I woke up at 6:00 AM after a night of many trips to the bathroom and unquiet rest.  Before going to bed at 9:30 I sat for a while at the kitchen island looking at my hands in the beautiful overhead spotlight, feeling contentment.  Joe, Amy, and Jan and the two boys had watched the show I’d been thinking about since I cleaned and scanned the slides in the Art History lab: 150 or so images from 1978 to 1984 projected on the white wall behind the couch.  Most of the pictures were of the trip to England we took from Lund in June 1978.  Joe was Ethan’s present age and I was two years younger than he is now. It was a time of fulfillment and promise for our young family then, as this is a moment of fulfillment and promise for his young family now. Jan and I pieced together a story line about the trip, and Joe filled in details both of us had forgotten.  He marveled at the similarity between my past and his present appearance.  The kids watched patiently for more than an hour, even though exhausted, and Ethan asked many questions. We agreed that just as Joe now remembers those events of 31 years past, Ethan will remember this present when he is Joe’s and grandpa’s age.

As I copy these words written a week ago, they recall yet another déjà vu.

–His playing guitar and accompanying Deb in those aching renditions of “Me and Bobbie McGee.”

–The days he worked in our new indoor kitchen in 1974, building the cabinets we were happy to finally afford. His ability to run a table saw so precisely he could rip oak boards into moldings. His pace of work, slow to observe, fast to complete.

–His frantic call at dinner time in California one night in 1988 reporting that the man to whom we sold the farm had started to clear-cut. My grief and shame.

But his presence remains with me whole, like the one-syllable chant of his name. The open face, the toss of his hair, the lift of his eyebrows, the lilt and occasional crack in his voice, his laugh, more melancholy than amused. His humility. His stillness.

This website is the beginning of my endgame.

My aim is to do this kind of sifting of grain from chaff with the motley collection of journals and letters that fill my file cabinet. I’m content with the belief that this life is all I get. Rather than a mess to clean up, I’d like to leave behind an ordered recollection of what I’ve learned and enjoyed.

I wrote that three years ago on the  “about” page  of this weblog.

I knew then I was starting a big project.  The more I work on it, the larger it gets. Not really then an endgame.

Next week mother-in-law Ruth will be 93. This morning I visited her in Sydney Creek, the Dementia Facility.  As usual when I arrive, she is asleep in her chair, but she perks up immediately, light streaming from her almost blind eyes, her voice clear and joyful.  She tells me her dreams and hallucinations and memories.  She picks up our last conversation where it left off.  I report on Claire and the two great-grandkids, she listens and laughs and says, “I remember those playground toys you built for her in your backyard in Claremont.”

That was 1983.  I tell her that just this summer the cable and hardware for that tree trolley, which I’d stowed  in an old carpenter’s chest salvaged from the farm, returned to Canada, where Joe rigged it up at Knoll House for the use of his kids, their friends, parents and grandparents.

Back home I dig old pictures out of a huge lateral file drawer  and scan a few to match with this summer’s.

The galvanized steel of the cables and eyebolts and the polyethelyne of the rope are more durable than other artifacts I’ve been excavating.  Week before last I spent many hours in the Cal Poly Art Resource Library using its expensive equipment to scan 250 35mm slides that had been boxed in cassette trays in my garage. They record moments from our wedding, from early days on the farm, from our family trips to Europe in 1978, to Hawaii in 1984, from our time in Claremont and Palo Alto. The slides were covered with dust and grease and their colors were faded and distorted. The scanner software and adjustments in Photoshop brought them back to life, some almost as good as new, many better.  I gasped as our images of thirty years ago revived on the monitor.

I  spent much of the previous week in the CLA computer lab converting old VHS videotapes of English 510 Players productions of Twelfth Night (1990) and The Winter’s Tale (1994) to binary files.  Like the slides, they needed to be restored to a more accessible and permanent medium.  I’d discovered that the dozens of short segments I’d digitized nine years ago and placed on the University Media Server to provide material for my Triangulating Shakespeare website had decomposed over time into a kind of pixel jelly. Now I could replace them in larger, clearer format and at full length.  But the new digital files will probably be no less fragile than the previous ones I’d assumed would last forever.  The problem is called “bit-rot.” See the entry called “Data decay: even computers forget” on the Australian blog,  Time, etc.; Humans in the big scheme of things.

This echoes the title of the work that Shakespeare rewrote as The Winters Tale, Thomas Greene’s The Triumph of Time. As I played and rewound and spliced the recitation of the character named “TIME”  in Act 4, Scene 1 (performed fifteen years ago by the daughter of my wife’s best friend in elementary school) I slipped into the allegorical role myself:

I, that please some, try all, both joy and terror
Of good and bad, that makes and unfolds error,
Now take upon me, in the name of Time,
To use my wings. Impute it not a crime
To me or my swift passage, that I slide
O’er sixteen years and leave the growth untried
Of that wide gap, since it is in my power
To o’erthrow law and in one self-born hour
To plant and o’erwhelm custom. Let me pass
The same I am, ere ancient’st order was
Or what is now received: I witness to
The times that brought them in; so shall I do
To the freshest things now reigning and make stale
The glistering of this present, as my tale
Now seems to it.

When I watched the final scene, where a memorial statue comes to life after its subject was thought to have been dead for sixteen years scripted  as a theatrical resurrection in a chapel, I felt that moment  of performance on the altar of San Luis Obispo’s  1762 Mission Church quickening again, wrinkled now but still warm.

