NOTE: The following is the first
chapter in what may be a forthcoming memoir titled No Secrets to Conceal
I escaped Dallas by the skin of my teeth on a Greyhound bus
to Berkeley in early September 1962. My mother wanted me to stay in Texas to go
to college. But I was dead set on going to the University of California. To get
her approval, I had to make her an offer she could not refuse.
My determination to go to Cal was prompted by a special
course on anti-Communism that the Dallas school district required every junior
to take during the 1960-61 school year. The only textbook was J. Edgar Hoover’s
Masters of Deceit. The whole exercise struck me as absurd. I considered
the Soviet Union a brutal dictatorship, but the anti-Communist hysteria of the
time felt misguided and repressive.
Being smothered by my mother’s love, totally alienated from
the Dallas orthodoxy, and bored by my lousy high school, South Oak Cliff, I had
already rebelled, timidly. This anti-Communist nonsense reinforced my
rebellion, which had begun during my last semester in junior high.
One day in the lunch cafeteria I overheard another student
eloquently advocate atheism, a concept that was totally new to me. Intrigued, I
asked a friend about this troublemaker. He told me they were neighbors, his
name was George Littell, and he was a good guy. My friend introduced me and
George and I became best friends.
I taught him how to play chess and he took me to the Dallas
Public Library for my first visit, which totally blew my mind. My mother had
the Modern Library Great Books collection at home, but I rarely read any. Being
set free to find my own books out of thousands was another story!
George showed me the philosophy/politics/sociology section,
where I quickly discovered Bertrand Russell, the British mathematician and
philosopher who wrote in a popular style that a high school student could
understand. Why I Am Not a Christian and In Praise of Idleness were
two of my favorites. Being awkward and shy with girls, I devoured his books, played
lots of chess, and started a high school chess club, my first organizing
project.
H.L. Mencken, the notorious, sarcastic columnist for the Baltimore
Sun, was George’s favorite. I too read lots of Mencken, who railed against
the stupidity of the “booboisie,” the ignorant middle class, and would
occasionally be racy, like when he intrigued me by saying he preferred
overweight women who had some meat on points “north, south, west, and east.”
Mencken led me to other iconoclasts like Ambrose Bierce, Tom Paine, and Ralph
Ingersoll.
The only essay I was ever assigned to write in high school –
yes, the only one (it was a terrible school) – I wrote on Voltaire, the
libertarian French satirist. But my favorite writers were Russell and Mencken,
When I first read Conscience of a Conservative by
Barry Goldwater during my sophomore year, I thought it was excellent Then I
read “The Case for Socialism,” an essay by Russell, who was an early vehement
critic of the Russian Revolution but favored democratic socialism of the sort
that became established in Great Britain and Scandinavia. So when I re-read
Goldwater’s book, I realized that when he talked about “freedom,” he was
talking primarily about unfettered freedom for Big Business and I disagreed
with his notion that private business should be able to do whatever they want
(regardless of the consequences).
My teachers were not impressed with my freethinking. None of
them ever encouraged me, with three subtle exceptions. One, a beautiful young
woman quietly let me know she was reading Anna Kareinna and suggested it
was somewhat scandalous. The chemistry teacher would play chess with me in his
lab when I skipped mandatory pep rallies (I’m still amazed he did that,
probably jeopardizing his job.) And the civics teacher was not shocked when a
fellow student told the whole class that I sat down during the Pledge to
Allegiance at the city auditorium when Ronald Reagan appeared on his General
Electric-sponsored speaking tour that catapulted him into his political career.
(I did not reject the Pledge, but rather how it was being used.)
The civics teacher may have been sympathetic to
nonconformists because he was gay. He took some of us male students to Austin
for the State basketball playoffs and he and some of the others carried on
behind closed doors in ways that puzzled me.
Dallas was dominated by the John Birch Society, the
precursor to the Tea Party that was also funded by the infamous Koch family.
The whole city was filled with John Birch Society billboards and tons of cars
sported their bumper stickers. (When Bob Dylan was invited to appear on the Ed
Sullivan Show, the top show on television, and sang “Talking the John Birch
Society Blues” during rehearsal, Sullivan ruled he couldn’t sing it and Dylan
walked out.)
