On Choosing Life — 1972–1975

This period of my life brought a metamorphosis in my personal lifestyle from self-destructive practices to healthy choices which have brought about a positive change to a happier and healthier life to now, at age 90 in 2016. In February, 1972, I was forced to take some days off work with a severe bout with flu. Cigarettes tasted like crap and I decided this would be a good time to quit smoking for good, going back to about 1948 when I had read the excellent little journal In Fact, edited by radical free-lancer George Seldes in which he argued that scientific evidence had revealed the deadly impact tobacco had to make it a lethal killer. I tried to shake this addiction several times over the years, when the craving returned particularly for the lure of the pipe and cigars and cigarillos. Aware that Pappa was the victim of lung cancer as a chain smoker at 55, so how many years would I survive the true “killer weed’‘ habit? So except for one lapse during my last drunk in late September, 1972, I never smoked again! Tina was incorrigible as a heavy cigarette smoker. Her breakfast consisted of three cups of strong black coffee, with a cigarette in her mouth the whole time. Try to talk to her at that time and she’d come close to biting your head off in a snit. So as long as we were together I ended up breathing her dangerous second-hand smoke. As long as I smoked I never noticed her breath when we kissed. But after I’d quit her mouth would smell awful.

I started work in the morning around 7AM and her gig in Oakland was at 9 driving to work. When I’d get home I’d open all the windows to the max to get the stale smoke out of the building. Then I’d clean and wash our numerous ash trays to make for a more healthful living environment. When she got home, the cigarettes were fired up and all ashtrays were full of butts at bed-time again. A no-win scene here. We never talked about it. We never quarreled in our marriage and avoided conflict of any kind. Was this a good sign for a lasting relationship?

LOS ANGELES ANTI-WAR MARCH

We took a Los Angeles trip during the Spring of 1972 and participated in an antiwar March of about 35,000 people from the western Los Angeles to MacArthur Park. Tina’s stepmother joined us from Ensenada to do her bit. Not one of the blockbuster affairs of 100,000 we knew from San Francisco. But its most impressive features was a contingent of 300 Vietnam veterans, dressed in jungle boots and camouflage, which was symptomatic of the anti-war sentiments which pervaded the ranks of the troops in Vietnam in probably the most unpopular war in US history to that point. Shortly after arriving in the Park by Alverado and Seventh Street a cry came down from a park hillside that a bunch of Nazis were demonstrating there. We hurried toward the spot to see what was going on. A sorry sight. A motley crew of about a dozen men of varying ages, some wearing swastikas, were standing there, tightly surrounded by a ring of LA cops to shield them from being attacked by some in the anti-war crowds. One carried a sign reading, “White Power.” As we stood there, dozens of the camouflaged Vietnam vets arrived on the scene and formed a large circle around the Nazis and the cops, with their backs to them and holding hands to prevent violence against the sad-sack cluster. I don’t know if any such attack was imminent but the vets as peacemakers defused the situation and the pathetic assemblage of Nazis and its police escort soon turned around and moved out of the park. But we were proud of the veterans’ action in heading off any possibility of violence.

GEORGE McGOVERN’S PRESIDENTIAL CHAMPAIGN

The excitement of Senator George McGovern’s (1922-2012) campaign for the Presidency, focused on our departure from the Vietnam War excited millions of us to join in mainstream politics to end that horror was a prime focus of our involvement in 1972. This left prairie populist from South Dakota struck a nerve in progressive America that rallied us to his campaign. A former history professor and combat veteran of WWII as a B-52 pilot in WWII who was decorated for 52 missions in the European Theatre, convinced us to support him as the agent to topple the right wing GOP reign of Richard Nixon and end the war. So Tina and I volunteered for his campaign as a major project. This was true of most members of our SF-SP Local. We weren’t the Realignment ideologues who controlled the SP nationally who were hardly in the McGovern camp. Their patron saints of the Meany hierarchy of the AFL-CIO, detested McGovern as a naive “com-symp,” a favorite term of the right wing John Birch Society, and refused to support him when he won the Democratic nomination. Their preference would have been the super-hawk Sen. Henry M. Jackson (1912-1983), the senator from Boeing in Washington State. A good many International unions did actively support and campaign for McGovern. But his campaign suffered a major disaster at the beginning and never regained the momentum to make it a race. After some major denials, he picked Missouri Senator Thomas Eagleton as running mate. Eagleton at one point in his career had received psychiatric care which in those days was a no, no. This created a major negative media exposure which went a long way to sink the McGovern ship from the beginning. Finally, a Kennedy dynasty family figure Sargent Shriver who had never held electoral public office took his place.

