Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap. 11: Ted Gold and Dave Gilbert: Roommates, 1967

Chapter 11: Ted Gold and Dave Gilbert: Roommates, 1967 (ii)

A few days later, I also helped Dave move his stuff from an apartment on W. 110th St., between Amsterdam and Broadway, which he had sublet for the summer. I arrived in the afternoon. We talked for a few hours, while we waited for another friend of Dave to drop off the car and U-haul in which we were going to move his stuff.

As Dylan’s Blonde On Blonde album played on a stereo, Dave told me more about his past life, and discussed his current study of Das Kapital with me. He also gave his interpretation of Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization to me at this time. After talking about the Civil Rights Movement’s continued shift towards Black revolutionary nationalism, Dave mentioned that he used to have intense discussions with a Black woman activist in Harlem during the period when “we were all naïve about the political implications of inter-racial love affairs.”

A few moments later, Dave sang along with the chorus of Dylan’s Stuck Inside of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again song, where Dylan moans: “Oh, Mama! Can this really be the end?”

“Do you hear that pain, Bob? Dylan’s expressing the pain that you get when you realize that no matter where you go geographically under capitalism, you’re still going to end up feeling the same intense alienation and loneliness that the System produces everywhere,” Dave explained.

Dave, like everyone else around Columbia SDS, liked to spend time analyzing Dylan’s lyrics and philosophical shifts. Dave seemed to empathize more with Dylan’s shift away from his earlier, more politically radical-oriented albums than Ted did.

After the car and U-haul arrived, I helped lift chairs, a desk, drawers, boxes of books and a mattress from the apartment to the elevator, and then into the U-haul. When we had finished moving Dave’s furniture and boxes of books to our new apartment, we returned to the 110th St. apartment in the evening, where we found many people high, and dancing, at some kind of hip left party. I didn’t know any other people at this party, because most of the hip left people there were a few years out of college and not part of the Columbia SDS scene.

Dave introduced me to another New York SDS Regional Office activist at this party, named Joe, who Dave felt was “a hard worker and a dedicated guy.” Joe was blind in one eye and had a speech impediment, but he didn’t let his poor vision and speech impediment stop him from doing more than his share of the SDS Regional Office shitwork. Unlike most Movement activists, Joe lived with his parents.

A final Summer 1967 Columbia SDS steering committee meeting was held one afternoon in September at the Schneiders’ apartment. Ted and Trude, Teddy and Nancy, the Schneiders, Al and I were there. And, for the first time, a Columbia College student named Robby appeared at a summer steering committee meeting. During his 1966-67 freshman year, Robby had chosen not to be that politically active in Columbia SDS circles.

I had first met Robby in a parking lot that we used as a stickball field—inside the Beech Hills development in which I lived—during the 1950s; and he was, thus, an old childhood acquaintance. Robby’s parents were Old Left professionals. After we confronted the Marine recruiters in April 1967, Robby seemed to become less frivolous in his attitude towards life and more interested in radical New Left politics than in Columbia University academic life, although he had still remained outside the SDS steering committee’s inner circle discussion group.

Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap. 11: Ted Gold Dave Gilbert: Roommates, 1967

Chapter 11: Ted Gold and Dave Gilbert: Roommates, 1967 (i)

In late August and early September, Ted and I walked along Claremont Ave., ringing bells of superintendents and asking if there were any vacant apartments in the buildings. We didn’t find any vacancies.

Ted did not yet wish to move in with Trude. So Ted, Dave and I continued to search for a vacant 3-bedroom apartment, and it was a difficult task. Dave and Ted found a reasonably-priced apartment eventually and paid money to a broker on W. 72nd St. and Broadway to reserve the right to rent the apartment. But the broker played some kind of “bait and switch” game with Dave and Ted. The apartment suddenly became unavailable, and Dave and Ted lost $600 in broker’s fees, until they could win a court judgment against the broker.

In mid-September, with the help of Columbia’s Off-Campus Housing Office, Ted, Dave and I finally managed to find a run-down, vacant, 3-bedroom apartment on W. 94th St. Our landlady was a woman in her late 50s named Mrs. Grossman.

