The Great Shark Hunt Part 28

One of the most surprising things about the rent strike was the fact that so few people in San Francisco had any idea what the Beat Generation was. An interviewer from a radio station went into the streets seeking controversy on "the return of the beatniks," but drew a blank. People remembered the term, and not much more.

But the Beat Generation was very real in its day, and it has a definite place in our history. There is a mountain of material explaining the sociological aspects of the thing, but most of it is dated and irrelevant. What remains are the people who were involved; most of them are still around, looking back with humor and affection on the uproar they caused, and drifting by a variety of routes toward debt, parenthood, and middle age.

My involvement was tangential at best. But Willard was in there at the axis of things, and in retrospect he stands out as one of the great "beatniks" of his time. Certainly San Francisco has good cause to remember him; his one and only encounter with the forces of law and order provided one of the wildest Beat Generation stories of the era.

Before San Francisco he had been in Germany, teaching English and cultivating an oriental-type beard. On his way out to the coast he stopped in New York and picked up a mistress with a new Ford. It was de rigueur, de rigueur, in those days, to avoid marriage at all costs. He came to me through the recommendation of a friend then working in Europe for a British newspaper. "Willard is a great man," said the letter. "He is an artist and a man of taste." in those days, to avoid marriage at all costs. He came to me through the recommendation of a friend then working in Europe for a British newspaper. "Willard is a great man," said the letter. "He is an artist and a man of taste."

As it turned out, he also was a prodigious drinker in the tradition of Brendan Behan, who was said to have had "a thirst so great it would throw a shadow." I was making my own beer at the time and Willard put a great strain on the aging process; I had to lock the stuff up to keep him from getting at it before the appointed moment.

Sadly enough, my beer and Willard's impact on San Francisco were firmly linked. The story is a cla.s.sic, and if you travel in the right circles out here you will still hear it told, although not always accurately. The truth, however, goes like this: Willard arrived shortly before I packed up and left for the East; we had a convivial few weeks, and, as a parting gesture, I left him a five-gallon jug of beer that I did not feel qualified to transport across the nation. It still had a week or so to go in the jug, then another few weeks of aging in quart bottles, after which it would have had a flavor to rival the nectar of the G.o.ds. Willard's only task was to bottle it and leave it alone until it was ready to drink.

Unfortunately, his thirst threw a heavy shadow on the schedule. He was living on a hill overlooking the southern section of the city, and among his neighbors were several others of the breed, mad drinkers and men of strange arts. Shortly after my departure he entertained one of these gentlemen, who, like my man Willard, was long on art and energy, but very short of funds.

The question of drink arose, as it will in the world of art, but the presence of poverty cast a bleak light on the scene. There was, however, this five-gallon jug of raw, unaged home brew in the kitchen. Of course, it was a crude drink and might produce beastly and undesired effects, but. . . well. . .

The rest is history. After drinking half the jug, the two artists laid hands on several gallons of blue paint and proceeded to refinish the front of the house Willard was living in. The landlord, who lived across the street, witnessed this horror and called the police. They arrived to find the front of the house looking like a Jackson Pollack canvas, and the sidewalk rapidly disappearing under a layer of sensual crimson. At this point, something of an argument ensued, but Willard is 6 feet 4, and 230 pounds, and he prevailed. For a while.

Some moments later the police came back with reinforcements, but by this time Willard and his helper had drunk off the rest of the jug and were eager for any kind of action, be it painting or friendly violence. The intrusion of the police had caused several mottos to be painted on the front of the house, and they were not without antisocial connotations. The landlord was weeping and gnas.h.i.+ng his teeth, loud music emanated from the ulterior of the desecrated house, and the atmosphere in general was one of hypertension.

The scene that followed can only be likened to the rounding up of wild beasts escaped from a zoo. Willard says he attempted to flee, but floundered on a picket fence, which collapsed with his weight and that of a pursuing officer. His friend climbed to a roof and rained curses and s.h.i.+ngles on the unfriendly world below. But the police worked methodically, and by the time the sun set over the Pacific the two artists were sealed in jail.

At this point the gentlemen of the press showed up for the usual photos. They tried to coax Willard up to the front of his cell to pose, but the other artist had undertaken to tip the toilet bowl out of the floor and smash it into small pieces. For the next hour, the press was held at bay with chunks of porcelain, hurled by the two men in the cell. "We used up the toilet," Willard recalls, "then we got the sink. I don't remember much of it, but I can't understand why the cops didn't shoot us. We were out of our heads."

The papers had a field day with the case. Nearly all the photos of the "animal men" were taken with what is known among press photographers as "the Frankenstein flash." This technique produces somewhat the same impression of the subject as a flashlight held under his chin, but instead of a flashlight, the photographer simply holds his flash unit low, so that sinister shadows appear on the face of a subject, and a huge shadow looms on the wall behind him. It is a technique that could make Casper Milquetoast look like the Phantom of the Opera, but the effect, with Willard, was nothing short of devastating; he looked like King Kong.

Despite all the violence, the story has a happy ending. Willard and his friends were sentenced to six months in jail, but were quickly released for good behavior, and neither lost any time in fleeing to New York. Willard now lives in Brooklyn, where he moves from one apartment to another as walls fill up with paintings. His artistic method is to affix tin cans to a wall with tenpenny nails, then cover the wall with lumpy plaster and paint. Some say he has a great talent, but so far he goes unrecognized -- except by the long-suffering San Francisco police, who were called upon to judge what was perhaps his most majestic effort.

Willard was as hard to define then as he is now; probably it is most accurate to say he had artistic inclinations and a superabundance of excess energy. At one point in his life he got the message that others of his type were gathering in San Francisco, and he came all the way from Germany to join the party.

Since then, things have never been the same. Life is more peaceful in San Francisco, but infinitely duller. That was pretty obvious when the rent strike cropped up; for a day or so it looked like the action was back in town, but it was no dice.

One of the "strikers," an unemployed cartoonist with a wife and a child and a rundown apartment for which he refuses to pay rent, summed up the situation. His landlady had declined to make repairs on the apartment, and instead got an eviction order. In the old days, the fellow would have stayed in the place and gotten tough. But the cartoonist is taking the path of least resistance. "It takes a long time to get people evicted," he says with a shrug, "and we're thinking of splitting to New York on a freight train anyway."