The hard boiled international political games played by Nixon and his top adviser Henry Kissinger also worked against McGovern’s campaign. Nixon’s Feb. 21, 1972 visit to China was a master stroke in creating new openings with an old Cold War enemy enabling him to play the growing antagonisms between Soviet Russia and Mao’s China to his own advantage. Thus, despite his Cambodia and Laotian incursions and North Vietnam bombings he worked to demonstrate he would be the real,”peace president.” A cagey modern Machiavelli at the art of “realpolitik.” The GOP campaign machinery also branded McGovern effectively as a “left wing extremist” who would be a disaster. so Nixon prevailed with over 60% of the vote and McGovern only carried the State of Massachusetts and the District of Columbia in the electoral vote. I’ve always seen McGovern as one of the most sincere decent human beings in American mainstream politics so this outcome was a sad and bitter pill. Meantime, Nixon’s Watergate burglars were busy with their break-ins even before the end of the election campaign, and finally in 1973 Nixon and his advisers saw that Vietnam was unwinnable for the American imperial war machine and brought the troops home in military defeat. North Vietnamese troops took over Saigon in April, 1975.

MY FINAL BATTLE WITH DEMON RUM

In September of 1972, Tina went by herself to visit her family in Los Angeles. I stayed home to mind the fort by myself. Finally, I couldn’t hold back the demons of a dry alcoholic’s cravings. Although I loved Tina as a comrade and life partner, our lack of an active sex life gnawed at me. I began to stop at a bar around Tenth and Market on the way home from work where the bartender was a beautiful, tall and friendly black woman of around 30 who was charming in her conversation. Nothing happened but I stayed for more and more brewskis to bask in her presence. One night I even stopped at a gay bath house in the Castro and clumsily, half lit, tried to make out without success. Tina tried to call me one night, but wondered why I wasn’t there to answer on a week night. What the hell was happening to me again after a long hiatus of sobriety? So after her return from LA, one night after work I stopped at the 10th and Market bar anyway and began to drink steadily. Pretty bashed, I got in an argument with a couple of young Navy sailors about the war and they beat me up and left me lying on the sidewalk. I crawled to the main public library steps bruised and bleeding, and upon telling two strangers where I lived they picked me up and drove me home. Tina was shocked to see me in such a state, and I got involved in a long conversation with her as she gave me strong black coffee to drink and I smoked a couple of her cigarettes while complaining about our arid love life. She didn’t challenge me as I accused her of a incestuous fondling that I’d seen between her and her two younger brothers, and of the fondling between she and her late father in motels she once told me about on their long car ride from Milwaukee to Ensenada. “Everybody gets in the act except me, your husband.” So I bitterly recounted that she would never be a free woman as long as her late father had his dead hand on her “snatch.” She just listened in amazement without criticism and later admitted truth to my observations of an unhealthy family scene. This concluded that last real drunk of my life.

REALOS SEEK SP CONTROL IN DSF MERGER

In 1972 the Shachtmanite-Suall Realos made a move to assure control over the SP after their 1970 Convention set-back when their Harrington-Shier allies broke discipline to join Debsians in our successful motion to compliment the Assemblies for Peace for their work to end the Vietnam War. They initiated negotiations with a right wing social-democratic group called The Democratic Socialist Federation, a small group of older SocDems allied with the International Ladies Garment Workers Union hierarchy. DSF had been formed in 1957 as a further right breakaway group from the Social Democratic Federation which refused to join the merger of the SDF and the Socialist Party at that time. This new merger between SP-SDF and DSF occurred in March, 1972, with Bayard Rustin and ILGWU leader Charles Zimmerman becoming co-chairs. We in the Debsians opposed this as taking the operation further to the Cold War right and not compatible with our basic left democratic socialist politics and Debs/Thomas principles. So we saw that we couldn’t be part of such a rightist pro-war amalgam. So a number of SP Locals such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, Milwaukee and Philly united to form under the banner of Council of Democratic Socialism, once a group founded by the late Norman Thomas, and wait for further developments. Prior to that March merger of the DSF and SP, Harrington’s close ally Carl Shier gave me a call from Chicago. “Harry, shall we join forces and go to that DSF merger convention in NY and make one last try to head it off?” I told him it was a waste of time and would take what’s left of that SP element and move it further to the right. I felt I wanted to no art of such a nightmare as a multi-tendency form of socialism was impossible within it and would just sink things further into the bog of a Meanyite pro-imperialist “social democracy.” (Carl’s daughter Nancy was a UC Berkeley student at the time and sympathized more with us SF Debsians than with East Bay’s Shachtmanite Realos.) I don’t know if Carl made any attempt to go further with his dissent, although Mike Harrington barely hung on in that unholy alliance trying to salvage something. In a December convention of the DSF-SP, they dropped the name “Socialist Party” and renamed themselves “Social Democrats USA” and buried themselves deeper into the maw of US pro-imperialist politics.