POSTSCRIPTS:

January 20 2010: Wow! Just watched the old Measure for Measure video. Really amazing that you managed to get such solid performance out of non-acting students. I found the play charming and — most importantly — the language really came alive. You should do some directing for community theater. — Elizabeth

November 30 2009: It was wonderful to hear from you. I just got started on Facebook. Wishing you happy holidays, Don

November 28 2009: How wonderful to hear from you! Unfortunately I can’t seem to open this link – which might be a good thing as I think I was a pretty shockingly bad actress–Ann

November 24 2009: Thanks Steven–it’s amazing!  Tom

November 24 2009: Hi Steven! Wow. Thanks for this treasure trove! I remember lending my VHS copy of”Twelfth Night” to a friend soon after I received it. Never got it back. Almost twenty years later, my kids are saying “Daddy, you look weird. And why are talking so funny?” Congrats on leaving lasting wonderful impressions on your old students!–Greg

November 23 2009: What fun! Good to hear from you. Patty

November 23 2009: Participating in the English 510 Players Production of “Measure for Measure” was one of the highlights from my Cal Poly years. I’m sure I’ll cringe as I watch my performance but what an awesome experience it was. Thank you, Dr. Marx! –Candice

November 21 2009: This is great! Thanks for doing this Steven.  We’ll give you a call for lunch next time we’re down–we had a really good time with you guys last time. Take care. –Craig

Thank you for the invitation to the fortieth anniversary celebration at Packers Corners and for your handwritten note. Jan and I would love to attend, but regrettably that date coincides with our yearly pilgrimage to Lund British Columbia where we established our own total loss farm thirty eight years ago.

Your invitation has spurred me to delve into the collection of relics of our days in Vermont I’ve stashed in a file cabinet, and has brought our stays there both in the period 1968-70 and our visit with you and Marty in 1993 vividly back to mind, accompanied by great gasps and sighs.

Forty years seems a particularly powerful interval. Perhaps the the rounder number of 50 will be as strong, but I suspect by that time many more of us will have dropped out of sight and those who remain will be pretty unsightly. We attended the 68-08 Columbia Strike Reunion in May, getting together for wonderful times with Peter Behr and Linda (Grace) Leclair.

I’ve scanned and uploaded a few pictures from 1968 and 1993 on my Flickr site.

I imagine you’re overwhelmed with archived documents, but let me know if you’re lacking The Occasional Drop of 4 October 1968, 19 December 1968 and 21 December 1969. They are here in good condition.

Love,

We passed huge construction cranes filling the airspace at the corner of Broadway and on to Earl Hall, the venue for the morning’s programs. Entering the upstairs rotunda we heard the last part of an extraordinary soprano saxophone rendition of “Amazing Grace” closing the memorial celebration for those of the strikers who had died in the last 40 years.

As I stepped inside I remembered this space 38 years ago, filled with paintings, sculptures, photographs, a great inflatable transparent tepee and 180 or so students participating in the three day final-exam festival of performance and ritual that concluded my Pastoral and Utopia class and my University teaching career before we headed for the end of the road in Canada. The poster for that event had been framed by a large Omega, suggesting its apocalyptic overtones but also signifying Ohm, the logo of “The Resistance,” an organization for civil disobedience opposing the draft. In the open-mike session that followed the memorial, Peter spoke earnestly about that group, which preceded and outlasted the Columbia strike–of its assistance to those fleeing the country or going underground, of its sit-ins at draft boards, of its members who went to jail for long periods, of its commitment to non-violence, of the predicament of young males at the time personally oppressed not by sexism but by militarism.

Then it was time for the last of the conference’s beautifully sequenced events–a ceremony at the site of the unbuilt gym in Morningside Park. We walked there with Mike Taylor, a fellow ex-Resistance member and head of a substance abuse clinic at St. Luke’s Hospital who now lives in 423 W. 120th. I’d remembered the park as a littered, graffitied, overgrown and threatening place one tried to stay away from, this being part of the rationale for Columbia’s appropriation of it. But on this overcast Spring day it radiated splendor. Mature trees of many hardwood species were fresh leaved or in full blossom. Jonquils and hyacinths bloomed among glistening rock outcrops. Children of all complexions played tag on the paths and stairways and shrieked in the playgrounds below.

In the fenced-off dog run, pets and owners shared fragrance. Across the the street from the facing row of Harlem brownstones, a man performed acrobatic calisthenics while fans cheered at a softball game.

The dramatic cliffs, long staircases, winding paths and large trees brought back memories of Fort Tryon and Inwood Parks, where I could go to escape the dark tenement in Northern Manhattan in which I lived as a kid. Approaching the site we heard the sound of a waterfall plunging over the ragged scar of rock blasted before the fence was torn down by protestors, and we saw the large pond below filling the space flattened by bulldozers they’d sat in front of. Above us on the slope rose the apse of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, topped with a trumpeting angel. In the distance the towers of Manhattan, behind them bridges and the low hills of Queens.

The first speaker at the podium set up on the asphalt path was Brad Taylor, President of the Friends of Morningside Park, a neighborhood association devoted to the preservation and improvement of the Park. He gave a brief description of the association whose motto is “Our Common Ground,” told of the recent success of their efforts to give the Park Landmark designation to protect it forever from development, and expressed gratitude to the audience for our efforts forty years ago that made their triumph possible. The community spirit, public participation, and financial largesse of this organization seemed a model of the “new urbanism” celebrated as an alternative to the blight and sprawl afflicting the whole country. But I wondered what proportion of its members lived in the luxury high rise condos on the Cathedral property, and I worried about what those protesting the gentrification of Harlem the day before would have to say about this idyllic picture.

Taylor introduced a man in a leather jacket and jeans who’d been sitting casually on the railing as Adrian Benepe, Parks Commissioner of the City of New York. Benepe welcomed us with another tribute to our actions forty years ago. He remembered as a young boy, his father, a Columbia professor, coming home bloody from police beatings in the melee after the bust. Benepe offered a tribute to the man responsible for the restoration of the scar left when Columbia abandoned construction, Marshall Brown, a master gardener who designed the plan and recruited volunteers to plant and tend the vegetation that surrounded us. To commemorate the revival of the park, we’d be planting a weeping cherry tree to symbolize the idea of people coming together in healing and reconciliation.

