1960S Decade of Dissent: the Way We Were

By Bernie Keating

Ginny and Montana are students caught-up in campus turmoil at the University of California, Berkeley, during the 1960s nation-wide era of dissent. It is a story of social misfits, troubled people scared in a dysfunctional childhood who drift together in the cause clbre of the moment -- and there are plenty of causes for them to find:

anti-authority sit-ins

anti-Vietnam War marches

draft card burnings

Vatican Two church revolt

civil rights turmoil

grapepicker strike

underground Weatherman

martial law - street barricades

Ginny and Montana and their fellow students had all these things on their plate -- on and off campus. Ginny becomes the activist leader of the violent Weatherman organization and goes underground as a fugitive from the FBI. Now, fifty years later, it is difficult to believe but many in our nation were engaged in an almost open revolt. Names of people are fictional, but all the events are exactly as they happened. I know, because I was there.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Oct 16, 2009
• ISBN: 9781449027780

Bernie Keating

Bernie Keating’s was raised in Buffalo Gap, South Dakota, served as a naval officer during the Korean War, completed graduate school at U.C. Berkeley, and then began a fifty-year career as executive, becoming Manager of Quality Assurance for the world’s largest packaging company. As an avocation during his long working career, he also wrote books and the current one is his twenty-second. He and his wife live on a ranch in the Sierra Mountains near Sonora, California.

Book preview

ONE: BERKELEY

If you arrive in Berkeley along Telegraph Avenue, as I did on the bus that fall day in 1959, you come to a dead end on Bancroft Way at the edge of the University of California and walk across Sather Gate onto campus. It’s all changed now, but that was the way it was then. Sather Gate, an ornate rock bridge with an overhead arch, crosses Strawberry Creek, a meandering little stream that tumbles down the steep Berkeley hills to eventually flow into San Francisco Bay. I guess there is a creek there, but to be honest, I’ve never walked down through the tangle of blackberry vines to see if there is any water in it. It’s not much of a creek anyway, and certainly does not compare to the Tuolumne River on the Indian reservation in the Sierras north of Yosemite where I was raised. I guess you could say I was raised — even though I mostly survived on my own because my father added little to the process, and I had no mother — she’d disappeared before I was old enough to remember.

But Strawberry Creek did provide a colorful border to the university campus back then as it flowed down toward Shattuck Avenue in the main part of Berkeley. Then it disappeared into a culvert and was no longer part of the landscape in the confines of a city that had no place for a meandering creek.

Even before reaching the campus, I got my introduction to the Berkeley scene by walking up Telegraph Avenue and passing through the hordes of beatniks loitering on the sidewalks. Their dress code set them apart: ragged, dirty, old obsolete army surplus dungarees, some barefoot with khaki leggings that reached to the knees, while still others wore combat boots and bandanas of various colors with wild, uncombed hair that often fell below the shoulders. Then there was little to choose from between males and females, since they all looked the same. As I passed through Sather Gate, I was greeted by protesters standing on platforms shouting their taunts to everyone and seemingly to no one, as the parade of students marched through, paying scant attention. A guy standing on a ledge shouted, We will Goddamn be silent no more! They call us the silent generation, but we are silent no more. Silent? Shit. Screw Kerr! The chancellor is a fascist!

Shocked, I hurried on past. He saw me. Hey Indian boy, yes you. Why do you take it? Speak up. Get mad as hell. Don’t take it anymore! I was upset. He called me Indian boy. God, is it that apparent? Can’t I escape the reservation?

The campus was where vine covered buildings stood as monoliths rising above rows of marbled steps. The one in front would become my classroom for freshman English — a subject that was a tough challenge for me. With a mixture of Mi-Wuk and the gutter language of my reservation father, the English I learned in school was always a struggle. My father set a poor example, I suppose. He was a drifter, working odd jobs here and there when he worked at all and his education was nil — no more than a grade or two — if that. He never told me. When he was a boy, there were few schools for Indian kids that amounted to much and money government plowed in mostly disappeared before it got to the classroom. When I was a boy it was worse, because I changed schools so many times when my father moved from place to place. How was I to learn much? But I guess I was naturally smart and learned anyway. By the time of graduation from my reservation school, I was getting good grades and qualified for this scholarship since I was an Indian and got a high score on some tests.