That's the way it is these days in the erstwhile capital of the Beat Generation. The action has gone East, and the only people who really seem to mourn it are the reporters, who never lacked a good story, and a small handful of those who lived with it and had a few good laughs for a while. If Willard returned to San Francisco today, he probably would have to settle for a job as a house painter.

National Observer, April 20, 1964 April 20, 1964 The Nonstudent Left BERKELEY.

At the height of the "Berkeley insurrection" press reports were loaded with mentions of outsiders, nonstudents and professional troublemakers. Terms like "Cal's shadow college" and "Berkeley's hidden community" became part of the journalistic lexicon. These people, it was said, were whipping the campus into a frenzy, goading the students to revolt, hara.s.sing the administration, and all the while working for their own fiendish ends. You could almost see them loping along the midnight streets with bags of seditious leaflets, strike orders, red banners of protest and cablegrams from Moscow, Peking or Havana. As in Mississippi and South Vietnam, outside agitators were said to be stirring up the locals, who wanted only to be left alone.

Something closer to the truth is beginning to emerge now, but down around the roots of the affair the fog is still pretty thick. The Sproul Hall sit-in trials ended in a series of unexpectedly harsh convictions, the Free Speech Movement has disbanded, four students have been expelled and sentenced to jail terms as a result of the "dirty word" controversy, and the princ.i.p.al leader, Mario Savio, has gone to England, where he'll study and wait for word on the appeal of his four-month jail term -- a procedure which may take as long as eighteen months.

As the new semester begins -- with a new and inscrutable chancellor -- the mood on the Berkeley campus is one of watchful waiting. The basic issues of last year are still unresolved, and a big new one has been added: Vietnam. A ma.s.sive nationwide sit-in, with Berkeley as a focal point, is scheduled for October 15-16, and if that doesn't open all the old wounds, then presumably nothing will.

For a time it looked as though Govemor Edmund Brown had side-tracked any legislative investigation of the university, but late in August a.s.sembly Speaker Jesse Unruh, an anti-Brown Democrat, named himself and four colleagues to a joint legislative committee that will investigate higher education in California. Mr. Unruh told the press that "there will be no isolated investigation of student-faculty problems at Berkeley," but in the same period he stated before a national conference of more than 1,000 state legislators, meeting in Portland, that the academic community is "probably the greatest enemy" of a state legislature.

Mr. Unruh is a sign of the times. For a while last spring he appeared to be in conflict with the normally atavistic Board of Regents, which runs the university, but somewhere along the line a blue-chip compromise was reached, and whatever progressive ideas the Regents might have flirted with were lost in the summer lull. Governor Brown's role in these negotiations has not yet been made public.

One of the realities to come out of last semester's action is the new "anti-outsider law," designed to keep "nonstudents" off the campus in any hour of turmoil. It was sponsored by a.s.semblyman Don Mulford, a Republican from Oakland, who looks and talks quite a bit like the "old" Richard Nixon. Mr. Mulford is much concerned about "subversive infiltration" on the Berkeley campus, which lies in his district. He thinks he knows that the outburst last fall was caused by New York Communists, beatnik perverts and other G.o.dless elements beyond his ken. The students themselves, he tells himself, would never have caused such a ruckus. Others in Sacramento apparently shared this view: the bill pa.s.sed the a.s.sembly by a vote of 54 to 11 and the Senate by 27 to 8. Governor Brown signed it on June 2. The Mulford proposal got a good boost, while it was still pending, when J. Edgar Hoover testified in Was.h.i.+ngton that forty-three Reds of one stripe or another were involved in the Free Speech Movement.

On hearing of this, one student grinned and said: "Well I guess that means they'll send about 10,000 Marines out here this fall. h.e.l.l, they sent 20,000 after those fifty-eight Reds in Santo Domingo. Man, that Lyndon is nothing but hip!" hip!"

Where Mr. Hoover got his figure is a matter of speculation, but the guess in Berkeley is that it came from the San Francisco Examiner, Examiner, a Hearst paper calling itself "The Monarch of the Dailies." The a Hearst paper calling itself "The Monarch of the Dailies." The Examiner Examiner is particularly influential among those who fear King George III might still be alive in Argentina. is particularly influential among those who fear King George III might still be alive in Argentina.

The significance of the Mulford law lies not in what it says but in the darkness it sheds on the whole situation in Berkeley, especially on the role of nonstudents and outsiders. Who are these thugs? What manner of man would lurk on a campus for no reason but to twist student minds? As anyone who lives or works around an urban campus knows, vast numbers of students are already more radical than any Red Mr. Hoover could name. Beyond that, the nonstudents and outsiders California has legislated against are in the main ex-students, graduates, would-be transfers, and other young activist types who differ from radical students only in that they don't carry university registration cards. On any urban campus the nonstudent is an old and dishonored tradition. Every big city school has its fringe element: Harvard, New York University, Chicago, the Sorbonne, Berkeley, the University of Caracas. A dynamic university in a modern population center simply can't be isolated from the realities, human or otherwise, that surround it. Mr. Mulford would make an island of the Berkeley campus but, alas, there are too many guerrillas.

In 1958, I drifted north from Kentucky and became a non-student at Columbia. I signed up for two courses and am still getting bills for the tuition. My home was a $12-a-week room in an off-campus building full of jazz musicians, shoplifters, mainliners, screaming poets and s.e.x addicts of every description. It was a good life. I used the university facilities and at one point was hired to stand in a booth all day for two days, collecting registration fees. Twice I walked almost the length of the campus at night with a big wooden box containing nearly $15,000. It was a wild feeling and I'm still not sure why I took the money to the bursar.

Being a "non" or "nco" student on an urban campus is not only simple but natural for anyone who is young, bright and convinced that the major he's after is not on the list. Any list. A serious nonstudent is his own guidance counselor. The surprising thing is that so few people beyond the campus know this is going on.

