Berkeley Daze

 “Berkeley!?” I occasionally hear younger voices ask excitedly. “You were at Berkeley in the 1960’s???!!! WOW! You mean you’re a real hippie???” 

 Yes to the first question. I was there. From the fall of 1967 to the spring of 1970, three of the school’s, and the country’s, most tumultuous years in the last third of the century just past, years that launched the Queen of the California University system into a central position in popular culture and lore of the age.

 As for being a “hippie,” my still thickly-accent-speaking grandmother was convinced that I was. My parents, I’m sure, feared that I was. But I wouldn’t have automatically said so. I had enough trouble, as an 18-year-old suddenly transported from the staid East coast to something akin to Oz on the West coast, just trying to figure out who I was to myself without adding to the identity problem by adopting a label that was invented – and constantly re-defined for convenience as a “catch-all phrase” – by the media of the day.

 History, though, has its own way of cutting broad swaths through hosts of facts that were importantly distinctive to those who lived them, but declaring them meaningless details in its rush to establish the common denominators that would define an era for later, less immediately-involved generations. So history would likely say that I was a hippie, regardless of my individual truth.

 Berkeley. University of California at. Hippies. Free love. Dope. LSD. Haight/Ashbury. The Wintergarden and Filmore West. Otis Redding and Richie Havens and the Grateful Dead all sitting at the dock of the bay with flowers in their hair. The Campanile bells at noon. Magical, forest-glen-like Strawberry Creek. Eucalyptus. Mario Savio and the Free Speech Movement. Mrs. Robinson and plastics. 

 Berkeley. Telegraph Ave. Sproul Plaza. The daily noontime rallies and speeches. Oakland. The Black Panthers and Eldridge Cleaver and Bobby Seales. The VVAW. Draft card burnings. The Alameda County Sheriffs. Ronald Regan, governor and head of the Board of Regents and, as far as we were concerned, an arch far-right-wing reactionary to be opposed almost religiously.

 Berkeley. The People’s Republic of. People’s Park. Police riots. The National Guard with drawn bayonets. Small arms in the classrooms in classmates’ jackets and backpacks. Dynamite rumored to be at the corners of several buildings. Tear gas everywhere, including the bombing with it by National Guard helicopter of Herrick Hospital in the middle of campus, one fine day. Eating lunch at Sproul that day and getting it, too. The Alameda County Sheriffs running amok in white and/blue helmets with plastic motorcycle face guards and medieval shields made out of heavy acrylic, and gas masks, and clubs, and shotguns. Thirty-five people shot in one day. Going to school every day from that point on with your “survival kit” of wet paper towels and Vaseline gel against the airborne chemicals that choked your lungs and burned your skin if … when … it came ….