Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap. 22: At United Parcel Service and Queens College, 1969

Chapter 22: At United Parcel Service and Queens College, 1969 (ix)

Steve’s W.16th St. apartment had a bathtub in the kitchen. Howie and Jamie were the two High School Student Union activists who were going to move in with us. I had met Howie the previous spring, when I had picked up flyers and union newspapers from the High School Student Union’s communal apartment on the Upper West Side, for distribution at high schools on Staten Island.

Our only furniture in the W.16th St. apartment ended up being mattresses on the floor and a few pieces of furniture that we had each picked up from the garbage on the street. By the end of December 1969, Howie, Jamie, Steve and I had moved in; and by early January 1970 the place had become a Movement crash pad for about 20 former high school activists who had been repressed by high school authorities during the previous school year, but who were still members of Howie’s entourage. The telephone rang constantly, as the former high school activists kept telephoning from their parents’ apartments in Brooklyn, the Bronx and Queens to gossip with Howie or arrange to come into the City and stop by the W.16th St. apartment to trip, get stoned or drink.

It was somewhat sad to see how disillusioned with people most of the former high school activists of the previous year had become, as a result of their organizing attempts of the previous year. In 1968-69, they had sponsored political meetings, handed out leaflets in schools, put out underground newspapers, lived collectively, organized anti-war demos and strikes and been written about in the New York Times Magazine. By early 1970, however, most of their time was being spent tripping, drinking, getting high and trying to repair broken love relationships. Most of the disillusioned activists were being pressured by their parents to get back on the academic track and apply to college, yet they all already realized that the U.S. university system “sucked.” When demos and marches were held, they would all be there out on the street in a militant way and they identified strongly with Abbie and the other Chicago Conspiracy 8 Trial defendants. But they had become too discouraged by the previous year’s daily activism to attempt any day-to-day Movement organizing at the high schools they either still attended or had dropped out from.

The former High School Student Union activists (who were mostly from white middle-class backgrounds or had mostly been on the elite student track) realized U.S. society was rotten to the core, people in the U.S. weren’t really free and revolutionary change was needed. But they felt the approach of the SDS Regional Office staff of older activists to building the Movement (as exemplified by Nick) had been ageist in relation to high school students; and plagued by Marxist-Leninist sectarianism, “correct lineism” and “vanguarditis.” They also had nicknamed Mark in an unfavorable way (referring to him, irreverently, as “Mark Crudd"). Yet they were too discouraged and impatient to be able to collectively develop an alternative way of interesting the mass of New York City high school students in revolutionary politics, once their underground newspaper was not instantly successful in recruiting high school students to strike and shut down the public schools for more than a few days in 1968-69. But they also felt in early 1970 that the Weathermen were on a “crazy death-trip.”

Living at the W.16th St. apartment in January and February 1970, though, was like another constant pot party and it enabled me to meet many teenage activists and former teenage activists who were a few years younger than me, in a grass-smoking situation. The women high school activists were as intellectually interesting to converse with as the men high school activists; and there was always some disgust expressed by them at the ageist implications of statutory rape laws and birth control information dissemination practices.

Jamie was from a wealthy Manhattan prep-school background of divorced parents and had a cynical low-key personality. By early 1970, he was spending most of his time either reading underground newspapers, getting stoned or tripping to Grateful Dead music or hanging out with his woman friend, who still lived with her parents in Queens, but who would often spend the night at W.16th St. with Jamie.

Howie was an enthusiastic, jovial guy with an extremely comical personality. He wasn’t able, by this time, to accomplish much in the way of political organizing, because he was too busy having fun. But he was quite humorous and funny and had a charismatic personality. He lived his daily life in a spontaneous and adventurous way and always seemed to enjoy having an audience of people around him to entertain.

Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap. 22: At United Parcel Service and Queens College, 1969

Chapter 22: At United Parcel Service and Queens College, 1969 (viii)

After getting paid triple time for working on Thanksgiving at UPS, I decided to quit the job and give up my Jackson Heights room. My neighbors in the rooming house were very straight males—in terms of their orientation towards the 9-to-5 world—and were complaining about my guitar practicing and my playing of Supremes’ vinyl records on my portable phonograph. And I felt my job at UPS, while giving me a good sense of what factory work felt like and where blue-collar workers were at politically—was isolating me too much from Movement activists in the evenings.

In early December 1969, I began to crash in the living room of my parents’ smaller apartment in Fresh Meadows, Queens. They had moved to the smaller apartment in a slightly more affluent neighborhood, because they finally realized that my sister and I no longer needed to have bedrooms in their apartment anymore, because we had both left home. In the 1960s, the rent control laws made it easier for young people to live away from their parents during their 20s.

