marching around the circle outside the President’s office, chanting to end the war, when a group of jocks showed up, and started their own chant: “Push ‘em back, Push ‘em back, way back.” They grabbed our placards, ripped up the signs, and left us marching around with wooden crosses, all that was left of our placards. Very eerie, indeed.

A few years ago, I took an amazing class on the Psychology of Race taught by a wonderful woman, Lisa Harrison. I’m including some interesting (to me, at least) short essays that I wrote in her class.

My most empowering moments have been centered around my political involvement – sit-ins, college anti-war activities, and throughout my years with the environmental, anti-nuclear, and non-violence film and activist communities. However, I have also experienced powerlessness in terms of disillusionment with the left – both its in-fighting, as well as its seeming failure to make any headway in influencing public and/or global policy. Not to mention my dissatisfaction with my fellow boomers.

I feel that I have experienced a lack of power both as Jew and as a female. I remember one incident as a high school student, when a Jewish girlfriend and I went to a New York statewide conference to represent our high school girls’ service club, Hi-Y, which was affiliated with the YMCA. In our school, there were the Jewish service clubs and the non-Jewish service clubs. The conference was a retreat somewhere on an island in the middle of Lake Ontario. At this conference, one of the main topics for discussion was, “what to do about all the Jews in the Hi-Y service clubs in the downstate area.” Needless to say, my friend and I were upset, although we were too afraid to speak up at all, and just “passed.” I regret now not taking a more courageous stand. In retrospect, the other reason my friend and I probably didn’t act was that she was having a major flirtation with the one of the cutest “Waspy’ boys who was in a leadership position, and we didn’t want to make waves.

I recall one story about power and race/ethnicity from the early seventies. After going to hear Billy Graham at Shea Stadium with a group of “politically correct” friends, (Bob Fitzgerald among them – he okayed me mentioning his name), we were standing on the corner of Broadway and 107th, when I noticed that a Chicano-looking man was emerging from my brownstone, with my record player under his arm. The group immediately retorted that if it were a white guy, I would have said, “there goes a guy with a record player just like mine” and that, since it was a man of color, I jumped to the conclusion that it was my record player. Anyway, we all watched as the man disappeared across Broadway. When we went upstairs, my apartment was indeed ransacked. One of life’s great ironies…. Go figure.

I have been playing music and writing songs lately. Here’s the lyrics I put together for one of David’s recent film projects on the amazingly quick rebuilding of the MacArthur Maze in the Bay Area in April 2007. The song was originally to the tune of an old folk ballad, the FFV, with alternative lyrics written by Charley Poole in the thirties about “Georgie and the IRT” (Georgie, a shipping clerk, was cut in half by the subway’s doors shutting on him). Anyway, our guitarist reworked it as a smoking rockabilly song (aka “dieselbilly”) so we used it as the closing title song for the Director’s Cut (the client was reluctant to use it) for David’s film “Amazing.”

A tanker truck on ol’ 880, came a’ cannonballin’ through

Rolling up the MacArthur Maze, as the City came into view.

At 3:42 on that April morn’, into mighty flames it burst.

To the driver’s surprise, he was still alive, but commuters, they feared the worst.

Experts came from far and wide to measure and to test.

As blood pressures rose, Caltrans chose, to bid out for the best.

The lowest bidder was C.C. Myers whose skill in the trades was known.

We’ll fix this maze in the fewest days; and I’ll take the bonus home.

All at once, ol’ C.C. Myers had crews workin’ night and day

The goal at last, was to build it fast, and get the folks back on their way.

With Stinger Steel, the working crews and safety engineers,

They tamed the maze, in 17 days, got drivers back in gear.

So sing a song to MacArthur Maze, the Caltrans staff, the team,

Working day and night, to get it right, they labored on full steam.

An urban legend, ol’ C.C. Myers, along with Stinger Steel,

They made a plan to fix the span; the public sure got a great deal.

And to conclude, here are some of my random untitled limericks:

At first it began as a whim

And a need to be shapely and trim.

Soon I will be fatless,

And you’ll be Charles Atlas,

Hooray, ‘cause we’re joining a gym.

****

The Pilgrims were feeling forlorn,

‘til the Indians gave them some corn.

Instead of beef jerky,

They got to eat turkey,

And that’s how Thanksgiving was born.

Then I remembered a terrific school project my son did when he was 11 years:

a photo-biography of “My Mom.” Who is, of course, me.

I’ve attached a pdf of this interview he did of me, interspersed with news clippings, photographs, and his “Question Man” character who asked questions about my life. His interview covers a lot of turf: meanders through my childhood, my experiences at Columbia, my work, our family and other things of interest to an 11 year old boy.

So, now read: MY MOM by Jake Evans-(PDF)

Postscript

About me, my family, my work:

The organization, WHEDCo (www.whedco.org), that I founded in 1992 now has a staff of over a hundred people, operates a microenterprise network of home-based childcare-givers throughout the Bronx (where I’ve worked for the past 20 years); a Head Start Center, a commercial kitchen business incubator, youth after school and summer education/enrichment programs. We also develop and build affordable housing.

