Topic Author's Original Post - Jan 16, 2013 - 07:57am PT
Found this and figured some of ya'll would enjoy. This is from the same guy who does the "Whole Foods Parking Lot" song and the "Yoga girl" one as well.
hey, I lived at the corner of Haste and Telegraph, above "Mario's Mexican Restaurant," which burned down in the last year or so...
was the 1971* academic year... my senior year at Cal...
...and I don't worry about being "Berkeley enough"
[edit]* they say if you can remember those times you weren't really there... Gary emailed me that I couldn't have been a senior at Cal in 1971, and he's right, it was 1975, but if I had been smart enough, maybe I could have been a senior then after one year... the reality: it took me four and one summer class, to complete.
I spent four of my happiest climbing years at Berkeley; freshman year (1969-70) in Smythe Hall at the top of Dwight, next two in "The Zoo" (still standing on Piedmont, just north of Dwight), and last across from Live Oak Park on Shattuck within easy walking distance of Indian Rock. Thanks for posting this. It's a classic.
That's hitting a little too close to the mark, Werner. In 1969, Dave Altman and I were in Chem 4A together. In the lab, we were given a glass cleaner with instructions that said, essentially, "Only let this touch your clothing where you want a hole to appear." I suspect Dave took the hint and kept his clothing intact. I, on the other hand, got holes in my sweater and vest. I should have had a lab coat!
Living in B town now. It is hard to be Berkeley 'enough'...been living here all my life and anywhere else I go, it seems a little weird.
This rapper also does that more well known "Whole Foods Parking Lot" rap..very funny..."these dudes with clip boards lookin' at me like they know me.."
We were totally fueled by that place. The dinners were huge, about right after a long day at Indian Rock when we were young. Dave A. and I went there many times in the 70s.
As part of the Berkeley Rock scene I felt I needed to ride my bike to the Valley in a day. The fuel for that ride came from Mario's. (I also carried a plastic bag full of cooked potatoes, my super secret formula for success!)
I bumped into Dave at the Berkeley gym last week and he mentioned you John. Some climb you guys did way back in the dawn of time.
Everything we did was at the dawn of time ;>). When we were freshmen, I had already been climbing for a few years, and Dave hadn't started yet, but he kept asking questions that showed his interest. Around 1973 he got serious about climbing, and I had to get serious about the working world, so he passed me up in climbing and, if I remember rightly, you passed me up in bouldering about the same time.
I lived in Berkeley from October 1965 until January 1970.
I got there a few months after Mario Savio and the Free Speech Movement captured the scene and was there for the war protests including guard shacks blown up on campus from time to time. Once while doing laundry at a laundromat on Telegraph, students built a bonfire in the middle of the street and I had to lug loads of clean laundry to the car under the gaze of rooftop police.
I was unsuccessfully evangelized by Hubert the street preacher, and converted to radical politics by Noam Chomsky and others. No Oakland draft riots but marched in San Francisco. Saw Bobby Kennedy speak a couple of months before he was assassinated. Lived in fear of Oakland race riots which miraculously never materialized and rejoiced that none of our friends were drafted. Some climbers managed to get disqualified for mental reasons and some went to Canada.
I had to breathe second hand ganja through every movie I ever attended, shopped at the Berkeley Co-op and REI when they still rad (two girls were busted for trying to decompact their dope in the coffee grinder), went to slide shows and parties with Harding, Sacherer, Morton, Erb, Dozier, Thompson and Beck, among others.
Concerts, lectures, and wonderful intellecutal conversations with strangers. That was the Berkeley I remembered. Climbing in the Valley by that time was just a slde show.
The Berkeley Barb had a columnist named Alice Kahn originally from Chicago. This is the sixties-seventies. Knowing her big city origins, none of us here should be surprised that Alice had access to irony and even could do sardonics. Many loved her stuff; I sure did. She coined a number of memorable phrases regarding Berkeley. She eventually also wrote for the SF Chronicle as well. I think she might have been syndicated by that point. Anyway, one quote was, "more Berkeleyer than thou". Another was how "the City Council had made the streets safe for dog shit" when they passed some ordinance regarding curbing your pets---an ordinance that remained in effect far too long, apparently. And Alice is credited with coining, "Yuppie" and had two fictional yuppies as a starter kit, Dirk and
Bree.
PH (Berkeley 1951 to 1970) Berkeley Co-op number #3454
When I got drafted out of Yosemite Valley in 1970 for the Vietnam War I got sent to Berzerkeley or was it Oakland induction center of all places ......
My son's best friend dropped out of Cal as a senior. He went to Chez Panisse and got a bus boy job. Then he became a wine runner, trained as the garde manger, and now is a line cook.
I began climbing there and was mentored by Chuck Ostin.
In '73, when Dolores and I lived with Randy Hamm and Gypsy, we rented directly across from Herrick hospital on Dwight, just below Shattuck. Then we moved to Telegraph when they left for Europe because, apparently by this time Randy and Gypsy were in danger of becoming tooo Berkeley, so they decided to travel and roughen up the edges.
