College

My arrival in Berkeley in September ‘62 will forever be etched in my memory. Looking across the beautiful San Francisco Bay at Mount Tamalpais, getting off the Greyhound at San Pablo and University avenues, taking a local bus to Shattuck Avenue, and walking down to Virginia Street were memorable.

Most unforgettable, however, was walking up Virginia looking for the house where I had rented a room. Compared to Dallas, it was like navigating through a tropical jungle on a path that curved left and right with bushes, flowers and enormous trees everywhere. Walking past my address and having to double back twice caused concern. Then I found it, a duplex set back from the street, halfway hidden. How strange! Not like the straight, well-ordered housing in Dallas.

My landlady, Mrs. Brogden, welcomed me. She was renting two bedrooms where her children had slept before they went off to college. My room had two single beds and my roommate was a bit strange. He believed pro wrestling was authentic and loved to watch it. But my other roommate played the jazz trumpet, which intrigued me, and the house was only three blocks from campus. I was satisfied.

But I quickly encountered a problem. Mrs. Brogden’s son was still there and he wanted me to go out with him on a double date that night. I declined. He said his girl friend couldn’t go unless her girl friend also had a date, which puzzled me. I insisted I wanted to stay home. He became almost hysterical. I still refused, retreated to my room, and got settled. My top priority was to go hang out with the beats in North Beach.

My expedition across the Bay the next morning was incredibly exciting. North Beach felt like home. I wandered around and soon ended up in Mike’s Pool Hall, which had ten or more pool tables like in the movie “The Hustler.” No Minnesota Fats though.

After a while, still having a cheese sandwich that my mother had prepared for the trip, I walked up to the bar and asked for a glass of milk. The bartender said, “I don’t have any milk but I can sell you a glass of wine.” I started to tell him I was only eighteen, but caught myself, accepted his offer, and said to myself, “Welcome to San Francisco!”

The University was enormous, with. 35,000 students, but the campus, especially Strawberry Creek, was beautiful. After learning I couldn’t enter the introductory course for my Physics major because I hadn’t studied calculus in high school, I failed the “writing sample test” by a narrow margin and had to take a special non-credit course to boost my skills. The instructor loved crisp, short, clear sentences. His favorite model was Hiroshima by John Hersey. Failing that test was a blow to my ego, but it improved my writing. But equally important were the long, heartfelt letters to Mother that I frequently wrote.

Another wakeup call was discovering that, unlike in Dallas, I was a mediocre chess player. I found games on campus and had no chance. Mostly out of curiosity, next spring I went to a baseball workout, thinking I might try out. But I soon realized that was pointless. Having done amateur theater in Dallas the previous summer, I tried out for a Maxim Gorky play. But my Texas accent didn’t quite fit the role of a Russian!

Clearly, I was now in a whole new league. It was humbling.


Less than two months after I arrived in Berkeley, the Cuban Missile Crisis hit. Like most Americans, I was terrified and followed events closely. One night I stayed up late writing an unassigned essay for my Political Science class arguing that if the United States could have missiles in Turkey, I didn’t see why the Soviet Union couldn’t have them in Cuba. My teaching assistant liked what I wrote. Bertrand Russell’s campaign to “ban the bomb” had influenced my thinking.

Prior to the Cuban Missile Crisis, I’d been a strong supporter of President Kennedy. My grandfather had been excited by his campaign for Vice-President in 1956, which probably affected me. During the 1960 Presidential campaign, I found Arthur Schlesinger’s Kennedy or Nixon persuasive. And the Cal campus was still buzzing with excitement from a recent appearance by Kennedy at the Greek Theater.

But I disapproved of Kennedy risking a nuclear war for reasons I found unpersuasive. My faith in liberalism was shaken. It was only years later that I discovered that Kennedy averted war in large part by secretly promising to withdraw those missiles from Turkey that had struck me as so hypocritical.

The crisis quickened my interest in politics and I switched my major to political science. I wanted to become a professor of political theory.


