High School and the Influences of slavery, Assassinations, and the Vietnam War, by Kathy Green

Kathy Green was raised in St. Louis, Missouri. After majoring in geology, she became a National Park Ranger for five years. During that time, she met Chuck Kroger [the editor’s brother], whom she married in 1978. They settled in Telluride, Colorado in 1979, where they co-founded Bone (Back of Nowhere Engineering) Construction company. When Chuck died of pancreatic cancer in 2007, Kathy and co-workers continued the company’s projects. Kathy enjoys hiking, running rivers, making art (including silk dying), and working for environmental and social justice in her region.

 

Background: Missouri was the compromise state in the Civil War. Some of my great great great ancestors fought on the confederate side and owned slaves. My mother still has the slave book from that time, recording the births and deaths of the slaves. My mother also was told (oral history) that my fifth great grandfather was a “good owner” because he never broke up families.

I was in first grade in 1956 when Adlai Stevenson was running for president. My family had moved to Webster Groves a year earlier. Webster Groves, a St. Louis suburb, was more conservative and Republican than my family. My understanding is that all of my family had been Democrats since the Democratic Party was formed in the 1830s. A few family “rogues” have married Republicans but their kids have all been born Democrats. I came home in tears one day in late October 1956 because we had had a mock election at school. Out of 30 students in my class, Adlai Stevenson had gotten only six votes. Come election day that November, I was “working the election”—almost six years old, standing the required 100 feet from the door to the school/polling-place door, smiling and trying to hand every approaching voter a Stevenson brochure. Working elections was a family activity. A little metal pin of the bottom of a shoe with a hole worn in the sole is one of my prize possessions to this day. Go Adlai!

At the same time that I was a young child being taught to work elections and work to preserve historic buildings from demolition, my grandfather, John Raeburn Green, and the family law firm were under severe criticism and lost many clients during the McCarthy witch-hunt. My grandfather believed that everyone deserved counsel and he believed in free speech. He took the pro bono case of a man accused of being a Communist and defended him before the Supreme Court (and lost). For that volunteer work, Joseph McCarthy, from the Senate floor, called my grandfather and his law partner (one of the senators from Missouri) communists—a scary and destructive event at the time. Many of my family preferred to be activists that flew “under the radar” after that experience. We were never afraid to be Democrats, to work for social justice, environmental justice, and other liberal causes. We just did not need recognition—especially in the Senate. I didn’t understand the risk completely. I don’t think even my grandfather understood it that well. But I grew up my entire life with this story. My mother said never to tell anyone you were a socialist or a communist.

When I was five, my kindergarten teacher taught us the National Anthem and Dixie, one right after the other. One time when my family went to a ball game, everyone stood and sang the National Anthem. When it was over I started in to sing Dixie. My mom asked what on earth I was doing, and I said, Singing the next stanza. She said, No! Can’t you tell that those are two different songs? I couldn’t; apparently I’m tone-deaf/musically challenged. Throughout elementary school our music teacher had us sing both songs in succession.

 

Our family were big Hubert Humphrey supporters. Once John Kennedy became the Democratic candidate for President, we were all for him. We worked hard to help Kennedy win the election. Many of our friends were Republicans so during the 1960 election and during his presidency, I heard these friends rant and rave against JFK. On Nov. 22, 1963, I was almost 13 years old and in eighth grade. They told us over the junior high school speaker system that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. School was dismissed. I walked out of school confused and upset, into a howling rainstorm. As I tried to find the friends that I usually walked to and from school with, my mother suddenly appeared with my little brother to drive me home. Everyone was crying. At home, the TV was on full time—that never happened in our house; we traditionally watched only an hour or two of TV a day. All our friends came by our house over the next few days. The people that had been ranting and raving against Kennedy were crying and praising him. I found this total change in their feelings startling and confusing.

In my high school, Webster Groves, there were a series of ironic things that happened in my history classes. We were reading about socialism and communism and about sharing the wealth, and it seemed so intuitively obvious that that’s how the world should be run. On the one hand we were practicing duck and cover to protect ourselves from the Communists, but on the other hand we were learning how fair those systems are. Webster Groves was a pre-Civil War town that had had plantations and farms with slaves. Every kid knew disturbing history. In my junior year we had a teacher who was new to the area and kind of young. He started out with a lecture about people who had been slaves taking up the names of their owners after the Emancipation Proclamation. We were sitting there, black and white kids, some with the same last names, and we all knew that Johnny’s great great great grandfather had owned Sally’s family way back. We’d known this our whole lives, and the teacher was giving us this huge lecture. We were thinking, Yeah, so what? The teacher asked if there were any questions, and the black kid popped up and said, Yeah, I’ve got the same last name as he does because his grandfather owned mine. The teacher got a horrified look on his face. Apparently the history teacher didn’t know the history of the town he was teaching in. Things were not always perfect between the white and black students. We knew our history and knew that it wasn’t good or kind, but we felt it wasn’t worth dwelling on. Most of the time, we students wanted to move towards more racial equality. These high school lectures followed being taught to sing “Dixie” along with the “National Anthem” all through elementary school. Strange….

The next year we had Modern European History. A woman teacher started the first class with an introductory lecture. This class had about 20% black and 80% white students, with two random Asian students whose parents were professors at the big universities. The teacher lectured that we all came from Europe and that European history is the most important in the world, and on and on. She stopped and my friend Janet raised her hand. Janet has blond curly hair and blue eyes. Janet said, I am a Cherokee Indian, and this history has nothing to do with me, and why did you say that it did? The teacher said, Oh. She quickly started roll call, and she got to the name Janet Bushyhead. Janet raised her hand. She really was a Cherokee Indian and a princess at that. An Englishman had married into her tribe years and years ago, so lots of Bushyhead family had blond curly hair and blue eyes. Her dad looked much more Cherokee but her grandmother and sisters did not. It was a priceless moment. We were bratty sixteen-year-olds in 1967. To see the look on this teacher’s face. The black students were all smirking. Had one of them challenged her, they probably would have gotten sent to the principal. We thought, how can she lecture us when she could look out across the classroom. Maybe you don’t see the sleeper Indian princess in disguise but you could see the diversity that we did have in this small town.

When I was in high school, my dad became the selective service attorney counselor, so that if you were going to get drafted, you were provided with a lawyer to talk to. This was a volunteer post. It was interesting for me; I was a very shy, gawky, geeky sixteen-year-old high school kid and I was watching the sports stars at my school a year or two older than I who had not gone to college or dropped out and now were being drafted and would come over one evening a week. My dad would come home early. I would sit at the top of the stairs where I could hear what was being said. They were almost in tears. I’d listen to what my dad was telling them about deferrals. There wasn’t much hope he could offer them. It was sad, and some of them never came home. This counseling brought it all alive for me, just like World War II later came alive for me when I traveled in Germany. My mother told me a lot of stories about World War II, and watching this unfold in my younger years brought it all home and understand the impact of being in your teens and early 20s during that war was so incredibly major.

My parents started out tolerant of the Vietnam war; it seemed like something the U.S. ought to do. My dad had served in World War II. It made him grow up but it also distorted the rest of his life. In time my family got more and more angry about the war. Both my grandmothers had these big buttons that said “Grandmothers for McGovern” and were very active in his campaign. That’s one of the things that shaped my high school years from 1965 to 1968. The other thing that influenced me was the knowledge that my great great great grandfather had owned slaves, and then, after “Roots” was aired, to see black people come to our house to look up their family histories in the slave book. Then in the spring of 1968 a lot of dramatic events happened. Martin Luther King was killed, and then the night before I graduated from high school, Bobby Kennedy was killed. It was this weird feeling. I can remember we were having our family dinner before we went to the graduation ceremony, and there were these graduate parties afterwards, and I was sitting there all dressed up in those silly clothes, supposed to be celebrating the biggest event of my life, and we’d just had another assassination. It was really hard to reconcile the two: to go forward with the ceremony and the congratulations and to party that night and the assassination the day before. There wasn’t much alcohol and barely any marijuana at this party because it was 1968 in the Midwest. Five years later everybody would have gotten drunk or stoned to mourn the assassination. But it was a real wake-up call that these things were happening my senior year of high school.

Graduating from high school is a big change in your life, but graduating into a world where assassination was becoming an everyday occurrence was scary. What would college and adult life be like?  [to be continued]

White Owl Cigars and Racial Tension: Hauler on a Tobacco Farm, by Marty Bernstein

Marty Bernstein worked in the New York state court system as a civil servant. He was like a round peg in a square hole—a left-wing court officer and clerk. Two years after retiring in 2007, he worked part time at a non-profit for the developmentally disabled. In 2013 he completely retired and now spends vacations in a cooperative community in upstate New York called Spring Glen Meadows, the home of burned-out sixties radicals. He has two adult children and has been married to the same woman for 38 wonderful years. Her name is Patricia Ruggiero Bernstein. He says it has been a great Jewish-Italian combination.

