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!
Let us know!