The nonstudent tradition seems to date from the end of World War II. Before that it was a more individual thing. A professor at Columbia told me that the late R.P. Blackmur, one of the most academic and scholarly of literary critics, got most of his education by sitting in on cla.s.ses at Harvard.

In the age of Eisenhower and Kerouac, the nonstudent went about stealing his education as quietly as possible. It never occurred to him to jump into campus politics; that was part of the game he had already quit. But then the decade ended. Nixon went down, and the civil rights sturggle broke out. With this, a whole army of guilt-crippled Eisenhower deserters found the war they had almost given up hoping for. With Kennedy at the helm, politics became respectable for a change, and students who had sneered at the idea of voting found themselves joining the Peace Corps or standing on picket lines. Student radicals today may call Kennedy a phony liberal and a glamorous sellout, but only the very young will deny that it was Kennedy who got them excited enough to want to change the American reality, instead of just quitting it. Today's activist student or nonstudent talks about Kerouac as the hipsters of the '50s talked about Hemingway. He was a quitter, they say; he had good instincts and a good ear for the sadness of his time, but his talent soured instead of growing. The new campus radical has a cause, a multip.r.o.nged attack on as many fronts as necessary: if not civil rights, then foreign policy or structural deprivation in domestic poverty pockets. Injustice is the demon, and the idea is to bust it.

What Mulford's law will do to change this situation is not clear. The language of the bill leaves no doubt that it shall henceforth be a misdemeanor for any nonstudent or nonemployee to remain on a state university or state college campus after he or she has been ordered to leave, if it "reasonably appears" to the chief administrative officer or the person designated by him to keep order on the campus "that such person is committing an act likely to interfere with the peaceful conduct of the campus."

In anything short of riot conditions, the real victims of Mulford's law will be the luckless flunkies appointed to enforce it. The mind of man could devise few tasks more hopeless than rus.h.i.+ng around this 1,000-acre, 27,000-student campus in the midst of some crowded action, trying to apprehend and remove -- on sight and before he can flee -- any person who is not a Cal student and is not eligible for readmission. It would be a nightmare of lies, false seizures, double entries and certain provocation. Meanwhile, most of those responsible for the action would be going about their business in legal peace. If pure justice prevailed in this world, Don Mulford would be appointed to keep order and bag subversives at the next campus demonstrations.

There are those who seem surprised that a defective rattrap like the Mulford law could be endorsed by the legislature of a supposedly progressive, enlightened state. But these same people were surprised when Proposition 14, which reopened the door to racial discrimination in housing, was endorsed by the electorate last November by a margin of nearly 2 to 1.

Meanwhile, the nonstudent in Berkeley is part of the scene, a fact of life. The university estimates that about 3,000 non-students use the campus in various ways: working in the library with borrowed registration cards; attending lectures, concerts and student films; finding jobs and apartments via secondhand access to university listings; eating in the cafeteria, and monitoring cla.s.ses. In appearance they are indistinguishable from students. Berkeley is full of wild-looking graduate students, bearded professors and long-haired English majors who look like Joan Baez.

Until recently there was no mention of nonstudents in campus politics, but at the beginning of the Free Speech rebellion President Kerr said "nonstudent elements were partly responsible for the demonstration." Since then, he has backed away from that stand, leaving it to the lawmakers. Even its goats and enemies now admit that the FSM revolt was the work of actual students. It has been a difficult fact for some people to accept, but a reliable poll of student att.i.tudes at the time showed that roughly 18,000 of them supported the goals of the FSM, and about half that number supported its "illegal" tactics. More than 800 were willing to defy the administration, the Governor and the police, rather than back down. The faculty supported the FSM by close to 8 to 1. The nonstudents nearly all sided with the FSM. The percentage of radicals among them is much higher than among students. It is invariably the radicals, not the conservatives, who drop out of school and become activist non-students. But against this background, their att.i.tude hardly matters.

"We don't play a big role politically," says one. "But philosophically we're a h.e.l.l of a threat to the establishment. Just the fact that we exist proves that dropping out of school isn't the end of the world. Another important thing is that we're not looked down on by students. We're respectable. A lot of students I know are thinking of becoming nonstudents."

"As a nonstudent I have nothing to lose," said another. "I can work full time on whatever I want, study what interests me, and figure out what's really happening in the world. That student routine is a drag. Until I quit the grind I didn't realize how many groovy things there are to do around Berkeley: concerts, films, good speakers, parties, pot, politics, women -- I can't think of a better way to live, can you?"

Not all nonstudents worry the lawmakers and administrators. Some are fraternity b.u.ms who flunked out of the university, but don't want to leave the parties and the good atmosphere. Others are quiet squares or technical types, earning money between enrollments and meanwhile living nearby. But there is no longer the sharp division that used to exist between the beatnik and the square: too many radicals wear ties and sport coats; too many engineering students wear boots and levis. Some of the most bohemian-looking girls around the campus are Left puritans, while some of the sweetest-looking sorority types are confirmed pot smokers and wear diaphragms on all occasions.

Nonstudents lump one another -- and many students -- into two very broad groups: "political radicals" and "social radicals." Again, the division is not sharp, but in general, and with a few bizarre exceptions, a political radical is a Left activist in one or more causes. His views are revolutionary in the sense that his idea of "democratic solutions" alarms even the liberals. He may be a Young Trotskyist, a De Bois Club organizer or merely an ex-Young Democrat, who despairs of President Johnson and is now looking for action with some friends in the Progressive Labor Party.

Social radicals tend to be "arty." Their gigs are poetry and folk music, rather than politics, although many are fervently committed to the civil rights movement. Their political bent is Left, but their real interests are writing, painting, good s.e.x, good sounds and free marijuana. The realities of politics put them off, although they don't mind lending their talents to a demonstration here and there, or even getting arrested for a good cause. They have quit one system and they don't want to be organized into another; they feel they have more important things to do.

A report last spring by the faculty's Select Committee on Education tried to put it all in a nutsh.e.l.l: "A significant and growing minority of students is simply not propelled by what we have come to regard as conventional motivation. Rather than aiming to be successful men in an achievement-oriented society, they want to be moral men in a moral society. They want to lead lives less tied to financial return than to social awareness and responsibility."