This spring, we’re in the middle of construction of one of the first multi-family affordable “green” buildings in the city (probably the country). Green building is fascinating, as it is a continually evolving field. And as the market for green building grows, so too will the demand for green materials and products that can be manufactured right here in the USA. No wonder the presidential candidates are talking about “green collar” jobs.

I feel fortunate that I’ve been able to create my own work, and organizations to house it, for the past 25 years. I think they call it “social enterprise” these days.

But the work has been demanding—growing a business (our annual operating budget is over $7 million not counting the housing), raising money, worrying about meeting payroll, and always thinking about being true to the mission, and the best at what we do.

Jake, author of “My Mom,” is one of my three “children.” He is now 24 years old, and was the adolescent from hell. My husband Roger (more about him in a minute) and I told each other in our darkest parental hours that if we could get him through adolescence he’d be a great adult. I’m proud and profoundly relieved that Jake has become a terrific young man: an environmentalist; an outdoor educator—he takes groups of young people on exotic expeditions: mountain & rock climbing, canoeing, and living in the backwoods. He knows wilderness emergency medicine; he loves to cook, and has the best taste in music (he had that even when he was terrible).

I’m married to Roger Evans, who is the Director of Public Policy & Litigation for Planned Parenthood Federation of America, where he’s been since shortly after Jake was born. We’ve been together, happily, for 25 years.

Before marrying Roger I had a brief marriage, which had as its only positive outcome the birth of my oldest son, Matthew, who is now 32 and in law school.

Matt spent his twenties being a Democratic Party “operative” and working on political campaigns all over the country. He finally tired of the roller coaster of endless campaigning and decided to get a profession. We all hope he’ll get a real job and make some money soon.

And then there’s my daughter: probably the most wanted daughter in the world, Lilias (Lily) who just turned 18. Lily has been the daughter every mother dreams of: brilliant, beautiful, centered, graceful, independent, funny. In September she’ll be going off to Carleton College. And I’ll miss her. She had absolutely no interest in applying to Barnard or Columbia.

Deciding to have Lily in a way sums up how I think I’ve lived my life since Columbia. I had just turned 40 years old, and Jake was six. I knew the biological clock was ticking, but I just couldn’t wrap my brain around the possibility of having a third son. And so I decided I couldn’t do it.

Time passed. I searched my soul; Roger and I talked. The ball was in my court.

I arrived at what I knew was the cross-roads; decision time. Then or never.

And what made me decide to roll the dice and get pregnant again was asking myself this question: Would I look back at my fear to take a chance with remorse? Would I regret not having the courage to take a risk? I realized that I had always chosen paths that entailed some risk, some uncertainty, some fear.

Things I love: music, dancing, cross-country skiing, yoga, swimming, being at the beach or in Vermont, reading fiction, travelling. Having a sister, Dana, living in NY and being a friend—and a niece too: Abby.

I’ve been a Bruce Springsteen fan for over 30 years- this year deciding to live the “groupie” experience, going from concert to concert- as many as I can afford.

What I wish for: that Barack Obama becomes the next President and perhaps we can dig this country out of the catastrophe that has been the Bush presidency.

I was born in Cincinnati in 1946 to a Nissei (second-generation, US-born) Japanese American father who became a doctor, and my mother is from a white working class family from Kentucky. My parents got together right at the end of World War II when there was a lot of anti-Japanese sentiment, and my mother was initially disowned by my grandfather for marrying my father. Eventually, when the children started coming, my mother was accepted back into her family. In our immediate family life though, it seemed that the class and gender power differences mattered at least as much as the racial ones.

My early years were spent in some very isolated places in upstate New York and Michigan. My father had a series of jobs working in tuberculosis sanitariums, and we lived on the grounds of these institutions. It only occurred to me much later that these might have been the only jobs available to him as a Japanese American doctor right after WWII. We were very isolated. My happiest memories are of the summers we spent at my Japanese grandparents’ summer home because my aunt and uncle and their children were also there. It felt like we were our own tribe, and it was the only time in my childhood that I had a sense of belonging.

I spent my formative adolescent years in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s in a very small town in upstate New York where the parents of most of the kids I knew either farmed or worked in the slipper factory. Again, aside from my family, the town was white, albeit ethnically diverse. There was “Guinea Alley” (this was before politically correct speech) where many of the Italians lived, and being Catholic seemed to forge a bond that overcame ethnic boundaries for Italians and Poles. I didn’t think of my town as white. To my adolescent eyes, people just were who they were. But who I was, and how I fit in, were mysteries. Race at that time and place meant Negro. I wasn’t Negro, but I knew I was different. When I was 14, my father left our family, and remarried. It was a difficult time. I did well in high school, and credit my great high school English teacher with teaching me how write an academic paper, and encouraging me to go to Barnard.