I was crashing in my parents’ apartment for only a few days when the TV news reported that Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, two leaders of the Illinois Black Panther Party, had been murdered in their beds by the Chicago cops. The next day, cops in Los Angeles stormed the BPP office there and shot it out with Panther activists, before making arrests. It appeared that the U.S. government had decided to escalate its war on the Black Panther Party—from the level of judicial frame-ups, arrests and random street shootouts in which over 25 Panthers were killed to an all-out campaign of orchestrated attacks on all Panther political action offices. It appeared that civil war between BPP-led Black ghetto masses and the U.S. government’s armed agents—which, during the summer, the Weather Statement had predicted was coming—was about to break out.

An anti-war demonstration was being held in the evening in Midtown Manhattan during the same week to protest the presence of Nixon at the Waldorf-Astoria. The “Dial-A-Demo” telephone answering machine announced the demonstration’s time and place. I traveled into Manhattan and joined a few thousand other protesters. People at the demo chanted “Avenge Fred Hampton! Avenge Fred Hampton!” A few demonstrators threw some rocks through store windows. The cops used the stone throwing as a pretext to charge into the crowd of demonstrators, clubs swinging, and to make some arrests. On the street while retreating from the cops, I bumped into a Movement guy named Steve, who worked as a film editor for Newsreel. I had met Steve during the summer, when he requested my assistance at his apartment for an afternoon, during his editing of a film on the Richmond College Social Change Commune that Karen of Newsreel was also working on.

Steve was a tall guy from rural Western Massachusetts who was more of a hippie-anarchist than a New Left politico. He lived in the Chelsea area of Manhattan, in a cheap apartment, but he was planning to move into a 4-room pad on W.16th St. and 8th Ave. with an even cheaper rent of $40 per month.

“What are you doing these days?” Steve asked.

“I’m looking for some Movement group to work with,” I replied.

Steve smiled. “Why not work with Newsreel? We need activists for our high school organizing caucus. I think you’d be good at organizing high school students.”

“I’d love to work with Newsreel. But I need to find an apartment to share. And once I find an apartment to share, I’ll have to get a straight job to pay my rent.”

Steve continued to smile. “I’m moving into this apartment where the rent is only $40, with some High School Student Union people. Why don’t you move in with us? Then you won’t have to get a 9-to-5 straight job and you can work as an organizer for Newsreel.”

I smiled. “That sounds great. When are you moving in?”

“In a few weeks. Why don’t we get together tomorrow at my place?”

“O.K. I’ll give you a call tomorrow.”

The next day I went into Manhattan and Steve showed me both his old run-down apartment and his cheaper new run-down apartment. On the way to the apartment to which we were going to move into, we stopped off at the local public school to pick up a Newsreel film that had been rented and screened by a 6th-grade special ed teacher. It turned out that the teacher was an anti-war guy I had known at Richmond College, who had gone into teaching in order to avoid the draft. He was attempting to teach his class in an experimental, free-school fashion. While we were in the classroom, he had Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are A-Changin’ album playing on the phonograph. But the eight students in the class appeared more interested in fooling around than listening to the Dylan record. And the anti-war teacher looked frustrated.

“A free-school, experimental approach doesn’t work in the public schools. The public school system is a mess,” he whispered to me glumly.

Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap. 22: At United Parcel Service and Queens College, 1969

Chapter 22: At United Parcel Service and Queens College, 1969 (vii)

In November 1969, there was another large anti-war demo scheduled for Washington, D.C. At a pre-demo planning meeting on the weekend before this mid-November mass gathering, I noticed Mark. The meeting was well-attended and was being held inside the Washington Square Methodist “Peace” Church. It was the first time I had noticed Mark since the early summer demonstration at JFK Airport which had greeted Nelson Rockefeller, following Rockefeller’s Latin American tour.

Mark really looked like a wild hippie now. His hair was longer than it had ever been and he was again bearded. He also now wore a cowboy hat and he seemed like he was stoned. Because Mark and the other Weatherman men had been beardless and short-haired only a month before, during the “Days of Rage,” at first I did not realize that Mark was attending this meeting, because I did not recognize him. Mark did not bother to speak at this meeting and, after observing the meeting briefly, Mark walked out in the middle of the meeting. So I did not get a chance to exchange thoughts with him at this time.

The November 1969 D.C. anti-war protest was attended by large numbers of both anti-imperialist youth and by youth who were simply anti-war. Weathermen with motorcycle helmets on their heads also showed up in D.C.