WE REDEEM THE NAME OF SOCIALIST PARTY-USA

Immediately, we non-Realo SP Locals around the country, clustered loosely under the transitional Union for Democratic Socialism, got excited saying, let’s reclaim our old name and get on track with the Debs-Thomas tradition! This created a buzz around a number of the locals, or non-Realo comrades within them, who went to town via letter, leaflet and phone in LA, SF, Chicago, New York, Indianapolis, Philly, and most importantly, Milwaukee, with the backing of its respected former Socialist Mayor Frank P. Zeidler, to call a re-founding convention to claim back our historic name of Socialist Party-USA sometime in Spring, 1973, for a new beginning! Meantime, Mike Harrington decided to give up the SDUSA ghost and resigned in early 1973 to set up the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC) to attract more liberal New Politics elements of the Democratic Party and of social unionism in labor to build a kinder, gentler form of Realignment than that of hard-line war hawks of SEDUSA (or Seducer, as some of us southpaws called it.) Now back to the personal for a bit, which two paragraphs ago, left me sobering up from the last drunk of my life.

RECOVERY WITH UNION STREET THERAPY GROUP

Next day after my nocturnal sobering dialogue in late September, 1972 with Tina, I went to work, much the worse for the wear. During my breaks during the day, I got on the phone with a number of substance recovery programs to try to find the best one available to break through to a successful program. For this was the point in my mid-life when I made the choice of Life over a Death that was certain to come sooner than later in my addictive travails for most of my adult life. I finally connected with a new group therapy program using all the latest modalities and disciplines in the field that had just opened up offices on Union Street in San Francisco in the Marina District, a couple of blocks west of Van Ness. I’ve long forgotten its name but I’ll call it Union Street Therapy Group, as it no longer exists. I made an appointment for an interview for that very evening. I called Tina at her job and she agreed to join me for the interview. I didn’t want to lose my marriage due to my recent behavior in falling from my hard-earned sobriety again.

Upon arriving for the interview on Union Street, we were surprised to see that the administrator of the Union Street Therapy Group was none other than Bill Cameron, leader of an earlier alcohol recovery program South of Market I’d attended in 1971 around the time I met and married Tina. Of course, I didn’t stay sober during the course of that group therapy and dropped out. Bill gave us the brochures for this new program which was a an intensive long-term venture and rather expensive. As he explained it, Union Street met every weekday night for four-hour sessions after work and all the therapists were recovering alcoholics themselves who had been sober for a long time and had training in the arts of group therapy. The staff consisted of both men and women, including Bill’s wife. The idea centered around the point that an extra ingredient of trust would be established since both staff and clientele had a history of the same addiction in common. I’d now had a 25-year drinking career, the last of ten of which I’d been trying to get off it without lasting success. The cost of the program for several ensuing months would be $3000. Maybe this was the ticket! I signed the contract and then he offered the pen to Tina. “But I’m not the one with the problem,” she protested. “You don’t have a problem, Tina? Then how come you married a guy knowing he was an alcoholic before you married him, and went through with the marriage anyway? You say you don’t have a problem?” Bill responded. He then discussed the inclusion in the therapy between the alcoholic and his or her co-dependent spouse or life partner and the importance of both partaking in the therapy. So Tina signed the contract, too. and we would both attend the week night sessions at Union Street. The plan included group leaders in both the client and co-dependent categories.