In the summer of 1965 when I was fourteen and in junior high school, my family moved to Springfield, Massachusetts from Long Island, New York. In the summer I got a job on a tobacco farm in the Connecticut Valley. It was called a shade tobacco industry. They made tobacco for the outside of White Owl cigars. The farm was owned by the Hathaway-Stene Tobacco Company.

Young boys and girls would be hired to work there every summer. There was a hierarchy by height that determined what work one would do. Shorter boys were pickers because it was a handicap to be tall when picking. (Harder to stoop.) The foreman was my gym teacher, Mr. Gallucci, whom I liked. He would take us on a school bus out to the field.

I wasn’t a picker but a hauler. I would pull a metal framed canvas bin, about the size of a drawer in a chest of drawers with a loop in one end, down the rows to pick up the leaves. I would take them to a large shed, where all the girls worked “sewing” the leaves and hanging them to dry and age.

I had come from a lily-white, middle-class suburb on Long Island. When I got to the fields, there were both black and white boys, many of them working class. I had never been around black kids before. There was a lot of hostility and racism towards them. Although I never heard the white boys use the n-word, they called the black kids “Cottonbolls.” One time it came to blows between the two groups, and I assisted in stopping the fight. I hung out more frequently with the black kids than with the white ones.

                                                 

All the kids came from Springfield. They went to fairly segregated schools but ironically they all played ball together at the ball park, where they seemed to get along fine. At that time the schools were de facto segregated but not by law. The junior high schools were neighborhood schools. When I attended junior high school there were no Jews in the area. The principal told me that I wasn’t allowed to be in the academic program, although I loved school and had always gotten good grades. My dad thought that the principal was an anti-Semite.

The four senior high schools were not neighborhood schools. They were arranged by type and were segregated by placing kids in the school deemed appropriate. The top school that was overwhelmingly white was called Classical High School. Its focus was the liberal arts. Timothy Leary had graduated from there.

The next one was the Technical High School. It had a mixture of white and Black and Puerto Rican. The third was Commerce High School, which was mainly black and Puerto Rican. The Trade High School was overwhelmingly Black and Latino. The next year I went into the Classical High School, where all the classes were academic anyway. In high school I attended weekly silent vigils against the war in Vietnam. I believe it was organized by a church group like the Quakers or Unitarians. Also the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.

At the tobacco field we earned $1.10 per hour, less than minimum wage. I remember I made $44 a week. There were poor sanitary conditions in the fields. Wooden barrels on little trailers would come around bringing us drinking water. (Apparently the barrels had formerly held wine. We could smell the residue.) We had to relieve ourselves in the fields. There were two groups: day and migrant. The migrant workers—Puerto Ricans—were kept separate from us.

 

I was glad to have this job. First of all, it gave me some spending money. Also, it was my first significant experience with racism. And I got the chance to understand manual labor and appreciate the manual laborers.

Wearing Whites: My Time in the Military by Roger

Roger lives in the San Diego area, has two children and seven grandchildren, and frequently travels with his family. He spends his summers at a lake in northwestern Montana.

 

In 1966 when I was a junior at college in Billings, Montana, I was drafted because my grades had dropped below the threshold. I believed anyway that serving my country was my duty and that I would be proud to do it. I feared going off to Vietnam but was willing to do so if needed.

I was inducted at Butte, Montana and did my basic training at Ft. Lewis, Washington, where ours was only the second group to go through basic there since World War II. Coal-fired boilers heated the barracks. We had to keep the windows open as a precaution because of the meningitis outbreak at Fort Ord in San Francisco. Doctors thought that open windows would help prevent an outbreak at Ft. Lewis.

After basic, I was sent to Fort McPherson, 3^rd Army Headquarters, in Atlanta. I was assigned to the hospital laboratory school for training as a lab technician. Back at Ft. Lewis I had had the requisite testing in basic training and received an extremely high score on the code translation test. I had been exposed to Morse Code in Boy Scouts but never got my merit badge because I hadn’t proved competent in it. So when I took the requisite battery of tests in basic, I just filled in random answers on the multiple choice test. When they called us in to discuss the tests, I was told I got one of the highest scores they’d ever seen in code translation. They  wanted to send me to the communication school in Ft. Huachuca, but I told them I didn’t want to do communication and would prefer to “wear whites,” meaning to be assigned to a medical unit, hopefully in the U.S.

To get to Atlanta we took a Delta jet through Chicago. It was my first travel on a jet plane. We landed at O’Hare Airport in Chicago and I was overwhelmed at the immensity of it. In Atlanta we waited at the airport for someone to pick us up. Announcements were made over poor loud speakers in a southern drawl; we couldn’t understand any of it.

The Ft. McPherson base (Ft. Mac) itself was luxurious compared to Ft. Lewis. There were 600 acres; more than half of the base consisted of a golf course. It was a place where old soldiers were headquartered shortly before they retired. There was a laboratory school. In retrospect I often wondered if there weren’t connections for most of us to get into this particular school because the really big lab school was in Ft. Sam Houston in Texas with several hundred students. We, on the other hand, had only 21 or so students.

Once two friends, Keith and Bob, and I went to meet Keith’s new girlfriend at a Southern Baptist Church. We were told we would arrive after the service, but it turned out that the service hadn’t yet begun so we reluctantly sat through it. We found ourselves sitting in the front row.

At the end of the service the preacher said, “Those of you who have seen the light of Jesus and accepted him as your savior, please rise.” We three just sat there. The pastor repeated this twice, his voice rising in pitch each time. We were embarrassed but didn’t succumb. On the way out of the church, the minister greeted everyone. As he shook my hand, I said, “I think it’s strange that this is Atlanta, Georgia. Why are there no black people in this church?” Whereupon he pulled on my hand, yanking my arm, and guided me firmly out the door without responding to my question.

There was only one black student at the lab school. Joe was a lifeguard from Los Angeles before being drafted. I’d never had occasion to be friends with a black man before, having grown up in Kalispell, Montana. We’d go out to classy places in Atlanta like the Top of the Mart, where we had no problems being served.

I had married my wife on leave at Christmas time, and we rented an apartment. At a party at my place, Joe was standing by the pool when some of my friends shoved him in, all in fun. The day after the pool incident, I was contacted by my C.O. He was from Lubbock, Texas. “Don’t you know where you are?” he asked me.

“I know very well where I am,” I replied, mimicking his tone.

“Well, obviously you don’t. And you’re going to have to learn!” It turned out that a white sergeant in the same apartment complex had complained about Joe. Later after we were intimidated into moving out, we found out that the pool had been closed for three days to be drained and “cleansed.”

A friend of mine had put a deposit on another unit in the same complex. He was asked if he knew me and my wife. “Yes,” he replied, “and I have a lot more friends [implying black friends] than they do.”

“How do you want your deposit back?” the manager asked him.

Our next apartment was in the middle of a black neighborhood. A twenty-foot barbed wire fence “protected” it. However, the managers did tell me there was no problem if I had black visitors. Six months later a law was passed prohibiting landlords from discriminating against military personnel.

I had a best friend from college in Montana—he’d been best man in absentia at my wedding because he was serving in Vietnam at the time. He wanted to go into politics someday. K.C. [not his real name] felt that serving in the military was important to his political aspirations, (although he would have willingly volunteered anyway). In order to be accepted he had to go through Montana Senator Mike Mansfield, then Senate Majority Leader and a former marine, who pulled strings for him because he didn’t meet the height requirement. He went from Camp Pendleton in California to Vietnam, where he was serving his tour.

It was the end of my lab training and we were sitting in Atlanta waiting to be assigned and watching the national news on TV. The news always reported the number of fatalities and told stories about some of the men. Although his name wasn’t mentioned, I got chills down my spine and said, “K.C. Is dead.” He hadn’t been required to do any more patrols because his remaining tour of service was only three days. However, because he wanted to spend the remaining time with his men, he volunteered to go out on a final patrol with them. He took point [led the patrol], stepped on a landmine, and was killed. My wife and I established a scholarship at our alma mater in his honor. I still think about this incident with great sadness.

One week later I got orders to ship out. It was all hush-hush. We had no idea where we were headed. We loaded our supplies at the train tracks. After flying for three days in a C130 transit plane, touching down in Kentucky, San Francisco, Honolulu, Wake Island, Guam, and flying over Vietnam, we landed at Korat Air Force Base in Thailand.

I was stationed in a field hospital. They called it a mobile lab, but it didn’t really move. It was in the middle of nowhere and I hated it. It served as support for the air base for daily bombing raids on Vietnam and was 80 kilometers from Cambodia. There were illegal flights over Cambodia and Laos against the will of those countries’ governments, in order to reach Vietnam.