On a Friday night during this weekend, just before a Weatherman march from DuPont Circle to the South Vietnamese government’s embassy was scheduled to begin, I bumped into Nancy and Gus in a Movement center at George Washington University. Preparing for this demo in the same room, and wearing a motorcycle helmet, was Dave. Dave smiled at me in a friendly way. And, after he left the Movement center for the DuPont Circle Weather “kick ass” demo, Nancy rolled her eyes at me and grimaced; indicating that she felt that Dave and the other Weatherman had really flipped out by coming to D.C. with their helmets and their super-militancy.

A few minutes later, curious about what would happen when the Weathermen confronted the D.C. police at DuPont Circle in their Weather affinity groups, I left the Movement center and headed up toward DuPont Circle. When I got there, the D.C. cops had begun to use tear-gas and clubs on the anti-war demonstrators. Weather or Yippie affinity groups were either fleeing or regrouping on the various side streets that formed a spoke around DuPont Circle. As they retreated or regrouped, the Weather or Yippie affinity groups heaved rocks through store windows and then quickly ran to other streets in order to continue the nighttime trashing, in response to the D.C. cops breaking up a peaceful anti-war march before it was even able to start marching.

After a few hours of running away from clubbing D.C. cops and police cars which had sirens blaring—and trying to avoid inhaling too much of the air that was filled with the stench of tear gas—I ended up spending the night in a D.C. church; uncomfortably stretched out in a room crowded with sleeping anti-war demonstrators, between a church wall and a bohemian anti-war artsy woman in her late 20s.

The following morning, 500,000 anti-war demonstrators gathered on the grass near the Washington Monument to protest the War, while Nixon watched a football game and pretended to ignore the crowd. Less than 5 years before, only 30,000 anti-war demonstrators had gathered at this same spot, indicating to what degree the rising body count in Viet Nam had turned U.S. public opinion against the government’s war policy. Most of the 1969 demonstrators were white left-liberal middle-class youth who were neither consciously anti-imperialist nor militantly anti-racist. Most of the November 1969 anti-war crowd was still largely into the kind of hip capitalist pacifism that John Lennon had expressed in his “All We Are Saying, Is Give Peace A Chance” song, which the crowd sang in unison.

The Yippies and other hard-core Chicago 8 supporters were more radical and militant than either the white middle-class pacifist youth or the SWP and CP left-opportunists and peace movement bureaucrats who had organized the demo. The pacifist, SWP and CP bureaucrats acted like cops while marshalling the demo, in order to discourage any kind of spontaneous civil disobedience or militant street actions.

Dave Dellinger, however, managed to announce a post-rally militant march to protest the fascist repression that was being legally implemented at the Chicago 8 Conspiracy Trial, but which had not been mentioned by any of the day’s previous speechmakers. So, despite the opposition of the big rally’s marshals, about 10,000 of us started to march to the Justice Department building, demanding that Bobby Seale be free and the criminal conspiracy charges against the Chicago 8 be dropped.

After we had gathered outside the Justice Department building for about 5 minutes, chanting “Free Bobby Now! Free Bobby Now!”, the D.C. cops broke up our demo by shooting a heavy dose of tear gas on the crowd. People retreated rapidly from the building and, within a few hours, were heading back out of D.C. in buses or in cars. Once again, the limits of non-violent militant street protest were demonstrated. As long as we had no effective weapons to use against their tear gas, it did not matter how militant or how numerous we were in our political confrontations with the Warfare State on the street.

After the sun had been down for a few hours, I was offered a ride back to New York City by a young couple in love, a few blocks from the Capitol. A few weeks later, the guy mailed me a postcard saying that, as a result of our discussion in the car, he and his woman friend had decided not to postpone any longer splitting from their parents and moving down to Florida to set up house together.

People changed their lives rapidly in the ‘60s and people drifted into and out of each other’s life rapidly in the ‘60s, in a spontaneous, yet intense way. The combination of the immediate draft threat, the repression from the cops and being high on pot most of the time seemed to produce this readiness to make quick, spontaneous moves.

Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap. 22: At United Parcel Service and Queens College, 1969

Chapter 22: At United Parcel Service and Queens College, 1969 (vi)

In October 1969, the U.S. corporate media felt that the War in Viet Nam was now unwinnable. So when a non-Movement, non-radical white middle-class group called “The Viet Nam Moratorium” organized local anti-war demos at which Democratic Party politicians spoke in mid-October, the mass media provided pre-demo publicity. Like most Movement people in October 1969, I felt the main issue was imperialism, racism and the System that had let the immoral war last so long—not just the war. So although I welcomed the entrance en masse of liberal democratic people into the anti-war ranks, I did not trust all the Democratic Party politicians who began to jump on the anti-war bandwagon at this time.

In Manhattan, the Viet Nam Moratorium demo was well-attended, but dull and non-militant. Aside from Pete Seeger, none of the invited speakers or performers appealed to me as much as the speakers and performers who had been appearing for years at the previous anti-war rallies I had attended.