Fortunately, I had made arrangements to eat my meals at Ridge House, a small student co-op between my residence and campus that was built by William Randolph Hearst as a summer home for one of his progeny. That setting provided a comforting sense of community, with about 40 male students who lived there and another 40 like myself who boarded. The presence of students from throughout the world was stimulating. The “richness and diversity” touted in the University catalogue proved true.

I immediately gravitated to Dave Robbins and Lyle Downing, two graduate students who had animated conversations about philosophical, political, and cultural issues. Mostly I listened. But when I voiced my agnostic doubts about the literal interpretation of the Bible that I had learned from my fundamentalist upbringing, Dave and Lyle weren’t shocked like people back in Dallas had been. Rather, they took it in stride and introduced me to modern existentialist theologians who re-interpreted those myths into contemporary language.

I’d usually sit with them at the dinner table where we’d continue the conversations. Once when the chair of the Education Committee came by to recruit tutors for underclassmen, he assumed I was a senior and asked me to be a tutor!

I quickly switched from chess to bridge. We’d play all night for money, drinking tea and coffee, take a break to eat breakfast, and continue.

An art history graduate student and I would solve the taxing Double-Crostic puzzle in the Saturday Review. He had esoteric knowledge and I had a logical mind. We complemented each other well.

My pickiness about food vanished. I ate what was served or I starved.

We’d have beer busts and “Dinner Date Dance” theme parties that served hard liquor. Walking home across the campus of the Pacific School of Religion, I’d urinate on the sidewalk out of contempt for their “solemn assemblies.” Once I woke up to discover that in the middle of the night, I’d neatly thrown up onto a clipboard lying on the floor, missing the carpet completely.

On the way to campus, there was a pizza parlor (in a dark beer garden set off the street that seemed like a sinful opium den to me), a donut shop, and an ice cream store. Combined with the alcohol, my thin frame began to expand.

Around the corner, across from campus, there was a coffee house that served all kinds of intriguing teas that were totally foreign to me. I ordered jasmine.

One night I went to hear the Vince Guaraldi jazz trio. I came back to Ridge House and said I’d liked the concert. Mike Romeo, a hipster from North Beach, said, “Yea, it was bitchin’.” Never having heard that expression before, I replied, “No, I liked it.” Mike explained that “bitchin’” was a positive term. He also loved to say, “Whatever’s right,” an expression of cultural relativism that challenged me.

Hearing Jewish jokes was new to me too. My cultural environment in Dallas was so homogenous I never heard them there.

My freshman Speech class instructor always utilized the Socratic Dialog. He’d pose probing questions to the students in the style of Socrates. I loved it, both listening and engaging. One day we went outside and sat on the benches in the Eucalyptus Grove to discuss the “Grand Inquisitor” chapter in The Brothers Karamasov. At one point, the instructor summarized the main character’s argument that God does not exist because if he did, he would not allow so much suffering. The instructor asked if anyone agreed with that argument. There was a long silence, after which I raised my hand. I felt like a minority of one on the hot seat. The instructor challenged my position, but I held my own and was proud that I had had the courage to raise my hand.

At the start of my sophomore year, I applied for a by-invitation-only inter-disciplinary American Studies course. Two of the instructors were professors of political theory, John Schaar and Sheldon Wolin, who later mentored Cornel West at Princeton. The course included three 15-person seminars, which involved extensive dialog with the professors. I went to the interview and was surprised and pleased when I was accepted.

The course proved to be traumatic. During the discussions, I was absolutely unable to utter a single word. The other students were much more well read than I was and they were quick with their comments. I was totally intimidated and insecure.

I compensated by working extra hard on my research papers and ended up getting a good grade. The main impact of the class, however, came from being assigned to read The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel by Albert Camus, two books that have had a lasting impact on me.

Before my junior year began , at the last minute Mrs. Brogden asked me to move out due to my involvement in the civil rights movement. My new room was far from campus. My father had reduced his financial support so I had to work more and took a job working in a cigar store on the corner of Telegraph and Bancroft where I had to stand up for long hours all cooped up in a claustrophobic three-by-three foot space.

