Sociology 1A

A Memoir of the Sixties

Part 1 of 2

 

Cleaning out a closet one day, you opened a box and there on the top of a stack of papers was your transcript from Merritt College in Oakland. You hadn’t seen it in forty years. You scanned the list of classes you completed and, lo and behold, there it was: Sociology 1A. And you could not help but smile at the memory of those hectic days long ago.

You remember the first night of class—was it fall semester ’68?—you were late as usual. You parked on Grove Street, a couple of blocks from the campus and took off on a flat-out sprint, just as you had so many nights before. You ran by the barbeque joint where an old Black man was standing outside, taking a smoke break, and he called to you Hey, Lickidysplit, you late for class again? Ha ha ha! Without breaking stride, you shouted back You got that right. See ya later. And he said Not if I see you first! Ha ha ha! The laughter followed you down the street and you promised yourself someday you’d stop there for barbeque because it smelled like heaven.

You bounded up the steps of the main building, up the staircase to the second floor and into the classroom. You grabbed a desk at the back of the class. The instructor was reading aloud from a text of some sort and twenty-some-odd students were hanging on every word. Is he reading from the textbook? you asked the guy sitting next to you. No, it’s a poem. I think he said it’s by Robinson Jeffers. You checked out the instructor. He was wearing a plaid wool shirt, jeans, motorcycle boots. Perched on his nose was a pair of round granny glasses. His hair was long and shaggy. He looked like John Lennon gone to seed. He finished with a line that said something about life crawling out of the primordial ooze onto dry land. He closed the book with a thump, then fake-stumbled off the desk where he’d been sitting and said Now that is heavy! The class gave him a round of applause.

You sat there wondering what the hell this had to do with sociology. The instructor launched into a discussion of the class syllabus and the text that was required. He said to buy it used; don’t waste money on the new edition. And in less than an hour, it was class dismissed. Maybe it was because you were tired, or stressed out with too many things to do, but you started to think about dropping this class. You were trying to take two classes a semester, but it was too much. You needed to drop a class and this one, with the John Lennon wannabe, was the prime candidate.

You started to go forward to speak to the instructor, but he was surrounded by eager students, most of them girls who thought he was way cute, and so you decided to give it one more week. You would see how the next class went and then you would decide. At least he was letting you out early and you could go home and read bedtime stories to your girls, maybe catch a catnap before heading to work at midnight. 

In a minute, you were down the stairs and back out on Grove Street.

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Ambition came to you late in life. At first you thought all you needed was a job, any job, to put food on the table and a roof over your head. And so, you got married and got that job and two beautiful daughters came along. And then you realized food on the table and a roof over your head wasn’t enough. You were working for bosses who were no smarter than you, but they had something you didn’t: a degree; the magical piece of paper that says you are an educated person. No, just a job was not enough. Not nearly enough. Plus, you wanted the world for your kids. So, you hatched a plan. Go back to school, finish your second year of college, do it on the cheap at a community college, make sure your classes were transferrable. You were working and living in the East Bay so Merritt College in Oakland would do just fine. Then you would transfer to Sacramento State College, move the family to Fair Oaks, take over a house there that your brother had offered to you. Your wife would work, you would work part-time, your mom would watch the kids. And in three years or so, with any luck, you’d be finished. You would be that educated person. There would be no stopping you. What a plan!

So there you were, working as a computer operator at Lawrence Radiation Lab—UC Berkeley, working the graveyard shift because it paid a fifteen percent differential, working part-time for Grodins Men’s Wear selling Florsheims in their shoe department, your wife earning extra money providing daycare for a working mom.

You didn’t know it then, but what you needed was a Plan B.

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Berkeley, California. The People’s Republic of Berkeley. Berserkeley. Scarborough Faire. Call it what you want, in the mid- to late-sixties it was an interesting place to be. You were hired at LRL Berkeley in the spring of 1965, just in time for the denouement of Mario Savio and the Free Speech Movement. He stood in Sproul Plaza and declared victory over the UC Administration and then said Hey, don’t leave yet. We’ve still got a war to stop. And so, the FSM morphed into the anti-Vietnam War movement and things went from interesting to radical.

There were nights driving to work when you got off the freeway at University Avenue and were greeted by a police barricade, an officer shining his flashlight in your face asking What’s your business here? You knew then that another demonstration had gone out of control. You remember the night you came to work and the guys on the evening shift described the helicopter that hovered over Sproul Plaza and dropped teargas to disburse the demonstrators. Then there was the night some radicals (terrorists?) bombed a tower on the power line feeding the Lab and you sat in the dark until dawn, the only light in the building coming from battery powered lanterns mounted on the walls, half of them inoperative due to neglect.