Around this time, I was getting lonesome for Helene, whom I hadn’t seen since I moved from Staten Island. So I spontaneously hopped on a subway from Jackson Heights and headed for the Staten Island Ferry terminal in Manhattan. When the ferry docked in Staten Island, I suddenly noticed a familiar-looking physical beauty standing next to me and smiling. It was Helene.

“You’re just the person I’ve been longing to see, Helene. I was hoping to meet you tonight. It must be cosmic,” I said with a giggle.

Helene laughed and invited me up to her new apartment, where she was now living with a different guy than she had been living with the previous spring. Her present boyfriend was away on a business trip within the record industry. Helene’s new apartment was a bus ride away from the ferry terminal and we spent the rest of the evening and early morning hours, after we arrived there, getting smashed together on Helene’s potent hashish, gossiping and feeling close again. I still was in love with Helene. But she still was not interested in getting involved with any New Left activist.

“People walking around with picket signs aren’t going to ever really change anything anymore in this country. Why waste your time trying to wake all these straight people up?” Helene said. Helene also joked with me about how some of the professors at Richmond College were now acting more like hippies and how a few married male professors there kept trying to seduce her. In tribute to Helene, I later wrote the “Open Up Your Eyes” song:

Open up your eyes
And eat my sweet candy
And hold me tight in darkness
And love me, fair Helene.

Oh, I was just a hobo
Trapped in poverty
But one day I spied you
I’m in love Helene.

Let me buy you ice cream
Fill your world with glee
People call me `stranger’’
Call me friend, Helene.

And I don’t want your money
Save your Aunt Tootsie
I just want to hug you
And be with you, Helene.

The Chicago 8 Conspiracy trial was getting daily coverage on all three TV networks during this time and Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin were able to turn it into a comedy show, after Black Panther Chairman Bobby Seale was bound and gagged and shipped off to New Haven for another trial on a trumped-up murder-conspiracy charge. The effect of the fascist way Bobby Seale was treated and the media coverage of the satirical antics of Abbie and Rubin was to increase, in a major way, the number of anti-war white youth who considered themselves radical; and who felt that the U.S., indeed, had a totalitarian political system.

Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap. 22: At United Parcel Service and Queens College, 1969

Chapter 22: At United Parcel Service and Queens College, 1969 (v)

As a Movement alternative to Weather, I had begun to consider working more closely with Newsreel. Newsreel’s strategy of focusing on using its films to raise off-campus mass consciousness rapidly and combat corporate mass media manipulation in order to speedily create the prerequisite mass off-campus consciousness necessary to make revolution, appeared to be more realistic than Weather’s off-campus exemplary action strategy. I visited Newsreel’s new office at 922 Seventh Ave. one late September morning on a weekday. The new office was a much larger loft than the previous W. 31st St. Newsreel office that I had visited during the summer, when I had arranged for Lynn to speak at Queens College. Florrie was still staffing the office as Newsreel’s office manager in late September 1969. And she still was friendly.

“I’d like a few film catalogues in order to distribute them among community organizations in Queens and perhaps interest some of them in setting up screenings of your films,” I said.

Florrie agreed to give me some Newsreel film catalogues. And after she gave them to me, she suddenly gave me a glance of curiosity and asked: “What do you do with your life?”

I gazed into her eyes and replied: “I work part-time at United Parcel Service in the evening. The rest of the time I do Movement organizing at Queens College and around the City.”

I wasn’t too successful in interesting community groups in screening Newsreel films out in Queens during October 1969. When I showed the catalogue of films to the Cantor of the synagogue where I had been bar-mitzvahed (which had an anti-war rabbi), for instance, the Cantor’s only comment was: “Why is there a picture of Fidel Castro on the cover? I don’t think we could show these films here.”

As the “Days of Rage” approached, I became apprehensive about what might happen to my old friends from Columbia SDS and I also began to feel that I should be out there in Chicago, after all, in some way. So I telephoned Scott, who was still living on the Upper West Side with his woman friend Carol.

Scott was planning to drive out to Chicago to observe the “Days of Rage” demo. But since he wasn’t compelled to work 9-to-5 yet at this time, he was planning to leave too early in the week to make it possible for me to drive out with him, without me having to sacrifice my UPS night job, at a time when I had no money saved. So, over the phone, both Scott and I agreed that, while it would be good for me to go out to Chicago, it was self-defeating for me to sacrifice my only source of income just to be there as an observer, unless I could get a ride later in the week. But I couldn’t find any other non-Weather Movement person who was driving out there later in the week. So I wasn’t able to show up in Chicago between October 8th and October 11th, 1969.