Ted and I dropped by the W. 93rd St. apartment of Ted’s parents, to pick up some of Ted’s extra books and records that he wished to drop off at our apartment. When I examined Ted’s bookcase there, it was interesting to notice that he had back-issues of the now-defunct muckraking Ramparts magazine from the early 1960s. I thumbed through some of these early issues, while Ted figured out which of his extra books and records to gather up.

I also noticed that Ted had a copy of Fleming’s The Origins of the Cold War, which argued that the Soviet Union wasn’t responsible for starting the Cold War after World War II. When Ted noticed that I was glancing at Fleming’s book, he smiled and said: “You know Fleming isn’t even a Marxist, but just a fairly conservative historian. Yet even he admits that the United States government was responsible for starting the Cold War.”

The apartment of Ted’s parents was furnished much like the apartments of those right-wing relatives of mine who owned small businesses or were accountants or insurance salesmen. Ted’s younger brother happened to be in the apartment and Ted said hello to him. But they exchanged few other words, before his brother went into his own room.

“He’s a good kid. But he’s not interested in radical politics at all,” Ted said with a shrug, as we walked back to our new apartment, carrying boxes of records and books. Trude then arrived at our new apartment a short while later, and the three of us walked across Broadway and up one block to W. 95th St. to the Thalia revival film house to see Humphrey Bogart in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

I visited the apartment of Ted’s parents a few more times that month, including one time during the evening. At this time, his mother was sitting with a group of three or four women friends or women relatives—who all appeared to be in their late 40s or early 50s—and they were chatting when we walked in. Everybody said hello to Ted with fondness in their voices when we entered the apartment for a few moments. But then the women quickly resumed their conversation, as we picked up more of Ted’s things and quietly left the apartment.

Around this time, I asked Ted how his parents first indicated to him that the United States was an imperialist society.

“My father explained to me how oil company interests determined U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East,” Ted replied.

After most of Ted’s stuff was moved into the apartment, his father came over on a Sunday afternoon with Ted and me, and he looked over the apartment. Ted and his father seemed to relate to each other as much in a brotherly way as in a father-son way. Ted’s father thought the apartment was over-priced, but he didn’t express any disapproval at Ted for moving from the dorms into his own apartment. Although Ted’s father was a doctor, on Sundays he dressed casually. He seemed youngish in his physical appearance and was a Maoist, but he wasn’t interested in having any extended political discussion with me and Ted at the apartment. He was just interested in checking out his son’s new living quarters.

One evening in mid-September, Ted drove his father’s car out to my parents’ apartment to help me move my guitar, some suitcases of clothes and some books into our new apartment. After loading my stuff in the trunk of his father’s car, Ted drove north towards the Whitestone Bridge, over the bridge and then across the Cross Bronx Expressway towards Upper Manhattan. A thunderstorm began as we approached Manhattan. The rain had stopped and the sky was clearing up, however, by the time we reached our apartment.

Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap. 10: The Viet Nam Summer of Love, 1967

Chapter 10: The Viet Nam Summer of Love, 1967 (vi)

Ted had spent early June with friends out in Berkeley and had let his hair grow long for awhile out there. Then he had returned to the Upper West Side for the rest of the summer in order to be a group counselor in Columbia’s white paternalistic “Double Discovery” program. In late July, I dropped by Ted’s dorm room in Furnald Hall to talk about his apartment hunt, and to turn on with him.

After starting the fan in his dorm window—to reduce the accumulation of smoke in the room—and filling up his pipe with some marijuana, Ted passed the pipe to me. We then each took turns holding a match over the pipe, as the other inhaled. Folk music and folk-rock music provided our background musical atmosphere.

After talking about the “adjust to a repressive society” politics of the psychiatric clinic I was working at, discussing Ted’s attempt to expose his “Double Discovery” group of high school students to the writings of Malcolm X, and exchanging thoughts about the organizational problems Viet Nam Summer organizers were having on the Upper West Side, Ted suddenly asked with a smile: “Have you heard the new Beatles’ album?”

“No. I still don’t like the Beatles too much. They’re boring, compared to trying to analyze Dylan lyrics,” I answered.