Our apartment on Telegraph was three floors up, above Casa de Eva (overrated) & faced the Berkeley Hills with a wide vista. The time it snowed down to our level, that was a special treat.
thanks to zBrown for the picture of the building... our appt. was on that row of windows, a floor up from the street, on the Haste St. side, the one at the end of the building away from Mario's.
Mario's was an economic solution to the problem of eating out... though we always looked to see who got an actual piece of chicken in the soup course!
It was a rough corner with a lot of street life intervening, often for the worse, into that building. But it was Berkeley.
That's where my friend Susie lived in 1968, Ed.
Jan, REI didn't come to Berkeley until 1975.
I think you are recalling the Co-op Wilderness Supply, at Cedar and
Shattuck, across the streets from the Co-op grocery store.
They also had a branch down near Ski Hut, I think, perhaps right across
University from their other grocery store.
Ha, Scuff, I was gonna point that out, too. In fact, Big Jim asked me to
go help open that store and I said, "What, leave Seattle to go live with a
bunch of crazy hippies? Besides, it's like 3 hours to the mountains, none
of which has a real glacier." That dude was deluded.
Herr Braun ... that would have been Oakland, be thankful they didn't send you to L.A. The inductors actually wanted me to spend the night so they could do some further tests one me. I declined.
Anyway, as long as we're doing pictures
Here'e one place I lived. The student co-op on Ridge Road, a converted, historic hotel
Cloyne Court Hotel (John Galen Howard, 1904) shortly after completion, looking northeast from Le Roy Avenue. Also visible are Allenoke Manor (left), Beta Theta Pi chapter house (right), and a cluster of five steep-roofed Maybeck houses on Ridge Rd. and Highland Place, including Charles Keeler’s house & studio just above the eastern Cloyne wing. (photo: Louis L. Stein Jr. collection)
U really coming to Berkeley, Dingus? Hit me up for a coffee or tea!
I love the Portlandia song. Esp. the bit about SF at the end.
Berkeley isn't nearly as Berkeley as I would have guessed before moving here. My neighborhood is almost (not quite) as ghetto as where I lived in West Oakland, although the house across the street is covered in murals and has flowers planted in brass beds in the front yard.
It usually comes as a surprise to many to find that Berkeley was a right wing retirement community prior to the early sixties. It had been turning school bond issues for years for example until that famous sea change fifty years ago.
And the town was starkly segregated even though blacks were 36% of the population. Obviously the schools had a problem and the city was the first to start busing kids to try to solve de facto segregation. Bussing was a crisis for many of the pseudo liberals and there was kind of a white flight amongst even these families or at least their kids who suddey were schooling privately. My sister's kid was even one of them; he was suddenly in Athenian School in Walnut Creek!
At the time, funds were lacking to buy the land, and the plan was shelved until June 1967, when the university acquired $1.3 million to take the land through the process of eminent domain (compulsory purchase). After taking control of the land, neighborhood residents were evicted and demolition of homes began
Not a good choice of colors I'd say, since the map appears to show that the richest folks live on Tilden Golf Course. :)
Another point, since you can reverse text, as we have all seen on another thread, why can't you rotate it 90 degrees and get an upright smiley? Next thing you know they'll be colorzing everything. In the immortal words of Barbarella, "Damn that Turner".
Raised in So Cal, I didn't make it to Bezerkeley until 2011. The moment I hit the place it was love at first sight. When I walked thru Peoples Park it was a fantastic, glorious experience. I kept pointing at all the wonderment and my friend kept yelling at me to quit pointing.
Spring in the B. Place is also Fantastic. The Gardens are Glorious!!!
Best Ever is Walking the Claremont Trail and at the top viewing All of the Bridges....Wow and Yow!!! L.
^^^The world according to the Word from Above, the almost-almighty US Census.^^^
"This would seem to be skewed because of the presence of students, but another Bay Citizen article states that the Census Bureau did not count adults living in groups in calculating the Gini Index just to avoid distortions."
Not knowing Berkeley enough, I am hesitant to suggest that perhaps maybe the folks the Census "interviewed" lied through their Dr. Bronner-cleaned teeth and sought purposely to mislead the Feds, which the Census-takers, being largely resentful low-lifes, temporarily conscripted to feed the Fascist Regime information which could serve to enslave the common man, and having no real good reason to do the job other than to feed themselves, and who therefore had no culpability, since they were trying to do the right thing by their conscience and to impress their friends but at the same time saw a chance to stick it to the Man, if only a pinprick, went along with the distorted counts given them by the various commune members (Four yesterdy, ten today, maybe thirty or forty a week, sometimes less...) and reported ridiculous fantasy figures given them by the residents of many and many a pad in the Berkeley and North Oakland vicinity, thus ensuring the perpetuation of the myth of Berkeley being the seat of mystery and possibility in the Golden State.
The liquor store just out-of-frame to the right - right where the cops are shooting at. That's where we got our Rainier Ales - green death! The first thing that came to mind when I saw your shot.