In New York City, during the ‘Days of Rage,” the news from Chicago was that the only people who had showed up for the Weather demo were the few hundred hard-core Movement people who had joined Weather; and that the Chicago cops had wounded some Weathermen with gunshots and brutalized or arrested many Weathermen, after windows were broken by Weatherdemonstrators. I was not surprised that few people ended up showing up for the Weather demo, but I was relieved when I heard that none of the Weathermen had been killed.

As an alternative for those Movement people who hadn’t gone to Chicago, Movement white radicals who weren’t Weathermen had planned a march in support of anti-war GI's at Fort Dix in New Jersey. Josie, the former Columbia SDS and New York Regional SDS organizer, had set up an anti-war coffeehouse near the army base and 38 GI's had been placed in the stockade at Fort Dix for protesting the War in Viet Nam. Around the time that the Weathermen were completing their Chicago protest, about 3,000 anti-war protesters took buses from New York City to Fort Dix.

To express our support for the jailed anti-war GI's, we started to march onto the grounds of the army base, after a rally in which folksinger Barbara Dane sang a number of anti-war songs in a spirited way. But a few minutes after we entered the army base, about 20 MPs fired tear gas at us. So, coughing and choking, the 3,000 of us quickly retreated from the Fort Dix army base grounds and marched back in a disorderly fashion to the waiting buses which would drive us back to New York City. The tear gas attack on us, which effectively denied us our first amendment right to assemble in an anti-war protest on the military base, reminded me, once again, that unless the Movement developed an effective way to resist the State’s violence against us, it would continue to be repressed whenever it sought to dissent beyond the Establishment’s legal limits and attempted to non-violently disrupt the System’s war machine.

Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap. 22: At United Parcel Service and Queens College, 1969

Chapter 22: At United Parcel Service and Queens College, 1969 (iv)

As the “Days of Rage” approached, I still didn’t rule out the possibility of going out to Chicago, though. A split-off faction of Weatherman, called Revolutionary Youth Movement II, was planning to hold a less militant demo in Chicago simultaneously with the Weatherman “kick ass” demo. Near the end of September, I attended a Newsreel film showing at Rutgers University's Newark campus, that was part of a radical student anti-war festival there. Florrie and Lynn turned out to be the Newsreel people who brought the films to be screened. After the film showing, Lynn gave a militant speech to the crowd of about 100 anti-war youths and urged people to come to the Chicago demo in a few weeks.

Although Lynn was not a member of the Weatherman group, her politics at this time were quite similar. Her line on anti-sexism, however, was much harder than the anti-sexist line at this time of Bernardine and the other Weatherwomen. Weatherwomen, such as “The Motor City Nine” (who successfully used their karate skills in a Detroit community college classroom to apparently gang up on two pro-war men students who tried to disrupt an anti-war movement recruiting speech), emphasized the importance of Movement women becoming physical feminists and as fierce physical fighters as Movement men. Lynn, however, stressed more the importance of Movement women fiercely fighting against the male chauvinism of men—inside and outside the Movement—and against male supremacy everywhere.

In early October 1969, a few days before the Chicago “Days of Rage” demo, I bumped into Harvey in front of the Washington Square “Peace” Church on W.4th St., where Newsreel was holding an all-day screening of its films.

Harvey was friendly at first when we met. Then his expression turned serious and he asked: “Are you going with us to Chicago, Bob?”

I shook my head and replied: “I’ve decided not to go. The pigs are too well-armed for us to be effective. I agree with the Panthers. It’s a suicidal trip.”

Harvey frowned. “You’re wrong, Bob. It’s the right strategy. We can’t use the same tactics we used at Columbia to build the Movement now. We have to put our bodies and our lives on the line—and fight—if we want to see a Revolution. We can’t hide behind our white skin privilege anymore. And we have to be ready to die, Bob.”

“I don’t think it’s going to accomplish anything without the Black community in Chicago and the Panthers supporting the demo, Harvey.”

“The Panthers have different strategic needs than we do. Unless we follow through on this demo and really bring the war home, we’ll be selling out the Vietnamese.”

I felt bad about not wanting to follow Harvey out to Chicago, although it still seemed morally justified, but politically illogical, to me. “Maybe you’re right, Harvey. But I just don’t believe it’s the place and time for me to risk my life. Most Movement people in New York aren’t going to join the Weather demo. At best, they’ll join the RYM II march,” I said.

“Most Movement people are bourgeois. We’re looking for militant working-class fighters, not middle-class talkers, now.”

“I doubt if many non-Movement working-class youth are going to go to Chicago either.”

“Well, even if our demo is small, we have to go through with it. We have a revolutionary obligation to fight as hard as the Vietnamese. And to risk our lives as much as the Vietnamese, as long as the war in Viet Nam continues.”