Benepe had hoped to introduce Thomas Hoving, colorful former director of the Metropolitan Museum and New York Parks Commissioner in 1966 and 1967 when the gym controversy heated up, but he was not well enough to attend. Instead Benape read passages from Hoving’s autobiography stating his “vow to bring a halt to this disgusting project” and describing his encounters with the loathed Grayson Kirk, who was sure that with Wall Street and City officials behind him there was no way it could be stopped.

Benepe’s folksy self-confidence and his enthusiasm for urban green space as the center of community excited my admiration, but once again, a challenge to authority created second thoughts. While he spoke, a dignified man with a short white beard handed out half-page leaflets accusing Benape of complicity with “The Destruction of Thousands of Trees that has Occurred in New York Under the Bloomberg Administration, mostly in the interest of privatizing public space.” Then I remembered that at the open mike an hour earlier, Joel Kupferman, with the Environmental Justice Committee of the National Lawyers Guild, had accused Benepe of being the one who’s refused to allow anti-war rallies in Central Park and who’s responsible for the installation of artificial turf in dozens of city parks.

The next speaker was Sam White, one of the SAS students who occupied Hamilton Hall. He recalled growing up in Harlem, where he still resides, and loving the park as a child. He and his friends regarded it as theirs not Columbia’s, and when he “went up the hill,” as the first one in his family to attend college, he was devastated by watching the fence erected and the bulldozers going to work. He praised the “creative obstruction” of the takeover and the partnership the students felt with the members of the Harlem community who also came up the hill to provide them food and protection.

The final speaker was Suki Ports, a woman diminutive in stature but powerful in voice and carriage. Not affiliated with the university, she was an early Morningside Park activist and the organizer of this commemorative event. Well before the student demonstrations, she had sat in front of a bulldozer to keep it from knocking down trees at the gym site “that it took three of us to put our arms around.” The many years of battle that produced this outcome, she said, has led to a healing of black and white.

A little internet research while I was writing this revealed that after the gym construction was stopped, the mess wasn’t cleaned up for twenty years, largely due to disputes among different community organizations, including the West Harlem Community Organization, Friends of Morningside Park, and the group led by Suki.

After Suki’s speech, we all clambered down near the top of the waterfall where the weeping cherry stood ready for planting. As the audience clapped, four shovel fulls of dirt were thrown on its roots by Suki, Adrian, Sam and Brad.

Note: To access more photos, a slideshow and larger versions of the ones included here, go to this flickrpage.

This picture was taken on the front steps of Peter Behr’s family home in Middle Village Queens, where we stayed for four nights during the conference. I had spent the whole ten hours of our flight engrossed in the story of the strike narrated in the 300 page book, Up Against the Ivy Wall, written immediately after it concluded over the summer of 1968 by the student reporters of the Columbia Spectator. I hadn’t looked at the book since the year it was published, and clumps of its pages came apart as I read. I was astounded by the precision of its research, the astuteness of its political analysis—even with the distance of hindsight–and the liveliness of the narration. As I finished with each clump of pages I passed it to Jan who was equally enthralled. The book was edited by Robert Friedman, Spectator’s editor at the time and now one of the organizers of the conference and moderator at many of the sessions.

We arrived at Newark airport late Wednesday night and traveled by airport monorail to the transfer station where we were picked up by the hotel shuttle and taken to Howard Johnson Inn nearby. At that hour the driver, passengers and hotel clerk were Africans, widely varying in feature with different hard-to-decipher accents, all extraordinarily good looking and coal black. I couldnt resist staring. Once again, it was brought home to me how restricted is the circle of people I encounter in my three different homes, San Luis Obispo, Lund B.C., and Ketchum, Idaho. In the morning we took shuttle, New Jersey Transit railroad and the E train Subway to Queens. I marveled at the varieties of public transportation, its speed and efficiency and the luxury of being able to do nothing but look at the the rich flow of faces while in transit.

Peter picked us up at the Forest Hills station and gave us a tour of his childhood haunts. At his mother’s house, two local women he’d hired were painstakingly cleaning the filthy kitchen and schmoozing nonstop with New York accents straight out of Archie Bunker. The place was awash in clutter and disrepair, but he had arranged for one upstairs bedroom to be clear enough for us to inhabit comfortably. The two other bedrooms were packed with bags, boxes and trunks of documents. Jan started in sorting them and trying to build a picture of Peter’s mother’s financial and legal position. Before the men in the white coats came and took her to the hospital and Peter transferred her to a nursing home for the demented, she had kept all the papers but deliberately confused any order so as to foil the interlopers she feared would find them. Peter assigned me the job of matching the pile of keys to the more than a dozen locks installed on the house’s doors inside and out. One was a foot and a half off the ground on the outside of the basement bathroom. Peter said she feared the neighbors coming in that way.

In the late afternoon Peter drove us across the Triborough Bridge through Harlem to Morningside Heights, passing the building on 110th st. that he and Linda lived in when she was kicked out of Barnard. The neighborhood had been frightening in those days—someone was killed in their apartment building’s lobby—but now was gentrified. Across the street the huge mass of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine was blocked from view by a high-rise condominium on the church property. We picked up Linda Grace at the corner of Broadway and 94 St., the four of us together for the first time since their breakup in 1969. We’d met at a draft resisters’ picnic in Riverside park shortly after Jan and I moved to New York from California in 1967, and we’d shared many adventures in addition to the Columbia strike, including frequent stays at the Total Loss Farm commune in Vermont and a road trip through New England to Quebec.

We found a parking spot on 112 st. and while searching for a place for dinner I picked up a copy of the current Columbia Spectator. The whole issue was devoted to the conference we came for.