While there, I learned that doctors are not what you think. I had always considered them intelligent, but there was one in particular that opened my eyes. Ours was considered a “hardship tour of duty,” which meant, among other things, that no relatives or spouses were allowed there. One black sergeant violated the rule and kept his diabetic wife there. At the time of the incident I was on call. A doctor from Beverly Hills—a draftee—was on duty. The sergeant’s wife came into the clinic, needing insulin. Dr. H refused to see her. I pleaded with him to no avail. After talking to her for a while, I went off to sleep. In the morning I went into the lab, which also served as a morgue, and found her lying on a slab. I was sickened and furious. That rich SOB! I will never forget that incident.

Dr. H would order all the lab tests he could think of, regardless of need and even though he knew we couldn’t carry out many of them due to our limited facilities. But he would make it an immediate order [called STAT] and then ignore the results.

In one area of Thailand, soldiers were collecting mosquitoes for a malaria study. A soldier from the study came into the hospital, feeling sick. Malaria showed up in his lab test. Dr. H didn’t know what to do, and the kid died. The pathologist, a captain and our boss, had the authority to bring charges. But Dr. H had more time in and therefore outranked our boss. Also, our boss had acquired his medical degree through the army; i.e., he wasn’t wealthy. Therefore he feared retaliation and backed down. Charges were never brought.

I didn’t experience much danger in Thailand. Once when I was at the enlisted men’s club, the “Thai Cong” blew up our ammo depot, which scared the hell out of us. The whole building shook.

Once three MIGs were intercepted as they headed towards the base. A red alert was declared; the base was blacked out, except for the lighted red cross on the hospital roof. Our C.O. insisted that that light be turned off also. It took a long time to figure out how to do this. Meanwhile, we sat in the dark in the hospital over a flask of scotch.

Another incident was at the grand opening of Veena’s Restaurant. Veena was the wife of the former hospital C.O., who died leaving her his military insurance, enabling her to start the restaurant on Freedom Highway, a road built by the U.S. headed towards Cambodia. Veena was especially fond of us hospital personnel and treated us like royalty, so 90% of the hospital personnel along with most of the base command were present at the opening of her restaurant. I was approached by a friend from CID [military intelligence] and ordered to inform the general that we needed to evacuate immediately because the CID had found three mortars in the surrounding area directly aimed at the restaurant and it was unknown if there were more.

As to casualties, in order to cope with them, I had to gradually learn to distance myself from the horror that was the reality of my job. I remember one pilot that crashed at the end of the runway and nothing was left of him but a mass of charcoal; nothing human-looking remained of his body at all.

When I arrived in Oakland in 1968 at the end of my tour of duty, we were required to wear our uniforms to fly home on stand-by. Our commander had warned us to ignore any demonstrators. It was a rainy day. As we were driven by bus to a plane bound for San Diego, we saw demonstrators with their anti-war signs. It was painful, the lack of understanding for the effort I had just made in serving my country.

Last year, along with another Vietnam-era vet and a World War II vet, I had occasion to visit the World War II museum in New Orleans. It was a moving experience. It had taken 46 years for me to hear the two words, “Welcome home.”

 

Letters from West Berlin, Part 4, by Kitty Kroger. December 1966: Awakening to the Vietnam War

In the summer of 1966 upon graduating from Colorado College, a friend had arranged a summer  job for me in a youth hostel on Sylt, a German island  in the North Sea off the coast of Hamburg. After two months, I left by train to see a bit more of Europe before returning to the U.S. My first stop was West Berlin. Maybe I thought the divided city would be especially interesting, or was it just the first place on my route?

Whatever the reason, I ended up living there for four years. Following is the fourth of a series of selections from detailed letters to my parents during that time. As you will see, over time I was altered by my experiences in 1960s West Berlin and ended up a different person from the politically naive girl who first arrived there.

FOURTH IN A SERIES
December 1966

December 10, 1966
Dear Mom and Dad,

Today I took part in a demo against the war in Vietnam. I feel strongly about it although there are still so many gaps in my knowledge. But the more I learn, the stronger I feel.

 

Dec. 10, 1966
Dear Charlie,

I’ve recently become part of a study and action group of American students who are against America’s presence in Vietnam. We may start marching in January. Meanwhile we’re learning. We have a lot of literature on Vietnam, and we read all we can. All the kids in the group are clean-cut types, no beats at all, which should impress the conservatives at least. Today I joined a group of Free University students, about two to three hundred, in a short march and protest speech in the heart of Berlin. I was very disappointed that the group got rowdy at the end so that the police had to disperse them from blocking traffic and even had to haul off three or four students bodily. But the interaction of discussions between students and bystanders was very profitable. At the end, however, the students burned a Papier-mâchéhead of Johnson, shouting Johnson Murderer, etc., which probably doesn’t do anything at all to advance anything at all. About ten Americans took part in the march itself, not in the aftermath.

 

Monday, December 12, 1966
Dear Parents,

I’ve been reading a lot about Vietnam and also a novel Steppenwolf  by Herman Hesse in German.

I read a good article saying that Vietnam can’t be compared with Hitler’s conquest of Europe because China is not able or willing to move in and overtake another country Blitzkrieg style. [At the time one of the arguments for the Vietnam War was that China wanted to take over the world like Hitler did.] She [China] works through internal subversion and exploits national unrest and revolution, which is occurring in South America, Africa, and Asia. America is outdated, unenlightened, and immoral if she thinks she can prevent Communism by distribution of military support to governments all over the globe “whose main virtue is often their anti-communism” and whose vices are greed and exploitation of its own people’s poverty and an eagerness to take American money into its own pockets.

Here according to my limited knowledge is what I think is happening in Vietnam and elsewhere. America pours money into many foreign countries to support the governments in the status quo. In doing this we disregard the fact that we are making these countries extremely dependent upon us industrially, which the people and leaders of the people resent. America promises support and protection of the ruling regime (like Batista) against communism and revolution in return for the raw materials of these under-industrialized lands. America buys these goods out, cheaply develops them in her own factories and with her highly developed industry, then in return sells them back to the countries at a tremendous profit. The people don’t receive even the initial price for the raw goods. The government in power receives this money, which it uses to build palaces, great monuments to its own glory, to support mistresses, and for an army to defend itself against its own people. Thus the money doesn’t go to build factories, to enable the people to produce their own finished products. The lands remain backward and poor, and the people grow more and more dissatisfied.

So the communists support revolutionaries who overthrow (or try to) the government, and then America is forced to send military supplies—and in Vietnam and elsewhere—men to suppress these uprisings. It’s a fallacy for us to assume that these virgin governments, which are just beginning to attain independence, will simply become puppets of China or Russia. They want to be independent, to be allowed to develop their own industry. Look at Ghana and Indonesia and Cambodia. They are not communist, although they have sharply dealt with America. They have succeeded by themselves in setting back communism and they want to be left alone to develop, to be neutral, to trade with both the east and the west. But first they have to have a period of isolationism, just as we did in the nineteenth century, to build themselves up. If we put pressure on them to accept our way of government, then the communists react with counter-attacks and the country may even become a battlefield.

We shall lose economically when a country “breaks away” from us, but we shall not necessarily lose it ideologically.

Yes, there is no doubt that Vietnam will become communist under Mr. Minh.

[Ho Chi Minh led the Việt Minh independence movement from 1941 onward, establishing the communist-ruled Democratic Republic of Vietnam in 1945 and defeating the French Union in 1954 at the battle of Điện Biên Phủ. He officially stepped down from power in 1965 due to health problems, but remained a highly visible figurehead and inspiration for those Vietnamese fighting for his cause—a united, communist Vietnam—until his death. After the war, Saigon, capital of the Republic of Vietnam, was renamed Hồ Chí Minh City. when (if) we pull out, but Vietnam has had an unhappy history of horrible colonial exploitation by the French, which was finally ended by Ho Chi Minh and the communists. Then the bungling and cruelties of Diem, who was apparently set up by America, caused the National Liberation Front to arise within South Vietnam itself. In other words, Vietnam is not a Nazi situation and is no test case for America and its desire to check the flow of communism. (Source: Wikipedia)]

Please comment if you have time.

Love, Kitty

 

[December 1966]
Dear Family,

Thanks for your letter, Dad. I’ll answer it soon. Hope you had a great Christmas.

People were very nice to me at Christmas. My landlady brought me a huge plate of assorted fresh fruit and chocolate. She still keeps bringing me homemade applesauce with lemon rinds, cranberry sauce, homemade potato soup, and other goodies. For Christmas Eve I went to the home of a German friend Elizabeth. The family stems from Bayern (Bavaria). They speak a strong Bavarian dialect among themselves, and it was wonderful to hear them all talking excitedly among themselves and brutalizing the German language. The mother played “Silent Night” on the piano and we all sang. We had carp—boiled and fried—and a delicious sour cream dessert. They gave me a huge plate of nuts, fruit, and cookies. I gave Elizabeth a bright red and blue plaid tablecloth. We watched part of “A Christmas Carol” auf deutsch on TV and then an exhibition of religious frescoes and oil paintings from the Middle Ages and Renaissance—also on TV—while the father, a psych prof at the Technical University, explained some of their typical characteristics to me. The whole family (three daughters and a son) all walked to Midnight Mass through falling snowflakes. They light the candles on the tree for the first time that year. (All Germans have candles instead of colored lights, which they first light on Christmas Eve.)

