At Berkeley in the Sixties: The Making of an Activist

24 Summer Session

24 Summer Session The second week in June, after the semester ended, Helen came to Berkeley to make sure that my house was left clean and to get her deposit back from Mrs. Roberts. She was in a foul mood, angry about my forthcoming trial and angry that I intended to complete my last fourteen units in summer school and earn my degree in August, a decision which would deprive her of seeing the traditional graduation ceremony. After a couple hours of cleaning house and enduring her growls, I left on a pretext. While I was gone, Allan stopped by and entered without knocking. We often left the door unlocked as burglaries were not common and there was usually someone in the house. I returned to see Helen chasing him out the door with a broom. Someone called the police. After the dust settled, Helen packed her car with my encyclopedia, hi-¤, and some other household stuff brought from Northridge the previous year and drove home. Helen should have been thankful that my second trial kept me in Berkeley; otherwise I would have gone to Mississippi for Freedom Summer . Only my obligation to appear for trial kept me from applying to COFO. Once I faced the fact that I could not go south in June, I began to think long term. I did not want to work for civil rights in the South for only a summer, I wanted to stay as long as necessary. I ¤gured I could afford to wait a couple more months and ¤nish my degree ¤rst. This plan was undermined by the loss of my campaign job and faded when I couldn’t ¤nd another one. UC charged tuition for summer sessions. I had paid for the ¤rst session but couldn’t afford to pay for the second or even for textbooks for the ¤rst one. Toni picked up temp work as a secretary while I did odd jobs such as store inventory and guinea pig in psych experiments . We scraped together enough for the second month’s rent, but not much more. Our food budget was, to put it mildly, meager. The need to economize challenged our cooking skills. Stale bread at twenty cents a loaf and lettuce at ten cents a head made lettuce sandwiches our staple. Our diet improved considerably when a passing friend suggested we scavenge in the bins behind the grocery stores. They throw lots of good stuff in there, she said. She was right; the bins were full of fruits and vegetables with only a few blemishes on them. We only had to wash them and cut out the rotten spots. Some of the things we found, like eggplant, I had never cooked before. Between the discount bread and regular nighttime scavenging trips we ate okay, except for protein. Toni and I created an informal competition over who would eat our “weekly meat” ¤rst. I got mine by arranging invitations to the co-op eating units, whose members could invite one guest a week to dinner. Toni got hers by getting her various boyfriends to take her out. She usually won our contest , but then she had to deal with the boys who generally expected her to sleep with them in exchange for her meals. After a while she just refused to answer the phone and insisted that I handle yesterday’s boyfriends . By the end of my second trial and the ¤rst summer session, I had had enough of school and of Berkeley. I chafed to be free of classes and desperately wanted to go to work in the South. I told everyone I was going to drop out and split. There was important work to be done; history was happening right under my feet and it wouldn’t wait until I could ¤nish school. That I did not do this is due solely to the personal intervention of James Townsend, the professor in charge of the Political Science Honors Program. This program allowed a small group of us to meet weekly for two years to discuss interesting books and ideas with one professor. It was a striking contrast to the impersonality that was typical of a Cal education. Professor Townsend heard I wanted to drop out and invited me to his home to discuss it. We talked for three hours. By the time I left, he had not only convinced me to stay in school but had suggested a suitable topic for my senior honors thesis (the...