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28 First Week of the Fall Semester
- Indiana University Press
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light, the curly-headed man awoke and in a groggy voice told me to come visit him. When I said “No thanks,” he growled, “Put out or get out.” I got out. He removed my suitcase from the trunk, and the taxis drove off, leaving me by the side of the road. It wasn’t too long before I got another ride, and this one did go all the way to Los Angeles. The driver left me at a gas station in North Hollywood around 2:00 a.m. on Sunday. I phoned home and told Helen where I was. A half-hour later her car pulled up. She was wearing a robe over her nightie and was only half awake. Saying nothing, she drove to Northridge and put me to bed. 28 First Week of the Fall Semester The day after Labor Day I returned to Berkeley. Allan was packing to leave for Ohio. My landlady had rented our ®oor to four students at double the summer rent. I had a week to ¤nd a place to live. I looked for another house and found three which I could have rented out for enough to cover my own room, but the landlords turned me down because I was only 19. Without my mother’s backing, my ¤nancial credibility was weak. Not that I was broke; from my button money I gave $50 to CORE, paid Allan my share of the cost of the buttons, and still had plenty for a¤rst month’s rent and the cleaning fee. I found a house at 1601 Milvia Street, northwest of the campus, for $215 a month. It was a trek from the student haunts on the south side, but I couldn’t afford to be picky. The owners had recently purchased it as an investment and were having trouble ¤nding tenants because one room was occupied by a little old lady whom they did not wish to evict; few students wanted to share their space with an adult. The ¤rst ®oor had two bedrooms with a bath in between on one side of a hallway and a 140 l At Berkeley in the Sixties living/dining room and kitchen on the other. Upstairs was another bath plus one large and three smaller rooms with sloping ceilings surrounding a central staircase. No one had to go through anyone else’s room to get to their own. I took the large bedroom downstairs that shared a bath with the other tenant and rented out the rooms upstairs. When fully occupied , the rooms paid $210 a month, reducing my living expenses to a manageable amount. My ¤rst housemate was Victoria Blickman, a junior from upper New Jersey who would become my political comrade for the year. The other roomers—mostly boys plus one couple—came and went over the months; some may have bonded at times, but I was never part of their group. Much more than the year before, I was just the landlady and house manager. The following week I registered for classes, paying the “incidental fee” of $120 for the semester. I took the minimum load of twelve units since I only needed eight to graduate and wanted time to write my senior honors thesis. At Bancroft and Telegraph, SLATE was selling the fall Supplement to the General Catalog, now grown to sixty-four pages stapled between a spiffy gray cover labeled “Volume II, Number I, Twenty-Five Cents.” Due to popular demand, we had enlarged our print run; this issue cost $1,850. Although I had little to do with its production beyond course evaluations, I was listed on the editorial staff, so I caught some of the ®ak that came from including “A Letter to Undergraduates” by Brad Cleaveland. Brad was one of those ex-students who were wedded to Berkeley. After graduating in 1959, he continued as a grad student until he received his M.A. in 1962 and was still around in 1964. Born in 1932 and raised in Washington, D.C., Brad had spent four years in the navy between high school and college, where he decided his calling was to be a Presbyterian minister. Brad went from religion to radical politics via the study of political science, serving as SLATE’s ¤rst treasurer and occasional inside agitator along the way. His many years in the classroom gave him a particular interest in reforming collegiate education. He thought classes and grades were oppressive. Son of a...