The committee was severely critical of the whole university structure, saying: "The atmosphere of the campus now suggests too much an intricate system of compulsions, rewards and punishments; too much of our attention is given to score keeping." Among other failures, the university was accused of ignoring "the moral revolution of the young."

Talk like this strikes the radicals among "the young" as paternalistic jargon, but they appreciate the old folks' sympathy. To them, anyone who takes part in "the system" is a hypocrite. This is especially true among the Marxist, Mao-Castro element -- the hipsters of the Left.

One of these is Steve DeCanio, a 22-year-old Berkeley radical and Cal graduate in math, now facing a two-month jail term as a result of the Sproul Hall sit-ins. He is doing graduate work, and therefore immune to the Mulford law. "I became a radical after the 1962 auto row (civil rights) demonstrations in San Francisco," he says. "That's when I saw the power structure and understood the hopelessness of trying to be a liberal. After I got arrested I dropped the pre-med course I'd started at San Francisco State. The worst of it, though, was being screwed time and again in the courts. I'm out on appeal now with four and a half months of jail hanging over me."

DeCanio is an editor of Spider, Spider, a wild-eyed new magazine with a circulation of about 2,000 on and around the Berkeley campus. Once banned, it thrived on the publicity and is now officially ignored by the protest-weary administration. The eight-man editorial board is comprised of four students and four nonstudents. The magazine is dedicated, they say, to "s.e.x, politics, international communism, drugs, extremism and rock'n'roll." Hence, S-P-I-D-E-R. a wild-eyed new magazine with a circulation of about 2,000 on and around the Berkeley campus. Once banned, it thrived on the publicity and is now officially ignored by the protest-weary administration. The eight-man editorial board is comprised of four students and four nonstudents. The magazine is dedicated, they say, to "s.e.x, politics, international communism, drugs, extremism and rock'n'roll." Hence, S-P-I-D-E-R.

DeCanio is about two-thirds political radical and one-third social. He is bright, small, with dark hair and gla.s.ses, cleanshaven, and casually but not sloppily dressed. He listens carefully to questions, uses his hands for emphasis when he talks, and quietly says things like: "What this country needs is a revolution; the society is so sick, so reactionary, that it just doesn't make sense to take part in it."

He lives, with three other nonstudents and two students, in a comfortable house on College Avenue, a few blocks from campus. The $120-a-month rent is split six ways. There are three bedrooms, a kitchen and a big living room with a fireplace. Papers litter the floor, the phone rings continually, and people stop by to borrow things: a pretty blonde wants a Soviet army chorus record, a Tony Perkins type from the Oakland Du Bois Club wants a film projector; Art Goldberg -- the arch-activist who also lives here -- comes storming in, shouting for help on the "Vietnam Days" teach-in arrangements.

It is all very friendly and collegiate. People wear plaid s.h.i.+rts and khaki pants, white socks and moccasins. There are books on the shelves, cans of beer and c.o.kes in the refrigerator, and a manually operated light bulb in the bathroom. In the midst of all this it is weird to hear people talking about "bringing the ruling cla.s.s to their knees," or "finding acceptable synonyms for Marxist terms."

Political conversation in this house would drive Don Mulford right over the wall. There are riffs of absurdity and mad humor in it, but the base line remains a dead-serious alienation from the "Repugnant Society" of 20th-century America. You hear the same talk on the streets, in coffee bars, on the walk near Ludwig's Fountain in front of Sproul Hall, and in other houses where activists live and gather. And why not? This is Berkeley, which DeCanio calls "the center of West Coast radicalism." It has a long history of erratic politics, both on and off the campus. From 1911 to 1913, its Mayor was a Socialist named St.i.tt Wilson. It has more psychiatrists and fewer bars than any other city of comparable size in California. And there are 249 churches for 120,300 people, of which 25 percent are Negroes -- one of the highest percentages of any city outside the South.

Culturally, Berkeley is dominated by two factors: the campus and San Francisco across the Bay. The campus is so much a part of the community that the employment and housing markets have long since adjusted to student patterns. A $100-a-month apartment or cottage is no problem when four or five people split the rent, and there are plenty of ill-paid, minimum-strain jobs for those without money from home. Tutoring, typing, clerking, car was.h.i.+ng, hash slinging and baby sitting are all easy ways to make a subsistence income; one of the favorites among nonstudents is computer programing, which pays well.

Therefore, Berkeley's nonstudents have no trouble getting by. The climate is easy, the people are congenial, and the action never dies. Jim p.r.i.c.kett, who quit the University of Oklahoma and flunked out of San Francisco State, is another of Spider's Spider's nonstudent editors. "State has no community," he says, "and the only nonstudent I know of at Oklahoma is now in jail." p.r.i.c.kett came to Berkeley because "things are happening here." At 23, he is about as far Left as a man can get in these times, but his revolutionary zeal is gimped by pessimism. "If we have a revolution in this country it will be a Fascist take-over," he says with a shrug. Meanwhile he earns $25 a week as nonstudent editors. "State has no community," he says, "and the only nonstudent I know of at Oklahoma is now in jail." p.r.i.c.kett came to Berkeley because "things are happening here." At 23, he is about as far Left as a man can get in these times, but his revolutionary zeal is gimped by pessimism. "If we have a revolution in this country it will be a Fascist take-over," he says with a shrug. Meanwhile he earns $25 a week as Spider's Spider's star writer, smiting the establishment hip and thigh at every opportunity. p.r.i.c.kett looks as much like a Red menace as Will Rogers looked like a Bantu. He is tall, thin, blond, and shuffles. "h.e.l.l, I'll probably sell out," he says with a faint smile. "Be a history teacher or something. But not for a while." star writer, smiting the establishment hip and thigh at every opportunity. p.r.i.c.kett looks as much like a Red menace as Will Rogers looked like a Bantu. He is tall, thin, blond, and shuffles. "h.e.l.l, I'll probably sell out," he says with a faint smile. "Be a history teacher or something. But not for a while."