Ted laughed and replied: “That’s what I used to think, too. But the Beatles seem hipper in their new album.”

Ted then took the record out of the album jacket, lifted off the turntable the folk record that had been playing, and put on the turntable the new Beatles record. A few seconds later, for the first time, I heard the song lyrics:

“It was twenty years ago, today.
Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play…”

We kept smoking in the dorm room, as the record continued to play. Our time sense became distorted, as each 3 minutes of record time felt like 15 minutes. We were both giggling a lot by the time the song that began “I read the news today, oh boy” on the second side started. Laughing, Ted pointed out the skillful way the Beatles used sound effects to prolong the “I’d love to turn you on” phrase in the song.

I asked Ted if he had decided yet what he was going to do after his scheduled Spring 1968 graduation.

“I might go to grad school in London,” he answered with a shrug.

“Aren’t you tired of being in school?” I replied.

Ted shrugged again. “My mother wants me to go to grad school. And I think I could get a good recommendation from Professor Silver,” he said.

Columbia Professor of Sociology Silver was Ted’s favorite professor during his junior year. Ted then felt Silver was quite deep intellectually and quite decent, personally. In part, because of his admiration for Silver, Ted had decided to shift his academic major from mathematics to sociology. “Professor Silver has no family and seems like a lonely guy. But he really seems dedicated to his students. I’ve spent a lot of time talking with him in his office. And I feel very attracted to him, in a platonic way,” Ted had said earlier in the year.

Ted then asked me if I knew what I wanted to do after I graduated.

“Avoid the draft. Then go to Appalachia and organize poor whites for awhile. Then move someplace else and organize people there. I want to live in different cities in the U.S. after college for a few years. Not just live in one place and be stuck in just one job for 40 years, like my father. I want to work at many different kinds of jobs during my life,” I replied.

“You have post-scarcity consciousness. If we can make a revolution and gain control of the technology, people won’t be trapped in one city and in one career for their whole lives,” Ted said with a smile.

After awhile, Ted and I started to talk about Teddy.

“You know, I love Teddy a lot. But I think he’s stopped growing politically and intellectually,” Ted suddenly said.

I was surprised at this comment. I hadn’t yet noticed any particular change for the worse in Teddy, politically or intellectually.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“He doesn’t seem to want to think too deeply about political questions or read political books anymore. When I try to talk strategically with him, he just seems content to answer by rhetorically repeating some quotation he’s memorized from Mao or Che Guevara or Ho Chi Minh,” Ted answered.

“I haven’t noticed that. But he’s still a good speaker and has that great, warm personality. Everybody seems to like him,” I replied.

Ted laughed and retorted. “I know he’s a great talker. And, like I said, I still love him. But do you know? Teddy doesn’t know how to write a coherent leaflet. He can speak. But if he tries writing anything, it contains a lot of grammatical and spelling errors, and a lot of confused politics. Unless I write the leaflets myself this fall, the chapter will be in trouble.”

I laughed.

Ted also first mentioned to me at this time that he had fallen in love with a recent Barnard graduate named Trude. “She’s also a counselor in the Double Discovery program,” Ted noted.

After Ted introduced me to Trude later in the summer, Trude and I both thought it coincidental that when Trude was a senior at Broad Ripple High School in Indianapolis, I had been a sophomore there. In her senior year at Broad Ripple, Trude had been the yearbook editor and very active in high school journalism affairs. In New York City, by the time she had graduated from Barnard, Trude had become popular with leftist Columbia men because of her sweet personality, her gentleness, her intellectual seriousness and her increased surface beauty. She now dressed more bohemian than she had dressed in Indianapolis, wore blue jeans and let her long brown hair hang down.

Ted also indicated in this Furnald Hall dorm room discussion that he felt the African-American rebellions of the summer meant that the mass of African-American people had outgrown Martin Luther King’s pacifist political line and were moving in the direction Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael and SNCC had predicted people would move. “I’ve been doing a 15-minute political commentary show for WKCR this summer, explaining why the Black rebellions are justified,” Ted said.

Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap. 10: The Viet Nam Summer of Love, 1967

Chapter 10: The Viet Nam Summer of Love, 1967 (v)

In late July, Columbia SDS steering committee people started to meet in the Schneiders’ high-rise apartment on LaSalle St., a few blocks from Columbia’s campus. Meetings were held in the evening during the week, on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. Political strategy for the coming 67-68 school year was discussed. At one of the meetings, Katie and a male student activist, both from Princeton SDS, participated in the strategic discussion with us. We talked about our experiences in attempting to mobilize students in opposition to both Princeton and Columbia’s Institute for Defense Analyses connections and both Princeton and Columbia’s performance of Pentagon-sponsored research and weapons development activity on campus. Katie was a good-natured, serious intellectual activist who seemed to know almost as much about U.S. university ties to the Pentagon as Mike Klare knew.

Nearly all the people attending the informal summer Columbia SDS steering committee meetings were “Praxis Axis” people. Teddy, Nancy, Ted, the Schneiders, Harvey, Evansohn, a grad student from Boston named Al and I were among the people meeting. I brought research about IDA’s involvement in “Project Agile”—which directly related to weapons research for Viet Nam War operational activity—to one of the meetings. I also listened to much theoretical discussion about New Left political strategy and SDS chapter internal organization and education. Peter Schneider, Teddy and Ted, especially, seemed to feel that too great a gap existed between the political consciousness level of Columbia SDS’s leadership and its rank-and-file’s political consciousness level. Each felt that in the 67-68 academic year a special effort should be made to involve rank-and-file members in smaller groups, to maximize their participation in SDS chapter activity.

In Summer 1967, Monthly Review published an English translation of Regis Debray’s Revolution In The Revolution, which argued in support of Che Guevara’s “foci theory of revolution.” Near the end of the summer, SDS Regional organizer Halliwell appeared at one meeting to make the case for applying Regis Debray’s theory of “mobile tactics” to Columbia University conditions, with Columbia SDS acting as the non-violent equivalent of Che’s “guerrilla foci group.” According to Halliwell’s analogy, the mass of Columbia students, like the mass of Latin American peasants, could only be aroused if Columbia SDS developed the capacity to act on an off-campus level as a mobile guerrilla foci at anti-war demonstrations. In Halliwell’s view, Columbia SDS should continue to use its usual educational methods to persuade future members of the new working-class—the mass of Columbia University student “peasants”—to become off-campus mobile demonstrators who pushed the U.S. anti-war movement “from protest to resistance,” by their mobile tactics.

Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap. 10: The Viet Nam Summer of Love, 1967

Chapter 10: The Viet Nam Summer of Love, 1967 (iv)

During some political discussion in his apartment during the academic year, Teddy had mentioned that he “didn’t believe in shrinks” and that “friends should help each other solve their personal emotional problems.” At the time I heard Teddy make this statement I had nodded in agreement, because this was my feeling, too. And experience observing shrinks at the clinic had confirmed my view that friends were preferable to shrinks when it came to having someone to talk over your emotional problems.

So I wrote Teddy a note and asked if I could talk with him about my emotional problems. After receiving my letter, Teddy telephoned me.

“I got your letter. When do you want to get together?” Teddy asked.

I agreed to meet him in the evening at his apartment, later that week. When I got to Teddy’s apartment, I felt somewhat awkward. But I also felt relieved that he was kind enough to attempt to help me with my emotional problems. My love for Teddy was as strong as it would ever be, and I trusted him fully. He seemed like the best friend any person could have.

Teddy answered the door and looked concerned as he invited me into his apartment. Nancy was also in the apartment at the time, looking as beautiful as ever, but also looking concerned and uneasy as she said “hello.” Then, after a minute or two of small talk, Teddy and I left the apartment to go for a walk across campus and into Riverside Park. As we walked towards Riverside Park, I opened up myself emotionally to Teddy and he seemed very understanding.

“You have Nancy to love. And that makes life worth living. I can’t seem to find anyone to love. And without love, New Left politics gets to be emotionally empty after awhile,” I said sadly.

Teddy tried to cheer me up. “Being with Nancy doesn’t solve everything. The System is still enslaving and totalitarian and encourages sexual repression and alienation. But political activism can sometimes help overcome feelings of emotional alienation from everybody,” Teddy replied.

