In the summer of 1964 I applied to the University of California at Berkeley, and was accepted. I had to take a placement test for the Spanish language, and placed in the top ten out of two thousand students taking the test. But when I registered, I did a really stupid thing: I signed up for a full fifteen units, although I had to commute from SF by taking two buses, and had to work every day after school and on Saturday. To make things worse, my first class was at 8:00 a.m. Meanwhile, my paltry savings account was going down and down.
One day, while rushing from my linguistics class to my Shakespeare class with a heavy book briefcase, I walked smack into a glass door, which knocked me even sillier than I already was. This caused me to take stock and question the wisdom of what I was doing. But before that, something just as unexpected came along
It was the Free Speech Movement, the first of many such major protests on university campuses that would sweep across the U.S. Whole books have been written about it, but what I can tell you is this: it was very compelling, and I came to consider it more important than anything that was going on in the classrooms. Maybe it was, but I already had too many problems to be skipping classes.
I was one of the students who, practically in unison, dropped into a sitting position on the Sproul Plaza pavement around the campus police car that now held a fellow student, preventing the car from leaving. We sat around the car in shifts, and that night, after a Joan Baez concert in the Greek Theater, I came back again. It was dangerous in several ways. The campus police had been bolstered by the un-academied Oakland police. As we sat around the campus police car in a tangle of legs, the protesters passed around that it was Gandhi's birthday. It wasn't, but it gave us something inspiring to think about. We eventually went home, after the University administration agreed to a settlement (which they later reneged on).
By day, I would listen to Mario Savio, Bettina Aptheker, and others, sometimes wearing an armband. I sometimes trudged in a circle in front of Sproul Hall in my trench coat, carrying that heavy book bag that included the complete works of Shakespeare (I had to be dressed for work at Berlitz), while FBI agents took pictures of us from the Sproul steps. In the late afternoons I went straight to work, getting off around 9:15 p.m. and walking through the dark streets of the Tenderloin to get to my apartment. I often carried an umbrella (for possible use as a weapon). One night a menacing type started to approach me from across the street, and I pulled a screwdriver out of my trench coat pocket, knowing that in the light from the streetlight it would look like a knife. He crossed back over to the other side.
One day I signed a petition in support of the civil disobedience of the student protesters, which earned me a threatening letter from the Dean (I'll post it below if I can find it). I was always tired, and worse, I had no time to study. Finally, I decided that I had had enough.
Text © 2020 by Donald Jacobson Traxler.