On Christmas day I went to Wicclair and Mierendorff’s apartment for supper and wine and bloody Marys. I gave Mr. Wicclair a theatrical calendar which I bought in East Berlin and I gave Mrs. Mierendorff a copy of Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast because it deals with his life in Paris during 1920-1924 or so and because Mrs. M. spent time there after the Second World War and fell in love with it just as I did. She gave me a book of German poetry and he gave me a huge box of chocolates.

On the 26th, I went to Frau Kern’s [she had employed me to babysit and houseclean] for a delicious half-chicken lunch and schnaps and wine. I brought the kids a “doctor set” and they gave me a wonderful “Care” package, which consisted of fresh fruit, Wurst, candy, eau de Cologne, tea bags, and canned mandarin oranges. I discussed “life at the University” with Herr Kern, who is an assistant physicist there, working on his doctorate.

My friend in East Berlin is an elderly man about 70 years old. He invited me and a friend to hear some Beethoven on his record player, and he treated us to an egg liqueur and he and I played Mozart for four hands on his piano. He was very warm and cultured and dignified and sweet—and somehow so tragic too because of his isolation in only half of what used to be his whole city.

Being here in Europe has made me terribly proud sometimes of America and our schools and art and spirit and friends. After [I was] held by the East Berlin officials [one] day and discussed politics briefly with [an] official, I was especially proud of our freedom of expression and of my liberty to express to that man my own political views without having to worry about whether I was expressing ideas in accordance with the ruling party of my government or not.

The East Berliner expressed only ideas that were in the strictest harmony with the “party line,” but by so doing he didn’t impress me as being either sincere or even rational. The only impression I received was one of stupidity that he could defend his government so blindly with the same responses to whatever I said. Or I felt pity that he was so afraid to discuss openly with me both the mistakes and the progress made by his government. Not that I would expect him in any case to condemn his government, but he couldn’t even admit the possibility that perhaps the mess that Germany is in today is the result of many complex factors involving errors on both sides. And not just on Germany but on every single issue he assumed the same sort of stereotyped attitude of black and white. It was impossible to discuss solutions to problems with him—he was too concerned with making East Germany and the communist-block countries appear golden.

Once during the conversation I mentioned that my interest in politics had quickened after I’d been in Europe a few months, and that for the first time I was beginning to actively study the Vietnam War and take issue with some of my government’s policies. The official responded in the most sincere manner, “That’s understandable. Of course you couldn’t criticize the U.S. policy when you were in the states: you’d be put in jail.” I was shocked, but he was very sincere; I think he really did believe that. I said, “Where did you ever hear that? That’s completely false. you couldn’t be more mistaken. I can criticize the government as much as I want to.” He shrugged his shoulders and said, “Oh yes, the American freedom.” Then he changed the subject.

We are losing face all over the world by our stand in Vietnam, because of the way we are handling the war. If I am sincerely against the war for intelligent, well thought out, and largely moral grounds, then I can’t be so hypocritical as to appear otherwise, and I can’t do any service to my country regarding its image in the eyes of the world if I either verbally support or at best refuse to discuss outside of the family the topic. The world has got to know, Johnson has got to know, that a large number of Americans intelligently, not blindly, and strongly follow what they believe to be their moral responsibility in opposing the continuation of the war. Johnson is not the only American. I am an American too. And I think, Dad, that the information is available to the layman, to the non-specialist, to the public.

Kitty

Letters from West Berlin, Part 3, by Kitty Kroger. October and November 1966: Hitchhiking, Trip to Paris, and Talking with a Student from Hanoi

In the summer of 1966 upon graduating from Colorado College, a friend had arranged a summer  job for me in a youth hostel on Sylt, a German island  in the North Sea off the coast of Hamburg. After two months, I left by train to see a bit more of Europe before returning to the U.S. My first stop was West Berlin. Maybe I thought the divided city would be especially interesting, or was it just the first place on my route?

Whatever the reason, I ended up living there for four years. Following is the third of a series of selections from detailed letters to my parents during that time. As you will see, over time I was altered by my experiences in 1960s West Berlin and ended up a different person from the politically naive girl who first arrived there.

THIRD IN A SERIES
October 1966

Berlin 1966 Oktober

Dear Mom and Dad,

I wanted to tell you about my trip through Austria. I hitched about half of the trip alone and never had any problems but I got sort of tired of rejecting invitations to go out dancing with truck drivers, to drive through the Alps with 45-year-old travelling salesmen. But I did get some interesting rides with a foreign correspondent for French newspapers, with one of the inspectors of the German Starfighters, with an ex-SS soldier, and with a Viennese war refugee. When I hitched with other people, the rides were sometimes even better. A Dutch couple bought me and my two hitching mates from English and Australia each $1.25 bus tickets to Hitler’s tea house high in the mountains above Berchtesgaden.

An Italian businessman picked up Dave and me in S. Austria. We communicated in grunts and gestures the whole way. He had a flat tire. Once Dave and I stopped to buy bread and cheese for lunch, and the grocer insisted on giving us a partial tour of the town and on driving us right to the door of the youth hostel. His son and family lived in America and he was so proud of it.

Another time a Persian guy and I just happened to be hitching on the same stretch when a truck stopped and picked us up. The Persian spoke almost no German and although he spoke English, he understood almost nothing. Besides that the truck made so much noise you couldn’t hear anyway. But our truck driver insisted on speaking to us, which required a tremendous use of gestures because of the noise and all. Several times the truck almost ran off the road, and then from time to time the driver would take a swig of some brown liquid from a brown bottle. He kept calling it Kaffee, but the Persian and I arrived unanimously at the conclusion that the Kaffee smelled strongly of beer. In addition to all that, the man kept saying things like “I’m a Russian really,” and “Goldwater gut, Hitler gut—both strong, not wishy-washy.” In the face of all this, the Persian kept trying to convince me to spend the night with him instead of hitching on to Berlin right away. And I don’t think he got the message that I had no intention of “taking advantage” of his hospitality. At any rate he kept repeating the invitation every five minutes, and by the end of the trip I was a nervous wreck.

I think I had the best experience in Salzburg.

The city is small (100,000 approximately) and reeks with atmosphere. One night my English and Australian friends and I went to a large café for dinner. There was an Austrian six-piece orchestra that played Straus waltzes and Austrian folk music. At our table sat a very distinguished looking elderly Austrian gentleman, with his glass of Schnaps (German for schnapps—hard liquor), and his Wiener Schnitzel. From time to time he would sing to the music in a beautiful baritone. When dinner came the English and Australian guys started to show me how to eat European style, and although the Austrian had been oblivious to us up to then, he couldn’t resist showing me the only really correct way to eat, the Austrian way, which consists of holding the fork in the left hand, stabbing a piece of Wurst (sausage) with it, and shoveling sauerkraut and potatoes onto your fork with your knife, then stuffing the whole mixture into your mouth. Another night in Salzberg, we all went to a pub for dinner—about ten of us from the youth hostel. A group of young Austrian workers were sitting at another table. They started to sing, we started to sing, and we took turns singing English folksongs and Austrian ones. Finally, they all came over and sat with us and someone started playing an accordion, and we danced the polka and kept drinking more beer. Of course we had to all head back to the hostel for 10 pm curfew.

Classes at the Technical University (T.U.) have started. I’ve attended two so far.

Two nights ago I went out dancing with Howard. First we walked about three hours around Kreuzberg looking at the architecture. We wandered down to Stuttgarter Platz, a cheap striptease section of town, with streetwalkers standing in front of every door. Every bar looks the same. The outsides are plastered with pictures of strippers and the façade is always black tile with a thick curtain hanging before the door. You walk in and there’s a jukebox and a screen for the filmstrips (literally film strips). We chose one with good beat music, talked the manager down to half-price for our drinks, and danced and talked for about three hours. It was 6 am when I finally got home. I slept until 3:30 pm the next day. What a depraved life!

My room is cold—perhaps I’m not using enough coal. But I think the coal oven is not very efficient. Anyway, the coal is costing a lot more than the DM 9 a month which my landlady assured me.

 

November 7, 1966

Last night after spending my morning at a lecture on T.S. Eliot and my afternoon in the American-German library reading plays, I went to the jazz concert to get a ticket at the last minute and I met friends there; afterwards we went to an all-night jazz party, where all the entertainers jammed. Dave Brubeck, Astrud Gilberto, bossa nova, the Kuhn brothers quartet. It’s rather ironic coming to Berlin to hear fantastic American jazz. We all bought a hot Wurst (fried hotdog) for breakfast and went to the end of another party, then headed home after driving around Berlin in the dawn to look at architecture again. Got in at about 9 am and slept till 1 pm.