We ended up at the West End Bar, now part of a chain renamed Havana Central, but still featuring a menu recalling its history as a home of beat generation writers and sixties radicals.

While waiting for our order I opened the Spectator to a full-page story about the saga of Peter and Linda.

…

After a better dinner than any served in the old West End, we crossed College Walk to Casa Italiana, where a crowd waited to get in to the oversubscribed opening reception and panel. Eyes scanned aged flesh searching for traces of the youthful countenance that the mind groped for in shreds of memory. When one of the two connections sparked the other, arms embraced. Although I knew none of them, it was gratifying to observe the number of African-Americans present. At the door stood Stewie Gedal, trussed in earphones and mike, but easy to recognize.

At the well lubricated reception on the back verandah, people packed close and exploded with resurrected moments and contemporary associations. One man said he remembered me moaning in the art school on a Saturday morning during a break in our life drawing class when the model was particularly attractive, “I cant take any more” and heading home to my wife. Another man, married to a former student in the Pastoral and Utopia class, told me he works with a former Cal Poly political ally and friend who now is Provost at Cal State East Bay.

Through the crowd, I pushed my way to Michael Klare, expressed my admiration of his work then and now, and asked him to pose for a photo with my treasured copy of “Who Rules Columbia,” the conclusive indictment of the University produced in 68 with the help of secret documents “liberated” from President Grayson Kirk’s office by the strikers.

Prodding by organizers finally succeeded in herding the obstreperous crowd of several hundred into the Palazzo’s lavish ballroom. Above the podium was inscribed a Latin motto in Columbia’s hallmark font of imposing capitals: MORIBUS ANTIQVIS RES STAT ROMANA VIRISQUE—”The Roman state rests upon customs and men of old.”

Built in 1926 and described by one scholar as Fascism’s “veritable home in America…a schoolhouse for budding Fascist ideologues,” it was hard to decide whether the selection of this venue for the opening event was a joke by the rebels on the University or the other way around.

The first speaker was Nancy Biberman, who welcomed the crowd and introduced the members of the conference organizing committee. She began by pointing out that no women belonged to the strike’s leadership group and the only mention of women in the history of the period was the President of Barnard College, Martha Peterson, who overruled her own appointed judicial committee and kicked Linda Leclair out of school for living with her boyfriend. Linda and Peter stood arm in arm at the back of the room receiving wild applause.

Nancy affirmed that this marginalization of females to food preparation and cleanup roles during the strike led directly to the foundation of the 1970’s feminist movement. Her own history as founder and CEO of the Women’s Housing and Development Corporation exemplified the success of that movement and also the way that so many participants in this reunion had stayed true to the convictions of forty years ago.

Nancy went on to introduce other members of the organizing committee. First, Tom Hurwitz, whom I could picture from old with a red bandana cutting an Errol Flynn figure of noble pirate. Since then he has become one of the country’s best documentary cinematographers and a verger at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.

Next Hilton Obenzinger, community activist, Stanford professor, prolific poet, novelist, essayist and author of the just published Busy Dying, a memoir centered on the Columbia strike. Then Laura Pinsky, counselor, public health activist and author of The Essential AIDS Fact Book. Then Thulani Davis, author, musician, journalist and Buddhist leader. And finally, Robert Friedman, whom I remembered as the trenchcoated and detached student editor of the Spectator in 68, and who in the meantime has been editor of the Village Voice. Robert hatched the idea for this conference with Lee Bollinger, current Columbia President.

In her opening remarks Nancy emphasized the theme of reconciliation. Contrary to the claims of some faculty, administrators, media commentators and later historians, the 68 strikers were not out to destroy the university but to improve it by successfully opposing bad policies affecting race relations, involvement in military research and authoritarian university governance. The decline of Columbia’s finances and fortunes following the strike was due to the decline of New York City overall, its abandonment by the Federal Government. Its later ascendance in the 1980’s likewise could be attributed to the city’s renaissance and growing real estate values.

Nancy insisted on the value of the education the University offered both through regular classes conducted by its illustrious faculty and through the strike itself, which provided an experience in real community and in the empowerment of people working together to change what seems like an unalterable and tyrannical establishment. She also expressed appreciation for the faculty’s role during the strike, their adherence to the “doctrine of interposition,” whereby they sided neither with strikers nor the administration but placed their bodies on the line in an effort to protect strikers from conservative students and the police.

This last point struck me as somewhat revisionary in light of what I remembered that drove me to join the students: the faculty’s ineffectiveness resulting from their hesitancy to take sides or split into factions. But it was of a piece with her introduction of the present University president. Bollinger, Nancy said, arrived at Columbia in Fall 1968 and although he didn’t take part in the protests, became a distinguished First Amendment Scholar who authored a book entitled The Tolerant Society and argued Affirmative Action cases before the Supreme Court. Nancy thanked Bollinger for welcoming the strikers back to the University though he emphasized that this was not to be construed as Columbia’s official sponsorship of the conference.

At that moment there was an outburst from the audience at the back of the room and both black and white individuals who were veterans of 1968 denounced Bollinger for Columbia’s present day policies involving the development of a huge campus expansion into Harlem north of 125th St.–one that will displace residents and lead to the gentrification that destroys low-rent and largely non-white neighborhoods. I had read a little about this long-standing controversy on the preconference listserv, where it was made clear that the conference organizers both wanted and did not want to be associated with Bollinger, just as he both wanted and didn’t want to make this an official Columbia event, since those who did not agree with the strikers at the time and other conservative alumni were outraged by any such University celebration. It was becoming clear that the mission of reconciliation would remain in tension with that of continuing struggle.