It was a new program that operated on eclectic approaches, which included transactional analysis with its parent-adult-child ego transitions, and the Fritz Perls school of Esalen Gestalt therapy with a lot of touching, group hugging and similar intimacies. We met with each individual staff member, both male and female, before moving on into our primary or co-dependency groups. My first session was with Bill Cameron himself. When I suggested that one of my goals was to get off the booze to “save my marriage,” Bill blew the whistle: “Never mind the marriage. Your only goal is your own recovery. Whatever happens other than that is irrelevant right now.”

The primary alcoholic group therapist was a middle-aged fellow named Bill Wingfield, a recovering alcoholic with a colorful background, from being a free lance crop-dusting airplane pilot to a boat-owner smuggling illicit arms to Latin and Central American counter-revolutionary groups. Yet he was a supporter of baby doctor Benjamin Spock’s Presidential campaign as a Populist Party candidate contrasted to Tina’s and my support of the McGovern campaign. Our group, with the exception of one young woman, was made up of male alcoholics, including a forest ranger, a truck driver, a gay Examiner newspaper editor, a white collar office worker, a North Beach bohemian regular at the Café Trieste, a retired college professor, and the late North Beach Beat poet Harold Norse. During the course of our months together we became more intimate within ourselves than with our own families, Tina experienced much the same in her co-dependent group.

I was the first in my group to make an emotional catharsis through Gestalt empty chair work where I was talking with my father in the other chair and then switching back and forth being both Pappa and myself, physically changing seats throughout, finally breaking through the hurt I felt about him dying before he could fulfill his promise of having a long talk with me the last time I saw him before his delirium in the rest home where he died in September, 1944. I broke down crying and sobbing as the group members wrapped their arms around me hugging until this burst of sorrow had run its course. I credit my brothers and sisters at Union Street for their full support in my recovery and to finally take responsibility for my own feelings.

RECONNECTING WITH STEP-DAUGHTERS

Somewhere along the line in these years I was able to connect with my step-daughters I had with Kathlyn. Christine had met a Vietnam vet and truck driver and either married or lived common-law with him at age 18 and got pregnant by him. Apparently, he was a violent, abusive man and would beat up on her while they lived in a small SF Tenderloin apartment. On my own birthday, March 18, 1972 she gave birth to a son Christopher Michael. Very soon after she fled their place and moved in with Kathlyn and her sisters in the Haight, sporting two huge black eyes. Kathlyn called to come see my new grandson along with Tina. We did so and it was a shock to see Chris with her two huge shiners and bruises. She had the most wistful, longing look in her blue eyes. My heart went out to her as she was still the same sweet girl as always, now woefully in deep despair over her fate. Dani and Andrea fussed over their new-born nephew like they had borne him. We maintained contact, Kathlyn being real nice to Tina, who didn’t feel all that comfortable with the situation. Tina didn’t want any kids of her own but was nice with the girls. Time went on, and we picked up Andrea and took her on a Saturday trip to Santa Clara County and then a camping weekend on the Sacramento Delta. Tina was quite sweet to Andrea while she was with us but later confided to me that these outings should end, thinking that Kathlyn was trying to palm the girl onto us in hopes we’d adopt her. This might have been true for all I know since Kathlyn had something of a devious mind-set, but since Tina made it clear that she wanted no children in our relationship these weekends came to an end although they had brought forth a warm parental feeling in me again. My marriage to Tina was too important to me then to do otherwise. Time went on and one evening I got a surprise phone call from Christine who said she had married and moved in with Steve Alcaraz, another Viet vet of Mexican descent who also drove a truck as a member of Teamsters Local 16, and they were living in the San Bruno Avenue area and Steve had legally adopted Christopher as his son. She considered me as the only real father among all the men who had been with her mother and asked me if I’d be her “Daddy.” “Of course, Sweetie, of course, I’d love it!” Tina, who listened in on our phone talk, and sensed the deep love vibrations between us, loved this transaction as we were both adults as father and daughter!. She and Steve invited us over for dinner on a Saturday evening which turned out beautifully as the beginnings of a bond that grew between us to last a lifetime. Steve was also a strong union man and a supporter of the dissident Teamsters for a Democratic Union in his local. Tina also enjoyed the evening immensely as she particularly liked Steve as a straight-up guy.