“But do you really think New Left activism can create a new ideal society? Won’t there always be people like Hitler and other frustrated artists who will be dissatisfied, even under a socialist society?” I asked.

“They’re building a new society in China and overcoming bourgeois artistic elitism and elitist intellectualism with their cultural revolution. And they’re creating a new man in Cuba. We can do the same in the United States…Although not all personal problems can be solved immediately by revolution,” Teddy answered.

We continued to talk about the need to change society and the human obstacles to building a new world in the United States, as we walked in Riverside Park. Then it started to get dark and we headed back towards Broadway and Columbia’s campus.

By the middle of my walk with Teddy, I began to realize that, although it felt good to talk about my feelings of emotional emptiness and loneliness with Teddy and he proved to be a kind listener, Teddy could provide me with no easy solutions. I would have to learn to live with my loneliness, but not let my emotional loneliness interfere with my ability to work politically to build a New Left radical movement that would strike at the sociological sources of my personal unhappiness.

On the Upper West Side, Columbia SDS activists who remained in Manhattan were taking part in “Viet Nam Summer.” Patterned after the “Mississippi Summer” of 1964, “Viet Nam Summer” was a nationwide student anti-war campaign to raise off-campus consciousness about what was going on in Viet Nam. SDS activists around Columbia set up tables on the sidewalks and canvassed Upper West Side apartment buildings. Some other Columbia SDS activists, like Mark, spent a good part of the summer out in California’s Bay Area, where Haight-Ashbury was experiencing its ‘Summer of Love.”

But the “Summer of Love” was also another “long, hot summer” in the African-American ghettoes of the United States. Black mass rebellions, generally triggered by acts of white police brutality, took place in Tampa, Cincinnati, Atlanta, Newark, Plainfield, NJ, Detroit and other U.S. cities. In the Newark Rebellion, at least 21 African-American civilians were shot down by police and National Guard soldiers. In the Detroit Rebellion, at least 33 African-American civilians were also killed by police officers or National Guard soldiers.

Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap. 10: The Viet Nam Summer of Love, 1967

Chapter 10: The Viet Nam Summer of Love, 1967 (iii)

I tried to link up with anti-war people in Queens on the weekends. But in July and August 1967 there still wasn’t that much of a peace movement out there. PL people in Queens were collecting signatures on Roosevelt Ave. in Flushing for a petition which called for an anti-war referendum to be placed on the New York City election ballot in November. After I signed their anti-war petition, they invited me to a meeting at their anti-war committee’s office in Jamaica, near Sutphin Blvd. and Hillside Ave. Because I still felt a moral and political responsibility, and a personal urgency, to continue doing New Left political work during the “summer of love” in 1967, I showed up at their meeting in the evening.

The meeting was chaired by an intellectual woman who seemed to be in her early 30s and who wore a dress and used lipstick. Her last name was Silberman. She had run unsuccessfully as an independent anti-war Congressional candidate in Queens. Her husband was a radical professor at Queensborough Community College.

Three younger PL men activists and one younger woman activist, who also seemed to be college students, attended the meeting in Jamaica with me. All of us were white. For about 1 ½ hours we discussed possible strategies for increasing anti-war feeling in Queens that summer and raising consciousness about the Viet Nam War. But whenever I suggested doing anything other than working on the PL-conceived anti-war referendum petition campaign—like demonstrating in a creative way outside a draft board or trying to hold a big anti-war rally—all the others at the meeting would take turns speaking for 5 minutes and repeating almost identical arguments as to why a Summer 1967 petition campaign was the best way to reach the working-class in Queens with anti-war ideas. I decided not to attend the meeting the following week.