After waiting for the protestors to finish, Bollinger welcomed the overflow crowd and expressed appreciation for the chance to work with the organizing group. “I thought about making my office available to you all night,” he joked and Peter Behr shouted, “Do you have good cigars?” Addressing the evening’s topic, “Columbia 68 and the World,” Bollinger mentioned the convergence of an extraordinary number of things that had to be changed at the time and that young people cared deeply about: Vietnam, Civil Rights, rights more generally, and the environment. These concerns he stated “go to the core of the world we live in today.” This I took as an acknowledgment from one who wasn’t involved at the time, that what we and the other activists of our generation accomplished was significant enough to be honored. One of the outcomes, he stated, was a new relationship between the University and Harlem that has led to a five year process producing agreement on the Manhattanville redevelopment plan.

This prompted a new outburst, understandable to be sure, but I, and I think most audience members were relieved when Hurwitz moved in and somehow quietly managed to convince the interrupters to complete their remarks and leave. Bollinger went on to address another recurrent theme—that today’s students have not mobilized in comparable ways and that the current atmosphere is no longer conducive to advances like affirmative action. Nevertheless, he said, students today are engaged in different ways.

Bollinger left to polite applause, and then Robert Friedman took the podium and offered a brief chronology of events leading to the takeover and asked members of a panel of speakers to place that event in historical context. First was Tom Hayden, Thomas Jefferson of the New Left, author of Port Huron Statement, the founding manifesto of SDS. In 1965, he’d been working as a community organizer in Newark, but as the Vietnam war escalated and black power increased, he worked for Bobby Kennedy, getting up every day and thinking of the war.

When a call came to him about the strike, he hurried to Columbia and helped with the takeover of the Math building. He saw the strike as I did at the time–a way to show resistance to the atrocity of the war and to put pressure on a local high-profile organization, since there was no way to put enough pressure directly on the federal government to make it respond. Hayden asserted that the takeover of the buildings was a rational tactic of the powerless, taking issue with an op-ed column in the previous day’s New York Times stating that the occupation was crazy, an expression of the madness that arose from the chaotic circumstances of that year, written by Paul Auster, another of the conference’s participants.

Next speaker was Bill Sales, head of Ethnic Studies at Seton Hall University and author of the book From Civil Rights to Black Liberation. Bill had been one of the leaders of the Student Afro-American Society which asked white students to leave Hamilton Hall the first night of the occupation and to take over their own building.

Bill talked about the alliance established between the Harlem Community and the African American students, many of whom were the first in their families to attend college and who felt alienated from the formerly all white University. This was the period during which whites were being purged from Civil Rights organizations in favor of Black Power. The construction of the gym in Morningside Park with its tiny portion and back door on the bottom floor for Harlem was an affront that Blacks had been fighting for years. Community members supported them with food, political pressure and the threat of massive social rebellion. The black students were taking immense risks by siding with the community against the University, and they came to the conclusion that whites were neither well enough disciplined and organized nor seriously enough committed to be worked with closely under those conditions. “We had to write ourselves into history,” he concluded.

Two other speakers, sitting in for Kathleen Cleaver and Nicolas von Hoffman who made late cancellations, spoke of the ferment throughout the country and the world, not only among students, but among labor unions, women’s groups and nationalist groups rebelling against rulers in both Communist and capitalist societies. Someone stated that 1968 began as a year of great promise, with Lyndon Johnson’s refusal to run for a second term, the Prague Spring and the success of the Columbia strike, but by the end of that year, with Nixon’s election, the crushing of the Velvet revolution in Czechoslovakia, the killings at Kent State, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, hope had waned.

Bill Sales countered that for Black people, Columbia 1968 ushered in a decade of great progress: the militant takeovers of Cornell and San Francisco State for instance, which led to the creation of Ethnic Studies programs nationwide, large increases in college enrollments of minority students, and hiring of faculty of color. He pointed out that though many books and films had told the white students’ story, that of the Blacks had yet to be told, but in fact was now being completed by a PhD candidate at Columbia in the audience, Stefan Bradley. It was clear from Thulani Davis’ participation in the planning, from Sales’ presence on the panel and from the turnout of African Americans in the audience that this story, like that of the women’s role in the strike would be surfacing at the conference for the first time.

As the evening lengthened and the load of impressions grew heavier, my note taking got more disjointed. And now, as the number of days since the event grows, my memory of specifics frays.

Friedman’s questions led the panelists from recalling the past to reflecting on the present and predicting the future. Hayden noted the importance of keeping the memory of Columbia 68 alive as encouragement to those fighting against war, racism and injustice now. It was the triumph of a youthful, idealistic perspective that refused to accept the cold-war, materialistic, ethnocentric, corporate worldview promulgated by the media and by most authority. Today that dominant culture is even more monolithic and pervasive, and it seeks to erase the memory. He mentioned also that he is the father of a recent college graduate whose enthusiasm for Barack Obama echoes the hopes of 40 years ago and who has convinced him to see the connection between them in the present campaign.

A member of the audience claimed that Columbia is more dangerous today for Harlem than it was in 68, not only in process of destroying one of its neighborhoods, but also planning to install a biological warfare laboratory deep underground as part of the new facility. She stated the obligation of those gathered to attend a protest rally and march of the West Harlem Coalition coming to the campus on Saturday.

All speakers shared the affirmation that we must not allow this anniversary to remain a celebration of past glory but to make 68 alive now and in the challenging future of the world and our own aging. To counter any weariness prompted by such resolve, Bill Sales told of his recent meeting with John Hope Franklin, 94 years old, dean of African-American historians, former President of the American Historical Association and political activist to this day. “I looked at him like a walking tree under which I could get shade.”

next installment

Note: To access more photos, a slideshow and larger versions of the ones included here, go to this flickrpage.

In January, when we first received word of next week’s reunion, my wife Jan Howell Marx and I agreed to go. The topics and speakers promised a pooling of wisdom about how to relate to a world which had become worse than the one we confronted head on in 1968. It would also be a chance see old friends and enjoy April in New York.

