Joan Baez in the Sixties
It was totally coincidental (but oh so timely!) that we watched the Neflix documentary “Berkeley in the Sixties” last night. For me, there was a lot of déjà vu in the film — familiar faces, familiar places, familiar experiences. This is the description that was on the CD sleeve:
University of California, Berkeley, alumni recount how their quiet school became the epicenter of 1960s campus activism, starting with the free speech movement and evolving into organized opposition to the Vietnam War. The students also championed civil rights, the women’s movement and the Black Panther party. Archival footage is interwoven with present-day interviews and songs by the Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix, Joan Baez and Jefferson Airplane.
Mario Savio in the Sixties
In 1961 I was newly married to Marta’s father and I had just begun my first teaching job in Hayward, CA which is just 17 freeway miles south of Berkeley. Although we didn’t know the term then, we were a ‘blended mixed-race family’ and had purchased a home in a Joe Eichler development — a development that purposely reflected the diversity in the Greater Bay Area. Eichler’s post-war philosophy of integrated middle class neighborhoods was on the cutting edge.
My husband Bill taught in Oakland in “the flats” — all black neighborhoods, though no-one used the term “ghetto.” He learned of an after-school program for inner-city kids in Berkeley that was looking for volunteers, preferably teachers. We went to a meeting with the organizer, UC Berkeley student named Mario Savio, and we signed up to work three days a week.
My assignment was to be the “adult presence” at an elementary playground where I doled out basketballs to kids — mostly middle-schoolers as I remember — who honed their skills and occasionally played work-up or had an impromptu game if enough kids showed up. At six o’clock they helped me return the balls to the equipment closet, I locked it up, and we all went our separate ways. Once in a while Mario, himself, would come by to ask “how’s it going?”
1969 – Sydney and Another Notable
As the sixties progressed, we would see Mario and other Berkeley students in the news. We’d watch the confrontations and police riots with concern. We’d root for the students and the activists and joined the peace marches. We felt way too old (after all we were well over 30!) but we also felt much more kinship with the students than with UC’s President Kerr and the trustees and the uptight Governor Reagan.
As I watched the almost-familiar footage last night, I felt saddened and discouraged. How hopeful we all were that we could help change the world! And… here we are sixty years later. Still hoping. But now the operative words are “to save the planet.”
Sydney,
I was going to Cal then. I went to the first sit-in in Sproul Hall, but had to return a two hour library book, and when I came back everyone was being arrested and put in paddy wagons. I thought “oh well, I did my duty” and went back to the rooming house.
Mario was a good guy!
Sorry I missed you there.
Bruce