Truth and Love: Finding the Soul of the Sixties

By Carol Blackman

In 1967, tour buses drove through the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood to see the Hippies. San Francisco of the late 1960s became legendary as the epicenter for lifestyle experimentation—including plenty of sex, a new selection of drugs, and some mighty fine rock ’n’ roll.
San Francisco native and journalist Carol Blackman was there, and in Truth and Love she tells the “betcha didn’t know” stories of this exciting era in San Francisco’s history, including memories from sixty first-person interviews.
While investigating the mysterious death of a pivotal figure in SF State’s student strike—a man who changed her life—Carol peels back the layers of myth to reveal the real stories of Hippies, Black Panthers, and San Franciscans who blurred the lines between the traditional and avant-garde. These folks were responsible for many ideas that were considered radical then but are now accepted as mainstream.
The legend of the Summer of Love looms large, but it is the real people of the city that have had a lasting impact, with ideas that could only have been fostered by San Francisco in the late 1960s.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Carol Blackman
• Release date: Sep 2, 2017
• ISBN: 9780998743417

Carol Blackman

Carol Blackman is a newspaper reporter, author, and speaker. A proud native San Franciscan, she studied at San Francisco State University, earned an MA from Santa Clara University in Educational Psychology, and has published six nonfiction books.

Book preview

Carol Blackman is a newspaper reporter, author, and speaker. A proud native San Franciscan, she studied at San Francisco State University, earned a MA from Santa Clara University in Educational Psychology, and has published six nonfiction books.

More to Say from SF, moretosayfromsf.com

© 2017 by More to Say from SF

All rights reserved. Published 2017

Postcard art by Ted Lewy reprinted by permission of Beatrice and Julio Bergerman.

ISBN: 978-0-9987434-1-7

Publisher’s Cataloging-In-Publication Data

(Prepared by The Donohue Group, Inc.)

Names: Blackman, Carol, 1948-

Title: Truth and love : finding the soul of the sixties / Carol Blackman.

Description: [Sonoma, California] : More to Say from SF, 2017.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017908014 | ISBN 978-0-9987434-0-0 | ISBN

978-0-9987434-1-7 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: San Francisco (Calif.)—History—20th century. | San Francisco (Calif.)—Civilization—20th century. | City dwellers—California—San Francisco—Interviews. | Hippies—California—San Francisco—History—20th century. | Black Panther Party. | Nineteen sixties.

Classification: LCC F869.S357 B53 2017 (print) | LCC F869.S357 (ebook) | DDC 979.461—dc23

Contents

PART ONE | Do Your Own Thing

Introduction | Discovery

Chapter One | Bye-Bye,1950s

Chapter Two | The Emperor Was Right

PART TWO | San Francisco Characters Then and Now

Chapter Three | Neighborhoods

Chapter Four | The Swells: Nob Hill

Chapter Five | Gay and Proud: The Castro

Chapter Six | The Black Panthers’ Legacy: The Fillmore

Chapter Seven | The Establishment and Power: Civic Center

Chapter Eight | Saints & Sinners: Union Square and the Tenderloin

Chapter Nine | More than Topless: North Beach

Chapter Ten | Landmarks: The Bay and the Pacific Ocean

Chapter Eleven | Ethnicity: Chinatown, Japantown, the Mission, Alcatraz

Chapter Twelve | Hometown Entertainment: The Haight

PART THREE | From San Francisco State to Key West

Chapter Thirteen | San Francisco State University

Chapter Fourteen | Hayakawa, the Strike, and the AFL-CIO

Chapter Fifteen | Sailing Away

Epilogue | The Soul of The City

Acknowledgments

PART ONE

Do Your Own Thing

Introduction

Discovery

The week before my freshman year in college, in fall 1966, I crisscrossed San Francisco State’s ninety-seven-acre campus attending various orientations and getting an armful of registration forms signed. Gradually getting acquainted with the campus layout, I ducked into a concrete, two-story box called the Humanities Social Sciences building, built as a part of the original campus in 1954.

In one of the building’s many bland beige classrooms, I found Professor Hawkins seated toward the front of the otherwise empty room, facing chairs that soon would be filled with students. He indicated that I should sit down on a wooden chair directly opposite his chair.

Gary Hawkins looked like someone had ordered him from central casting in Hollywood. He was more than six feet tall, athletically thin, with strong-looking hands and a pleasant, handsome face. His close-cropped blond hair, along with a neatly trimmed mustache and beard, looked appropriate with the brown tweed blazer with suede patches at the elbows. A yellow Oxford-cloth shirt, a perfectly knotted tie, brown slacks, and loafers completed his quintessential professor look. The only thing missing was a pipe.

He held out an index card. I am a professor in the Speech Communications department and I need you to read this card to me. It’s a simple screening device to determine if you have any speech impediments, he said.