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 first 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 Elizabeth Irwin High School 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.

next installment

My aunt Hannelore died on January 21, almost three months ago. I keep telling myself that I will write about her or to her, to reach some kind of closure. Doing this with my father and mother upon their deaths in 1995 and 2005 allowed me to say goodbye and close the door. But Hanu has been weighing on my mind, and so has Gabi, her surviving sister, to whose living presence I feel I owe it. The delay has been largely due to lack of time—the pressures of teaching, visit to the family in Idaho, etc.—but now there’s no more excuse.

Other reasons made me start and stop, go frantic or lethargic, change plans. I felt a special connection with Hannelore because she was such a prolific writer, such a perspicuous observer, such an elegant stylist. Her love for books, expressed in her devotion to the family bookstores, could well have issued in her becoming a novelist or non-fiction writer, vocations I’ve always admired but never felt confident enough to pursue. She focused those talents on eliciting information about me and my family and then formulating her own stories about what was going on, often with great insight, sometimes comically off the mark. This connection led to extensive correspondance going back twenty years. Unearthing the file folders of thick letters she wrote and the word-processor and email files of my answers is an imposing task that I started last week, disappointed at first by the many holes in the record and then thankful that not more has survived for me to process.

Our connection was also influenced by circumstances of kinship. I had no brothers or sisters. Neither did my father. Hannelore was one of my mother’s step-sisters. She along with Gabi and brother Hans-Peter were my only aunts and uncles. With my maternal grandparents they emigrated to Brazil to escape the Holocaust while my parents went to New York. I had heard about them and seen pictures since earliest childhood, but had met only Gabi in person, during her visits to the States. Their many offspring are my only cousins. After my father’s death Jan and I took a trip to Sao Paulo in 1998. We felt deeply welcomed and at home in family gatherings. But that trip also revealed oceans of distance: cultural, linguistic and experiential.

In-person contact magnified Hannelore’s admirable eccentricities. We stayed in her house, squeezed between highrises in downtown Sao Paulo, filled with relics of Germany in the 1930’s. We witnessed her midnight rambles with neighborhood derelicts and her relationships with her live-in maid and son. She guided us through the business enterprises of her children and around the city-center. But the proximity was difficult: her ceaseless conversation, her endless discussions of the selection, purchase and packaging of gifts, her solipsistic self-sacrificial gestures made me claustrophic. She insisted on our sleeping in her bedroom, tidying up and cooking for us, but not eating. And she never slept. After three days I was relieved to return to the more relaxed hospitality of my aunt Gabi. Similar relief followed Hannelore’s lengthy phone calls to California, which I usually had to force to conclusion.

Death at 86 is no cause for sorrow, and Hannelore had been in the hospital twice during the last few years. Recent business reverses may have been the coup de grace. Cousin Marcelo’s brief email described a good ending, at midnight, on the way upstairs:

Unfortunately, our dear and lovely ant Hannelore died yersterday, at 0:00. Renato called us and immediatly me and Rony runned to her house to give them a little confort cause de sadly situation.
Lastely, she was bad because her hart was weak.
Suddenly, in her home, when she was going to upstairs, her hart stooped and she died quietely. Dario and Renato were together. Hannelore died near her son’s

But I cried when Gabi told me the news on the phone in Jan’s office. And now I want her to keep talking.

5 April 2002

I am not at the office, stayed home for a fortnight because I fell and broke—once again—my even previously not too classical nose, … I also broke all my front teeth, but nowadays you can glue them, which I had done…Monday I will go back to the bookstore!

…we are having big trouble with the house. You remember it is a double-house, now my neighbor has Alzheimers and cant practice medicine any more, his wife has Alzheimers too, they share a nurse, and the son, a building engineer, has sold the half to be torn down and incorporated with two more lots for a big building. We share one roof and separation wall. They want us to sell too and are trying to force us because we are afraid for the structure of our house. As a matter of fact legally they cant do it, but nobody cares much about the laws here…that was the reason I fell, because I was so worried. They are already tearing down the other two houses they bought, with a crew of unqualifiedmen, with axes, without the necessary license.

July 5 2002

Yesterday the Bookfair ended. I am getting a bit too old for these events, but love them. Ruy got an honorable mention for a book on Physics he publishes at an Oscarlike ceremony. We had a beautiful stand, a monument to Ernesto. I am very grateful that the children continue his life’s work…

Ruy managed to get a court order to postpone the demolition of our town house. Mario is a friend of the owner of the foremost civil engineering firm, who declared it unsafe for our house if the other half is torn down. A nice young lady judge had the demolition stopped by a summons served…eventually they are going to succeed…Of course, his is a crook and of course he waited for Ruy to leave for a US Bookfair on Tuesday to try on Friday to tear down the house court order and all, and of course Ruy had foreseen that intention and sent his bodyguards to stand in the path.

March 16 2005 (Upon the death of her older stepsister—my mother)

She was so happy and so proud of her family and I wish I could visualize her when she was her own self because her last years were very sad, since she was present only physically and not with her admirable mind. Very often that is the tribute people have to pay for still being around. I hope this wont happen to me, even more so because I would be financially a heavy burden on the family…She had a very special marriage, a lasting love-affair with adorable Henry. I don’t know whether you ever knew how the marriage happened: Henry was a promising executive in her best friend’s father’s department store, Tiefenthal and Halle. Lotte Tiefenthal set out on a trip to visit family and entrusted her so-to-say fiancée Henry to Lise’s care and guard so no no one would conquer him for herself. Of course he succumbed to Lise’s charm and beauty and…she kept him for herself. Lotte Tiefenthal would have liked to murder her when she returned, but emigrated also to the States, got married…and stayed friends. As opposed to Gaby and me, Lise had a new boyfriend and marriage candidate every month and kept our father busy chasing them away, but he was very happy with her final choice, Henry. Even during that restricted and morally hypocritical period , he helped her in finding a job there so they could be together. They did have an exceptionally happy marriage, though she was moody and he quite a tyrant in his charming way. I am really happy you followed their example, even though in the beginning, in those troubled years, you partially had a hard time. Janet went with you through thick and thin until you finally were “allowed” to resume your disrupted career. And like they did, you enjoy each other’s company.