One month before the Kennedy assassination, former
Democratic Presidential candidate and then United Nations ambassador Adlai
Stevenson appeared in Dallas and was jeered, jostled, hit by a sign, and spat
on, prompting him to warn President Kennedy not to go to Dallas. (After the
assassination, the local establishment became very concerned about the city’s
image and most of those bumper stickers quickly vanished.)
The same oppressive atmosphere permeated my high school. I
hated it and my teachers knew it, much to their displeasure.
The only thing I knew about the beats came from watching The
Many Loves of Dobie Gillis on TV, listening to the comedian Dave Gardner,
and reading Hugh Hefner’s “Playboy Philosophy.” But I identified with them and
wore my bathroom slippers, Native American-style moccasins, to school.
I challenged rules that seemed arbitrary, like having to
leave the cafeteria during lunch hour and not being able to cross an invisible
line when we went outside. And I would sit down rather than stand up to sing
the Fight Song during mandatory pep rallies (when I went) – even though I sat
on the second-to-last last row, the coaches stood right behind me, and I played
on the school’s baseball team.
But I never pushed it to the point of being overtly
punished. I had been “teacher’s pet” prior to high school, was very repressed
emotionally, and was basically a coward. The only fight I had ever gotten into
was when a student spectator ran onto the field during a soccer game and took
the ball from me when I was about to score a goal. I tried to mutilate him and
got taken to the principal’s office, where my hands were slapped severely with
a flat board.
My sophomore year in Speech class I gave two speeches. The
first was on “Why I Believe in Flying Saucers” (my mother’s influence). The
second, inspired by a C. Wright Mills book that I gave before the United States
drove Cuba into the arms of the Soviet Union after the revolution, was on “Why
I Like Fidel Castro.” Word surely circulated among the teachers.
On the first day of English Literature class, the teacher
told us to read the introduction to our textbook and write at least
three-fourths of a page about what we would like to have done if we had lived
in Medieval England. I read it, quickly wrote the required minimum declaring
there was absolutely nothing I could imagine liking about Medieval England, and
put down my pin, probably with a smirk on my face. The teacher said, “Are you
already finished, Mr. Hudson?” I said, “Yes.” She replied, “Well, I can see
what kind of grade you’re going to get.”
Later that year, when I spelled “there” “their,” or vice
versa, she gave me a poor grade and when I complained with tears in my eyes,
she said, “Well, in college if you do that, they will fail you.” I did in fact
get my worse grade ever in her class.
I believe it was a C, for I probably did get a few Bs.
Mostly however I got As without hardly ever studying. Normally I’d do my
homework at my desk while waiting for the tardy bell to ring and the teacher to
take roll. The anti-Communism course instructor, who also coached the
basketball team and taught history, clearly hated it when I scored 100 on his
tests.
Math was particularly easy. On the Preliminary Scholastic
Aptitude Test (PSAT), I answered every question correctly and scored in the top
1%. But my high school never assigned me to any honors courses, not even math,
probably because they did not like my demeanor. Perhaps my parents or I could
have requested that I be placed in an honors class. But I knew nothing about
it.
So when I went to Cal planning to major in Physics, I was
surprised to learn that I could not take the normal introductory Physics course
because I had not studied calculus in high school. (At the time, I was
disappointed, but on reflection, it may have been a stroke of good luck.)
Fortunately a clique of close friends helped me cope. In
addition to George, who scored 800 on both of his College Boards and went to
Harvard on a full scholarship, there was Terry Prince, who also scored two 800s
and went to MIT, Roland Cunningham, who went to Texas Tech and ended up in the
Seattle area, probably working for Boeing, and Mike Doughty, who became a
top-level social welfare administrator and college instructor. We would stay up
late smoking pipes and cigars, playing poker, and discussing life and
philosophy (though we never drank and knew nothing about drugs). As Bob Dylan
sang, “I wish, I wish, I wish in vain/That we could sit simply in that room
again”
South Oak Cliff High School had another small group of quiet
rebels who raced sports cars in a local shopping mall parking lot and listened
to jazz. I became friends with one, Gary Bishop, now an accomplished
photographer who after graduating finished second among Texas amateur racecar
drivers and once drove at Daytona. I’d go over to his house and help him with
his homework. Gary would also sit down during the Fight Song at pep rallies.
