Sundial:Columbia SDS Memories:At Flushing HS, 1964

Chapter 1: At Flushing High School, 1964 (v)

Much of the summer of 1965 was spent feeling lovesick and missing the possibility of bumping into Rona again in school. Much of the creative energy which drove me to spend my time writing that summer seemed to flow from my frustrated love for Rona.

I would close the door to my room and block-out the sound of the blaring TV which my parents watched most evenings. Then I began writing lyrics to love songs expressing my longings for Rona, protest songs, poems and the beginnings of stories and novels. I ended up writing about ten songs for a cappella singing during the summer. I also started to write a play entitled A Ball In A Basket.

My first protest song was entitled “Freedom Is What We’re After.” Its lyrics included the following:

Look out world! We’re coming
We’re gonna correct your wrongs
Look out world! We’re running
From the age of games and songs.

We’re young, we’re youth
And we all shall rebel
From all on earth
Which has the stench of hell.
For Freedom is what we’re after
From the tyrannies of Man
And war and all injustice
Must be banished from this land.

I also wrote a protest song called “The New World Is A-Comin’,” containing the following lyrics:

The New World is a-comin’
Tomorrow it begins
We’re ready for the journey
For the tide is rushing in
Oh, Love will be the answer
Integratin’ all our thoughts
And gone will be the sorrow
Of the little boy who’s lost
Of the little boy who’s lost.

In my play I expressed opposition to the tendency to conform out of fear, which seemed to characterize most people I saw around me. On a few weekend mornings after breakfast, I took a bus to Kissena Park, carrying a notebook. Then I would sit for a few hours on the park grass and write the beginnings of a novel.

In mid-July 1965, I started to work for the first time in the 9-to-5 corporate office world. My only previous job had been as a newspaper delivery boy during the first half of 1963, when I delivered the now-defunct Indianapolis Times.

Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap. 1: At Flushing H.S., 1964

Chapter 1: At Flushing High School, 1964 (iv)

The professor who interviewed me said he taught music courses at Columbia. He had grown up in Indiana and was a short, thin guy in his early 40s. I can’t recall much of what was discussed at my interview. I felt very nervous and tongue-tied; although I guess I was polite and pleasant enough not to get screened out. The professor asked me a few questions about my Indiana background, my career plans and my high school band participation. After the interview, I didn’t feel that I had made a good impression. So when my letter of acceptance came that spring from Columbia, I assumed, before I opened the envelope, that it was a letter of rejection.

I didn’t like the elitist notion of an Ivy League, but I assumed that Columbia wished to let people enter it on the basis of merit, regardless of class or racial background, in order to democratize the Ivy League academic world. Unlike CCNY, Columbia provided me with the opportunity to live in a Manhattan dormitory, as well as study in a Manhattan classroom. If Columbia had rejected my application, I would have enrolled at CCNY at 137th Street, commuted from Queens and been economically compelled to live with my parents.

I remember very little of my high school graduation ceremony, which was held in the RKO Keith movie house on Northern Boulevard. I couldn’t wait to get out of my cap and gown. Rona attended as a member of the band that played “Pomp and Circumstances” and I felt sad that it was the last time I would probably see her.

The Social Studies Department chairman, Mr. Kelly, awarded me the class history medal. I assumed that if I couldn’t earn a living as a writer or playwright, I would teach history in high school in the Black community, to students from economically impoverished families.

As far as senior class-ranking was concerned, the school administration had rated me “number 2”. When my transcript from three terms at Broad Ripple High School was mailed to Flushing High School from Indiana, the Broad Ripple High administrators indicated that, under their letter-grading system, an “A” mark equaled a “94 to 100” numerical mark and a “B” letter-grade equaled an “87 to 93” numerical mark. The Flushing administration bureaucrats decided, when determining my four-year high school average and class ranking, to put a “97” down on my transcript for every “A” grade I received at Broad Ripple and a “90” for every “B”. As a result of this bureaucratic transformation of all my “A’s” into “97” and all my “B’s” into “90”, my grade average was magically inflated into the second-highest in the senior class at Flushing.

I felt intellectually amused, but socially embarrassed, by this bureaucratic transformation of my grade average. I first learned of my “super-high” grade average in homeroom one day when I read about it on the front page of the Flushing High School student newspaper. The principal wrote me a special note, however, stating that I was not eligible to give the salutatorian address at the graduation ceremony, despite my “outstanding grade average,” because I had only spent two terms at Flushing High School.