I also spent an evening during the summer attending a meeting in Queens which was addressed by two National Guardian editors, including Jane McManus, at some peace group meeting place near Jamaica. About fifteen other National Guardian readers attended the meeting. Most of them were Old Left, CP drop-outs in their late 40s, 50s or 60s. I can’t recall much about what was said at the meeting, except that it stressed how criminal was the U.S. involvement in Viet Nam, that the problem of U.S. imperialism was deeper than the war and could only be eliminated by establishing socialism, and that there was a continued need for an independent radical newsweekly like the National Guardian [which later changed its name to the Guardian]. I received a lift to my parents’ apartment from a man and woman couple in their late 40s or early 50s, who both talked politics with me in the car. They both seemed to feel quite politically isolated in Queens, despite their National Guardian subscription, and they both seemed much less optimistic about the prospects for a New Left-led revolution than I was.

On an emotional level, I started to feel overwhelmed, myself, by feelings of alienation, misery and loneliness by July 1967. On most summer evenings and on weekends, I began to feel completely loveless and emotionally hung-up.

Out in Queens, I had lost contact with everyone I had grown up with or had known at Flushing High School. Aside from Llewellyn, no one interested me enough at the clinic for me to consider going out with socially. Meeting people on the street in a spontaneous way seemed impossible and none of the bars around Queens seemed to attract my type of people. I felt completely isolated.

My parents both felt I was too deeply into New Left politics. My mother thought that SDS activism was nothing more than a poor substitute for not finding myself a steady Barnard woman friend, preferably of Jewish background. I ate with my parents after work, but either went outside after dinner or kept to myself in my room, while they watched TV in the living room.

I felt desperate for love and for companionship and for community. I felt personally fucked-up because I couldn’t seem to develop a sustained love relationship with any woman. I missed talking with and seeing Teddy and Nancy every few days. I missed the upper-middle-class intellectual leftist youth/student community scene on the Upper West Side, which seemed more emotionally, morally and politically alive than the dead suburban-type affluent working-class neighborhood in which my parents lived. I had risen out of my class somewhat and become part of an upper-middle-class left community. Now I found it impossible to fit back emotionally into the affluent working-class family scene I was now compelled by economic circumstances to drop back down into.

I nearly fell apart emotionally. I was almost paralyzed by loneliness and emotional depression. I now found my songwriting and writing to be as emotionally empty and meaningless as my academic work had been. I the absence of a sustained love relationship with a woman, life on earth seemed totally meaningless when I was unable to engage in daily radical political activism. I felt I needed somebody to talk to about my emotional turmoil.

I also found it difficult adjusting to life in Queens that summer because I suddenly didn’t have ready access to pot when living in my parents’ apartment.

Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap. 10: The Viet Nam Summer of Love, 1967

Chapter 10: The Viet Nam Summer of Love, 1967 (ii)

Failing to find a summer factory job in Queens, I ended up seeking another NYC Urban Corps work-study job, through Columbia’s Placement Office at Dodge Hall. I returned to the campus for my summer job placement interview dressed in a sport jacket, dress shirt and tie. I wore sunglasses, because I felt strange walking around Columbia again while dressed so straight, and hoped to not bump into anyone around campus who would recognize me.

I noticed that Columbia SDS had set up an anti-war table on Low Plaza, and that a fairly large group of summer school students were gathered around it, debating the war in Viet Nam. Before going up to the Columbia Placement Office, I decided to surreptitiously stop by at the SDS table and listen in on the debate. After listening for a few minutes to the debate, I heard Teddy’s voice, suddenly, exclaim with a laugh: “Bob! What happened to you? Why is your hair so short? Why are you so dressed up?”

“I’m still hunting for a summer job,” I replied.

Teddy then mentioned that Harvey had a good summer job that summer in which he could do whatever he wanted all day, as long as he went to a sympathetic professor’s office at the end of the week and signed his time-sheet accurately. I laughed, but felt some envy that both Teddy and Harvey seemed financially able to afford to spend the summer around Columbia’s campus, without having to go home and live with their parents and work off-campus like I was required to do.

During the academic year, though, Teddy, even as Columbia SDS chairman, had to hold a work-study job all year-long to support himself, unlike Mark or I. Teddy’s work-study job was being a “study-hall monitor” in Carmen Hall a few evenings a week. Being a “study-hall monitor,” in practice, meant that Teddy would sit next to Nancy at a desk, while they both studied in front of whichever Carmen Hall students were using the dorm study hall on that particular night, and would make sure no group of students made too much noise in the study hall room.