I remained immersed in the civil rights movement, participating in a sit-in at an Oakland welfare office opposing forced workfare. Before the semester started, the University released their order prohibiting on-campus recruitment for off-campus political activity. It was clear the shit was going to hit the fan.

My political activity had caused my grades to plummet. It was becoming clear that my goal of becoming a college professor was unrealistic. My sense of identity was adrift. Down deep, I felt like I was in a no-win double bind. So one day I impulsively called Mother and asked if I could return home.

She said yes and one of those two seminary students who had led that post-graduation study group recommended that I apply for a job as an orderly at the county psychiatric ward. I did, and although employees were required to be 21 and I was only 20, they hired me.

The next semester I enrolled at Southern Methodist University. My clearest memory consists of sitting at the back of the classroom for the 8am Art History Class and looking forward over the heads of hair sticking up high in the air that the young women had managed to put together in the early morning. It was amazing. They must have awakened at six just to work on their hair. I never saw anything like that in Berkeley, even when Mrs. Brogden brought me to a painful event at the sorority where she was an adviser.

My best course was Contemporary Theology. We studied the process theology of Charles Hartshorne and read Martin Buber’s I and Thou, which has inspired me my whole life.

I also went to Austin for a weekend workshop led by a campus minister who had been to a workshop at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. The participants exchanged foot massages, which blew my mind, and did sensory awareness exercises, a Western form of meditation. It opened me up to the world of humanistic psychology.

After working at the mental hospital for several months, I spoke with the head of the unit, Dr. Bob Beavers, and his psychologist about my interest in a mental health career. They recommended that I focus on a Ph.D. in psychology rather than an M.D. So the next fall I returned to Cal and decided to pursue a Field Major in Social Sciences.

The psychology department there, however, was focused on quantitative research, which bored me. The only interesting course I took in that department was one on the psychology of religious experience, which was addressed in a sympathetic light.

I recall an inspiring sociology course taught by Ernest Becker. He once asked, “Have you ever really been touched?”

And I remember another professor of political theory, Norman Jacobsen, whom I really liked. We brought him to Ridge House for a seminar and he told us that rather than teach he’d really like to open a restaurant and develop it as a community center.

Mostly though, my college years are a blur, hidden behind a fog of sexual obsession, drug experimentation, rock-and-roll concerts, and political demonstrations.

When I returned to Cal, I moved into Ridge House, which I loved. Particularly comforting was the downstairs music room that we equipped with state-of-the-art speakers. I’d lie there on a couch in the dark for hours listening to Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and other soulful music.

I coached our softball team and was elected to most of the important leadership positions at the co-op, including President and House Manager. A Board of Directors oversaw all the co-ops, but each one was self-managed. Dinners were delivered from a central kitchen, we prepared our breakfast and lunch,  and we were responsible for maintenance and enforcing house rules. It was a valuable experience that led to a life-long interest in cooperatives.

My most brilliant act of leadership at Ridge House was the design and execution of a prank against the residents of our new neighbor, Ridge Project. During my year away, the co-op Board had built a new large, co-ed building right next to ours, with a connecting door. We resented the invasion. So I suggested that we store up hundreds of water balloons, lock all our doors, set off their fire alarm that would bring the residents into their courtyard for a supposed fire drill, and bomb them from above with our water balloons. The plan went off without a hitch. When they took cover under the connecting passageway, one of our members spontaneously pulled out our fire hose and thoroughly soaked them. They tried to retaliate, but our locked doors blocked them. After a while, they accepted the beauty of the prank and let it go.

Ridge Project did bring Allen Ginsberg, the beat poet, to speak there one night. Their living room was jammed. He came across as a very kind, gentle, intelligent person. A warm evening.

And I enjoyed sitting in their large living room getting aroused sexually by women who would get aroused by exposing their thighs and making eye contact. In fact, that was a favorite activity of mine all around campus. Short skirts were in fashion. High school girls in Dallas didn’t wear them, but they sure did at Cal. I’d sit in chairs and couches at the Student Union and the reading room in the Main Library and play games with exhibitionist girls who clearly were into it. I also played footsie in the library.