I was relieved that I wasn’t going to be compelled to give a speech at graduation based on a bogus class ranking which was achieved by bureaucratic error. Although I did score 796 on the College Boards’ American History achievement exam, in high school I wasn’t grade-oriented enough to have been able to obtain a salutatorian-type grade average, without the bureaucratic mistake.

Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap.1: At Flushing H.S., 1964

Chapter 1: At Flushing High School, 1964 (iii)

Most of March and April in the Human Relations Club was spent rehearsing the anti-bigotry play. Because Rona had the most expressive and clearest speaking voice, she was chosen by Mr. Freedman to play the teenage woman character that had the main role in the play. Around school, I would bump into Rona and say “hi.” But I couldn’t figure out any way to interest her in more than just a casual acquaintanceship. By the end of the school year, I was as lovesick as Romeo at the beginning of Shakespeare’s "Romeo and Juliet."

Outside of the Human Relations Club meeting discussions, I can recall very little intense or significant discussion with any students at Flushing. Most of my conversation with people there was on a superficial level. I just couldn’t wait to get to college and get away from my parents’ apartment and be on my own and get away from the public school system.

Although I strongly identified with the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, I kept most of what I was feeling about the System inside of me. At Flushing High School, I never really found anybody else who fully shared my sense of alienation and was willing to talk for long hours about what we could all do, as a generation, to secure more freedom.

When the weather was not too cold after classes, I spent many afternoons playing basketball in the Whitestone playground at 149th St. and Willets Point Boulevard, just north of Memorial Field. Most of the other guys I played with attended one of the local parochial high schools: Holy Cross High School or Bishop Reilly. After the pick-up games ended, we each went our separate ways.

In the playground, if you played enough basketball games with each other you would get close on a certain level. But high school guys never really talked deeply to each other, if their only point of contact was meeting in the playground and they attended different schools. Most of the guys I played basketball with were Italian-American or Irish-American. But none of us working-class guys thought ethnically very much, in those days. Each of us thought of ourselves as being, primarily, white American. Being ethnically Irish, Italian or Jewish was felt as a secondary identity.

To get into Columbia College in the 1960s, an applicant had to submit to a personal campus interview. In early 1965, I dressed up in a suit and tie and took a bus and subway to the 116th St. and Broadway station in Manhattan. I walked through the kiosk exit/entrance that used to be there (before Columbia had their station modernized in the 1970s) and located the School of Journalism building, where my screening interview was to take place.

Glancing around Columbia’s campus between Low Plaza and South Lawn, I felt that it looked more like a real campus than Queens College’s campus. The campus seemed much smaller than Indiana University’s Bloomington campus, with which I was familiar as a result of visiting my older sister there. But Columbia’s campus, situated in the middle of Manhattan apartment buildings, interested me more, because I wanted to be involved with people who lived in Harlem. Indiana University’s large campus could not fulfill that desire.

In the early 1960s, the large Midwestern state universities seemed to offer just size and football teams. I assumed Columbia would offer me both activist intellectual stimulation and interaction with the cultural riches and neighborhoods of Manhattan. I assumed that Barnard and Columbia students interacted with each other easily on a daily level, because of the closeness of the two schools.

Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap. 1: At Flushing H.S., 1964

Chapter 1: At Flushing High School, 1964 (ii)

I fell helplessly in love with Rona the year before I went off to Columbia. Rona was a National Merit scholarship finalist who seemed love-filled and was quite popular. She was also a first clarinetist in the high school band; and she seemed like she would make a great companion. But I found it impossible to transform our casual acquaintanceship into a love affair, although we were thrown together occasionally around the high school for eight months. Another thing I liked about Rona was that she wasn’t into dressing up too much when she was outside the school building; and, instead of just wearing dresses and skirts, she also wore slacks in the early 1960s.

I first noticed Rona in Spanish class. She was a year behind me in school. But the juniors who were honor students in Spanish were put in the same class as seniors like me who were taking their fourth year of Spanish. Rona spoke often in class and was one of the pets of the teacher. But when the teacher had his back turned during Spanish tests, she was willing to pass out the answers to multiple-choice questions to the students who sat in the back of the classroom.

We were both in the Human Relations Club of Flushing High School, which met every Friday afternoon. This was a new club organized by a young social studies teacher named Mr. Freedman, who came on to his students as a friend who really loved being with his students.

Each week ten women students, three men students and Mr. Freedman would discuss at the Human Relations Club meeting topics like racial prejudice, high school dating, politics, the press, TV shows, war and peace issues, anti-Semitism, education and miseducation at Flushing, religion and school regulations. We also gossiped about everybody else at the school.