1973 SOCIALIST PARTY RE-FOUNDING CONVENTION

Following long cross-country phone conversations and letters and mimeographed position papers in these pre-computer age forms of communications, several Locals and sympathetic comrades within other Locals decided to hold a convention picking up the name “Socialist Party-USA” which the rightist Realos had so cavalierly jettisoned in becoming “Social Democrats USA.” The convention was held in Milwaukee at the invitation of ex-Socialist Mayor Frank Zeidler and the Socialist Party of Wisconsin in the Spring of 1973. The Wisconsin Party had a long standing office and meeting hall in Milwaukee from its heyday in the city government circles, which would accommodate our meeting. Although people like me, Tina, Virgil Vogel of Chicago, the Los Angeles comrades and others worked like dogs to make this convention a reality, it would never have happened without the prestige and good name of Frank Zeidler, the last SP elected official in a major US city. Several dozen of us arrived in Milwaukee on that historic weekend from around the country. Comrade Zeidler was ably assisted in convention arrangements by a younger comrade Bill Munger of Milwaukee plus other Wisconsin Party members. Tina and I took off about ten days from work to attend, spending a few days visiting in Chicago where we stayed at the home of my old Whitman housemate Gladys Scott in Hyde Park who was now the Education Director at the Hyde Park Co-op food market. In Milwaukee, we stayed at the apartment of Bill Munger and his wife. By this time, editorship of the Socialist Tribune may have passed on to Bill from our Los Angeles Editorial Collective and would become our official national SP newspaper following the Convention. Delegates I recall included Virgil Vogel and Bert Rosen of Chicago, Mark Weber of Northern Illinois, John Lester Lewine and Abraham Bassford III of New York, Phil Goodstein of Denver, Don and Carlie Anderson and Pam and John Acher of Indianapolis, Mae and Bill Briggs of Los Angeles, a college student comrade from a Iowa university who I recall as Bill Baar, and numerous members of the host Wisconsin Party. Two-time SP VP candidate the memorable Party veteran Samuel H. Friedman, Debs Caucus activist Seymour Steinsapir, and Jewish Labor Bund stalwart Motel Zelmonowitz, also came from New York to passionately urge us not to follow through on this but stay with the legal continuation of the historic SP now SDUSA and become a force with our own politics within it as a loyal opposition to the Realignment majority of whom they were not a part either. While respecting the position of these sincere comrades, we felt it was too late to be further involved with an element we felt alien to the principles of the democratic socialism as we saw them. So Comrades Sam, Seymour and Motel returned to New York disappointed. (I leaned more recently that the SDUSA named all three to its National Committee as a permanent powerless minority to cynically demonstrate that they were a “multi-tendency” organization with politics none of us in Milwaukee could identify.)

So SP-USA was reborn that weekend with the National Office in Milwaukee, and Frank Zeidler as National Chair. Among those elected to our first National Committee were Mark Weber and Virgil J. Vogel from Illinois, Bill Munger of Milwaukee, a couple of other comrades from Milwaukee including Frank, Phil Goodstein from Denver and me from San Francisco. Tina was named an alternate. After considerable discussion we voted Brahm Bassford of New York as National Secretary, who expressed willingness to move from New York to Milwaukee to take the job. Others I don’t remember as most all of my papers were eventually sent to the SP archives at Duke University.

JAMES WEINSTEIN MEETING

Local San Francisco, SP-USA, often invited outside speakers to our meetings to talk about their perspectives of interest to us. One of them was James (Jimmy) Weinstein (1926-2005) who wrote a quite decent not unsympathetic book about the Socialist Party entitled “The Decline of Socialism in America” (1967). Jimmy who was born in my own birth year had a similar personal movement history to mine. The son of wealthy leftist parents in New York. he had been part of the 1948 Henry Wallace campaign, and like me had a brief stint in the CP which he too had rejected because of its Stalinist politics. He had run for Congress as an independent from Upper Manhattan in 1966 without success and moved to San Francisco shortly thereafter. With his ample financial legacy he founded a magazine Socialist Revolution, later Socialist Review, and founded The Modern Times Bookstore, at 17th and Sanchez Streets, which still exists in the Mission District. Weinstein was also a prominent member of the San Francisco chapter of the New American Movement (NAM), a broad-based successor to the self-destructed Students for a Democratic Society, founded in December, 1971 in Davenport, Iowa, headquartered in Chicago. (After shedding an early neo-Leninist vanguardist perspective, NAM which never had more than 1500 members, merged with Michael Harrington’s Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee to form the Democratic Socialists of America in 1983, (DSA) which is still the most prominent social democratic organization today and is the only American affiliate of the Socialist International. Its main rival on the right in the US, Socialist Democrats USA, faded from the scene some years ago and no longer exists.) Some of us from the SP Local would attend NAM chapter meetings on weekends and found them to be compatible since both organizations espoused a free radical democracy.