The courses I’m auditing are French, literature, art, German. Last week I saw No Exit by Sartre. I heard a lecture at Amerikahaus in German on “Why Foreign Aid?” I talked about Vietnam with a Persian student. I met an Austrian man whom I had coffee with; we had this wild conversation about beauty and character in people. I didn’t really understand what he was trying to express, but it was interesting anyway.

[The Amerika Haus Berlin is an institution that was developed following the end of the Second World War to provide an opportunity for German citizens to learn more about American culture and politics. (Source: Wikipedia)]

Postcard of Brandenburg Tor, Friday, November 10, 1966

Dear Family,

I’m off to Paris for ten days. Leave at noon on a bus with eight other students from the T.U. Back the 20th. Whole trip including food and room only DM80 ($20). It’s part of an exchange trip with students from Paris. We’ll stay in a dorm at the university of Paris.

Went to East Berlin yesterday to get a visa for the zone transit. Saw a great ancient Near East museum there called the Pergammon. Sculpture, ceramics, sarcophagi from 2000 B.C. Berlin has so much to offer.

 

Berlin, November 20, 1966

Dear Family,

Now to tell you some about my Paris trip. We visited a Renault factory, where two models were completely assembled before our eyes in our two-hour visit there. Much of the work was done by people rather than machines, and I was told that in America machines do much more of the work.

I met Vietnamese students, one from Hanoi, who I talked with a long time. His jacket came directly from Hanoi and had the label in. He said there is no North and South Vietnam, there is only Vietnam. But the Americans are the invaders for economic interests of their own. That the South Vietnam government is only a puppet of America, to whom America can dictate, and that much of the fighting goes on in South Vietnam itself by South Vietnam people against the puppet government and the foreign imperialists, which is, I’m afraid, just exactly what we are. And I’m ashamed. The more I hear about America’s foreign policy, the more depressed I get. But it’s difficult to know, after a while, just what Truth is, Right is. American is protecting her economic interests in Vietnam and elsewhere in this world—is this wrong? And yet can this be right when thousands of innocent people are massacred and when our own soldiers go to Vietnam thinking they are fighting and dying for peace and freedom? this is another of those complex issues which frustrate me so completely.

Kitty

Three Options, Only Two Viable, by Marshall Hyman

Marshall Hyman is a retired teacher, living in Southern California, where he was born and raised 69 years ago. His family moved to Los Angeles in 1942 from Brooklyn, NY. He attended local public schools and graduated from U.C.L.A. He’s married and lives in South Pasadena.

In 1965 I was a recent college graduate. Everything I did at this time was influenced by the draft. I knew  wouldn’t go to Vietnam. I had three options, as I saw it. Only two were viable.

• Get drafted.
• Enter the Peace Corps.
• Leave the country for Canada.

Although I wasn’t politically aware, I did know I opposed this war and that the war had nothing to do with my security or anyone else’s.

My mom was a liberal and my dad was completely apolitical. My dad had trouble holding a job. Among other positions, he worked as a movie theater manager, on an assembly line making TVs, for a printing company, in department stores and liquor stores.  In 1956 in junior high school my social studies teacher gave us a poll. If we could vote, would we vote for Stevenson or Eisenhower?  The vote was 34 to 3 for Stevenson. Most of the kids were Jewish West L.A. kids. I was one of the three that voted for Eisenhower. I was just following what my dad did.

Although I was also Jewish, religion never took hold with me, but I attended a religious school because I was a  compliant kid—and besides, it was fun socially. I was pissed that I couldn’t play Little League Baseball, though, because I had to attend school on Saturdays.

My best high school teacher was an obvious leftie, and in college I admired the leftist professors. They are the teachers that most influenced me.

In college at UCLA I was aware of the Freedom Marches of 1964-’65.  One of my professors discussed them in class. I don’t think it ever occurred to me to go down South myself, but I did sympathize with the cause.

In the summer of 1965 I traveled in Europe. This was the start of the major escalation in Vietnam by President Johnson. my student deferment was about to end. While in Europe I read an article in the International Herald Tribune that the U.S. had ordered thousands of helmets from a helmet factory. By now we had over 500,000 men in Vietnam. The Westwood draft board couldn’t reach its quota—too many rich kids, and their lawyers working to keep them out of the army.

All my friends talked incessantly about the draft. My two closest friends were 4F. I was 1A. I applied to the Peace Corps and was accepted. I was issued a deferment (not an exemption). For three months I was given Spanish language training at the University of Arizona in Tucson.  I loved it. It was very intense. We had classes for four to six hours a day and I did well.

Then I was sent to Venezuela. I spent two years there. I had assumed that I’d be assigned to some squalid jungle, but in Caracas I was near what I considered a “South Miami Beach.” I worked in a little park in a barrio surrounded by a rich neighborhood. The park offered recreation for the poor kids. (Most of the poor families lived in the hills, where poor people tended to live in South America.) I told the Peace Corps that I wasn’t really needed down in that rich neighborhood, so  I was transferred to a hillside barrio. There I worked with liberal theologians and priests, mostly Belgian and Dutch,  and got introduced to early liberation theologists who loved Elvis.  I was given the assignment of teaching P.E. and English. Next I was transferred to an urban area to work with an Internado—institution that housed orphans or wards of the state. Again, I was teaching P.E. and English. It was run by a Croatian priest—a disagreeable man whom we called “the beast.” I didn’t find out that he was a pedophile until later.

Venezuela requested from the State Department volunteers for agriculture, technology, and recreation. I ended up working at a YMCA.

 

I received room and board with a family when I first got to Venezuela, then I got school food or ate at restaurants. For a while I had a room with no facilities. I quickly learned Spanish. There was a guerilla movement, mainly in Colombia, which is adjacent to Venezuela, so we had to be careful in certain areas. I only heard about it, never saw any danger.

In 1958 the dictatorship had been overthrown. People were proud of their free elections. They had their first president, a liberal democrat. However, oligarchs still ran the country even though it was a functioning democracy.

There was a major student strike in Caracas that brought the city to a standstill. The military shut down the campus during the strike. I believe they were protesting student repression. Also, the government did almost nothing for poor people; it  mostly built roads and fought rebels. Venezuela, like other poor countries, was a single commodity nation. However, in Venezuela, that commodity was oil—so Venezuela was probably the wealthiest country in South America. It had large middle and wealthy classes.

When I returned home in July of 1968, Los Angeles had changed drastically. In Venezuela I’d been learning about the student movement, urban rebellion, and the counter-cultural scene from some of the new people coming and going from the Peace Corps. Now I felt connected to the counter-culture, and I became an urban hippy: sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll.

I had to report to the induction center in downtown L.A.  But the week before my induction, I was offered a job with the Los Angeles United School District, which was looking for more Spanish-speaking teachers in response to the Blowouts in East Los Angeles schools. I was hired and awarded a life-time teaching certificate, even though I’d never taken a single education class. During the interview, I was asked, “What kind of certificate do you want? Secondary or elementary?“ I chose elementary and ended up teaching fourth grade. I was a beneficiary of a U.S. government policy called “channeling,” in which certain people were granted deferments due to the need for professionals in certain areas—not just in education but also in medicine, community development, and science.

In the spring of 1970 there was the big teachers’ strike to create a union. I knew nothing about teacher politics at the time. After the strike created the United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA), I became more politically engaged. By the mid-1970s I was chapter chair (shop steward) and on the House of Representatives of UTLA. I also started listening to KPFK (listener-sponsored radio) and going to anti-war rallies. In 1972 I registered for the Peace and Freedom Party and went to Venice [in Los Angeles] meetings. I lived in West Los Angeles at the time. But basically I remained a counter-cultural guy, anti-materialist. A hippy.

At work they were instituting the “open classroom” and other experiments. The first year they implemented the New Math and New Language, we used a textbook written by Noam Chomsky. It was all transitional grammar, intuitive—a completely different way to look at language. I loved it. I think it lasted a year or two before teacher and parent resistance got rid of it. Just like “new math,” it didn’t matter that the program was a more effective way of teaching, it was unable to overcome the “this is how I learned this” attitude of parents and the “this is how I’ve always taught it” attitude of teachers.

As I look back on those years, I realize how formative they were.  Something was going to happen to me during those charged times and I feel fortunate in reflecting that most of what I experienced was positive.  As the founders of the Peace Corps understood, I was able to bring back to my own community many of the altruistic principles that I learned about and experienced during my training and overseas service.  It feels like the road I ended up on in my life began in 1966.  Almost 50 years later, though the world has changed greatly, most of what I believe and how I try to act remains the same.  Though the big societal changes I wanted to see happen didn’t occur, I feel I was able to help many individual students during my teaching career and one never knows when a seed is planted, just how it’s going to grow.   Keep hope alive.