In March 1965 we decided to hold a joint meeting to fight racial bigotry with the Jamaica High School Human Relations Club, and a meeting was scheduled for early May. As our contribution to the joint meeting, we decided to put on a play which would dramatize why it was stupid for young people to pick up the prejudices of the older generation.

I then wrote a one-act musical play, which attempted to expose the irrationality of bigotry, through satire and the use of musical comedy parody techniques. For instance, to the tune of “I’m A Yankee Doodle Dandy”, I had my main character—who was to learn, by the end of the play, that bigotry was an irrational thing to be into—sing “I’m a jolly, biased bigot, a biased bigot, do or die.” I think I was influenced somewhat by the That Was The Week That Was satirical TV show of that era and by Tom Lehrer satirical record albums. I felt racism could be attacked by using satire and humor and snickering. The white racists in the South and North at that time really seemed to be on the defensive, psychologically, and on the ropes, politically. In retrospect, I overestimated how effective the weapon of satire could be in attacking racism in the United States.

By the time I finished my anti-racist musical satire, however, Mr. Freedman had secured a script for a one-act drama in favor of brotherhood from the Anti-Defamation League [ADL]. (The ADL hadn’t yet become as hostile to the Black Liberation Movement then, as it would later become). Mr. Freedman, therefore, wasn’t open to even considering something more “way-out,” like my musical anti-racist parody.

Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chapter 1: At Flushing High School, 1964

Chapter 1: At Flushing High School, 1964 (i)

I was a Flushing High School senior in Fall 1964 when I heard about the Free Speech Movement [FSM] at Berkeley. I especially identified with FSM leader Mario Savio, who had grown up in Queens like I had. Savio had gone to Martin Van Buren High School. Van Buren was the high school that the older students in the Beech Hills garden apartment development where I used to live had attended.

What most touched me about Savio and the Free Speech Movement’s message was the assertion that we were “human beings” and “not IBM card numbers.”

I had concluded that the whole rat-race and competition to get into college was ridiculous. I looked down upon students in my classes who were mark-happy and super-competitive, instead of intellectually curious. The process I was compelled to go through in high school in order to get into college seemed emotionally empty. I felt unfree in high school. The 1964 Berkeley Revolt indicated to me that other people in my generation shared my disgust with the U.S. mass educational system.

Another aspect of the Free Speech Movement which caused me to identify with it was the link to the early 1960s Civil Rights Movement. Since the 1957 controversy over the integration of Little Rock, Arkansas schools, one of the passions of my life had been my support for the African-American freedom struggle. The people who were fighting the University of California at Berkeley Administration were often the same people who had gone down to Mississippi to work with SNCC to win freedom for African-American people.

I considered myself a writer-activist in high school, even when almost everyone else in the three high schools I attended was non-activist and not interested in questions of war and peace and racial injustice. In Bayside High School, in Broad Ripple High School in Indiana and in Flushing High School nearly all the students I met were just interested in getting into college, getting Saturday night dates, driving, sports or shopping. When I learned that the FSM students were involved with the Civil Rights Movement in a way my classmates had never been, I felt that FSM people were my kind of people.

My interest in the Civil Rights Movement was reflected in the writing I did in high school. I wrote a character study of a former African-American classmate, entitled “Benny”, which the English teacher, Mrs. Griggs, liked so much that she read it aloud to the class, which found the piece hilarious. Mrs. Griggs—who had some connection to the Columbia University School of Journalism’s high school journalism program—wrote the letter of recommendation that most likely was decisive in getting me admitted into Columbia.

I was restless and eager to get out of high school and into a more activist student setting. Senior year seemed like a waste. I was put in detention for coming late too often. I still liked to play saxophone in the high school band, though.

School’s only value seemed to be as a place to meet high school women in a classroom setting, and as a place to play saxophone with other musicians. My love of writing had no outlet because the school newspaper at Flushing High School was run by a clique that never printed “controversial” articles which criticized the educational process at Flushing, and the literary magazine wouldn’t publish my stories.

Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Prologue

PROLOGUE: Clubbed At Columbia, 1968

We sat on the floor of Fayerweather Lounge, our arms linked, singing a freedom song defiantly. We heard our barricade of chairs and desks being torn apart and tossed to the floor. We saw helmeted Tactical Patrol Force [TPF] cops entering the lounge.

I watched four TPF cops grab, rough up and drag the student in front of me out of the Columbia University building. It all seemed unreal. It seemed like a bad dream or some scene from a Hollywood movie. The cops were intent on getting us out of the building as quickly as possible. Students who refused to unlink their arms were roughed up and clubbed by the cops more than students who quickly unlinked their arms.