Montana, will you come to my office during a free period when you don’t have a class? the school superintendent asked when he saw me walking up the hallway stairs. What was up? He seldom spoke to any of the students and I didn’t think I’d gotten in any trouble. Okay, sir, I said. I’ll be up after my next class, wondering what he wanted. Montana was my name, but God knows where it came from, because I’ve never been close to Montana.

My aunt, who I’d lived with during high school, said maybe Montana was given to me by my mother, who might have come from there, but she didn’t know What little I knew of my mother — which isn’t much — is that she was a white girl who worked in Sonora, where she and my father hooked up. I’d heard whispers that she’d worked as a prostitute in some brothel. I never knew if that was true, and guess I’d just as soon not know. Maybe she and father got married, but it didn’t matter much, because she disappeared soon after I was born. I was handed around to Indian families on the reservation for a few years, and then I went back to live with my father one time when he got out of jail and reformed for awhile. He even got a job. He wanted me with him, so back I went, being about nine at the time and having just completed the fourth grade in Tuolumne City, where I’d been living with a white foster family. During that time, I pretty much learned how to take care of myself, which is why I can still get along okay. I had a survivor mentality I guess.

When I went to the superintendent’s office, though, I was nervous as hell. Montana, he began in a friendly tone, I have some good news for you! Remember the test all the students took a couple weeks ago? Well, you scored very high, at the top of the class. Congratulations, he said, smiling.

Thanks, I said. That comes as a big surprise. It sure does.

Well, it is a nice kind of surprise, and it just might lead to something even better, he said. The government has set aside some money for minority college scholarships. The Bureau of Indian Affairs is anxious to have Indians qualify for some of those scholarships and go on to college. It’s a way to give bright young people like you, the chance to leave the reservation and get a higher education. Then he paused for a moment. I plan to make application for one of those scholarships for you. How would you like that?

I can tell you I was stunned. I’d hoped to get a job somewhere off the reservation to escape the footsteps of my father, but college seemed so remote it had never entered my way of thinking. But, sir, college costs a lot of money — more money than I’ll ever have, I said. I’m not sure it makes any sense to apply.

Nonsense, Montana, that’s the good thing about this minority scholarship. They recognize all the difficulties and they’ve opened their pocket book to make it possible. I want you to think about it tonight, he said. Then come back to my office first thing in the morning. We’ll work together in filling out the application. Okay? I guess it was, so I took his advice, went home, thought about it, applied, and here I was six months later in Berkeley.

The campus was built on a hillside. It climbs up a steep grade past the microbiology lab where they study germs, then past the geology building where the seismograph to measure earthquakes is located. That seismograph was situated in a good spot: right next to an earthquake fault. Across the road was the football field, called the Memorial Coliseum, although no one remembered where the name came from A funny thing about that sunken football field; it was built in the crack of the Hayward earthquake fault that had erupted – or whatever earthquakes do — a hundred years ago, creating this deep crevice that they dug out for a football field, making it sort of a natural amphitheater. If the Hayward fault ruptures again, that seismology building will be in an opportune spot. I hope it doesn’t happen on a Saturday football afternoon.

My favorite part of the campus was the north side with the engineering school, where the campus ended. The street starts in the flat part of Berkeley, goes past the campus border and then ends in the steep hills. North of Hearst was a cluster of business shops for a couple blocks, and then began the homes that clung to the hillside cliffs among roads so narrow a car could barely navigate. I liked North Berkeley, because the terrain reminded me of the hills where I’d lived with my father above the Tuolumne River. Our shack was bleak with no water or electricity, but I could step out the front door and see a beautiful Sierra Mountain landscape. I spent a lot of time there alone, because my father was gone for long stretches: sometimes on drunk binges, sometimes in jail.