Both screening rooms were long and very, very narrow — no more than six seats across on either side of the center aisle, if I recall correctly—and the walls dividing them were paper thin, ensuring that the soundtrack from next door’s movie was always intruding into your movie’s quietest and most contemplative moments. Closed during the 1990s,
LaVals
Grossburger
This was a small drug/variety store where I used to buy my European mailer envelopes. I wonder where all that correspondence is now.
Berkeley is my home town...Moved there to live with my dad, end of 6th grade, a culture shock from a suburban Sacramento grammer school to M.L.K Junior high, in 1974. You could take Swahili or Russian as an elective in freakin 7th grade! My father had a house on Grizzly Peak Blvd, between Forest Lane and Latham Lane, meaning just a few blocks above Pinnacle Rock. First weekend there, I wandered down and encountered the Sierra Clubbers Sunday climbing sessions. I had climbed twice already and jumped right in...learned the ropes, then started hanging at Indian Rock with Fred C. Mike and Amy, Scuffy B, Scott and Nat...I had this crazy paper route for the Oakland Tribune, all around the hills, down into Kensignton, then I would ride down to Indian, boulder till dark, and ride back up to home...I would be challenged to crank my bike up that hill today! Every summer up here at Donner Summit, after 40 days straight of guiding kids out in the high sierra sun...I have a deep craving to wake up on a Berkeley morning, with thick fog, and the smell of Eucalyptus trees, a double cap from the French Hotel...and perusing Black Oak bookstore...
I thought Jerry's Grossburger was pretty good until I discovered Giant Bongo Burgers on Dwight just east of Telegraph. They not only had an excellent Shish Kebab Burger for the then princely sum of $1.00, but the anti-Shah ambiance was pure Berkeley.
Today, outsiders may call Berkeley "the People's Republic." During its early-20th-century heyday, however, the city was run primarily by Republicans. But Berkeleyans — even then — were not immune to the call of the Socialists for a more equitable divvying of life's spoils.
In 1911, when Socialist J. Stitt Wilson ran for mayor, even a paper not known for its radical opinions supported his cause. "His well-rounded sentences, polished rhetoric and telling logic drove home the truth with great power," the Gazette said of his kickoff speech.
Wilson, then a boyish 43, called for public ownership of lighting and electricity, streetcars, water, and phones, and a public kindergarten, with all these services provided at minimal cost. The battle, he said, set private citizens against "a mere handful of individuals who control the resources of the nation." Wilson, a backer of women's suffrage, already had the support of Berkeley's progressive women.
"You know what I am standing for," he said to rousing cheers, "cheaper water, cheaper gas, cheaper lights, cheaper phones."
Read the whole story here, if you don't have anything todo
From 2008-2013 I was living in north Berkeley hills and Kensington. Lots of retired white people, local Kensington police force to kept out "the less desirable elements" and got excited when they could write a ticket for running the only stop sign around.
Melissa, that demographic map of rich/poor blocks matches up pretty well with what anyone can observe living there.
The restaurant I'll miss the most is De Afghanan Kabob place on University. Sometimes we would get take-out and sit up on Indian Rock. Sometimes it was a crowded summer sunset, sometimes all alone in a winter evening chill.
To quote Jerry Garcia...(he was referring to those who like the Dead) ...Berkeley is like licorice. People who like licorice really like licorice. People who don't like it, really don't like it.
I don't like licorice, but I really like Berkeley. And the Dead.
Throwpie, my daughter learned to ride a bike on the frontage road right next to there :)
And from the "Not Berkeley Enough" video... Adventure Park! That place is the most cool kids park I have ever seen or heard of. Where else can kids go to work picking up trash or nails on the ground, trade it in to earn tools like hammers and paint brushes, and then go start adding whatever they want onto the existing play structure? Or Codornices park, with the huge rock slide that wears a hole in your butt or scrapes the skin off your knuckles? I'll bet not many cities have stuff where kids can easily hurt themselves. But that stuff is so fun!
Been balling a shiny black piton hammer
Been chippin' up rocks for the great new line
I climb five ten if I take my time
Climbin’ that crack and drinkin' my wine
I been chippin’ them rocks from dusk till doom
My rider took the bolt kit to King Tut’s tomb
Guidebook says I should follow some crack
If I do five pitches gotta haul my pack, yes I will
(chorus)
Easy wind, blowin’ cross the Big Stone today
Cuz there’s a whole lotta climbin’, Mama
Yet for me to do today
And the belayer keeps on shoutin’
But you never heard a word he said!
Gotta find a woman who’ll be good to me
Won’t hid my bolt kit, try to make me free
Cuz i’m a stonemaster, El Cap, and my Heart is true
And I’ll give everything that I got to you, where’s my drill?
(chorus with dancing and juggling)
Credit: mouse from merced
In earthly life, Chuck eschewed permanancy in relationships, since they got in the way of his climbing.
And anything else which inhibited him in that way.
He was so Berkeley, really he was.
But there was little or nothing for him there, was there?
Let us know!