But he had to sit close to the stage and one day the principal noticed and
admonished him in front of the entire student body.
Gary lived on the “other side of
the tracks,” in what was probably only a middle-class house, but seemed like a
mansion to me. I lived in a tiny house, the first house my parents ever owned,
without my own bedroom, with seven people, including my two sisters and my
mother’s parents. (The neighborhood is now an African-American ghetto with a
house church in almost every block and my high school is now almost all Black
and Brown.) And he had a family who seemed to like each other. I enjoyed going
there.
Gary turned me on to jazz and Joan Baez. At home we only
listened to Frankie Lane, Johnny Cash, Johnny Mathis and such. Jazz and folk
were a whole new world and I loved it.
Throughout high school, I only had two dates. On one, we
went to hear the Modern Jazz Quartet on the campus of Southern Methodist
University. I felt like a grown up and cherished the concert. At the end, knowing nothing about the encore
tradition, as everyone was clapping I asked her if we should leave. She said
yes. Later I heard the quartet played a number of great encores and was
disappointed. I blamed her.
At night, I would often go for long walks alone and sit in
the swings at the nearby elementary school playground. After I had begun that
habit, I read in a text book a Ray Bradbury science-fiction short story that
was set in the future and featured a man who would walk alone at night while
looking at the windows of homes that glared with the light of televisions
inside where people were passively transfixed. Then an automated, driver-less
police car drove up, interrogated him, and arrested him for improper conduct.
(Is that the future for the Google car?) Like the character in the story, I
felt scandalous, a freak.
The only other item in that book I liked was “The Wasteland”
by T.S. Eliot. Sounded like Dallas to me!
George once suggested that we run
away from home. I was tempted, but decided against it. He did it anyway, but on
the first night, he called his mother from the edge of town and asked her to
come get him.
Some time later, he was selected
Dallas Optimist Club Boy of the Month and went down hill from there, as he
glimpsed a future of “success.” He joined the JROTC (Junior Reserve Officer
Training Corps), which struck me as strange. After graduation, we corresponded
some (he told me I should become an op-ed columnist). Then one night at
Roland’s house during Christmas break, we had a heated disagreement about the
Vietnam War (he approved) and we never communicated again. (The last I heard,
he worked for Mobil Oil and had his sights set on becoming CEO of one of the
nation’s ten largest corporations. For all I know, he succeeded. He was
“smarter” than I was, but I did beat him once in a citywide “numbers’ sense”
contest after secretly prepping for it).
When it came time to apply to college, we had to go to the
school counselor to get her recommendation. Terry said that when he went in,
she asked him, “Is it true that George is an atheist?” Terry lied through his
teeth and said no.
When I went in to see the counselor, I wanted to go to Rice
University in Houston to study physics. She started to check the highest
recommendation box but then noticed that the faculty had not selected me for
the National Junior Honor Society. She asked why, I told her I didn’t know, and
she left the office. After several minutes, she came back and checked the
second highest recommendation. I assume she found out that I had some
“character” issues. Rice rejected my application. (Thank God.)
This rejection prompted me to think back on that
anti-Communism course, during which the instructor played a documentary,
“Operation Abolition,” produced by the infamous House Un-American Activities
Committee (HUAC). The film included footage of a hearing the committee held in
the Supervisors’ Chambers at San Francisco City Hall in 1960. So many
protestors showed up to challenge the committee’s witch hunt the crowd
overflowed onto the steps of City Hall and the police swept them away with fire
hoses. The film’s narrator blamed the incident on agitators from the University
of California at Berkeley.
Recalling that scene, I decided UC Berkeley was just the
place for me and went to the downtown library to review the school’s catalog.