Hippy Soldier, by Jim Diggle

Jim Diggle has a carpet and upholstery cleaning business in Los Angeles, which he’s been operating since 1983. Today he’s a Buddhist, “taking refuge in the triple gem Buddha-Dhamma Sangha.” He practices yoga and meditates daily. Jim helped raise the two teenage children of his Peruvian wife.

 

 

 

 

In the early 1960s, I was 13 and lived in Santa Monica. I was from “Leave It to Beaver”—you do as you are expected. My dad was an aircraft mechanic but had trouble keeping a job. My mom was Peruvian and no longer worked after she came to the U.S. I found my parents conservative, uncommunicative, repressed, and cold. My friends, however, were lucky to have hands-on, friendly parents. I’d visit them, and then I’d go home and feel withdrawn. I believe it was this experience that affected my ability to be intimate in relationships. My family was Catholic—I was a “good little boy.” Because of the Church’s influence, I was afraid to act myself. I look back at those years as if I was going through the Inquisition. When I did anything free of restraint, I regretted it. I believed in Mortal Sins—if I was “bad,” I’d go to hell. My peers may have rebelled but I never did.

In 1964 I graduated from high school and attended Santa Monica City College. Through the media’s reporting on critical war news and the counter-culture movement, I became anti-religious, anti-church, anti-establishment, and anti-war. College was not for me; I hated it and did poorly. I had few friends. The only reason I attended college was to get out of my house. I studied subjects like liberal arts, art, history, and geography but avoided science and math, although they were required subjects.

When I realized I wasn’t going to make it at college, I decided that the only way to get away from my family was to join the army. So I enrolled in only a few units at college, became classified 1A, and got drafted. (That was ironic because I considered myself anti-war.)

In the army most of the other draftees were also against the war. In Basic Training in October of 1966 at Fort Ord in Monterrey, California, everyone was from the L.A. area. There were 17 to 20 of us. I was thrown together with people from various socio-economic levels, a new experience for me. Mainly white, some blacks and Mexicans. Many were hippies, with long hair—street guys, rebellious, with disciplinary problems, gang-like—especially the whites and Mexicans. (The black draftees were calmer and more well-behaved.)

In the army the coolest guy was a super hippy. He was a well-balanced, mild person. He shared his record albums of the Mothers of Invention and Frank Zappa. He adapted to the army and became a battalion leader, but most of the other white guys goofed off. As for me, I was still scared of everything.

During medic training at Fort Sam Houston, Texas, I was sure I’d be sent to Vietnam. Instead I was sent to Germany. Other guys had to learn to use M-16s. Wow! I get to go to Europe.

        

I was 13 months in Germany, stationed in Augsburg. There I was again thrown in with everyone—blacks, hillbillies (the most aggressive). Most sergeants were southerners or blacks. They were lifers—just doing their jobs no matter what. But I met some anti-war guys who turned me on to Bob Dylan, to folk music, to books on the counter culture,  to literature by Samuel Beckett and James Joyce. Drugs were cool. That’s where I became a hippy. Draftees had to stay out of trouble; even though I was anti-war, I had to survive. But at least the army couldn’t tell us how to think.

The inside of my locker at Augsburg

My platoon

I emerged from the army even more anti-everything. I lived for a while with my family in Santa Monica and got a job at St. John’s hospital as an orderly. But I didn’t take the job seriously. After my father died in 1969, Mom sold the house and left for Peru with my 16-year-old sister, who was quite a handful—smoking dope, dropping acid, and running away from time to time with her friends.

My mother and sister (R) and friend

I quit my job and decided to live as a hippy; it was similar to being homeless. With my family, I had only sporadic communication, which was easy because I felt no strong bonds to them.

I met Cecelia Holland, a hippy and successful author of historical fiction in her early 20s, and my friend Jack and I went to live in her house in Pasadena. I paid her $30 a month. I was cashing in my U.S. bonds by then. (The army had taken $18 a month out of our pay.)

I still had a severe fear of intimacy—no girls, no sex. I thought I’d be that way forever. I used drugs and had no thoughts about tomorrow. Finally I hit rock bottom. I had no money left, only $18 checks coming in from my savings bonds. I cashed in the bonds.

My older half-sister and her husband found out about my situation. Although they were conservative, they took pity on me. They would pay my way to Peru, they said. I contacted my mother who said yes, come down. I cut my hair and headed to Peru. That was in 1970.

I wondered what I’d do to get high there. People were copying American culture, the good, bad and ugly. I ran into an old friend, started doing marijuana and cocaine, and fell into the same situation as in the States. After I’d been in Peru ten months,  I told Mom I was going back to the U.S.

But the old crowd in the U.S. had changed. The hippy thing had mainly disappeared. Everything was changing. Kids weren’t living on the streets any more north hitchhiking. They were getting jobs, living in apartments, getting to be more responsible—things cost money. I hooked up with the brother of one of the Peruvian guys who had come to the U.S. We shared an apartment and I got a job right away. I had to. No more free life—nothing is free.

My friend was full of energy and didn’t do many drugs. Then I took up with a Latino crowd. I spoke Spanish. Also, I started relating to girls for the first time. I tried college again but was no more mature than before.

Since I had no ambition, any job was OK. I took on menial jobs at markets and factories. It was easier to survive on very little back then. An older friend of a Peruvian buddy of mine was a carpet and upholstery cleaner, who needed part-time weekend help. I worked a while for him.

By that time I had a regular job in shipping at Telecolor (a company that went house to house taking pictures). I met a Bolivian, Eduardo Villanueva, a geologist who traveled around the world looking for oil on the ocean bottom. So I went to Utah to work with him in the Great Salt Lake. Barges patrolled the lake, exploring the sub-surface. They used air cannons, aimed at the bottom, creating a wave that traveled 10,000 feet below the surface, and then they recorded it on a Richter scale as it created an earthquake under the water. If it was flat, that meant no oil. If there were cracks and fissures, there was oil and a drill would be sunk.

                   

We covered the whole Salt Lake. In 1974 the workers on the barge led a nomadic life, travelling the world. They were alcoholics, southerners; many came from broken families. Digicon, Inc. from Texas was the parent company; we had a joke: “Who didja con to get to work for you?” The working conditions were tough. We spent many hours on and then many hours off. We almost sank but the water was only four feet deep. On the plus side, the job paid well and provided room and board, so you could save money.

After Salt Lake I went up to Alaska with this same job, to Prudhoe Bay on the north slope. This was from 1974 to 1975. A pipeline was being laid from Prudhoe Bay to Valdez on the southern Pacific coast. We were in the Arctic, on the Beaufort Sea. There were three months of total darkness and three of total light. Polar bears, 60 degrees below zero, crazy workers. One Christmas night there was a gun fight between two drunken brothers. (Guns were legal there, for “self-protection.”) In the Arctic, we almost sank, but we were rescued and towed into the port at Prudhoe Bay.

           

I didn’t like my boss, an alcoholic. He’d fly off the handle when he wasn’t drinking. One day we were in dry-dock and he fired me. I left for Anchorage and then for Los Angeles.

In Los Angeles I hooked up with the same carpet cleaner I’d worked for earlier. He let me work part-time for him again. I also took a second job full-time job as an interior designer’s helper in 1976.

The interior designer I worked for

(By 1983 I’d formed Diggle Enterprises, a carpet and upholstery cleaning business. When my boss retired in 1992, I took over his carpet cleaning business as well.)

In the early 1970s I finally started to overcome some of my intimacy issues and was having relationships but with only superficial commitments.

I told myself I needed to do something about my life. I wasn’t in a good place; I wanted to settle down, have a family. On a trip to Peru in the 1980s I met my future wife Pilar. After beginning a superficial relationship with her, I gradually began to change because of her intelligence and wisdom. She taught me how to be a genuine human being.

Me in Peru

Looking back, I have no regrets because if that’s what I had to go through to get where I am right now, then so be it. Now I am a different person, a happy person. My experiences counted for something and I wound up in a much better place.

“Reborn” at Berkeley in the ’60s, by B.B.

B.B. lives on the West Side of Los Angeles and is a retired librarian. She studied writing at UCLA and Santa Monica College, and found her style—short, personal essays. She has been an activist since her college years, and is now trying to decide which activities she wishes to pursue in retirement.

 

I come from a liberal Jewish family in Denver, but unlike some kids, I wasn’t a red-diaper baby.¹  In the 1960s I attended UCLA. One of my memories from that time is that women students who wanted abortions had to travel to Mexico. A friend of mine got very sick after an abortion in L.A. When the school board found out why she was sick, she almost lost her teaching job. Earlier that year my roommate, the same woman, came back to the dorm and said, ”There are pills you can take to avoid getting pregnant.” This was an eye-opener and I soon headed to my doctor’s to ask for a prescription. I was nervous that he wouldn’t prescribe them since the idea of women having sex outside of marriage was still not widely accepted. My mother, for example, had said, “There were girls ‘like that’ in my day, too.” However, he wrote the prescription without incident, perhaps resigned by this time to college girls.

