Of all my brushes with famous people—and there have been plenty—nothing quite compares to 1969-70, my freshman year at College 5 at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
I arrived there flat broke with the promise of a work-study job, and a grant check pending while my dorm food would sustain me. I soon took a shine to Jan Gillespie the girl who took down my number in the food line. With an interruption to marry other people, we are still together, forty years later.
I had arrived in Santa Cruz hitchhiking, my third trip to get my stuff moved from southern California, and I arrived at about the same time a arge box containing my vinyl records came in by freight on a Greyhound bus. The clerk wanted extra money for the records, whose box by then was starting to split and spread. I triend reasoning with him, and in the end he relented. I was soon hitchhiking up to the campus from the town with a huge bursting box flled with my records and the records I’d inherited from my dad when he died two years earlier.
No matter, it had been a logistical nightmare getting all my stuff up to Santa Cruz, but I’d be safe there. Thre I’d have three square meals and a shared room in the redwoods. There I’d be safe from the draft, which was already gobbling up graduates of the 1969 founding class of Saddleback High School. There I would build my own life, not just be a participant in my mother’s attempts to drag us into the vortex of madness that saw her devoting herself to a brutal and incoherent drunk after my dad died and dragging my younger brother and sisters—who were not yet teenagers—to Ohio as my older sister and I were graduating from high school.
This was Santa Cruz, a new and innovative campus of the greatest university in America. Here I’d plant my flag. Here I’d find family by voluntary selection.
But first, I’d talk with EOP. Although I never identified that I was a member of a minority when I applied for the program, I could see the shock on the face of the counsellor of the Educational Opportunity Program when I walked into his office. He looked at me, studied my folder, looked up again and said, “You know, in our language “freno” means stirrup.” I smiled and said little. I was, after all, from a barrio of sorts.
I had come from a part of Santa Ana which was even then run down, although our high school was new and sparkling and our subdivision, whose developer had gone bust, was new and populated largely by white folks. Nonetheless, in my capacity as an emancipated minor, I sought every opportunity of financial assistance at my disposal.
My next stop in the Central Services building was the financial aid office, where I learned that grants are distributed at the end of the month and not when you arrive at a college. So I borrowed a fifty dollar Bing Crosby Temporary Loan. Der Bingle had left a bequest to fund this loan fund for just this purpose, and I thought it right and just to take advantage of the fund for the 10 days before I’d be getting my grant check from the Financial Aid office.
Back then if you scored high enough on your SAT you qualified for a California State Scholarship, good at any campus in the state—public or private—for most of your fees. In those good old days before Proposition 13 and herpes, attending school in California was a no-brainer, especially with the personnel needs of the military in Southeast Asia.
I cashed my Bingle check at the cashier’s window, stuffed the bills in the pocket of my jeans and went to the work study office, where I had a look at the job openings for the new quarter. I had done a bit of audio-visual work in high school, so I decided to try that, and, referral in hand, went off to the A/V office. I was assigned to the College 5 dining hall as a projectionist and soundman, neither of which I was qualified for. I had supervisors (all of whom smoked constantly) who would show up to train me on the equipment and then slip away. I got to ferry equipment around the campus in retired postal vehicles without driver’s seats which had an alarming tendency to roll over on the winding campus roads.
One of my first big gigs as a work-study projectionist was the lavishly named College 5 International Film Festival, which is one of the few events in this world that has no mention in Google. These were experimental films, presented by lecturer in film Tony Reveaux, with an all-star panel of judges including none other than Jim Morrison of the Doors. When it was time for the judges to award their individual prizes, Morrison gave his to a tedious short of a kitchen faucet dripping. It was then, October 17, 1969, as I was rolling up a cable outside the projection booth, that I had a chilling encounter with Morrison, who was making his way out of the judges’ area and heading out to rejoin the Doors. (To see a chronology of Morrison’s eventful 1969, click here.) It was one of those casual moments that doesn’t seem like anything at the time. No words were spoken as Morrison passed and looked at me. What I remember thinking is, “This man’s dead.” He may have been walking, but he was dead. Just a few months later, he was.
By the time Spring quarter, we’d all had enough of the weather in Santa Cruz, where It rained constantly for weeks at a time as the Pacific storms made landfall in Monterey Bay, stopped, and moved on. There were a lot of rumblings as the spring brought on fundamental changes in the weather and our outlook.
Then, just as it seemed like we should be dancing around a maypole and celebrating fertility, Nixon played the Cambodia card. Anybody could have told him that he was opposing natural forces which could never be controlled, least of all by a career Republican politician with his physical aspect. We were young, it was spring, and we were not going to take this shit.
The University had a system called the tie line which connected the campuses, office-to-office. A couple of guys I knew liberated one of the tie lines so we could contact fellow revolutionaries at the other campuses. I don’t remember quite how or why, but soon Bob Deasy and I were going south in his Volvo 122 to make sure that the tie line connections were working. Or something like that. I really don’t remember what moved us to the Volvo, but we made it to San Diego overnight, then headed back north for UC Irvine, UCLA and, finally, Santa Barbara, where, less than 2 months previously had been under martial law when the Bank of America branch in Isla Vista was torched.
Bob Deasy and I just regular civilians with not much in the way of political interest at that point in our lives, but we had aspirations to perform great deeds, and what with our campus on strike (faculty included) and not much incentive to stick around when the National Guard presumably came to call on College 5, we just thought this was the thing to do.
When returned to UCSC the strike had been moved into another whole direction that wouldn’t involve our efforts and we were rendered suckers for doing what we had done because someone had decided that the campuses would not be rising up as one over Cambodia and Kent State. It turned out to have been nothing but a pleasant trip up the coast.
A day or two after we returned to the dorms, my next-door neighbor Mike, whose surname has receded into the back of my brain, knocked on my door. Mike was a Vietnam vet, an interesting guy who gave a barnburner of a speech about his experiences in country and seemed a lot saner than he had every right to be. Mike told me that the famous Phil Ochs would be coming to campus to support our efforts in the strike, and he wondered if I could arrange to have a PA in the College 5 dining hall. The next day, Phil Ochs appeared in Mike’s room. I was called in and introduced by Mike as a music major. Phil Ochs shook my hand and said, “Well, you probably know more about music than I do.”
I assured him I did not, and we got down to business.
I had the key to the locker where the sound equipment was kept, and I told him that we could be assured that the giant Voice of the Theatre speakers, the underpowered Shure mixer, and a couple microphones ought to do the trick.
So off I went to the locker for an unauthorized usage of university property. Not that everyone else wasn’t appropriating whatever they could to stop the craziness that we’d seen taking place in southeast Asia, Kent, Jackson State, and the rising up around the country of the young against the old.
I set up the PA in the dining hall and we had a nice little concert. Phil thanked me afterwards for my little role in things.
It wasn’t long before the quarter sputtered and died. I went south to Sure Trucking in Costa Mesa and loaded freight on the night shift and lived at the Fishers’ house while they were in Colorado for the summer. Here’s a picture of me taken that summer taken by Richard Kuhlenschmidt, who also lived at the house:
Would you say I looked angry?
That first year at College 5 I worked sound for Ravi Shankar, Julian Bream (who shared his whiskey with me), poet Richard Braughtigan, and a few others who have flown out of my head through the years. But I’ll always remember that school year as starting with Jim Morrison and ending with Phil Ochs. It was an extraordinary place, with extraordinary people at an extraordinary time in the history of my generation and how it fit into American politics and culture. We felt like we were changing the world. Maybe we were.