And down in Oakland, not far from the Merritt campus, was the headquarters of the Black Panther Party, where a couple of off-duty Oakland cops drove by and shot out the windows. The Black Panthers scared the hell out of you—then. It was only later that you and most of your friends read Soul on Ice and you all wore “Free Huey” buttons and Tom Wolfe coined the phrase radical chic. Thankfully, you were gone by the time the Symbionese Liberation Army showed up and kidnapped Patty Hearst.

The majority of students on campus wore the non-conformist uniform: faded jeans, boots or sandals, battered old shirts or sweaters (preferably black), long shaggy hair, and lots of facial hair. And those were the girls! (Just kidding.) But you weren’t part of that. You had other priorities. You had a family to support, and you had The Plan, and by God you were sticking to it.

May you live in interesting times. Is that a blessing or a curse?

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Sundays were beautiful. It was your day off. No work at LRL, no classes to attend, no shoes to sell—except during the Christmas season. Sundays were family days. You’d take the bicycles from the patio, buckle the kids into the seats mounted on the back and hit the streets of Alameda. You lived at the north end of the island, close to the Naval Air Station, but the city had a fine system of bike lanes and bike-friendly neighborhoods to ride in. Alameda was a small town set down in the middle of a teaming metropolis. Your favorite thing to do was to ride out past the Southshore Shopping Center to the beach that faced San Francisco Bay. The kids could play in the sand for hours while you kicked back with a book or enjoyed an adult conversation with your wife. Off to the northwest you had a great view of the Bay Bridge and the skyline of downtown San Francisco, a city that you’d always loved. And then you’d load the kids back onto the bikes and head for home, through the beautiful neighborhoods, wondering how much those homes were worth and if you could ever afford one.

Maybe it was something you could add to The Plan.

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The second class session of Sociology 1A wasn’t much better than the first. The instructor held forth, displaying his snappy sense of humor, soaking up all the laughter, and generally enjoying the spotlight the classroom afforded him. Again, you wondered what the hell this had to do with sociology and you were glad you hadn’t purchased the text. You made it through to the break without walking out. You approached Mr. Lennon and told him you had to drop the class and he began trying to talk you out of it. Hey, stick it out. It’s not going to be so bad. No papers to write. Whataya say? You told him you couldn’t do it and would he please just turn in a drop for you and finally, reluctantly, he agreed. He shook your hand and wished you well as you headed for the door.

That’s that you said to yourself. Yeah, right.

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Working at LRL was a good gig. The computer center, situated in the Admin building way up on the hill behind the Berkeley campus, supported the Physics Department and graduate students who were assigned to one of several groups. The physics groups were headed by some of the best-known scientists in the field of high-energy particle physics, men like Dr. Luis Alvarez. By the mid-sixties, there were six or seven Nobel laureates associated with the Lab.

The mission of the computer center was to process all the data collected in experiments conducted utilizing LRL’s Cyclotron (invented by Dr. Ernest Lawrence), a particle accelerator that sent beams of protons crashing into target mater and recorded the results when atoms split and sub-atomic particles went spinning off through a bubble chamber.

You also worked with the grad students as they learned to use the large-scale computer systems. They studied FORTRAN and other languages and wrote programs to perform dubious functions, all in the name of higher learning. You got a kick out of seeing the new students arrive each fall, neatly shaven and trimmed, wearing their sport coats and ties, their wingtip oxfords shined to a high gloss. You’d take bets on how long it would take them to don the Berkeley uniform: jeans, sandals, shaggy hair, beards. It didn’t take long—about three weeks, max. You wondered what their families thought when they went home for the holidays.

But it was a good gig. You worked with lots of great guys and the occasional great gal. (Let’s face it: sexism was still rampant in the job market.) There was Hugh, a hard worker and a true friend, an older version of you: in his early forties, married with two daughters, working two jobs to make ends meet. There was Roger B, a smart-mouthed, cocky kid, always fun, always funny. There was Brian, who spent most of his free time tracking down his pot connection; needless to say, a very mellow guy. There was Roger G, who had moved on from grass to LSD and was evangelical on the benefits of chemical mind-expansion.

On the graveyard shift, midnight to eight, things got very quiet around 3:00 a.m. You’d fire up the long jobs that processed all that experimental data and then do your best to stay awake. One good thing to do was to step out onto the balcony that looked out across the bay to the Golden Gate Bridge. God, what a view! It was ever-changing and you never tired of it. The best, the one you’ll never forget, was the full moon hanging over the north tower of the bridge, a river of yellow light streaming across the bay to the Berkeley shore. San Francisco was off to the left, with the Top of the Mark and the lighted elevator shaft that reached the Crown Room at the Fairmont perched high up on Nob Hill. Standing there, looking out across the bay, you were absolutely certain anything was possible.

Wasn’t that the way a guy in his mid-twenties was supposed to feel?

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Coming soon, Part 2. Did the instructor turn in the promised drop? How did The Plan work out? Watch this space for the chaotic conclusion.

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