I achieved my liberation from this town by being an overachiever and getting a Regents Scholarship, plus a scholarship to Barnard. I arrived in New York in fall of ‘64 and never looked back until many, many years later when I discovered that I needed to reconcile that part of my life with the present. When I say liberation, I mean it! New York was my first real city, and will always be THE city to me. I also felt quite liberated and a sense of camaraderie being around radical Jews. They/you were smart, irreverent, and didn’t exactly fit either.

I have to say, my Barnard education was largely wasted on me. I wouldn’t take a class if it met before 10am. Aside from the strike, some of what comes to mind when I think of that era: Malcolm X’s speech at Barnard a few days before he was assassinated, hearing John Coltrane, Charlie Mingus, Thelonius Monk, Janis Joplin, Cream, the Doors, Jefferson Airplane, the Velvet Underground, seeing James Earl Jones in a Brecht play…I could go on and on, but what a time to be in New York! You may find this hard to believe, but this was also the first time I ate yoghurt. Remember Take-Home?

Unlike so many of you who arrived at Columbia with considerable political knowledge and experience, coming from a small town I was quite ignorant politically. It’s embarrassing, but I remember fall of my freshman year that I was actually for Goldwater! Not that I had any idea why, it’s just that my family had always been Republican. But I think it was later in my freshman year that I attended my first antiwar teach-in and things started to change. I probably went because I had a crush on some guy who was going. I knew next to nothing about Vietnam, and didn’t understand a lot of the speeches, but one thing struck me in a film that was shown at the teach-in. These people had Asian faces. There was something familiar about them that resonated with me. I started going to rallies at the Sundial. I hung out with some folks who later became notorious. I went to some meetings. It’s funny, more than the endless discussions of correct lines and actions, it’s the mimeograph machines that stick in my memory.

I started my first serious relationship towards the end of my sophomore year. I have Jon to thank for so very much. We went to some antiwar demonstrations together, including the one at the Pentagon, where we took the train down to D.C. and back. I still remember seeing the MP’s beating up the people in front of us. And no, the Pentagon did not levitate.

I honestly don’t remember how I ended up in Math Hall. My brother’s girlfriend Pam and I volunteered to take care of the food. I thought this was something helpful I could do, never giving a second thought to how gendered my behavior was - nor to the fact that I knew nothing about cooking! It was actually a lot of fun – I remember canvassing for money for the food in the West End and around the campus and getting lots of positive vibes and money. I don’t know how we put it all together, but Math Hall was well fed. Somehow we got stuff like spaghetti and chicken, and I remember Johnny Sundstrom disapprovingly asking us why we didn’t get lentils or something more practical. I barely knew what a lentil was.

My memories of Math are a series of impressions. I see many of your faces, though I don’t remember all of your names. What I remember most is feeling like you were my family, only better, without all the guilt and angst and depression. Being in Math was exhilarating and transcendent, a true peak experience that has deeply influenced the rest of my life. I felt that I/we could do extraordinary things. I was happy there in a way that’s been hard to match. It was a political happiness. I felt like I was with comrades, that I belonged, and that we were changing the world.
Selectively abridged life since Columbia 68

Fall 1968 – Moved to Berkeley

68-69 – Did community stuff on Kearny St. in SF Chinatown, Third World Liberation Front demos in Berkeley

Spring 69 – People’s Park demonstration, busted because a plainclothes cop from Texas identified me as being “with a bunch of Orientals throwing rocks at the police.” Not true, but it didn’t matter, and I was charged with assault with a deadly weapon. An “aha” moment for me; no, I was not white, and I had better watch my ass. I spent some time in the county jail with women accused of murder and prostitution who had been in for months waiting for their court appearances - a very illuminating experience.

1969-70 – Hung out with some strange left groups.

Winter 70-71 – Escaped to Brattleboro, Vt.

1971-1973 – Nursing school at Merritt Community College in Oakland – who could make a living with a Columbia degree in Oriental Studies? I was inspired to become a health worker by the barefoot doctors in China.

1975-76 – spent time traveling in Mexico and Central America

1977-81 – moved to Tucson, became a Family Nurse Practitioner, ran an urban Native American community clinic.

1979 – went to Cuba, which had a big influence on me

1982-83 – returned to Bay Area, got my masters in public health at Berkeley.

1983 & 1984 – to Nicaragua on solidarity trips with the Committee for Health Rights in Central America – more peak experiences.

1985-2000 – worked in a variety of jobs in public health, clinic management, and diversity programs. Got involved with a group interested in forming intentional, non-spiritual community. I was interested in the housing part, and out of this came a small group housing situation in Oakland that I was a part of until moving to Tacoma in 2000.

Got married and returned to school to get my PhD in Sociology at UC San Francisco.

2000 – Carl and I moved to Tacoma, Washington so I could take a faculty job at the University of Washington Tacoma where I teach classes on social justice and health, community and population health, the health effects of exclusion and inclusion, and health and aging in a diverse society. I’m still getting to know the community here, and I try to get my students involved as much as possible. My most recent research has been on the impact of relocation on the residents of a large multiethnic housing project. I’m currently on sabbatical working on a book based on focused life histories with older people of mixed race. Recently I’ve been getting into meditation, prompted by some health issues.