I took the card and started reading.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.

That’s fine. Let me have your registration form and I’ll sign off. You are my last one today. What’s your major?

As he was the first real professor I had encountered, I was caught off guard by his chattiness. History, I answered with lots of hesitation. In truth, I had no idea what my major would be.

Have you thought about Speech Communications?

Thought about it? No. At that moment, I had no idea what Speech Communications meant.

He explained that communications could be crafted to enlighten and encourage or used to incite, convince and promote selected ideas. He said he was teaching an entry-level class on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays from two to three in the afternoon. I had an opening in my schedule, and I needed another three units, so I told him I would see him there.

After his introductory class, I was hooked. I changed my major to Speech Communications, and for the next three and a half years, I saw Professor Hawkins almost daily. I took every class he taught. Gary Hawkins became my mentor.

Two years later, in November of 1968, SF State exploded as a major protest swept the campus. The students’ grievances centered on the creation of a Black Studies department. This would become the first Ethnic Studies department for any college or university in the country. In January of 1969, SF State professors went on strike against the administration to take a stand on labor issues.

As president of the American Federation of Teachers Local 1352 union, Professor Hawkins became a local celebrity of sorts. He was the spokesperson for the professors who were on strike, placing himself in direct opposition to then California governor Ronald Reagan and San Francisco State’s president Samuel Ichiye Hayakawa. Local TV stations and national networks reported daily on the strike with live broadcasts from campus.

Throughout the strike, Professor Hawkins told his students to continue showing up for classes to keep pressure on the college administration to settle with both the students and the professors. During this time, we lived in the same neighborhood. If I was waiting for the city bus to take me to school, and Professor Hawkins happened to be driving by in his VW van, he would pick me up. I would ride with him to campus with the strike posters crammed in the back of the van. He would drop me off to go to class, and Professor Hawkins would join the picket line.

San Francisco has a long history as a labor town. In what some thought was an unusual partnership, the AFL-CIO joined in the negotiations about the professors’ labor issues. In the face of this alliance, the college administration settled with both the professors and the students in late March 1969. Professor Hawkins returned to his teaching schedule to finish that spring semester.

That summer, I finished my bachelor’s degree. Then I returned to campus to take some graduate classes in the fall. Professor Hawkins was not teaching that semester so I did not see him for a few months.

The next time I saw him was in late December of 1969. I brought some food to a Speech Communications department holiday party at a friend’s house. When I walked into the kitchen, there he was leaning against the sink.

His hair was shaggy and shoulder length, his beard had grown down to his collarbone. He was wearing a red plaid flannel shirt, jeans, and even though it was winter, his feet were bare in his sandals. I asked him how he was doing. He smiled but did not answer me.

When I asked him if he was teaching the next semester, he hesitated.

Don’t know. I need to think about it.

I felt sure that once the stress of the strike was over, he would get back to what he did best, teaching about the intricate and fascinating subject of communications.

We promised to keep in touch. But we never did.

Twenty-some years, and three careers, later I was invited to speak to a marketing and media class on campus about my experiences as a newspaper reporter. I decided to drop by the Speech Communications department office to see if any of my former professors were still teaching, including my favorite professor.

I met the secretary for the department, too young to have been there in my time, and asked about Professor Hawkins. I was hoping she would direct me down the hall to his old office, the one I knew so well.

Haven’t you heard?

I was expecting to be told that he might be the chair of a department at some prestigious university, or a corporate advisor - to only honorable corporate clients - on communications strategy, or maybe a political consultant, for the liberal ones, on how to convince people about the benefits of a new social program.

She said, He’s dead.

There are moments when time can stand still when some words are spoken. The word dead did not instantly connect with the images I held of my Professor Hawkins. I was still trying to process the word when the secretary explained:

I’m sorry to tell you that he died in a boating accident off Key West Florida a couple of years ago.

A boating accident. An accident. I was stunned. How could I tell him how much he meant to me, how he had changed my view of life, and how many times I still heard his voice in my head?

My training as a newspaper reporter taught me to always get a second source. Could the secretary be mistaken? What was he doing in Florida? What kind of boating accident? What had become of him after that last time we talked? The questions just kept coming to me.

I wanted to know my mentor again and to revisit the unique time in history we shared. But if I could not share my memories with him, at least I could find out what happened to him.

Chapter One

Bye-Bye,1950s

We San Francisco natives have lived by our own rules since The City was founded on June 29, 1776. Most City natives have a live-and-let-live attitude about many things. However, there are limits to tolerance.

In 1918, a San Francisco Examiner story was published about a Mr. Hal H. Hobbs, a Los Angeles automobile dealer. Hobbs appeared in front of San Francisco County judge Morgan, attempting to petition for a divorce. The story read:

What do you mean by ‘Frisco’? asked the judge.