CONTINUE NEXT COLUMN

EAST BAY HARRINGTON SUPPORTERS LEAVE SDUSA

Three pro-Harrington members of the East Bay Realo SDUSA popped up at one of our SF SP Local meetings looking forlorn and lost. They were Laurel Burley, a UC-Berkeley librarian and an old comrade from the earlier SF Local who had been its secretary toward the end, David Tam, a Vietnam vet and East Bay activist, and Craig Murphy, a founder of a Berkeley printing collective which had gone broke, earlier. They were searching for a political home as they did not identify with Jim Burnett and his pro-Shachtman supporters in the East Bay Local. We got along well that night and shared dinner with them later in Berkeley. Yet they identified with Mike’s ideas of Realignment with the New Politics trends in the Democratic than with our more independent stance so were more amenable to DSOC which eventually began to grow in the Bay Area. We remained on friendly terms open to collaborating on common issues. Ironically, Dave Tam may have been the only one if the three to affiliate with DSOC for a time, but remained a Harringtonite in spirit in his lifetime of work within East Bay Democratic Party circles who is still active in his 70s. Laurel decided to stay out of further Socialist group politics but was active in her librarian’s union and Demo Party East Bay campaigns. We remained friends and when I was appointed to the Alameda Central Labor Council as a delegate from my Typo Union local, now affiliated with CWA, in the late 1990s by then-President Charles Tobias, I ran into Laurel who was long-time Sergeant of Arms on the CLC. This good soul passed away from lung cancer in her early 60s.

CAMPAIGN FOR BOARD OF SUPERVISORS

Since our newly constituted SP-USA supported the idea of our own campaigns for public office like in the old days, we discussed such prospects in our SF Local. Being a new bare bones operation, our ideas centered around running as Socialist candidates for local office rather than Presidential campaigns. The upshot was that I would run in the Fall 1973 elections for the San Francisco City and County Board of Supervisors. While these elections are non-partisan I would run openly as a Socialist Party candidate. It would be a low-key educational campaign to promote socialist issues on a municipal level, but without the resources for becoming elected. We announced our campaign in our monthly mimeographed local newsletter which came to the attention of Jimmy Weinstein who said that the SF Peace and Freedom Party was also planning to run a couple of candidates for the Board of Supes, and maybe NAM, SP-SF, and P&F should form a coalition and run an entire slate as Socialists for the Board. This made sense to us and we all agreed to meet to discuss it. So the SF Socialist Coalition was born to run a stronger progressive campaign. The two P&F candidates joined me to make up a three- person slate. NAM didn’t propose to enter any candidates from its own ranks but worked hard to make Socialist Coalition and our campaign a reality. My running mates were Kayren Hudiburgh and John Webb of P&F. Kayren and her partner Les operated a natural food store named Good Earth on Potrero Hill, well known and popular within its large leftist community. They specialized in home delivery around the Hill as well as operating a retail store. John was an alumnus of SF State and had been a member of the Joe Hill chapter of Students for a Democratic Society on campus. Both were much younger than me and were articulate and agreeable to work with. My main problem with them were that they were Maoists, who at that time controlled the SF P&F. Fortunately, they didn’t emphasize this aspect of their politics and pretty much stuck to the election program we devised with NAM for the campaign. (I hope the Maoism was just a phase of Kayren’s and John’s young lives which evolved in a more democratic direction later on. Mao’s China was certainly not my political lodestar.) Jimmy and our NAM coalition partners worked in the background of the campaign while we candidates were moving around the city in public forums to talk about our perspectives. The NAM folks also were the editorial board for our campaign newspaper Common Sense (think Thomas Paine) which we produced in large bundle quantifies in several issues, mostly made possible by Jimmy Weinstein’s financial resources. I was more diligent in attending candidate’s nights and public forums than were John and Kayren who didn’t attend public meetings which they considered were too bourgeois in nature. I rather enjoyed the public hustings which also included some television and radio appearances plus mentions in neighborhood newspapers. I ran something of a traditional SP campaign that a Norman Thomas might have conducted, rational and not bombastic or demagogic in my remarks.