I was also involved in feminist consciousness-raising groups and even worried that I’d be too hostile to my boyfriend. After graduating from  UCLA in 1962, I transferred to Berkeley, where I was “reborn.” Berkeley was like the center of the world to me then. Every social movement seemed to be happening there, from women’s issues to sex and drugs, from the student movement to civil rights.

I was arrested at Sproul Hall in Berkeley during the Free Speech Movement² and later spent a couple of weeks in Santa Rita Jail [in Alameda County.]  I could have just paid the fine, as many did, but I wanted to see what jail was like. Bettina Aptheker³ was in there at the same time. The women prisoners slept in  a big dorm and worked at repairing men’s clothes. Jail was interesting. Many of the women were minorities and poor. For us, it was a choice to be in Santa Rita, but not for them.

At the time of my arrest I was a student teacher. Max Rafferty⁴, superintendent of education in California at the time, denied some of us a credential because we’d been arrested. We took it to court, and through the ACLU and other attorneys we did win our credentials. (I have many of the documents from that court case and was recently asked to donate them to the Bancroft Library at U.C. Berkeley, where other Free Speech Movement documents will be housed.) I finished the teacher-training program, but after winning the credential fight, I decided I didn’t want to be a teacher!

I lived in Berkeley almost ten years. I went to graduate school to become a librarian, but there were no jobs. In 1972 my sister urged me to come to Los Angeles. “No way,” I thought, but two weeks later I found myself there. I took my first job at a private, special education school as a librarian. The teachers were all graduate students so I felt as if I was still in Berkeley. (Later I worked at the L.A. Public Library for thirty years—until 2013—and was happy working with a diverse public.)

In 1977 I adopted my newborn son. Medically, it was the right thing for me to do. Although I’d had several serious boyfriends, I was single when I adopted. I loved being a parent. I was friendly with other single women parents and joined single parenting [support] groups.

Notes:

1.  Red Diaper Baby:  a child whose parents were in the Communist Party U.S.A. 
2. Free Speech Movement: a student protest which took place during the 1964–1965 academic year on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley under the informal leadership of students Mario Savio, Michael Rossman, Brian Turner, Bettina Aptheker, Steve Weissman, Art Goldberg, Jackie Goldberg, and others. In protests unprecedented in scope, students insisted that the university administration lift the ban of on-campus political activities and acknowledge the students’ right to free speech and academic freedom.[Source: Wikipedia] 
3. Bettina Aptheker: an American political activist, feminist, professor and author as well as a former member of the Communist Party USA. 
4. Max Rafferty:  Rafferty was an educator who opposed busing, sex education and the New Left. His books condemned progressive education and urged a return to the fundamentals. For example, he wanted schools to focus on phonics, memorization and drill, and to discontinue “life adjustment” approaches from education. Among his controversial actions as school superintendent was his attempt to stop schools and classrooms from using books that he considered obscene, such as Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice and Leroi Jones’s Dutchman. He threatened to revoke the teaching certificate of any teacher who used such works. Politically, he was known as a spokesman for the ultra-conservatives. [Source: Wikipedia]

Nelson Mandela

“In a way I had never quite comprehended before, I realized the role I could play in court and the possibilities before me as a defendant. I was the symbol of justice in the court of the oppressor, the representative of the great ideals of freedom, fairness and democracy in a society that dishonoured those virtues. I realized then and there that I could carry on the fight even in the fortress of the enemy.”
Nelson Mandela, 1994

 

Like so many of us, I am greatly saddened by the death of Nelson Mandela. I suppose that he was “ready” to die, but when it actually happens, the sharp feeling of loss seizes me.

I just read a great tribute to Mandela at http://www.laprogressive.com/author/john-peeler/.  I hope you get a chance to read it.

I admire Mandela for his persistence in struggle, for his commitment to non-violence and reconciliation with his enemies, for his courage in telling the truth, for his incorruptibility, and for his uncompromising dedication to social justice. I hope we all can take this opportunity to learn from him, among other things about how to deal with one’s “enemies” with compassion, not hatred.

In keeping with the theme of this blog,  I learned with the help of Wikipedia about what Mandela experienced in the 60s and 70s. Almost those entire decades and more, he was imprisoned at Robben Island, convicted of four counts of sabotage and conspiracy to violently overthrow the government. (Rather than getting the death sentence, he and his co-defendants received life in prison.)

He remained there for the next 18 years^, imprisoned in a damp concrete cell measuring 8 by 7 feet, with a straw mat on which to sleep.Verbally and physically harassed by several white prison wardens, the  prisoners spent their days breaking rocks into gravel, until being reassigned in January 1965 to work in a lime quarry. Mandela was initially forbidden to wear sunglasses, and the glare from the lime permanently damaged his eyesight.At night, he worked on his LLB degree, but newspapers were forbidden, and he was locked in solitary confinement on several occasions for possessing smuggled news clippings.Classified as the lowest grade of prisoner, Class D, he was permitted one visit and one letter every six months, although all mail was heavily censored.

The political prisoners took part in work and hunger strikes – the latter considered largely ineffective by Mandela – to improve prison conditions, viewing this as a microcosm of the anti-apartheid struggle. ANC prisoners elected him to their four-man “High Organ” along with Sisulu, Govan Mbeki and Raymond Mhlaba, while he also involved himself in a group representing all political prisoners on the island, Ulundi, through which he forged links with PAC and Yu Chi Chan Club members.Initiating the “University of Robben Island,” whereby prisoners lectured on their own areas of expertise, he debated topics such as homosexuality and politics with his comrades, getting into fierce arguments on the latter with Marxists like Mbeki and Harry Gwala.Though attending Christian Sunday services, Mandela studied Islam.He also studied Afrikaans, hoping to build a mutual respect with the warders and convert them to his cause.

His mother visited in 1968, dying shortly after, and his firstborn son Thembi died in a car accident the following year; Mandela was forbidden from attending either funeral.His wife was rarely able to visit, being regularly imprisoned for political activity, while his daughters first visited in December 1975; Winnie got out of prison in 1977 but was forcibly settled in Brandfort, still unable to visit him.

From 1967, prison conditions improved, with black prisoners given trousers rather than shorts, games being permitted, and food quality improving.

*********

Some enlightening facts about and quotations from Nelson Mandela:

In 1986, former Vice President Dick Cheney, then a congressman, voted along with 179 other members of the House against a non-binding resolution to recognize the ANC and call on the South African government to release Mandela from prison. The measure finally passed, but not before a veto attempt by Reagan.

In 2000, Cheney maintained that he’d cast the correct vote.

In 2003, Mandela made several statements against the invasion of Iraq. “If you look at those matters, you will come to the conclusion that the attitude of the United States of America is a threat to world peace. Because what [America] is saying is that if you are afraid of a veto in the Security Council, you can go outside and take action and violate the sovereignty of other countries…..”

“…there is no doubt that the United States now feels that they are the only superpower in the world and they can do what they like.”

“If there is a country that has committed unspeakable atrocities in the world, it is the United States of America. They don’t care.”

Mandela wasn’t excised from a U.S. terrorism watch list until 2008, when  President George W. Bush signed a bill removing him. Mandela and other members of the African National Congress were on the list because of their fight against South Africa’s apartheid regime, which gave way to majority rule in 1994.

When Mandela was asked about his future plans, he replied,

“I really wanted to retire and rest and spend more time with my children, my grandchildren and of course with my wife. But the problems [around the invasion of Iraq in March of 2003] are such that for anybody with a conscience who can use whatever influence he may have to try to bring about peace, it’s difficult to say no.”

 

Letters from West Berlin, Part 2, by Kitty Kroger. September 1966: Settling In

 

In the summer of 1966 upon graduating from Colorado College, a friend had arranged a summer  job for me in a youth hostel on Sylt, a German island  in the North Sea off the coast of Hamburg. After two months, I left by train to see a bit more of Europe before returning to the U.S. My first stop was West Berlin. Maybe I thought the divided city would be especially interesting, or was it just the first place on my route?

Whatever the reason, I ended up living there for four years. Following is the second of a series of selections from detailed letters to my parents during that time. As you will see, over time I was altered by my experiences in 1960s West Berlin and ended up a different person from the politically naive girl who first arrived there.

SECOND IN A SERIES
September 1966

Sept. 14, 1966

Dear Family,

Berlin as one of the largest cities in the world is a bit small-townish. I live right in the center of town now, near all the  bars, the main Bahnhof (railroad station), named Zoological, aka the Zoo, and not far from a very famous, two-mile-long avenue, Kurfurstendamm, which is packed with nightclubs, bright lights, and tourists. It’s called the Kudamm. Other than this street, there aren’t many night spots at all. Berlin rolls up its sidewalks about midnight. Berlin is now so built up after the war. Many modern buildings, which look just like those in America. Modern supermarkets, Woolworth’s, subways. Americans are of course all over because of the base here. I find the atmosphere a bit disappointing. Berlin is called the “world city,” but it just isn’t—culturally, politically, or educationally.