More helmeted cops poured into the lounge. I realized my turn to be brutalized was coming. I noticed a husky, tall, helmeted African-American cop. We looked into each other’s eyes and I noticed no sign of empathy in his eyes. I thought to myself: “Yes, some Black men will even fight for Columbia, if you pay them enough.” He then grabbed me and started to rough me up as efficiently as any white cop. I felt a club come down on my head during the one minute it took for the TPF cops to shove me from the lounge to the front steps of Fayerweather Hall and throw me onto the campus grass. My head was bleeding. I lay dazed, until I was approached by a medical student who gave me first aid.

It happened fast. One moment we were singing and watching them come at us. Then, while they were brutalizing me, I was wondering whether I was going to survive. And I thought: “Is this really happening to me?” as they passed me from cop-to-cop and out of the building. I felt completely powerless, because they had all the clubs. And I was not clear about what was happening until I was on the grass of Columbia’s campus and realized that I was still alive.

Dino was lying on the grass next to me. He was also bleeding from the head. He was crying and cursing the cops. Spontaneously, we grabbed each other’s hand.

Dino was a tall African-American non-student. A street-hustler, a grass dealer, and a street revolutionary. He looked like a SNCC person, although he never had been into Movement organizing.

A medical student helped Dino and me stand up. Other medical students escorted us into an ambulance. We were taken with other bleeding protesters to Knickerbocker Hospital further uptown in Manhattan. In the emergency room, a doctor sewed up our head wounds and put bandages on our heads, using about 10 to 15 stitches. Then we were released from the hospital. I walked back downtown to my dorm room in Furnald Hall, in the darkness of early morning.

As I re-entered Columbia’s campus, I wondered how many other people were injured, how many other students were arrested and whether the Black students who had occupied Columbia’s Hamilton Hall had been brutalized. I wondered whether the Columbia Administration was going to be able to get away with its use of police to evict us all from the campus buildings we had collectively liberated. I wondered how the rest of the campus and the rest of the world were going to react to the police invasion of Columbia’s campus.

I was angry. And I was ready to resume the fight against Columbia’s institutional racism, complicity with the Viet Nam War and its policy of suppressing student dissent. But were other students at Columbia and Barnard ready to continue the fight?

By the afternoon of April 30, 1968, crowds of students had started to form again on Columbia’s campus. It became clear that the police bust had led to a mass radicalization of the campus. The fight against Columbia’s trustees and the Columbia Administration was going to continue. Spontaneously, students were angrily chanting, over and over again outside of Low Library, “Kirk must go! Kirk must go! Kirk must go!” and, simultaneously, raising their hands in the peace sign to emphasize each word.

Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Table of Contents

SUNDIAL: Columbia SDS Memories

For Ted Gold and student activists of the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and 21st century.




C O N T E N T S

Prologue: Clubbed At Columbia, 1968

Chapter I: At Flushing High School, 1964

Chapter II: At UM & M, 1965

Chapter III: Freshman At Columbia, 1965

Chapter IV: Summer Folk Songwriting, 1966

Chapter V: In Furnald Hall, 1966

Chapter VI: Enter Ted Gold, 1966

Chapter VII: Into Columbia SDS, 1966

Chapter VIII: Discovering IDA, 1967

Chapter IX: Confronting The Marines, 1967

Chapter X: The Viet Nam Summer of Love, 1967

Chapter XI: Ted Gold and Dave Gilbert: Roommates, 1967

Chapter XII: Marge Piercy and The Anti-Rusk Demo, 1967

Chapter XIII: Christmas Vacation with Mark Rudd, 1967

Chapter XIV: Back In Furnald Hall, 1968

Chapter XV: Steering Columbia SDS Into Action, 1968

Chapter XVI: We Shut Down Columbia University, 1968

Chapter XVII: Enter Bernardine Dohrn, 1968

Chapter XVIII: Summer In The Streets, 1968

Chapter XIX: Spreading The Student Revolution, 1968

Chapter XX: Commune On Staten Island, 1969

Chapter XXI: Weatherman Comes To Queens, 1969

Chapter XXII: At United Parcel Service and Queens College, 1969

Chapter XXIII: With Andrea Eagan and Newsreel, 1970

Chapter XXIV: The Explosion at West 11th Street, 1970

Chapter XXV: All Power To My Sisters, 1970

Chapter XXVI: Uncle Sam Don’t Want Me, 1970

Chapter XXVII: The Bronx and Kent State, 1970

Epilogue: Columbia SDS Memories: From Berkeley to Kent State