Yet there is something about p.r.i.c.kett that suggests he won't sell out so easily. Unlike many nonstudent activists, he has no degree, and in the society that appalls him even a sellout needs credentials. That is one of the most tangible realities of the nonstudent; by quitting school he has taken a physical step outside the system -- a move that more and more students seem to find admirable. It is not an easy thing to repudiate -- not now, at any rate, while the tide is running that way. And "the system" cannot be rejoined without some painful self-realization. Many a man has whipped up a h.e.l.l of a broth of reasons to justify his sellout, but few recommend the taste of it.

The problem is not like that of high school dropouts. They are supposedly inadequate, but the activist nonstudent is generally said to be superior. "A lot of these kids are top students," says Dr. David Powellson, chief of Cal's student psychiatric clinic, "but no univeristy is set up to handle them."

How, then, are these bright mavericks to fit into the super-bureaucracies of government and big business? Cal takes its undergraduates from the top eighth of the state's high school graduates, and those accepted from out of state are no less "promising." The ones who migrate to Berkeley after quitting other schools are usually the same type. They are seekers -- disturbed, perhaps, and perhaps for good reason. Many drift from one university to another, looking for the right program, the right professor, the right atmosphere, and right way to deal with the deplorable world they have suddenly grown into. It is like an army of Holden Caulfields, looking for a home and beginning to suspect they may never find one.

These are the outsiders, the nonstudents, and the potential -- if not professional -- troublemakers. There is something primitive and tragic in California's effort to make a law against them. The law itself is relatively unimportant, but the thinking that conceived it is a strutting example of what the crisis is all about. A society that will legislate in ignorance against its unfulfilled children and its angry, half-desperate truth seekers is bound to be shaken as it goes about making a reality of ma.s.s education.

It is a race against time, complacency and vested interests. For the Left-activist nonstudent the race is very personal. Whether he is right, wrong, ignorant, vicious, super-intelligent or simply bored, once he has committed himself to the extent of dropping out of school, he has also committed himself to "making it" outside the framework of whatever he has quit. A social radical presumably has his talent, his private madness or some other insulated gimmick, but for the political radical the only true hope is somehow to bust the system that drove him into limbo. In this new era many believe they can do it, but most of those I talked to at Berkeley seemed a bit nervous. There was a singular vagueness as to the mechanics of the act, no real sense of the openings.

"What are you going to be doing ten years from now?" I asked a visiting radical in the house where Spider Spider is put together. "What if there's no revolution by then, and no prospects of one?" is put together. "What if there's no revolution by then, and no prospects of one?"

"h.e.l.l," he said. "I don't think about that: Too much is happening right now. If the revolution's coming, it had better come d.a.m.n quick."

The Nation, vol. 201, September 27, 1965 vol. 201, September 27, 1965

Those Daring Young Men in Their Flying Machines. . .

Ain't What They Used to Be!

Myths and legends die hard in America. We love them for the extra dimension they provide, the illusion of near-infinite possibility to erase the narrow confines of most men's reality. Weird heroes and mold-breaking champions exist as living proof to those who need it that the tyranny of "the rat race" is not yet final. Look at Joe Namath, they say; he broke all the rules and still beat the system like a gong. Or Hugh Hefner, the Horatio Alger of our time. And Ca.s.sius Clay -- Muhammad Ali -- who flew so high, like the U-2, that he couldn't quite believe it when the drone bees shot him down.

Gary Powers, the U-2 pilot shot down over Russia, is now a test pilot for Lockheed Aircraft, testing newer, more "invincible" planes in the cool, bright skies above the Mojave Desert, in the Antelope Valley just north of Los Angeles. The valley is alive with aviation projects, particularly at Edwards Air Force Base, near Lancaster, where the Air Force tests its new planes and breeds a new, computerized version of the legendary, h.e.l.l-for-leather test pilot. Air Force bra.s.s at Edwards is appalled at the persistence of the old "kick the tire, light the fire, and away we go" image. The key word in today's Air Force, they insist, is "professionalism."

This made my visit to the base a bit tricky. It was painfully obvious, even after an hour or so of casual talk, that the hard-nosed pros on the flight line resented the drift of my conversation -- particularly when I asked about things like "dueling societies." The Air Force has never valued a sense of humor in its career men, and in high-risk fields like flight testing, a sense of the absurd will cripple a man's future just as surely as an LSD habit.

Test pilots are very straight people. They are totally dedicated to their work and not accustomed to dealing with slip-shod civilians who seem even faintly disorganized -- especially writers. My image was further queered by a painfully cracked bone in my right hand, which forced me to use my left in all formal introductions.

At one point, while talking to two colonels, I lamely explained that I break my hand about once a year. "Last time," I said, "it was a motorcycle wreck on a rainy night; I missed a s.h.i.+ft between second and third, doing about seventy on a bad curve."

Zang! That did it. They were horrified. "Why would anybody do a thing like that?" asked Lieutenant Colonel Ted Sturmthal, who had just come back from flying the huge XB-70 acoss the country at the speed of sound. Lieutenant Colonel Dean G.o.dwin, who is rated, along with Sturmthal, as one of the top test pilots in the Air Force, stared at me as if I'd just produced a Vietcong watch fob. That did it. They were horrified. "Why would anybody do a thing like that?" asked Lieutenant Colonel Ted Sturmthal, who had just come back from flying the huge XB-70 acoss the country at the speed of sound. Lieutenant Colonel Dean G.o.dwin, who is rated, along with Sturmthal, as one of the top test pilots in the Air Force, stared at me as if I'd just produced a Vietcong watch fob.

We were sitting in a sort of gray-plastic office near the flight line. Outside, on the cold, gray runway, sat a plane called the SR-71, capable of flying 2000 m.p.h. -- or about 3100 feet per second -- in the thin air on the edge of the earth's atmosphere, nearly 20 miles up. The SR-71 has already made the U-2 obsolete; the thrust of its two engines equals the power of 45 diesel locomotives and it cruises at an alt.i.tude just inside the realm of s.p.a.ce flight. Yet neither Sturmthal nor G.o.dwin would have balked for an instant at the prospect of climbing into the c.o.c.kpit of the thing and pus.h.i.+ng it as high and hard as it could possibly go.

