In the Company of Rebels. Chellis Glendinning
my lap to breathe.”
A few years later, at a writers conference in Prescott, Arizona, I met Flo Shepard, the woman with whom he had built a wilderness cabin in Wyoming, edited anthologies, and shared that last rich decade of his life. Shortly thereafter I received a letter from her asking if I might like to steward the Olivetti he had used to write his books. Amazingly, it arrived amid crushed newspapers and bubble wrap, a rickety little machine that looked wholly incapable of translating all those enormous thoughts into mere words. I held it in my hands, trying to take in the sagacity and panoramic vista it was still emanating.
IV. MAKE LOVE NOT WAR: BERKELEY IN THE ‘60S
LET’S TAKE THE PARK!
—DAN SIEGEL, PRESIDENT, ASSOCIATED STUDENTS UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, MAY 15, 1969
A protester against the shutdown of the communal People’s Park in Berkeley—in captivity. Photo credit: Ted Streshinsky. Courtesy of the film Berkeley in the Sixties ©1990.
THE DEITIES WERE WATCHING over my generation. An acquaintance from Cleveland who was studying at Amherst College—and would soon mutate into a rabid Communist Labor Party militant—said to me, “There’s something going on in Berkeley that has to do with our generation. You need to go.” The remark sunk in, and just a few days before my twentieth birthday, I threw work shirt, sandals and jeans into a little suitcase, bought a $75 plane ticket from Cleveland to the Bay Area, and made my break.
In 1967, Berkeley was a hub of youth culture and New Left politics—and was located right up Telegraph Avenue from Oakland, where the Black Panther Party was in gestation with its objective of protecting their communities from police violence via its own armed patrols. This was the first place inside the U.S. where I witnessed a flourishing street life, and indeed one of my first observations, at Moe’s Books on Telegraph, was how earthy, alive, and laid-back everyone seemed. Old jeans. Navy bellbottoms. Men boasting ponytails. Women in Mexican peasant blouses. Espresso and Gauloises. I heard jazz musicians and 1930s commie pinkos airing their radical sentiments on listener-sponsored KPFA-FM. Mario Savio from the Free Speech Movement was the postman. Richard Brautigan was penning his fish stories up in Bolinas; Julia Vinograd, her street poems at the Café Mediterraneum. Richie Havens belted out “Freedom” in the university’s lower plaza. The Free Clinic was overflowing with patients, the Free University with students. Books, books—everyone was devouring books. Karl Marx and Carl Jung. Anaïs Nin. Malcolm X, Eldridge Cleaver, Frantz Fanon. Wilhelm Reich. Simone de Beauvoir. Sylvia Plath. Allen Ginsberg.
I arrived in mid-June, and the tang of the 1966 Oakland Induction Center confrontation with the police lingered like Ripple wine on the tongues of the anti-Vietnam War activists. I found an empty apartment where the landlord let me crash gratis for the summer, got a morning job as a governess, bought a near-see-through dress made of burlap, hitchhiked from Berkeley to L.A., marched with Clevelander Dr. Benjamin Spock at the Century City anti-war demo, and when I took my first drag of marijuana, I saw satyrs galloping through the air. By September I filled out the forms to transfer from Smith College to the University of California, Berkeley.
Activist couple in the 1960s—expressing both their politics and their alternative way of life. Gratitude to the now-defunct Berkeley Tribe (1969–1972), which was more radical than the community’s original underground newspaper, the Berkeley Barb. Vol.1, No. 6, Issue 6, August 15, 1969.
When I got back to Cleveland to collect my things, my mother invited her movement friends to hear me talk about what strange goings-on were erupting in California. I was just delivering my analysis of the Beatles song “All You Need Is Love” when one mother, nearly quaking in fear, asked, “But, but … isn’t Berkeley just a big cesspool of sex, drugs, and radical politics?” I paused for a long moment, discombobulated by the alarm in her voice. I hadn’t really thought of it that way.
Finally, all I could do was answer: “Yes.”
MARTY SCHIFFENBAUER: MASTER OF POLITICAL INVENTION
(1938–)
I was so unhip, I didn’t know Berkeley was hip.
—M.S., LETTER TO CHELLIS GLENDINNING, 2014
I had never been to a real health-food store before. Of course, what with being in Berkeley, I had already been introduced to Adele Davis’ food theories, and encouraged to use whole-wheat flour, make my own yogurt, and drink herbal tea. And I’d heard of the Food Mill. At the time—before Wholly Foods opened its doors at Shattuck and Ashby and while the industry remained but a twinkle in the eyes of a few health-food-freak entrepreneurs-to-be—the Food Mill was the Bay Area’s only outlet selling organic grains, seeds, and flour.
But I didn’t know where it was.
Marty said he would take me. Imagine my awe when he pulled up to the Vine Street commune in a 1963 Chevy II … convertible. To my mind, the car presented a sharp quip of a lampoon of the American Dream our generation was rejecting and, at the same time, was utterly camp in its own right. Off we went—Marty in his trademark shorts and combat boots, with his flaming red corkscrew locks flying in the wind like Gorgonian snakes; me in U.S. Navy bellbottoms, purple Hindu shirt, and long brown braids—cruising along the Eastshore Freeway, past the driftwood/cast-off machinery sculptures constructed anonymously in the mudflats and on to Oakland’s MacArthur Boulevard.
In those days it was a good bet you would find all five feet and four inches of Marty as a very tall presence around the political advocacy tables in Sproul Plaza. He was a bit older than most in the anti-war movement and, before the 1974 stock-market collapse, he made his living by buying and selling stocks; it was a feature that I found incomprehensible but also far-out—and that definitely made him the All-American Hippie Weirdo Drop-Out. That he filled his studio apartment with God’s Eyes he crafted himself only enhanced my view. Marty kept his Gorgon hairdo for near a lifetime, although it did change color as the years ambled onward; he wore the shorts and boots until the late ‘70s, when they finally disintegrated and he switched over to athletic get-up. I was standing in front of the Café Mediterraneum on Telegraph Avenue when the tornado of red hair and gym shorts arrived, bubbling over with endorphins and the discovery that if he ran just three miles every day, he could eat all he wanted!
Marty grew up in Brooklyn in the apartment behind Berdie’s Corset Shoppe. His parents, Berdie and Morris Schiffenbauer, raised him Orthodox Jewish, sending him to yeshivas and keeping the Sabbath every week. “My parents were not very political,” he reports, “but they loved FDR and always voted Democrat. They were, of course, pro-Israel. Mostly their politics were of the Whatever-Is-Good-for-the-Jews variety.”
Marty in his Berkeley commune, 1972. Courtesy of Marty Schiffenbauer.
He first came to Berkeley in 1964, tooling up University Avenue in his Chevy II almost by happenstance. He liked the summer-blue sky, he liked the vibes, he liked the slender blondes—and in his own pre-anti–Vietnam War way he was escaping the draft. In 1962 Marty had opted to join the New York National Guard as the least demanding way to serve his military obligation. By his own admission, he survived six months of active duty but found the subsequent weekly meetings a drag on his time and on taxpayers’ money. Presaging the political expression that was to fill the rest of his life, he wrote a scathing letter to the New York Times. The captain of his reserve unit happened to read it, freaked out, and proposed that