Since there hadn’t been an SP electoral campaign since the Presidential race of 1956 with Darlingtion Hoopes and Samuel H. Friedman, I was the first Socialist Party candidate out of the gate since the reconstitution of the SP-USA in early 1953, I received letters of support and financial contributions of support from SPers from all over the country for our Supes campaign. The largest was for $50 from Darlington Hoopes himself from Reading. Although my dear cousin Lempi and her partner Mickey sent me a similar amount. There were numerous smaller amounts, all of which I turned over to the treasurer of the Socialist Coalition.

Our only ideological rival on the far left in the Supes competition was the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party of SF which ran a slate of five candidates. Howard Wallace (1936-2012) of the SWP I got to know later who became prominent as the energetic head of the Coors beer boycott, which company was vociferously anti-union and also anti-gay. Howard, a gay man himself, became prominent in the SF Labor movement because of his great role in the Coors boycott. Some years later he became my neighbor in the DuBoce Triangle. He told me he’d left the SWP for its sectarianism, and ran for public office later as an independent socialist and was a prominent member of the SF Labor Council as well. Howard died from dementia after a long illness a few years back, who made a valuable contribution as a gay labor activist highly respected in SF’s left circles. Another gay activist who ran for the supes in 1973 was the Castro’s own Harvey Milk (1933-1978). This was the last Supervisorial race on a city-wide basis, and Harvey, always an exciting speaker and personality but in his first time out, he dressed like a hippie wearing a long ponytail, so he failed election among mainstream voters. So in his next time out in District Elections, he dressed like banker but with the same “radic-lib” message spruced up, made the board in November, 1977 as the first openly gay person to be elected to public office in the USA. Only to be shot to death a eleven months later by a deranged ex-cop Dan White who the same day killed liberal mayor George Moscone. Harvey also lived in the DuBoce Triangle neighborhood as I did the last 23 years of my life in San Francisco. We became pretty good friends.

TINA WANTS OUT

Toward the end of that campaign, Tina who worked for our election pulled a surprise on me. She wanted to end our marriage. I went into shock. Matter of fact was, we lived together as room-mates more than as man and wife. I always yearned for a loving sexual aspect to our marriage, and actually she cringed from it. I didn’t try to force the issue but she felt she’d rather be single than in a marital scene. We were compatible in so many ways but the intimacy was lacking although there was a mutual fondness existent, also. That night I took a long, brisk walk of two hours downtown and back to work off the shock of her announcement. She had told about her desire for ending our marital state to her co-dependent group at Union Street and they had encouraged her to do what she felt best. There was concern in my alcohol recovery group that I’d seek solace in the bottle again. But fortunately, I was strong enough by then in my new sobriety not to plunge into the abyss again. Since the furniture in our flat was hers that we’d brought up from Los Angeles where she’d lived through 1970, I was the one to move out and she retained the flat. Our Dodge Dart was her car so I would be without wheels. At that point my Daly City house had no occupants so I moved sleeping bag and all to camp out there for the time being and commute to work by public transit. (I’m describing all this quite clinically with detachment as I don’t want to burden my readers with the emotional turmoil I was undergoing at the time. But somehow I managed.) Fortunately, I had taken up early morning jogging for some months and had undergone a series of Rolfing or structural integration sessions for improved body alignment which helped me to weather the storm without alcoholic relapse. Eventually, I was able to move back into the City to a great old third floor flat at 106 Sanchez Street in SF’s Duboce Triangle which became my abode for over two decades until 1996 when I moved to senior housing in Berkeley. The marriage status remain dormant until 1976 when Tina filed for divorce, and as far as I know never remarried.

SUPERVISOR ELECTION SUM-UP

Election results were what we expected in the 1973 Supervisorial elections. The SF Socialist Coalition ended up with a low vote, and corporate and union labor organizing and financing produced a mostly liberal or moderately conservative board with a big Democratic majority. The farthest right winner was Republican realtor John Barbagelata, long a fixture in City politics. On candidate’s nights I struck up a great personal accord with Barbagalata who was an easy and friendly conversational partner off the speakers’ platform. I felt he was more principled in his hard-core GOP views than big vote-getter centrist Democrat Diane Feinstein who won her first election to the Board as a stepping stone to the US Senate where she still serves in her 80s at this writing with prominence. The Socialist Coalition dissolved as we all went our own ways and our organizational mastermind James Weinstein lost his interest in independent left politics, left for Chicago where he founded the pro-Democratic Party progressive magazine In These Times, and found his own place in liberal Democratic politics until his death from brain cancer in 2006.