The Air Force has been trying for 20 years to croak the image of the wild-eyed, full-force, "aim it at the ground and see if it crashes" kind of test pilot, and they have finally succeeded. The vintage-'69 test pilot is a supercautious, super-trained, superintelligent monument to the Computer Age. He is a perfect specimen, on paper, and so confident of his natural edge on other kinds of men that you begin to wonder -- after spending a bit of time in the company of test pilots -- if perhaps we might not all be better off if the White House could be moved, tomorrow morning, to this dreary wasteland called Edwards Air Force Base. If nothing else, my own visit to the base convinced me that Air Force test pilots see the rest of us, perhaps accurately, as either physical, mental, or moral rejects.

I came away from Edwards with a sense of having been to IBM's version of Olympus. Why had I ever left that perfect world? I had been in the Air Force once, and it had struck me then as being a clumsy experiment in ma.s.s lobotomy, using rules instead of scalpels. Now, ten years later, the Air Force still benefits from the romantic pilot myth that its personnel managers have long since destroyed.

Back in the good old days, when men were Men and might was Right and the Devil took the hindmost, the peaceful desert highways in Antelope Valley were raceways for off-duty pilots on big motorcycles. Slow-moving travelers were frequently blown off the road by wildmen in leather jackets and white scarves, two-wheeled human torpedoes defying all speed limits and heedless of their own safety. Motorcycles were very popular toys with the pilots of that other, older era, and many an outraged citizen was jerked out of his bed at night by the awful roar of a huge four-cylinder Indian beneath his daughter's window. The image of the daredevil, speedball pilot is preserved in song and story, as it were, and in films like the Howard Hughes cla.s.sic, h.e.l.l's Angels. h.e.l.l's Angels.

Prior to World War II, pilots were seen as doomed, half-mythical figures, much admired for their daring, but not quite sane when judged by normal standards. While other men rode trains or chugged around the earth in Model-Ts, barnstorming pilots toured the nation with spectacular "aviation shows," dazzling the yokels at a million county fairs. When their stunts went wrong, they crashed and often died. The survivors pushed on, treating death like a churlish, harping creditor, toasting their own legend with beakers of gin and wild parties to ward off the chill. "Live fast, die young, and make a good-locJking corpse." That gag got a lot of laughs at debutante parties, but in aviation circles it seemed a bit raw, a little too close to the bone.

It was especially pertinent to test pilots, whose job it was to find out which planes would fly and which ones were natural death-traps. If the others took lunatic risks, at least they took them in proved planes. Test pilots, then and now, put the products of engineers' theories to the ultimate test. No experimental plane is "safe" to fly. Some work beautifully, others have fatal flaws. The Mojave Desert is pockmarked with the scars of failure. Only the new ones are visible; the older scars have been covered over by drifting sand and mesquite brush.

Each funeral means more donations, from friends and survivors, to the "window fund." The Test Pilots' Memorial Window in the chapel is a wall of colorful stained-gla.s.s mosaics, paid for with donations that otherwise might have gone into the purchase of short-lived flowers. The original idea was to have only one memorial window, but each year invariably brought more donations, so that now there are only a few plain windows left. All the others have been replaced by stained-gla.s.s memorials to the 100 names on the plaque in the chapel hallway.

Two or three new names are added each year, on the average, but some years are worse than others. There were no flight-test fatalities in either 1963 or 1964. Then, in 1965, there were eight. In 1966, the death count dropped to four, but two of these occurred on a single day, June 8th, in a mid-air crash between a single-seat fighter and one of the only two XB-70 bombers ever built.

That was a very bad day on Edwards. Test pilots are very close: They live and work together like a professional football team; their wives are good friends, and their children are part of the same small world. So a double fatality shatters everybody. Today's test pilots and their families live nearly as close to death as the old-time pilots ever did -- but the new breed fears it more. With rare exceptions, they are married, with at least two children, and in their off-duty hours they live as carefully and quietly as any physics professor. A few ride little Hondas, Suzukis, and other midget motorcycles, but strictly for transportation -- or, as one of the pilots explained, "So Mama can use the family car." The flight-line parking lot, where working pilots leave their cars, looks no different from any supermarket lot in San Bernardino. Here again, with rare exceptions, the test pilot's earthbound vehicle is modest -- probably a five-year-old Ford or Chevy, perhaps a Volkswagen, Datsun, or other low-priced import. At the other end of the flight line, in front of the test pilots' school, the mix is a bit livelier. Of the 46 cars I counted there one afternoon, there was one Jaguar XKE, one IK-150, one old Mercedes with a V-8 Chevy engine, one Stingray; all the rest were clunkers. A cl.u.s.ter of motorcycles stood near the door, but the hottest one in the lot was a mild-mannered 250 Yamaha.

