My Odyssey Through the Underground Press

Chapter 17: There’s a Place in the Sun

CHAPTER 17 There’s a Place in the Sun R edwood City and Palo Alto are, in a sense, the twin capitals of a small suburban metropolis known as the Mid-Peninsula, midway down the San Francisco Peninsula from San Francisco to San Jose, both much larger metropolises in themselves and with very different characters from each other. The Mid-Peninsula contains a little of each—some of the urbanity and worldliness of San Francisco, some of the provincial quality of San Jose, an old agricultural capital grown into a modern industrial center—as well as a distinct personality of its own, a blend of traditional and modern styles, several small cities jammed close together, each of which runs from the wetlands of San Francisco Bay through low-lying residential and commercial neighborhoods and up into the foothills of the adjoining Santa Cruz Mountains, with their history of redwood logging and rebellious individualism. Poor and rich, intellectual and working class, Anglo, black, Mexican, and occasional Asian communities intermingle in each of the cities. Stanford University, a world-class center of scientific and cultural research, sits square in the middle of all this, the legacy of robber-baron industrialist and one-time senator Leland Stanford. An enormous endowment of land and money dominates the area with shopping centers, industrial parks, research facilities, spin-off electronics industries, and traffic problems. As host community to Stanford, Palo Alto has always been somewhat overshadowed and underfunded by its famous guest, but during the 1960s and into the 1970s, the growth of the “Silicon Valley” electronics industry and the general prosperity of the area had been good to Palo Alto; a progressive city government had developed a wide range of city-funded services, and big portions of the foothills had been annexed into the city to provide for the possibility of continuing growth. Palo Alto during those days was also home to an innovative alternative-culture community , curiously scattered throughout the traditional downtown area and the surrounding neighborhoods with their more suburban character, with numerous outposts in the adjoining towns and the nearby rural, hilly areas. The Briarpatch Cooperative Auto Shop was just one of the unusual expressions of that community. The Whole Earth Catalog was being published in the adjoining town of Menlo Park, where a retail outlet, the Whole Earth Truck Store, was also located (an early source of environmentally sensitive new technology), along with 144 | Chapter 17 several related consulting and publishing ventures. Several consumer-operated food-buying cooperatives operated in the area, as did a string of community-based health services. The Briarpatch Network of alternative businesses linked these various enterprises together, and helped to promote a new philosophy of ecologically sound entrepreneurship. The Stanford campus had been a significant center of antiwar organizing; its onetime student body president David Harris became nationally famous when he burned his draft card, and later when he married folksinger Joan Baez and moved with her to a home among a group of rural communes in the Santa Cruz Mountain foothills above Palo Alto. Harris’s imprisonment for draft evasion, and Baez’s continuous performing and speaking in support of his cause brought national attention to the counterculture community of which they were a part. The leftist think tank Baez helped found and to a large degree supported, the Institute for the Study of Non-Violence, was located in an old house in downtown Palo Alto. The idea of “peace conversion” was born there when the local peace movement began asking the question: how can we redirect the “defense”-based economy toward something more useful? A couple of research and lobbying organizations formed around this issue, and a new monthly, community-based newspaper, the Grapevine, began publishing in June 1973. The Grapevine spoke for all the alternative communities of the Mid-Peninsula, with a bias toward leftist politics, small-scale economics, and do-it-yourself socialism. It contained lots of coverage of Third World anticolonial struggles. In format, it was a modest, even somewhat conservative tabloid. I began learning of all these developments when I developed a friendship with Bill Duncan, the manager of the cooperative auto shop, who was deeply involved in the community . Bill was very helpful to me in getting my truck-repair project under way—though not so helpful as to help me avoid a disaster the first time I started the new engine, which burned out almost immediately and had to be rebuilt again, to my great...