After saying goodbye to Teddy, I marched up to Columbia’s Placement Office to secure my Urban Corps summer job. The work-study job I was placed in was in the psychiatric clinic at Queens General Hospital, between Union Turnpike and Grand Central Parkway and 164th St. and Parsons Blvd. The supervisor at the psychiatric clinic was Mr. Crosby, an African-American who seemed to be left-liberal in his political views.

“You’ll be doing some intake work and some writing of social histories. But most of your work will be helping out on the clerical side, answering phones, making appointments and relieving our receptionist,” Crosby said to me on the first day I started work at the clinic. “You may not be experienced enough to satisfy some of the patients or patient families you speak to or to be able to help them with their personal problems. But just do the best you can…And if you need help, don’t ever be afraid to come into my office and ask for assistance.”

I worked at the psychiatric clinic from mid-June to mid-September 1967 at $90/week, Monday through Friday. One night a week, I worked until 8 p.m. As far as jobs went, this Social Worker Assistant job was a much more fulfilling job than my UM&M clerical job had been, and it was more stimulating than my assistant teacher/day care center jobs of the summer of 1966 had been. But compared to being a New Left activist at Columbia, my social worker assistant job seemed less fulfilling. To function adequately as a social worker assistant, I had to block out of my mind the reality of the Viet Nam War.

At the clinic, I was able to converse with two other African-Americans besides Mr. Crosby and the African-American patients (who made up about one-half of all clinic patients). On the evenings I worked late, a good-natured, jovial nurse named Mrs. Powell would come to supervise the clinic and sit at the reception desk with me. In-between answering patient questions on the phone or in-person, she would share with me her latest insights into the scene at Queens General Hospital. She was well-liked by all the patients because she was a hard-worker, kind, had a big-hearted, warm, funny personality, was a great conversationalist and had a wealth of experience in hospital work.

And then there was beautiful Llewellyn, the clinic clerk-typist who registered patients and typed up forms and cards all day and answered phones. She was so good-natured, warm and sweet that I wrote her a song in the middle of the summer called Beautiful Llewellyn. Each day Llewellyn must have smoked a pack of cigarettes. [In the 1960s, cigarette smokers were allowed to smoke at their workplace desks]. And while she smoked, we conversed with each other whenever I was needed to join her in doing some of the clerical work of the clinic. Llewellyn was around 20 and was from South Jamaica. We made each other laugh easily and, by the middle of the summer, I was quite fond of her. I didn’t ask her out, though, because, by Summer 1967, inter-racial love affairs were frowned upon in Black Liberation Movement circles.

“I’m going to miss you, Bob. I’m going to miss you not being here,” Llewellyn said with tears in her eyes in the back of the clinic, right before I kissed her goodbye and hugged her on my last afternoon of work at the clinic. I felt like crying for an instant as I hugged her goodbye. I then quickly walked to the front of the clinic and out of Queens General Hospital for the last time that summer.

Work at the psychiatric clinic gave me other memories: patients who threatened suicide over the phone and who were then given emergency appointments with the shrinks; interviews with parents, whose teenage daughter preferred hanging out with hippies in Greenwich Village in the evening, to sitting with them in front of the TV set in their living room; taking a suicidal, depressed, unhappy wife to Creedmoor’s admissions office on a 30-day voluntary stay; interviewing an African-American bus driver with a perfectly healthy and emotionally sane teenage son, who was being seen at the clinic only because a racist white teacher in junior high school had labeled the son “disturbed” for not being interested in mathematics; patients who had spent years isolated in various mental hospitals around the U.S.A. and were coming to the clinic because they couldn’t get hired for jobs, once their mental hospitalization history was mentioned to prospective employers.

While working at the psychiatric clinic, I read Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man and Eros and Civilization. As a result of this reading and my summer work experience, I concluded that psychiatric treatment under corporate capitalism was useless. Nearly all the clinic patients were unhappy because they were either unfree, lonely, sexually repressed or the victims of class exploitation or racial oppression. Their emotional misery would not end until society became less repressive, more leisure-oriented and more democratic, until they were able to find and give love, and until they could act in a sexually free way, without guilt.