The midnight roads around Antelope Valley are quiet these days, except for an occasional teen-age drag race. Today's test pilots go to bed early, and they regard big motorcycles with the same a.n.a.lytical disdain they have for hippies, winos, and other failure symbols. They take their risks, on a.s.signment, between dawn and 4:30 P.M. P.M. But when their time is their own, they prefer to hunker down in the wall-to-wall anonymity of their one-story, flat-roofed, Levittown-style homes between the base golf course and the officers' club, there to relax in front of the tube with a succulent TV dinner. Their music is Mantovani, and their idea of an "artist" is Norman Rockwell. On Friday afternoons, from four-thirty to seven, they crowd into the officers' club bar for the weekly "happy hour," where most of the talk is about planes and current test projects. Then, just before seven, they go home to pick up their wives and dress for dinner, again at "the club." After dinner there will be a bit of dancing to the jukebox or maybe a small combo. Heavy drinking is out of the question; a drunken test pilot is viewed with genuine alarm by the others, who see any form of social excess -- drink, wenching, late hours, any "unusual" behavior -- as an indication of some deeper problem, an emotional cancer of some kind. Tonight's juicer is tomorrow's -- or Monday's -- hangover risk, a pair of slow-focusing eyes or an uncertain hand at the controls of a $100 million aircraft. The Air Force has trained three generations of elite-level pilots to abhor any hint of foreseeable human risk in the flight-test program. The planes, after all, are risky enough, they are the necessary unknown factor in the equation that every test project ideally boils down to. (Test pilots are very hip to equations; they can describe a plane and all its characteristics, using nothing but numbers.) And a cool waterhead knows that an equation with only one unknown factor is a h.e.l.l of a lot simpler to cope with than an equation with two. The idea, then, is to minimize the chance of a second unknown factor -- such as an unpredictable pilot -- that might turn a simple flight-test equation into a scorched crater on the desert and another wave of donations to the "window fund." But when their time is their own, they prefer to hunker down in the wall-to-wall anonymity of their one-story, flat-roofed, Levittown-style homes between the base golf course and the officers' club, there to relax in front of the tube with a succulent TV dinner. Their music is Mantovani, and their idea of an "artist" is Norman Rockwell. On Friday afternoons, from four-thirty to seven, they crowd into the officers' club bar for the weekly "happy hour," where most of the talk is about planes and current test projects. Then, just before seven, they go home to pick up their wives and dress for dinner, again at "the club." After dinner there will be a bit of dancing to the jukebox or maybe a small combo. Heavy drinking is out of the question; a drunken test pilot is viewed with genuine alarm by the others, who see any form of social excess -- drink, wenching, late hours, any "unusual" behavior -- as an indication of some deeper problem, an emotional cancer of some kind. Tonight's juicer is tomorrow's -- or Monday's -- hangover risk, a pair of slow-focusing eyes or an uncertain hand at the controls of a $100 million aircraft. The Air Force has trained three generations of elite-level pilots to abhor any hint of foreseeable human risk in the flight-test program. The planes, after all, are risky enough, they are the necessary unknown factor in the equation that every test project ideally boils down to. (Test pilots are very hip to equations; they can describe a plane and all its characteristics, using nothing but numbers.) And a cool waterhead knows that an equation with only one unknown factor is a h.e.l.l of a lot simpler to cope with than an equation with two. The idea, then, is to minimize the chance of a second unknown factor -- such as an unpredictable pilot -- that might turn a simple flight-test equation into a scorched crater on the desert and another wave of donations to the "window fund."

Civilian test pilots, working on contract for companies like Boeing or Lockheed, are just as carefully screened as their soul brothers in the Air Force. The men who run the "military-industrial complex" are not about to entrust the fruits of their billion-dollar projects to the kind of pilot who might be tempted to zoom a new plane under the Golden Gate Bridge at rush hour. The whole philosophy of research testing is to minimize the risk. minimize the risk. Test pilots are sent up with specific instructions. Their job is to perform a set of finely plotted maneuvers with the plane, to a.s.sess its performance in specific circ.u.mstances -- stability at high speeds, rate of acceleration at certain climb angles, etc. -- and then to bring it down safely and write a detailed report for the engineers. There are plenty of fine pilots around, but only a handful can communicate in the language of superadvanced aerodynamics. The best pilot in the world -- even if he could land a B-52 on the Number Eight green at Pebble Beach without taking a divot -- would be useless on a test-flight project unless he could explain, in a written report, just how and why the landing could be made. Test pilots are sent up with specific instructions. Their job is to perform a set of finely plotted maneuvers with the plane, to a.s.sess its performance in specific circ.u.mstances -- stability at high speeds, rate of acceleration at certain climb angles, etc. -- and then to bring it down safely and write a detailed report for the engineers. There are plenty of fine pilots around, but only a handful can communicate in the language of superadvanced aerodynamics. The best pilot in the world -- even if he could land a B-52 on the Number Eight green at Pebble Beach without taking a divot -- would be useless on a test-flight project unless he could explain, in a written report, just how and why the landing could be made.

The Air Force is very keen on people who "go by the book," and there is, is, in fact, a book -- called a technical order -- on every piece of equipment in use, including planes. Test pilots can't go by "the book," however, because for all practical purposes, they are the people who write it. "We push a plane to its absolute limits," said a young major at Edwards. "We want to know exactly how it performs under every conceivable circ.u.mstance. And then we explain it, on paper, so other pilots will know what to expect of it." in fact, a book -- called a technical order -- on every piece of equipment in use, including planes. Test pilots can't go by "the book," however, because for all practical purposes, they are the people who write it. "We push a plane to its absolute limits," said a young major at Edwards. "We want to know exactly how it performs under every conceivable circ.u.mstance. And then we explain it, on paper, so other pilots will know what to expect of it."

He was standing on the flight line in a bright-orange flying suit, a baggy one-piece thing full of special pockets and zippers and flaps. These pilots are sporty-looking people, vaguely resembling a bunch of pro-football quarterbacks. The age bracket is early thirties to late forties, with a median around 37 or 38. The average age in the U.S.A.F. Aeros.p.a.ce Research Pilot School at Edwards is 30. n.o.body over 32 is accepted; few pilots younger than 29 have logged enough air time to qualify. From a list of 600 to 1000 applicants each year, the school picks two cla.s.ses of 16 men each. Washouts are rare; the screening process is so thorough that no candidate who appears to be even faintly questionable survives the final cut. Forty-one of the nation's 63 astronauts are graduates of the test pilots' school -- a military version of Cal Tech and M.I.T. -- the ultimate in aviation academics.

A sense of elitism is pervasive among test pilots. There are less than 100 of them on Edwards, with several hundred more spread out on testing projects from coast to coast. But Edwards is the capital of their world. "It's like the White House," says recently retired Colonel Joseph Cotton. "After Edwards, the only direction a test pilot can go is down; any other a.s.signment is practically a demotion."

Colonel Cotton is the man who saved one of the $350 million experimental XB-70s by short-circuiting a computer with a paper clip. The huge plane's landing gear had jammed, making it impossible to land. "You can't argue with a black box," said the colonel, "so we had to fool it." While the plane circled the base and engineers on the ground radioed careful instructions, Joe Cotton took a flashlight and a paper clip and crawled into the dark landing-gear bay to perform critical surgery in a maze of wires and relays.

Incredibly, it worked. He managed to short the faulty circuit out of the chain of command, as it were, and trick the computer into lowering the landing gear. The plane landed with locked brakes and flaming tires, but no serious damage -- and "Joe Cotton's paper clip" was an instant legend.