Train at Bahnhof Zoo
West Berlin

The people are a bit reserved too. I rather like that because this buddy-buddy bit is alien to my character, but it makes it a bit difficult to practice my German or even to feel very close to anyone here. I have made a wonderful friend out of the American doctoral candidate Pat Moylan. We get together all the time in the Studentendorf and hash over our experience here in Berlin. She must be about 30 or 35—she won’t tell anyone her age. She seems as young as I; however, in spite of the fact that’s she’s taught high school, and college, and is majoring in Old English at Duke University. We think a lot alike. I went to her “place” for dinner last night, and she’s coming to my “room” for supper tonight.

My new room is just great. The sun streams in through the balcony until 3 pm every day. The landlady brought me a huge plate of fresh peaches and apples the other day, and yesterday a bowl of noodle tomato soup. I’m never there but she leaves them on the table for me. I have a good hard bed, a small table, a huge desk, a closet, and three or four chairs in my room. There’s always hot water. The landlady has loaned me some dishes and a blanket—I find the whole setup very comfortable. And I’m strengthening my legs walking (or running) up the four flights of stairs.

I went to a ballet, movies, and a Gunther Grass play, The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising, last week. Movies are very cheap—about 65 cents for a seat. The play was $2 and the ballet only $1.50 and excellent. There are millions of American movies being shown, which I avoid, but I saw a Swedish movie, “Sibling Bed,” about incest, which was made by a former student of Ingmar Bergman. The movie was beautifully photographed and I understood it very well, but the plot was disappointing.

I have to ride the bus about an hour to work and an hour home every day. I use the time to read or to people watch. I buy a weekly bus pass, which costs only $1.25, and lets me ride three lines, (either bus or subway) as often as I like. The three lines take me within walking distance of just about wherever I want to go.

Kitty, Marta Mierendorff, Walter Wicclair.
West Berlin.

The woman I’m tutoring in English has her doctorate in sociology and is trying to get immigration papers into the U.S. She’s about 60. Her name is Frau Doktor Mierendorff. [Note: this may be repeated above or below.]  She lives with Walter Wicclair, a rather well-known director, producer in Los Angeles. Naturalized citizen and has a heavy German accent. They are going to try to return to the U.S. in Jan. She’s writing a book on culture in German. He’s directed and acting in Strindberg’s Danco of Death with rave review (in Los Angeles), also worked with the drama department. Dr. M told me Monday that her husband and his mother, both Jews, had been taken away during the war to Auschwitz and gassed. Neither of them like Germany at all. They feel it’s deteriorated in culture and general decency as a result of the terrible events of WW2. He gave a lecture at the Free University, in which he condemned the state of the German theater and the suppression of Jewish contributions to it. I read the lecture. I wish I knew better what was going on in politics—and what went on in history. Berlin is exciting because of what lurks in the shadows as a result of the war and the wall, the past and the present. Rolf Lobeck from Hamburg said that he felt that Europeans are different from Americans, precisely because the Europeans have gone through a war on their own land, seen their houses shattered, their relatives and friends killed, and are presently living amidst the ruins of the war—a constant reminder to them.

The older people fascinate me because of what they’ve seen and lived. With the students, however, it’s a different matter. The students are in many ways like Americans; they haven’t seen war on their territory or experience the loss of many relatives and friends. But they have grown along with the regrowth of their country and they’ve been under the influence of the adults who have experience terrible things. Thus they too think different from us.

Last Sunday I walked along the wall on this side for about an hour. It was really horrible. At one place there were two big dogs chained to a long bar, along which they could run. Every few feet there are guard platforms and houses on the “east” side, where East Berlin soldiers are posted with their guns. They always whistle and flirt with me as I pass by. A West Berlin new apartment building was built almost upon the wall at one spot, with signs on every outside entrance saying that it is strongly recommended that the renters not take pictures from the stairwell of East Berlin. Then at another place, there was an empty dirt lot with beer cans and other garbage. Three women were sitting around right next to the fence separating the city. They were lower class, dirty-looking, and seemingly oblivious to the “wall,” laughing and gossiping. This was near Checkpoint Charlie, where the American and other foreigners cross the boundary. The whole thing was so dirty and so depressing. A West Berlin man was shot the other day for swimming in a canal too close to the East German boundary. He was drunk. They killed him. The West German keep protesting, “It’s so ridiculous; they’re Germans too; we’re all Germans; I don’t understand!” (I don’t either.)

Kitty

Sept. 20, 1966

Dear Family,

Berlin is about 60% people over the age of 45 and a large number of those are over 65. The old people are “trapped” in Berlin, in a sense, because of the distance to move if they want to leave. But the students seem very alive. The government-subsidized theaters, museums and galleries are beautiful even if there seems to be a lack of excitement and pride on the part of Berliners themselves.

Last night Frau Mierendorff and her partner Walter Wicclair took me to a play . We sat in the fourth row. It was called “The Escape, “ written and acted by a Viennese Jewish comedian. It’s his true story of how during the Jewish purge he appealed to one of the Nazi district leaders (Gauleiter) to save his life on the basis of his value as an entertainer. The Nazi did save him because he had enjoyed the stage acts so much. The Jew was given permission to flee to his home in Vienna where after the war he was approached and appealed to by the same Nazi, whose own life was now in danger, to help him in return. Which he did. The theme of the play is the moral question of the Jew. What should he have done? Should he have allowed his own life to be saved, sat tight while his fellow were led to the concentration camps? In short, he was a coward, which he admits. He was afraid to die. “I want to be, to be, to be,” he said.

Or should he have refused to cooperate verbally with the Nazis? Should he have protested, spit in their faces, denounced them, and marched bravely off to the gas chambers, a martyr? Now, says the author actor, the faces of the condemned Jews come back to haunt him and he can’t sleep. Should he then have condemned the district commander to death, who had been responsible for so many deaths himself? But how could he? The Nazi had saved him when he had been afraid to die. Now the Jew, who recognized the pure terror of impending death and the overwhelming, overpowering will to “be,” to exist, couldn’t turn over the Nazi to the authorities.

He turns then to the audience and says, “What should I have done?” It was a powerful play, enhanced for me by the comments of Wicclair, who fled Germany in 1933 and Mierendorff, whose lover was executed at Auschwitz.

Saturday I returned to Kreuzberg, which is full of old, partly war-damaged apartment buildings with stone figures and heads of gods and angels built into the walls. Berlin has very few old buildings left at all. Almost entirely rebuilt with skyscrapers and modern buildings, which I find sad and disappointing. I want to see more tradition, more of antiquity, but war-demolished Berlin is not the place. Too much has been rebuilt to get the flavor of old Europe.

I read Time magazine more regular now than ever before in my life. One thing that being in Europe has done for me is to make me more aware than ever of current events. There are three English-language libraries here, one in  Amerikahaus, one in the British Center, and one in the American Memorial Library. They are fantastic. I’ve already checked out a German-language book and a history book. I’m also reading German literature: Nietzsche, Hermann Hesse, and newspapers. I can’t believe that this is me. I was always such an uninformed blind man before.

All Sunday I spent alone just reading. It was great. I’m getting so I can put sentences together in German better than in English. That’s because I’ve been hearing, reading, and speaking so much German. My English is really getting bad.

I keep my balcony doors open and the sun streams into my room. My landlady brought me tomato noodle soup and a delicious apple compote for lunch. I can’t decide whether I wish she’d go away and leave me alone or not. She’s so terribly over-mothering. She woke me up this morning by knocking on my door about some little detail and then she noticed that my feet were sticking out from under the down blanket she’s loaned me, so she shuffled back to her part of the apartment, brought another blanket, and wrapped it around my feet. When I’m home she continually comes down the hall to bring me something or make a suggestion about how I’m keeping up the room. It bugs me in a way but she means so well that I just can’t get really irritated. She’s about 75 and can’t stand straight, due to an auto accident years ago.

After seeing the movie “Blue Angel” last night, the two boys I went with, Howard and Johnny, and I walked around downtown Berlin window-shopping. and looking at the modern sculpture exhibit on top of Europa Center, which is a huge two-block square shopping center with international shops, banks, restaurants, night spots. We ended up in a beer joint talking and drinking the 14-cent beers. We all feel the same way about our jaunt in Europe; namely, we will never have this marvelous freedom again in our entire lives. Now we have the time to find out who we are , what we want , where we’re going. And to see the world. Americans are in many ways the greatest people in the world.

I worry sometimes that I’m limiting myself too much by staying in Berlin. My point in being here is to learn German well, experience the political situation, and get a feel for the German temperament.