I never dated much though. One friend, a redhead from Arkansas, and I would study together at the library at the Pacific School of Religion. And somehow I met a Mills College student my senior year and had some platonic dates with her.

But the closest I came to real sex was during a sleepover retreat organized by the Quakers' campus ministry during my freshman year. One clear memory is of a heated informal discussion about corporeal punishment. About half of those who were engaged opposed the practice, which was a novel idea for me that I favored. Then at night, we slept in a row on a deck in sleeping bags and two or three couples noisily engaged in sexual intercourse. I found it hard to believe.

I had a few good friends. On holidays, Jerry Zellhoeffer would invite a few of us down to his family’s house in the Carmel Highlands, where we’d get stoned and listen to Donovan and other records in front of a fire. John Lowry and I engaged in passionate intellectual discussions. Tom Solinger and I would argue about how well Bob Dylan played the harmonica.

But mostly I was a loner. I went by myself to live theater in San Francisco, seeing wonderful plays like Under Milkwood by Dylan Thomas. More often I’d go hear all of the famous Sixties San Francisco rock bands at the Avalon Ballroom and the Fillmore Auditorium. I’d hang out on Haight Street and make fun of the people in the Grey Line tour buses that would come by and ogle at the hippies out the window. I went to the ecstatic Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park, which concluded with Allen Ginsberg chanting Om as the sun went down. And I participated in student strikes at San Francisco State and Cal as well as anti-war demonstrations.

So my grades suffered and I took a number of incompletes, which (fortunately) forced me to do another semester during the summer of 1967. During the spring semester, I got wind of an experimental program, a Residence College, that would be held that summer at a nearby student co-op, Cloyne Court. The basic idea is that there would be no required reading and no tests. About 100 students would design their own learning program and meet with instructors one-on-one and in small seminars. And everyone would automatically get 12 units credit, enough for me to graduate. I jumped at the opportunity.

At the outset, someone nominated me to be one of the Coordinators for the program. Two other students and I were elected as Co-coordinators.

Many students wasted their freedom. But I studied Coming of Age in America by Edgar Friedenberg, a sociologist, The Politics of Experience by Ronald Laing, a psychiatrist, and The Courage to Be by Paul Tillich, a theologian. At the end of the semester I wrote a paper on those three books and their similarities. Not a heavy workload, but a meaningful one. And informally at the co-op and elsewhere, I learned a great deal.

The most dramatic moment of the summer happened during a forum on civil rights. The panel included the charismatic, eloquent Ron Dellums, then a city council member and later a famous U.S. Congressperson. The event was compelling and then from the audience, sitting at the back, a young Black man spoke with great fury about police brutality in Oakland and the need to resist. He made a powerful impression. It was Huey P. Newton, co-founder of the Black Panther Party, who would eventually play a major role in my life.

The most exciting moment, however, came toward the end of the semester. Judy Wheeler, a New York-based research assistant for Charles Silberman, author of Crisis in Black and White, came to study our experiment. My fellow co-coordinators had resigned so it was left to me to welcome her and organize a discussion group. To facilitate the conversation, she bought a case of large jugs of Almaden wine. For us that was a step up. We were used to rot gut Red Mountain.

She was very attractive, charming, and 32 years old. After a fun conversation, I walked her across campus to her hotel. When we arrived, she warmly invited me to visit and stay in her Greenwich Village apartment in New York City. As soon as the semester was over, I hitchhiked my way east. As I exited the Holland Tunnel, I was standing up on the bed in a Volkswagen bus with a sunroof window yelling at the top of my lungs.

During the day, Judy would go to work and I wrote my first published essay, “An Evaluation of the Residence College,” for the UC Berkeley student newspaper. I worked hard on it and still like it. My perspective on life and education is still much the same.

At night, we’d explore the Village. Judy would treat me to some nice meals and famous places and tell me stories about New York, like hanging out with Miles Davis. And then we’d go to her apartment and fuck our brains out for two weeks. Being ten years older than me and well experienced, she provided a great introduction to the glories of sex.