August 8 2006 (accompanying a newspaper clipping)

Yes that’s poor old little me at the meeting in one more attempt to get the “camelos” (Peddlers) out of the once beautiful new town center. Nobody goes to town any more. One of our past mayors, Erundine, brought thousands of them downtown, where they destroyed the asphalt, ruined shops, including ours, bankrupted all our department stores, cook and sell Yakisoba, produce in plain view, thousands of pirate CDs and DVDs, use the streets as public toilets, steal, assault. Cheating at cards, now and then one kills another, generally by knife. They are dirty, illiterate, uncultured and nobody manages to get them out because they are really a front. Everybody at the meeting had one minute to speak. I told them that I had observed them for years. They never sold anything, had no wrapping paper, no small change. I never saw anybody choose, buy, pay, and most of all, they are not worried about it. That means what? I made my point, the are there to peddle DRUGS! Of course I didn’t say that or I would be dead.

August 15 2006

Here is something to amuse you, photos of the celebration of 70 years of Ernesto’s beloved bookstore. Considering the situation we were not going to do anything. But at the last minute Ruy changed his mind, improvising. We decided to have a very modest celebration at one of Ernesto’s favorite Italian restaurants. Knowing Ruy, you wont believe it: due to the “special circumstances, everybody paid for himself, we all shared a few dishes, nobody even mentioned desert, except of course for Yago. And would you believe it, we had a wonderful time. I had taken Ernestos picture along. In front of it I placed an orchid all the employees together had given to me…It was really a mark in my life and I want to share it with you. On August 1 I completed 66 years in the firm. Sylvia is eligible for pension next year. If I live until then, I will have a sixty year old daughter.

When to stop? Hanu, Hannelore, Hannylorie. These are short excerpts of but a few of the letters I saved, and the dozens that disappeared. These are paltry samples of pictures you sent, I and Jan took, and my parents preserved in boxes of albums sitting in the garage. And I met you only once. How much of you is left to the sister, children, grandchildren, extended family, co-workers and neighbors with whom you spent your days? How much less than we long for, how much more than we can relinquish?

January 28 1973

Cold and rainy. Janet discovered Rebecca dead in the barn, hanging by her neck in an eight inch hole in the partition between her stall and the grain Michael Friedman was storing there. In order to get her out, Steven had to hacksaw her horns. We decided not to butcher her and buried her under boughs and ferns on the adjoining Crown land. Went to Friedmans place to get eggs and met Ken Law who brought our grocery order from the coop in Vancouver. Went to Pihls to get Vance, Letitia Tracy and Kelly Faire to help us do up eleven chickens including Ajax the rooster. Vance chopped the heads off and gutted them, Kelly carried the carcasses to Steven, Janet, Ticia and Tracy who plucked. It took two and a half hours. Afterwards we had popcorn and hot chocolate in front of the fire.

January 29 1973

Warm snow slush. J and S worked in barn, J transferring wet grain to dry place, S fixing the plumbing leak in the sink upstairs, cleaning up mess John left, including bleach bottle half full of pee. Barn is now ready for new occupancy. Made huge pot of chicken soup with Ajax. Froze ten chickens, one to Vance. Ken, Debby and Maz came for dinner. Ken stayed over.

Friday February 2

Steven has interview at Manpower and is told he should leave the area to find work elsewhere…Seth and Muriel write offering $1500 loan. Eight acre parcel of our land is listed at Marriette Agencies…..

Thursday February 8

Kenneth informed us of his decision to move into the cabin, as a result of a Tarot reading the night before. He brings string and teaches Steven how to Macrame. Steven stops freaking out for a while…Potato pancakes and parsnips for dinner. Mrs. Williams called and asks both Jan and Steven to substitute at school the next day. Melvin Marguilis and gang arrive in time for a party. Lou T. called saying they definitely want to buy the eight acre parcel…Ken agrees to take care of Jonah while Steven and Jan go to school. Nick Valerie, Kenneth, Melvin, stay over…

Sunday February 11

Clear morning, cloudy afternoon. S. picked brush, K. went along. J modeled for Fred. Jonah went to Nancy Crowther’s with Doreen. J and S went upstairs. K. cut the end of his finger off. J and S take him to hospital. Bleeding stops when Dr. Warriner looks at the cut. S and J and K buy ice cream at Knight’s Weekly News.

Monday February 12

…Steven goes to dentist and gets spark plug wires replaced on truck. Goes looking for work at construction site and with Durling the surveyor. Janet gets notice of reinstatement on UIC and a check for $58. Jeff Chernove says Kirpal Singh is the answer. David Creek says Primal therapy is the answer. J, K, and S work on plans for Valentines party and discuss jealousy.

Wednesday February 14

J and S go to town early for appointment with Dr. Ryan, the psychiatrist, then to lawyer to sign contract and close sale of land with Lou and Kent. Kenneth stays with Jonah and cooks all day for Valentines party: chicken in milk, dahl, yogurt salad. Steven makes Valentines cheesecake. People arrive and make Valentines and paint cookies: Tony and Maureen, Ron and Anne, Ian and Maggie, David, Susan and Jessica, Laurie and David Creek. S and J and K and Jonah exchanged valentines. S and K played recorders.