Why San Francisco, of course, answered Hobbs.

No one refers to San Francisco by that title except people from Los Angeles, said His Honor. I am chairman of the County Council of Defense, and I warn you that you stand in danger of being interned as an alien enemy. Don’t do it again.

There is a secret ritual that native San Franciscans perform when they discover they might have this sacred birthplace in common. No native is taught this ritual. It is a behavior that is absorbed and replicated during a native’s lifetime, no matter where the native might be living. For short, it’s known as the born and raised ritual.

Born and raised in The City is a code-phrase that elicits a special response from other true natives. It goes like this:

Native one says, I was born and raised in The City.

Native two says, Where did you go to school?

Without skipping a beat, a true San Francisco native knows this means where did you go to high school. Details about grammar school, growing up in a specific neighborhood, college degrees, and career information come later. But knowing where someone went to high school immediately defines one native to another.

San Francisco natives know certain truths. For example, they know there is no beach in North Beach, Pacific Heights has a better view of the San Francisco Bay than of the Pacific Ocean, and across the Bay does not mean north across the Golden Gate Bridge. It means anything east across the Bay Bridge, short for the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. Note what city comes first in the official name.

And The City means only San Francisco and is properly written, no matter what the Associated Press Stylebook says, with each word beginning with a capital letter. I know this because I am a San Francisco native. I am also a newspaper reporter. And so, with my knowledge of The City, and with the mystery of Gary Hawkins’s death haunting me, I started researching.

I visited the library at SF State, officially known as San Francisco State University since 1974, to see what stories might have been published on the announcement of his death to his academic colleagues. I also visited the main branch of our San Francisco Public Library to research general information about the 1960s in The City.

Some histories have been idealized over time. If you believe the myths, you would think that most San Franciscans were plucking flowers to wear in their hair and dancing in rapturous states of bliss in Golden Gate Park. Some were. Many were not.

Historians write grand tomes, with reflections about a place in time. My instincts were to start with the local newspapers from the late 1960s.

More than 70 million Baby Boomers became teenagers in the decade between 1960 and 1969. In 1967, five hundred thousand American soldiers were in Vietnam. China successfully tested its first hydrogen bomb. Thurgood Marshall was sworn in as the first African American U.S. Supreme Court Justice. The first microwave oven was introduced. Elvis was married for the first and only time, to his Priscilla, in Las Vegas. And things we thought we could count on in the 1950s were radically changing.

As I searched for stories about my professor, and also for stories that defined our life in San Francisco at the dawn of the 1960s, I found another familiar name. Much of what came to be called the American establishment, or corporate power structure, was created following the Second World War. A San Francisco Bay Area company that exemplified growing and thriving at the beginning of the 1960s was Kaiser Industries.

***

Henry J. Kaiser launched an industrial empire by building what were called liberty ships as cargo carriers for the American war effort in the 1940s. By the mid-1960s, Kaiser Industries included a global array of companies that engineered and constructed bridges, roads, and dams, and manufactured steel, cement, and aluminum. Kaiser Industries built houses, manufactured dishwashers for the houses, and employed thousands of people. They also provided health care for workers and their families through their own Kaiser Permanente hospitals and health care system.

When founder Henry J. Kaiser died in August of 1967, it seemed only natural that a family member, already in a corporate position within the conglomerate, would continue the legacy. By the time of his death, Kaiser’s son Edgar was running the company, then headquartered across the Bay in Oakland. Edgar and his wife Sue were the consummate 1960s corporate couple, entertaining business associates from around the globe at their contemporary East Bay estate. Their six children, three girls followed by three boys, were mostly grown.

In 1967, the middle son, Henry Mead Kaiser, had just married and was studying for his MBA at Stanford. After serving in the Navy, not in Vietnam but in Guam, he joined Kaiser Industries. As the grandson of the founder, his future inside the corporate conglomerate seemed secure.

In his early days at the company, Henry expressed an interest in psychology. He made a series of appointments with the head of the Kaiser Permanente mental health department to learn about more the field.

But as Henry recalled when we talked, Before the third appointment could take place, my meeting was cancelled.

More than forty years later, Henry had the chance to reconnect with the same mental health expert.

I learned that my father had called him and said, ‘My son will not be meeting with you again.’

Edgar Kaiser made it clear that young Henry was destined to serve as a business executive.

Henry went on to work in strategic planning for Kaiser Industries for a few years, and as CEO of Kaiser International, a nonprofit division of the company. Then, what was unthinkable in the early-1960s was taking place by the mid-1970s.

The good years were 1955 to 1968, Henry said. But during those years, stresses were increasing internally at Kaiser Industries.