I found Colonel Cotton at his new home in Lancaster, pacing around his living room while his wife tried to place a call to a fellow pilot whose teen-age son had been killed the day before in a motorcycle accident. The funeral was set for the next afternoon, and the whole Cotton family was going. (The flight line was empty the next day. The only pilot in the test-operations building was a visiting Britisher. All the others had gone to the funeral.) Joe Cotton is 47, one of the last of the precomputer generation. By today's standards, he wouldn't even quality for test-pilot training. He is not a college graduate, much less a master of advanced calculus with an honors degree in math or science. But the young pilots at Edwards speak of Joe Cotton as if he were already a myth. He is not quite real, in their terms: a shade too complex, not entirely predictable. At a recent symposium for the Society of Experimental Test Pilots, Colonel Cotton showed up wearing a Mickey Mouse wrist.w.a.tch. All the other pilots thought it was "great" -- but none of them rushed out to buy one for themselves.

Joe Cotton is a very gentle, small-boned man with an obsessive interest in almost everything. We talked for nearly five hours. In an age of stereotypes, he manages to sound like a patriotic hippie and a Christian anarchist all at once.

"The greatest quality you can build into a plane," he says, "is the quality of forgiveness." Or: "Having control of that airplane is like having control of your life; you don't want it wandering around up there, trying to get into a spin and crash. . .

"Flight testing is a beautiful racket. . . Being a test pilot on the Mojave Desert in America is the greatest expression of freedom I can think of. . ." And suddenly: "Retiring from the Air Force is like getting out of a cage. . ."

It is always a bit of a shock to meet an original, unfettered mind, and this was precisely the difference between Colonel Joe Cotton and the young pilots I met on the base. The Air Force computers have done their work well: They have screened out all but the near-perfect specimens. And the science of aviation will benefit, no doubt, from the ultimate perfection of the flight-test equation. Our planes will be safer and more efficient, and eventually we will breed all our pilots in test tubes.

Perhaps it will be for the best. Or maybe not. The last question I asked Joe Cotton was how he felt about the war in Vietnam, and particularly the antiwar protests. "Well," he said, "anytime you can get people emotionally disturbed about war, that's good. I've been an Air Force pilot most of my life, but I've never thought I was put on earth to kill people. The most important thing in life is concern for one another. When we've lost that, we've lost the right to live. If more people in Germany had been concerned about what Hitler was doing, well. . ." He paused, half-aware -- and only half-caring, it seemed -- that he was no longer talking like a colonel just retired from the U.S. Air Force.

"You know," he said finally. "When I fly over Los Angeles at night, I look down at all those lights. . . six million people down there. . . and that's how many Hitler killed. . ." He shook his head.

We walked outside, and when Joe Cotton said good night, he smiled and extended his left hand -- remembering, somehow, after all that rambling talk, that I couldn't use my right.

The next afternoon, in the officer's club bar, I decided to broach the same question about the war in a friendly conversation with a young test pilot from Virginia, who had spent some time in Vietnam before his a.s.signment to Edwards. "Well, I've changed my mind about the war," he said. "I used to be all for it, but now I don't give a d.a.m.n. It's no fun anymore, now that we can't go up north. You could see your targets up there, you could see what you hit. But h.e.l.l, down south all you do is fly a pattern and drop a bunch of bombs through the clouds. There's no sense of accomplishment." He shrugged and sipped his drink, dismissing the war as a sort of pointless equation, an irrelevant problem no longer deserving of his talents.

An hour or so later, driving back to Los Angeles, I picked up a newscast on the radio: Student riots at Duke, Wisconsin, and Berkeley; oil slick in the Santa Barbara Channel; Kennedy murder trials in New Orleans and Los Angeles. And suddenly Edwards Air Force Base and that young pilot from Virginia seemed a million miles away. Who would ever have thought, for instance, that the war in Vietnam could be solved by taking the fun out of bombing?

Pageant, September 1969 September 1969 The Police Chief The Professional Voice of Law Enforcement Weapons are my business. You name name it and I it and I know know it: guns, bombs, gas, fire, knives and everything else. d.a.m.n few people in the world know more about weaponry than I do. I'm an expert on demolition, ballistics, blades, motors, animals -- anything capable of causing damage to man, beast or structure. This is my it: guns, bombs, gas, fire, knives and everything else. d.a.m.n few people in the world know more about weaponry than I do. I'm an expert on demolition, ballistics, blades, motors, animals -- anything capable of causing damage to man, beast or structure. This is my profession, profession, my bag, my trade, my thing. . . my evil specialty. And for this reason the editors of Scanlan's have asked me to comment on a periodical called my bag, my trade, my thing. . . my evil specialty. And for this reason the editors of Scanlan's have asked me to comment on a periodical called The Police Chief. The Police Chief.

At first I refused. . . but various pressures soon caused me to change my mind. Money was not a factor in my decision. What finally spurred me to action was a sense of duty, even urgency, to make my voice heard. I am, as I said, a pro -- and in this foul and desperate hour in our history I think even pros should speak up.

Frankly, I love this country. And also, quite frankly, I despise being put in this position -- for a lot of reasons, which I don't mind listing: 1) For one thing, the press used to have a good rule about not talking about each other -- no matter what they thought, or even what they knew. knew. In the good old days a newspaperman would always protect his own kind. There was no way to get those b.a.s.t.a.r.ds to testify against each other. It was worse than trying to make doctors testify in a malpractice suit, or making a beat cop squeal on his buddy in a "police brutality" case. In the good old days a newspaperman would always protect his own kind. There was no way to get those b.a.s.t.a.r.ds to testify against each other. It was worse than trying to make doctors testify in a malpractice suit, or making a beat cop squeal on his buddy in a "police brutality" case.

2) The reason I know about things like "malpractice" and "police brutality" is that I used to be a "cop" -- a police chief, for that matter, in a small city just east of Los Angeles. And before that I was a boss detective in Nevada -- and before that a beat cop in Oakland. So I know what I'm talking about when I say most "journalists" are lying s.h.i.+theads. I never knew a reporter who could even say say the word "corrupt" without p.i.s.sing in his pants from pure guilt. the word "corrupt" without p.i.s.sing in his pants from pure guilt.