Friday February 16

… Jonah gets baby aspirin bottle and eats 10. J and S take him to hospital where he’s made to barf, but no aspirins are found…Late dinner. Jonah calls Kenneth “Kennie,” the first adult outside of “Nanet” and “Daddy” that he’s named.

Saturday February 24

David Creek looked after Jonah and Obie while S and J and K discussed plans for the OFY [Opportunities for Youth] Grant application to put Touchstone idea into action—a day camp on the farm…J cuts Kenneth’s hair to jawbone length. He shortens beard. S. goes to sleep in the yard, but is rained out at 3:00 A.M.

Sunday February 25

Chickens are happy in their new coop and laid 16 eggs. J and K and S divide up questions on OFY application. S went to cabin, Janet stayed in house. K. took care of Jonah. Everybody’s writing…J and S experience K’s cabin for the first time. Jonah goes to sleep; JSK discuss and write more. Jonah wakes up, Steven takes him to chickens and does chores and makes chicken soup while J and K work on question 4. Janet bathes Jonah and puts him to bed. More writing and discussion of finding junior staff. Jan calls art teacher, Mrs, Adams, who she substituted for, for recommendation of best art student. Answer is Elaine Sorenson, who lives in Lund…

Monday February 26

Steven’s first day of work with Durling Surveyors, on crew with David Butterfield and Lorie Padgett…On the way home picks up total payment for salal picking: $15.—Jan and K bake bread, brownies, crunchy granola and apple strudel. Rick and Sue visit, she’s due in six weeks. K. shaves his beard… After dinner borrow typewriter from the Parkers and work most of the night on the OFY application.

Saturday March 2

…(K’s handwriting) The Creeks dropped Obie over. Joanne and her sister came. S. worked on fence, planted four posts, put rails and shakes on 2 sections….Fred predicted Norma will give birth Mar 9, 1976 6lb. 7 oz. girl. Coq au Vin and baked potatoes cooked in sour apple plum wine. S. did finances. J cleaned the toilet. Sat in front of the fire. Peter Behr called from Berkeley. Slept by the fire.

Sunday March 4

Rainy morning. 17 eggs. S. worked on fence…K rebuilt a gate on way to chicken coop. J took out nails and peeled bark… Jonah lost one shoe in back of the barn and walked barefoot in the muck. Disney Duck laid three eggs in the stream. K found them…

Monday March 5

Steven used transit for the first time on the job…K and J shoveled out the barn while Lorie watched Obie and Jonah. After work, S. and K cut rails and poles for fence

behind the barn.

Sunday March 10

Steven got up early to work on fence. The weather cleared. Jonah and Obie went swimming in the creek with their clothes on. Kenneth builds a gate out of old shakes and cuts a heart in the middle. Jan nails up staves. Joann here all afternoon putting up insulation in the barn. Peter, Ronnie, Tanya Tai and Lynn Press come for cheesecake at 9:30. J and K had a ticklefight.

Sunday March 11

Spring in the air. S. repairs wind chimes and K puts up Jonah’s swing. Everybody works on fence and cleanup in AM. Then we sit on the rock and drink tea. Violets and crocuses are blooming…first day no fire in the barrel stove.

Tuesday March 20

S. goes to work at 7:45…home at 5:45. J baked cake, bread, granola and cooked casserole. K put two more windows on cabin. J and K and Jonah went to Lund. J. takes off wedding ring and doesn’t put it back on.

Saturday March 24

K. painted door of cabin. Joann and Scott work on loft, come for dinner. S. takes off wedding ring.

Monday March 26

K and J clean house. OFY person arrives to check out farm and discuss grant…

Monday April 2

Sixth wedding anniversary of S and J. Cloudy day. Marigolds up. Jonah plays outside. Janet moves clothes into her room. Banty rooster in with chickens. S. writes anniversary song. Jan makes chocolate-peanut frosting and heart of candied violets for S. and anniversary. Decorates with rings. S and J put them on.

Saturday April 21

Cloudy. S and David Lyons took Jonah for a walk at Okeover. Diana and K washed dishes and talked wool and weaving. Call from Emmonds beach that sheep Gwendolyn and lamb Reinhart are standing on bluff. J, S, K, Diana, David and Jonah get in red truck and chase sheep for two hours, up to Torgeson’s place. Art helps. Lamb is caught. Sheep splits. Art chases her back. Lamb in truck, held by K, cries to sheep. Sheep darts around into the arms of David. Sheep is tied and loaded into truck. Jan gives Diana some fleece.

Sunday April 22, Easter

Kenneth finds four dead banty chicks near barn and one in his dog Baja’s mouth. Lorie Padgett and family arrive with Easter candy and colored eggs. K. gives Jonah present of mobile. Children go picking fiddleheads for lunch, hear cheeping from near barn, find and bring a live chick into the house where Janet makes nest and feeds it with eye-dropper. Steve and Patty Hansen and others arrive with musical instruments. Sun comes out. Ten people trip. Kids hunt Easter eggs. S. cooks dinner. Frisbee in the field at sunset.

Sunday May 6

Kenneth builds meditation platform in cabin. Has vision of Kirpal Singh. Changes diet. Observes day of silence…

Tuesday May 15

S and K drive to town early—S to work, K to Vancouver. J. did goats. At 11:00 Brian called from Vancouver say the grant is coming through–$5000 for the summer.

Kenneth painted the sign
Kenneth in top image, seated at right
Kenneth seated to left of band
Kenneth in the middle
First performance of the Lund Theatre Troupe:
“Free to Be You and Me”
directed by Kenneth

Lund Theatre Troupe morning after opening of
“Three One-Acts” 1976

review of “Three One Acts” June 1976 Powell River Progress

review of “Three One Acts” June 1976 Powell River News

Preview of “Three One Acts” in Powell River News

smarx@calpoly.edu