“I agree with you there, Harvey. But I’m not sure Chicago next week is the best place or time to risk our lives.”

“I’m right, Bob. And you’re wrong.”

Feeling further debate was useless, I wished Harvey luck at the demo and went inside the church to watch the Newsreel films.

Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap. 22: At United Parcel Service and Queens College, 1969

Chapter 22: At United Parcel Service and Queens College, 1969 (iii)

In early September 1969, I decided that I wanted to participate in the Weatherman Chicago action the next month and possibly join Weatherman. Although I had read in the (now-defunct) U.S. radical newsweekly Guardian that Mark, JJ and others had been involved in some physical fights with PL people (during the summer and at the Black Panther Party-called anti-fascist conference on the West Coast) that seemed politically counter-productive, I still felt politically close to the Weatherman tendency; and thought that many anti-war youths would turn up for the October 1969 “Days of Rage” demonstration in support of the Chicago Conspiracy 8. From my previous year’s organizing work on Staten Island, from living out in Queens again, from attending Queens College and from working at UPS, I realized that the political consciousness gap between the elite university campuses and the rest of white Amerika was quite great. But I still felt that the Weathermen could quickly eliminate this gap by an intensive organizing campaign in white working-class neighborhoods.

I had Nick’s telephone number in Queens, as a result of doing some work with him earlier in the summer at Frank’s White Suburbs Organizing Project Movement office in Douglaston. So I telephoned him in the morning one weekday and he gave me the address of the Richmond Hill house where he and the other Weathermen were living in Queens. It was agreed that I would stop by there later that day.

The Weathercollective’s apartment was located in a house, a block south of Jamaica Ave. After I walked up the stairs and entered the apartment I was greeted by Nick. In an adjacent room were other people from Columbia SDS: Josh and Linda, Ted, Dave and Dionne. All said hello to me in a friendly way. Naomi, from the New York SDS Regional Office, was also in the adjacent room and she walked over to me and touched me on the back in an affectionate way. The Weather apartment was furnished in a sparse way, with little furniture except for the mattresses which were on the floor. The apartment looked as sloppy as a typical Movement office: political literature was scattered around the floor and on a table.

Nick then escorted me into the front room to speak to me alone about what was being planned with regard to the next month’s Chicago anti-war action.

“This demonstration is going to be different than previous demos,” Nick warned me in a somber tone. “It’s going to be heavy. And some of us may have to die.”

Nick then explained that since the purpose of the October 1969 demonstration was to bring the war home, Weathermen were not going to wait to be attacked and brutalized by the cops before starting to fight or engaging in property destruction. Instead, the Weathermen were going to Chicago with the intention of materially supporting the Vietnamese people and the National Liberation Front by engaging in property destruction and, in an aggressive way, fighting off the Chicago cops if they attempted to make any arrests of anti-war demonstrators.

“The Movement has to fight more militantly against the War and against the pigs than it has in the past. And not meekly submit to arrest. It’s national chauvinist for us not to risk our lives to stop the War when our Vietnamese sisters and brothers are risking their lives each day against our common oppressors,” Nick said.

I then asked Nick how many people were expected to participate in the Weatherman’s October “Days of Rage.”

“We’re expecting 50,000,” Nick answered.

I felt skeptical that 50,000 white working-class anti-war youth or anti-war student youth were actually going to come to Chicago if it was being advertised as a “heavy,” “kick ass” demo. I then asked Nick what people were going to do if the Chicago cops responded to our increased militancy and increased willingness to fight back, by using tear gas or their guns.

“We’ll be prepared to keep fighting back,” Nick replied.

“This demo sounds different than what people are used to. It’s one thing for people to spontaneously defend themselves against police brutality, like at Columbia or at the Chicago Convention protests. But it’s another thing to announce in advance to people that the demo is going to be a street fight with better-armed cops,” I said.

“We have to prove that we’re not chicken-shit in order to make a revolution here. We have to show that white revolutionaries are prepared to fight as hard as Black revolutionaries and Vietnamese revolutionaries, and not hide behind our white skin privilege,” Nick retorted. (Ironically, by the 1980s Nick had become a white upper-middle-class professor on one of the campuses of the City University of New York).

I told Nick that I would think about going to the Chicago demo and would call him if I decided to go out there with Weatherman. I then smiled at Ted and Dave, as I waved goodbye to them, and left the apartment.

As I left the Richmond Hill house and walked back towards the subway station, I began to consider the prospects for success of the “Days of Rage” in Chicago. I respected the apparent willingness of the Weathermen to risk their lives at this demo, but I doubted that enough people would follow them out to Chicago to risk their lives against the better-armed Chicago police for the action to be effective. I felt the Weathermen were quite justified, morally, in attempting to bring the war home in solidarity with the Vietnamese and the Black Panther Party—especially since the Chicago 8 trial seemed to indicate that the right of free assembly was no longer going to be allowed for the New Left.

