Escape

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.