As more corporate executives replaced family members, Henry was fired as CEO of Kaiser International

I was told I was doing a good job but one of the executives told the board that he didn’t want me to head International. I was never given a reason. To this day, I still don’t know why, Henry said.

By 1976, due to a change in the law about taxes, and the fact that the company did not reinvent itself, Kaiser Industries was being dismantled.

In the San Francisco Bay Area in the mid-1970s, people were beginning to invent businesses based on new technology, and a new financial network was needed to propel those businesses into the future. In 1977, Henry joined the trend by creating a financial firm.

I thought I should join a venture capital firm and learn the business.

Henry told his partners, I have no capital to invest. But because his name was Kaiser, and he was the grandson of one of the world’s wealthiest industrialists, Henry said, They didn’t believe me.

From 1977 to 2004, Henry lived and worked as a venture capitalist, doing what he describes as developing companies. He and his wife had a house in an upscale suburb, they raised their two daughters, and he joined the right clubs to make the right business contacts.

By 2004, my career had taken a very different and less successful trajectory than anyone might have predicted, Henry said.

In February 2004, a federal grand jury in Sacramento indicted Henry on twenty-two criminal charges for his role in misappropriating $2 million in a fraudulent financial scheme.

According to the criminal complaint, Henry’s firm wanted to prove to potential investors in Europe that they had the capital to back up their business proposals. One of Henry’s associates, who worked as a senior treasurer and analyst for a telecommunications company, illegally transferred $25 million of his telecommunications company’s money into the venture capital firm’s account. It looked as if Henry’s firm was successful. In the process of maneuvering the money back and forth from the legitimate company to the fraudulent account and then back to the legitimate company, $2 million went missing.

Charged with interstate transportation of fraudulently obtained property and conducting monetary transactions with criminally derived property, Henry cooperated with federal prosecutors to help build the case against his former colleagues. He pled guilty in April 2004 to two of the twenty-two counts brought against him. Because of his complete cooperation, the prosecutors dropped the other charges and recommended a lighter punishment.

Henry was sentenced to serve one year and one day in federal prison for his crimes. As a part of his plea agreement, he resigned from his board positions with Kaiser Hospital and Health Plans and the Kaiser Family Foundation, canceled his country club memberships, sold his family home to partially compensate for the missing money, and started volunteering with nonprofit groups.

On his website, on a page labeled Henry M. Kaiser – Book Synopsis, Henry writes, "How and why could the scion of such a family fall so completely from Grace, I wondered? How could I atone, and then rebuild my life? The second half of the book, Inheritance Lost, Heritage Transformed, written while earning my Doctorate in Clinical Psychology and spending a year less good time in incarceration, attempts to find answers to these questions and share, introspectively, the experience."

As I heard Henry’s story, I wondered if his circumstances would have been different if he had been given the opportunity to follow the interest he expressed in psychology so many years ago. Henry is currently hoping to create a practice in psychology to counsel families of wealth and position about how to insure a legacy through communications and appropriate planning.

***

Much of the tumult we all experienced in the 1960s was about redefining ourselves and our institutions. Change was inevitable. And if people were open to changes, San Francisco was the place to be.

Something that has never changed is San Francisco’s live-and-let-live attitude. On Wednesday, June 16, 2004, Phil Matier and Andrew Ross, of the San Francisco Chronicle reported on a finance committee hearing for the City and County of San Francisco.

Naked truth: San Francisco Supervisor Aaron Peskin was expounding on the city’s upcoming housing bond Tuesday, during a very dry and boring Finance Committee Hearing, when he looked up to see a naked lady at the lectern. More important – she was trying to interrupt him.

‘Look,’ Peskin told her, ‘public comment is closed.’ The woman left, only to come back in the same state of undress, this time demanding to be arrested. ‘Then I suggest, Peskin said, ‘that you go downstairs and talk to one of the sheriff’s deputies.’ And the woman left – without Peskin or any of the other board members so much as batting an eye. ‘Hey,’ Peskin said after the meeting, ‘…nothing surprises me.’

Chapter Two

The Emperor Was Right

To understand why San Francisco is such a unique place, you must go back to our history. The California Gold Rush was responsible for taking San Francisco from a village of ten thousand people to fifty-four thousand inhabitants in a matter of six months. Like thousands of speculators, Joshua Norton, a businessman born in London and living as a wealthy South African gentleman, arrived in San Francisco in 1849 hoping to get rich quick.

At first, Norton was wise with his investments. By the early 1850s, he had accumulated a fortune of $250,000 due to his success with San Francisco real estate. To diversify his business holdings, he planned to import rice to this thriving metropolis, hoping to cash in on what he perceived as a shortage.

But Norton was wrong. There was no shortage. Plenty of rice was available at a much lower price per pound than Norton had agreed to