Yet I was not confident that the Weathermen could pull off the kind of militant action they were proposing with any degree of effectiveness unless the Chicago Black Panther Party was willing to work closely with them in organizing the “Days of Rage.” When word came down from Chicago that Fred Hampton and other Black Panther Party people were not fully supporting Weatherman’s “Days of Rage” plan because they considered the proposed action too suicidal and “Custeristic,” I felt more strongly that it was doomed to fail. So I was not prepared to risk my life with the Weathermen in October 1969, despite my past political ties and personal friendships with many of them, by following them to Chicago to fight cops and break windows--without Black Panther Party support in Chicago for such militancy.

Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap. 22: At United Parcel Service and Queens College, 1969

Chapter 22: At United Parcel Service and Queens College, 1969 (ii)

When I wasn’t outside doing political organizing or working at UPS, I practiced my folk singing in a more intense way again, after purchasing a Phil Ochs songbook. I also began to write folk songs and love songs more frequently again, around this time. I still saw myself, primarily, as a revolutionary activist. But I also once again began to think of myself as a folksinger in the Guthrie-Seeger-Ochs tradition.

On FM radio during July and August 1969 there had been much media hype about a “Festival of Life” rock concert which was to be held in Woodstock, New York, near Bob Dylan’s country retreat and mansion. The idea of holding a counter-cultural “Festival of Life” summer rock concert was ripped-off by hip capitalist businessmen from yippies like Abbie Hoffman. During the previous summer, Abbie and the other yippies had organized an anti-war “Festival of Life” free concert in Chicago’s Grant Park which attempted to unite hip rock culture with New Left politics, in order to bring the maximum number of anti-war youths to the Democratic National Convention protests. The hip capitalist organizers of the Woodstock rock concert took the idea of a festival of life summer rock event at which various counter-cultural bands would play, divorced the event from any connection with anti-capitalist New Left political protest overtones, and planned to charge a hefty admission fee for the weekend of music.

In the weeks before the Woodstock Rock Festival, Movement people and the underground press accused the hip capitalist rock promoters of being rip-off artists, for both ripping off the yippies’ festival of life idea and for not turning the concert into an admission-free youth cultural event. As a concession to Movement people and Movement groups, the hip capitalists agreed to let various Movement groups set up informational booths in the rear of the concert site.

Because it wasn’t being billed as a free concert and seemed to be being pushed and sanctioned by the U.S. corporate establishment media that I had come to hate, I didn’t bother to go up to the Woodstock rock festival. But I listened to news reports about it on my transistor radio, while I hiked around Queens that weekend.

A few days after the event, which was attended by 400,000 predominantly white hippie youths (most of whom were either tripping on acid or high on grass), I received a detailed description in the Queens College cafeteria of the four days, from a hippie guy I had known at Richmond College, who had driven up to the Woodstock event.

“The thing that amazed me most was being around so many people who were also tripping. And being with so many chicks who were unashamed to go naked with cats around them,” the hippie guy said.

The New Left Movement failed abysmally in politicizing many of the white youths who spent the four days stoned together at Woodstock—and Abbie Hoffman was not cheered by the audience when he tried to appeal to the crowd to remember John Sinclair (who was then in jail in Michigan for 10 years after being convicted for the possession of one joint of pot). But the myth of Woodstock became influential in the 1970s. That fact that so many hip young people would gather in peace and love, united by psychedelic drugs and music in a community that was more joyful and less alienating than the Death Culture of the 9-to-5 corporate world, was impressive.

What was also both impressive and surprising was the number of people who showed up at the Woodstock festival and who now identified as hippies. Unlike in the early 1960s, many more people now clearly identified themselves more as bohemian hippies than as political radicals. Because over a hundred thousand more people showed up than the hip capitalist rock promoters had anticipated, they were unable to implement their plan to charge a hefty admission fee and the rock festival turned into a free music festival after all. The rock promoters, however, were still able to make huge profits from ripping off the counter-culture--by successfully marketing the rights to the Woodstock movie and the Woodstock vinyl record album, over the course of the next year.

Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap. 22: At United Parcel Service and Queens College, 1969

Chapter 22: At United Parcel Service and Queens College, 1969 (i)

By early August 1969, I was desperate to leave my parents’ apartment for my own space again. I found myself a part-time evening job unloading trucks at United Parcel Service in Maspeth, Queens for $52 per week, sold my saxophone for $100 to a follower of Meher Baba to raise my security deposit and broker’s fee, and rented a furnished room in a Jackson Heights rooming house, near 37th Ave. and 74th St. Most of August was spent completing the last two courses I needed to graduate, hanging out at Queens College for a few hours in the afternoon, and unloading trucks at UPS at night.