Then one time he never returned. Killed! Like I said, I’ve got a survivor mentality.

I could have made it on my own, but the agency people came to get me, taking me down to the Mi-Wuk ranchero to live with the widowed aunt and her three small children. That’s when I got a part-time job working for Frenchie in the pool hall, racking up cue balls.

In Berkeley, I found a place to live on the upper end of Virginia Street, a half dozen blocks from the campus. Virginia Street starts down against the water in the Bay and runs all the way through Berkeley up into the hills, where it ends abruptly against a cliff and can’t go any further. My room was perched against the cliff. The old widow who lived there had converted her garage into a room for rent with a bed, oil stove for warmth, electric hot plate for cooking, and partitioned off the corner for a toilet and shower. That toilet was a real luxury. My years on the reservation had been with outdoor privies and I’d taken few hot water showers. The best thing about the room, other than the toilet and shower, was that it gave me privacy — some place to be alone. I’d grown used to that on the reservation, being alone, and I found a security in it. Of course, it’s good only up to a certain point. The other thing I liked was to spend my evenings in the study room on the second floor of the University Library. I liked being around other people. Not that I ever talked to any of the students who sat at the long tables with their heads in books, but it gave me a good feeling to know I wasn’t alone, sitting there amongst them. None of them ever talked to each other either, so I wasn’t the only silent one.

Yes, I guess I was a natural loner; and maybe in some ways I could be called a misfit. The strange thing, though, is that those other students I sat with in the library and rubbed shoulders with in class didn’t seem much different than me. Of course, there were the sorority girls and handsome jocks strutting around the campus, but for the most part, we students looked as if we’d all qualified for some misfit scholarship or came from some foreign country. Now here we were at Berkeley, a rag-tag gang from no-where and everywhere. I came here on a scholarship to get an education at this great, heralded university and now sat amongst students who seemed to be as odd-ball as myself.

It didn’t make sense.

One of the best parts of Berkeley was this place called Tilden Park. If you climbed the stairs that scaled the cliffs above my room and kept hiking through the steep streets beyond, you eventually reached Skyline Boulevard. That is where Tilden Park began. It was a forested area that extended for miles to the east and north; I never knew how far, because I never made it to the other end. On weekends, when I needed a break from studying, I’d climb up to Tilden Park. Perhaps it was the Indian in my blood that made me run through the hills and breathe the air in those open spaces. I could go for miles and never see another person. It was great.

Then, before heading back to my room, I would sit on a rock near the crest and gaze at San Francisco across the bay. A bridge led from Berkeley over there, and off to the far right, I could see the Golden Gate Bridge and beyond it the Pacific Ocean, now ablaze in a spectacular sunset. What a scene. One day, I would go over to climb the hills of San Francisco.

At the university, I seldom had occasion to talk. With the classes so impersonal, I met no one I could call a friend. Most classes had over 50 students and one class was held in an amphitheater with over 300 students. I gradually recognized some of the faces and knew which ones would raise their hand to answer the questions the professors liked to throw out. They were the brown noses and I also saw familiar faces walking around campus, but I wasn’t the sort of person who’d go up to them and strike up a conversation. Sometimes a professor would look at the seating chart, then call out my name to answer a question. I hated that. It embarrassed me; my face would get flushed because I never seemed to have a good answer until after the class, when I mulled it through my mind. Sometimes if I did try to answer, my voice would crack. Those were the mornings when I’d not said anything yet and my voice wasn’t limbered up. I’d get upset with myself when I knew a good answer but didn’t raise my hand, only to listen to someone else responding with something that wasn’t half as good as what I would have said. I hated myself for always hanging back, but I suppose it sort of came from my survivor mentality of being over-cautious.

