In the Company of Rebels. Chellis Glendinning
lover Marc Kasky, he packed up his tent and enough dried food for ten days, and he launched off in his size-thirteen hiking boots to what became a yearly solo hike through the Sierras. That first year, too, he was visited by a hairy spirit in the night. The thing looked like a sort of werewolf-yeti. It appeared at the foot of his sleeping bag, as such creatures have a tendency to do, and crooking its claw in the shape of Little Bo Peep’s cane, beckoned Marc to come. It was the dead of night, and the forest was pitch-black. Marc graciously declined, rolled over, and went back to sleep.
I’m not sure if these kinds of visitations were not normal fare for the man. He had, after all, lived a life of wild and hairy ideas. In fact, he had an idea for just about every challenge that lay before him. Consider the public TV station he instigated at Franconia College in answer to the school’s need to bridge the gap between the insulated student body and the town’s working-class community: the communications students made programs about the town and, boasting next-to-nothing funds for a full-time station, set up a camera in the snowy woods through the night when there were no other shows to be had. Or the basketball team he started. Franconia possessed no phys. ed. department, no basketballs, no gymnasium, no outfits, no lanky athletic stars—and so, at the very least, the project was a risk. But it was an ingenious scheme as the town might then get behind its team.
What would happen if everything just … stopped? Positively Fourth Street mural at Fort Mason Center, San Francisco, 1976. Artists: John Wehrle and John Rampley. Photo credit: Jim Petrillo. Courtesy of John Wehrle.
One problem to be hurdled was that the White Mountains of Vermont presented a snow barrier to the other teams that would have to travel north, so they decided to only play, as the saying goes, “away from home.” Upon the team’s first such bus ride to Hampshire College in Massachusetts, an aghast Marc realized they didn’t have a handle. Since basketball courts have a score board that pits “Home” against “Visitors,” Marc thought, they could be the Visitors. They actually won that first game—and the national media went feral. Sports Illustrated, the New York Times, plus newspapers across the country published stories about the Franconia Visitors, and BINGO! the town—now with its very own TV station and an undefeated basketball team—began to feel very good about its college.
Yes, wild spirits sprouted from the head of Marc Kasky. As a student coordinator of Eugene McCarthy’s run for President in 1968, his idea for gaining votes in the all-important New Hampshire primary was not to chuck the campaign’s anti-war message down the throats of the voters of Berlin. It was to set up democracy centers where citizens could experience that they were responsible enough, intelligent enough, free enough to debate the issues and come to their own conclusions. The McCarthys were so impressed with this unique approach that they asked Marc to do the same in Grand Island, Nebraska; Eugene, Oregon; and Santa Monica, California. On the night of the primary they invited him to watch the results in their hotel room, and in her memoir Private Faces, Public Places, Abigail McCarthy called Marc “a symbol of all that was good in the student involvement in the campaign, all that was good in the new politics, all that was good in the campaign itself.”
Later, in the ‘70s, when he was director of San Francisco’s Ecology Center, Marc provided grounding for the churn and swirl of emerging environmental consciousness. The center was on lower Columbus Avenue, below Grant Street, known for its rebel dynamism since the Beat days, and right across from the very symbol of the economic forces that were wreaking corporate havoc upon the Earth: the new pyramid-shaped Transamerica Building.
First thing: in hopes of attracting a few bankers and financial advisors, Marc tore down the burlap wall coverings that hinted at hippiedom and painted the place crisp white. Then he and the staff set up an all-you-can-eat vegetarian restaurant, an eco art gallery, and lunchtime discussions on the city and its quality of life. Sure enough, people from the Financial District poured in. Secretaries. Brokers. Newspaper vendors. Radio commentator Wes “Scoop” Nisker (of “If You Don’t Like the News, Go Out and Make Some of Your Own” repute) popped by for coffee. Ponderosa Pine, who for years had trod the sidewalks of San Francisco without shoes, lent his rants on the glories to be had if only the nation could be broken down into self-sustaining bioregions. Stephanie Mills was a regular; she had gained clout when in 1969 she delivered her Mills College valedictorian lecture on the decision not to bear children due to overpopulation. Sierra Club president David Brower made the occasional appearance. And lo and behold for the power of painted white walls, former New York advertising executive Jerry Mander came to discuss his infamous Save the Whales ad campaign.
Architect Zack Stewart’s Canessa Gallery sat across the street on Montgomery. Ever the bearded eccentric, Zack enlisted the curious and courageous to join him on a boat trip up the Sacramento River so that the budding environmentalists could get to know what the Bay Area landscape looks like, where the city’s water comes from, who is polluting the river, etc.: in essence, to develop a Sense of Place. His River Terminus Expeditions shaped up to be a marine version of the Merry Pranksters’ hippie bus. It boasted three houseboats sleeping ten people each for three days. Each boat had a captain and a navigator, but Marc … well … he was dubbed Admiral of the whole shebang.
Accompanied by Ecology Center herbal teas and fresh-baked, whole-grain muffins, the All-Species Parade through the streets of the city was launched in 1977. The Rain Dance at the Legion of Honor was spawned to wake up the deities and counter the unforgiving 1976 drought; the ceremony was held on a Friday night, and by Saturday morning (of all rarities in San Francisco), it snowed. A block up Columbus, the International Hotel was throwing otherwise homeless, elderly residents into the streets; protest erupted, and the Ecology Center provided childcare for picketers. Then, like some kind of preordained synchronicity, San Francisco’s first environmental campaign focused on that concrete behemoth of a building across Columbus with its energy-sucking air conditioners, and its windows that couldn’t be opened to let in the Bay’s fresh, cool air.
Marc Kasky above Fort Mason Center, 1982. Photo credit: now-defunct San Francisco Food Coop. Courtesy of Marc Kasky.
And since the “straight” drop-ins and non–ecologically minded were confused as to how to live lightly on the land, Marc came up with his how-to-solve-daily-problems-as-if-the-planet-mattered radio show on KPFA-FM called “M.I.N.T.” Money Is Not Thrilling. One caller would confess the eco-disastrous temptation to buy a new car, and by the seat of his pants, Marc would advise him to paint the old one, get some new upholstery, add a hood ornament. Another would moan about her gripping desire to own a Kirby vacuum cleaner like the one her neighbor had; Marc would propose sharing machines.
Imagine how life was for me: I lived for seven and a half years with this fount of ingenuity. When I met Marc in 1979, he was director for Fort Mason Center, a World War II army base perched on the edge of the San Francisco Bay, and for 24 years he guided its development from an army base into a people’s cultural center. There were non-profit headquarters for the likes of Media Alliance, Magic Theater, and Blue Bear Music School. There were classrooms and museums and performance venues. The Zen Center’s Greens restaurant whipped up meals of organic vegetables grown on their Green Gulch ranch in Marin County and, needless to say, served their own baked Tassajara bread. Marc oversaw the building of the 450-seat Cowell Theater; the relocation/restoration of the in-decline eco mural “Positively 4th Street” depicting the reclamation of a defunct freeway off-ramp by plants and animals; and the renovation of the last World War II Liberty Ship, the Jeremiah O’Brian.
When work was finished, the ideas didn’t stop. Steeped in the psychological wing of the anti-nuclear movement of the 1980s, I was running an organization called Waking Up in the Nuclear Age. The motivation of WUINA’s cadre of mental health professionals was to present lectures on the psychological ramifications of living with the arms race and workshops to help citizens break through the denial and, as psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton called it, psychic numbing behind the paralysis of the population since the atomic era had begun. We were faced with a U.S. president taunting the opposition with inflammatory phrases like “Evil Empire” and bragging of bold,