The Introduction began, “Renowned for its richness and diversity, the San
Francisco Bay Area….” That seemed like heaven to me!
After determining that my grades and College Board scores
automatically qualified me for admission, my mind was made up. Tuition was free
and I could work to make ends meet. The only task left was to persuade my
mother.
For many weeks we went back and forth. Even the basketball
coach/history teacher/anti-Communism instructor, who lived across the alley
right behind us, told her, “Let him go. Let him get it out of his system.”
Still she refused. She wanted me to stay close to home.
But I had an ace-in-the-hole: Father Tollifer. He was head
priest at an upper class Episcopal Church in North Dallas. Once one reaches
that level in the Episcopal Church, one is totally independent, like being
tenured faculty at a University. So he was able to get away with being a
totally eccentric spiritualist, including membership in the secretive
Rosicrucian Society.
My mother and her small circle of friends, all of whom were
women 40-50 years old, revered him. They were totally into the metaphysical
world, read Edgar Cayce religiously, would go to séances and such, and one of
them took LSD before I ever heard of it.
I liked Father Tollifer too. Mother would take me to his
Tuesday night lectures on topics like “The Soul,” “The Mind,” and “The Spirit.”
I didn’t agree with all of it, but it was far more interesting than anything I
heard in school. And challenging. He was clearly an intelligent, thoughtful,
nice person.
One night he casually mentioned that he thought prostitution
should be legalized. I passed that on to my clique at school and two of them
were discussing it in Honors English at the end of the school day when some
cheerleaders overheard them and became very agitated. The teacher asked them to
quiet down and stay after class to discuss it. I got wind of the controversy
and joined in the heated discussion, taking Father Tollifer’s side. So the good
priest spiced up my life and I appreciated it.
Knowing how much my mother adored him, I told her, “Look,
I’ll go talk to Father Tollifer and if he says I should stay in Texas, I’ll
stay in Texas. But if he says I should go to California, I’ll go to California.
Ok?” As I expected she accepted the gamble.
When I explained the situation to Father Tollifer, he immediately
said, “Go to California.” I replied, “But I don’t want to hurt my mother,” to
which he responded, “Son, it’s a question of your own integrity.” We talked
some more, I thanked him, and as I left, he asked me to go to the Rosicrucian
library in San Jose. I told him I would. (I never did.)
After reporting our conversation, my mother backed off.
Freedom was on the horizon.
(Later, while watching an interview with Frank Bardacke in
the documentary “Berkeley in the Sixties,” I learned that many other students
were inspired to go to Cal because of the film, “Operation Abolition.”)
I didn’t go to the high school graduation ceremony, or the
prom. The sooner I had nothing to do with South Oak Cliff High School, the
better. (Though the trauma did stick with me and for years I often thought
about going back there to teach in order to show them how it should be done.)
That summer, in addition to going to some coffee houses to
listen to folk music and going to the Unitarian Church to check them out, I
participated in a marvelous study group conducted by two students at Perkins
School of Theology. Our class valedictorian went to the same church as the
seminarians, who suggested the study group. She invited our little clique to
participate.
We read stuff like Plato, Freud, Marx, and most memorably,
“Coney Island of the Mind” by the beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. I had never
encountered any of that kind of material in high school. So it was a
stimulating summer and after the last gathering, the hosts served us mint
juleps, the first alcohol I ever drank. A fitting sendoff to college!
That adventure with alcohol prompted some of us to get some
six-packs and find a dark field to drink. Unfortunately, however, some small
round prickly balls got stuck on the bottom of my pants legs, so I got into big
trouble when I got home and Mother noticed. I didn’t care though. I was about
to be free.
The Greyhound bus ride to Berkeley was incredibly exciting.
I had never been out of the state of Texas since we moved there from Arkansas,
and had never been out of Arkansas before that, for our family never took
vacations. And on the bus, a young Latin American female student attracted a
number of boys, including myself. She spoke openly about sex in a way that was
very titillating. I was on my way to a new world!
Little did I know that I was about to encounter a hurricane
called “the Sixties” that would sweep me up and change me forever, for better
or worse.