During my last weeks of attending classes at Queens College, I met a woman student who dealt grass on campus and ended up smoking pot with her in her parents’ Mitchell Gardens apartment in Flushing one afternoon, when her parents were away on vacation. She was a hippie and bohemian and spirited, but she wasn’t at all interested in radical political organizing. Another woman student I met at Queens College around this time, named Martha, was interested in New Left politics. After she handed me a flyer one afternoon on campus, I ended up asking her for a weekend date. She was a divorced ex-hippie who had lived in San Francisco when married for a few years. Martha also was the daughter of an Old Left musician and his wife, and she now lived with her parents in a large high-rise apartment in Flushing’s Carlyle Towers.

Martha’s intellectualism and leftism interested me, and we had a good time taking a subway to Coney Island, hanging out on the beach, swimming together and riding the roller-coaster. For a few weeks it looked like we might become lovers. Our friendship ended, however, when Martha saw me handing out a leaflet on campus for a political group, the Mother Jones Caucus, that she felt was competing with the political sect that she was in at this time.

The Mother Jones Caucus was a small New Left political group that was started at Queens College in early September 1969 by a married bohemian couple named Chele and Gunner. Chele and Gunner lived together in a rent-controlled, run-down apartment on Great Jones St. on the Lower East Side. Gunner was a good-natured, unemployed carpenter who was also taking some courses at Queens College in Fall 1969. Chele was a strong, warm, vibrant, idealistic, liberated woman activist with long light-brown hair, who had grown up in California. She was also enrolled at Queens College in Fall 1969.

Chele, Gunner and I became fond of each other quickly because of our philosophical similarities. We were able to organize both a Queens College rally that built for a march in support of anti-war GIs at Fort Dix in New Jersey and a campus rally that protested a police attack on the Black Panther Party office in Corona-East Elmhurst, Queens (which had left one Black Panther Party activist wounded).

But by early November 1969, Chele, Gunner and I all began to feel that New Left organizing at a commuter school like Queens College was unable to produce many more New Left Movement recruits. Queens College students (unlike students who lived in college dormitories or their own off-campus apartments) were tied too closely to their parents, in whose apartments and homes they still lived, to be personally emancipated enough to join the Movement en masse. So the Mother Jones Caucus at Queens College became inactive after a few months. I still felt close to Chele and Gunner, though. They were the type of Movement people who would invite you to dinner at their apartment on a Saturday night, if you worked with them politically.

Aside from doing political organizing work by day at Queens College in Fall 1969 (after finishing my summer courses and receiving a Richmond College BA in the mail), I continued to work part-time unloading trucks at UPS. It was hard physical labor; and there was never a shortage of trucks to remove heavy boxes from and then place the boxes down on the rapidly moving conveyor belt. About 50% of the UPS unloaders, packers and sorters were African-Americans and a substantial number of all the workers were returning Viet Nam War veterans. While we toiled in factory-like conditions, a sound system throughout the UPS distribution center broadcast either rock music or the New York Mets baseball game (The Mets were in the 1969 pennant race and would go on to win the World Series, and there was intense UPS worker interest in their fate). “Honky Tonk Women,” sung by the Rolling Stones, was the hit song being played on the radio most at this time.

Nobody at UPS enjoyed their work during the night shift. But it became clear to me after the first week at United Parcel Service that neither the 1960s Black Liberation Movement nor the white New Left Movement had made much impact yet on the consciousness of UPS workers. There was no sense among the UPS workers that a Revolution in the U.S. was either approaching or practical; and the idea that socialism was preferable to capitalism was not being advocated by anybody else in the distribution center. Whenever I worked inside the UPS trucks, the world of Movement people--who talked as if a Black Panther Party-led Revolution was about to begin shortly in the U.S.--seemed to be a fantasy world. I had to keep reminding myself not to assume that all working-class people in the U.S. were as uninterested in Black Liberation politics in 1969 as my UPS co-workers.

Working at UPS each night from August 1969 to early December 1969 was quite exhausting at first and reinforced my gut hatred for the classist capitalist system, but it also enabled me to have my days free to organize at Queens College and elsewhere. After finishing college, I was at a loss at what exactly to do with my life. Since I would soon lose my student deferment, it seemed impossible and purposeless to make any long-range plans, until I figured out a way to beat the draft.

I considered going into the U.S. Army to organize, if drafted, because a GI resistance movement was developing. But I concluded that it was still more practical and important for me to resist being drafted.