On the way back to my apartment after classes, I used to stop at a little grocery store on the corner of Euclid and Ridge Way to get a few things to cook on my hot plate. The checkout clerk was a young Chinese girl — probably a college student — who worked part-time and she’d always talk pleasant with me for a couple minutes. The store was never busy. On some days when I’d be on my way home in the late afternoon, she might be the first person I’d talked to all day. She was good looking, with soft brown eyes, long flowing hair, a nice smile and I thought of asking her for a date, but I never did. I even think she wanted me to ask her — like she was flirting with me — but I wasn’t good at doing that sort of thing. Once, my aunt told me I was a handsome guy and looked more white than Indian — like a white guy with a summer tan — and there was no reason I shouldn’t get dates. Sometimes the girls in high school would ask me to take them to a school dance, which I did, but I was so shy I never enjoyed those things. I didn’t know how to talk to a girl, I always seemed to clam up and could think of nothing to say until later, after I was home alone. Touching was not in my upbringing, nor was affection; I didn’t have a mother for that sort of thing. I don’t suppose it was even in the Indian culture. Then too, I never had a sister to learn how to socialize with so I could talk with a female. Too timid to ever try a kiss, I didn’t even know how to ask for one, but once when I was walking a girl home after a school dance, she threw her arms around me, pulled me in tight and kissed me, sticking her tongue in my mouth and pulsing it in and out. My blood raced fast, my penis suddenly grew very hard, and I don’t remember much after that. God, it was embarrassing.

The route I normally took home was to leave the campus through the Northgate exit, walk north one block to Euclid and turn right, go two blocks up Ridge Way and turn left on LeConte, passing along the side of Newman Hall. It looked like an old mansion, but was the church and social center for Catholic students. I didn’t know whether to consider myself Catholic, agnostic, or what, since I’d been dragged through every side of the religious thing. I didn’t know what my father was, because it was a subject that rarely came up. From fragments of conversation, though, I suspect he may have been exposed to the church somewhere in his past, as most Indians on the reservation had been churched by missionary priests; but however he might have been exposed, it sure didn’t take. No God existed in his hell-raising life. Then when I was seven years old, he got thrown into the county jail for a couple years for assault during a drunken brawl and I was taken to Tuolumne to live with this elderly white couple, the Caufields. The old lady should have been a nun instead of married to the old man, because she didn’t talk about anything except religion. There was constant praying. Of course, I was immediately baptized, sent to catechism, started taking communion and next thing I knew, I was dressed up in the black cassock of an altar boy for Sunday Mass. The old priest taught me the prayers to say when I kneeled on the altar steps or stood beside the altar delivering wine and water, or carted the heavy missal book from one side of the altar to the other. Other than the prayer thing, he rarely talked to us. Sunday mornings in church were a drag. The only fun things were a few games we altar boys played, like trying to muffle snickers when we’d hear the old priest — all adorned in his fancy robes during mass — suddenly let out with these big farts. They didn’t smell, but boy, they sounded great! I guess he was concentrating so hard on what was in that missal that he forgot to squeeze his butt and let them out softly. That’s how we altar boys did it: squeeze and let them out softly; at least during mass.

When my father got out of jail, he took me away from the Caufields and we moved into the shack on the Tuolumne River near Groveland, where he tended cattle in a mountain pasture. So my religious training came abruptly to an end, which was not a big disappointment. We were there for a couple years when my father went off one Saturday afternoon and I knew he’d caught the scent of liquor again. He never returned.

I was told later that he was killed in another drunken brawl. That’s when the agency people got me again, and this time took me to live with my aunt and her kids. I guess she was only part Catholic; we never talked about it much, and we never had to pray, but sometimes she’d drag me and the three kids to mass over in Tuolumne City; mostly on Christmas and Easter. By this time, the old priest was gone and the Caufields dead, so nobody at that church remembered I had been an altar boy. I was happy about that.

So as I walked past the Newman Club, it brought back a mixed bag of religious memories. I still knew the ropes about mass — when to stand, kneel, or sit — but I didn’t like talking to priests who might look for some opening to convert me back again.

The Newman Club had signs to entice students in. I was not motivated by the signs, but something else I saw through the windows caught my eye — a pool table. I