WAR RESISTERS LEAGUE ANNUAL CONFERENCE

Ira Sandperl

Joan Baez

Mandy Carter

During early 1974, I attended a series of workshops at the SF headquarters of the War Resisters League West in a Victorian House near Haight Street on Gandhian non-violent resistance offered by Ira Sandperl (1923-2013), a noted Palo Alto pacifist who along with singer Joan Baez had founded the Institute for the Study of Non-Violence in 1969. WRL-West was being administered at the time by a wonderful African-American LGBT pacifist Mandy Carter (b. 1948). About a dozen of us met for several weeks. Although I wasn’t a strict pacifist, I’ve always been sympathetic to non-violent direct action as the best way to effect social change. In our final session, a white guy in his 40s who had been a great contributor to our discourse, revealed himself as an active duty Air Force Officer at Mather Field who had attended our workshop in secret from his military comrades as well as his wife and family. Impressive. During our discussions, Mandy offered a practical example of how non-violent direct action worked in potentially volatile situations. this had been during the battle for Peoples Park in Berkeley where Governor Ronald Reagan had mobilized the National Guard and rooftop onlooker UCB student James Rector had been shot and killed by a guardsman’s bullet. WRL-West got the word that dozens of not-so-peaceful young radical street militants were going take on the troopers and cops at the Park fence. So Mandy and a large contingent of area pacifist resisters went early that morning to stand by the park fence as a buffer between the helmeted armed troopers and the street-fighting radicals. The WRL and supporters were spat upon and yelled at by the angry street guerrillas as enemy agents and finks for the class enemy. But they held their ground quietly until the situation diffused in time, and prevented more blood from being spilled. A genuine profile in courage.

So when Mandy distributed brochures to encourage participation in the WRL’s annual conference this year at Asilomar down the coast on a long weekend, I was eager to attend. I called Tina to ask if she was interested in joining me that weekend, I was a little surprised but delighted that she agreed to come. So Mandy made reservations for a joint room for both of us as she was unaware we were separated. Costs would include lodging and fully catered meal service. Tina had made it on Friday night and when I arrived on Saturday morning as I had worked swing shift the night before, she told me she had already run into some of my old friends from the past. These included WRL staffer David McReynolds from New York; Erica Enzer, my old Chicago SP comrade now working as a chemist in San Francisco; Barbara Backus, who with her husband Rex had been part of our LA SP Local in the 1950s, who now had a dairy goat ranch in St. Helena; and Ted Alpen, a former East Bay SP comrade now working as a librarian in Long Beach. Notables included Joan Baez and her also beautiful younger sister the late Mimi Farina, an entertainer in her own right; and a very nervous Daniel Ellsberg, the marvelous Pentagon Papers whistleblower on the unjust war in Vietnam just concluded and a featured speaker at this Conference. The legendary Catholic Worker founder Dorothy Day (1897-1980) had planned to come to Asilomar as well but instead opted to join in a United Farm Workers strike south of us, where was arrested for her own non-violent resistance that weekend. (My mother, although an atheist, admired Dorothy Day for her courage.) It was a great conference, marred only by continuous false fire alarms set off by FBI agents probably because of Daniel Ellsberg’s presence who was a target of the government. The firefighters who had to respond very time plainly told us that it had to be the FBI who was behind the alarms. I didn’t hear Ellsberg’s talk which was interrupted throughout by agent provocateurs in the audience who were trying to put him on the spot. He was undoubtedly aware of potential entrapment but managed to keep his cool. Daniel, who lives in Berkeley, is still involved in antiwar politics in his eighties, and continues to support the rights of latter-day patriotic whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden. That was the last weekend I ever spent together with Tina, who drove me home.

WATERGATE SAYS BYE, BYE TO TRICKY DICK

One political note I enjoyed during the 1970s was the early exit of “Slippery Dick” (as some of us called him) Nixon from the Presidency because of the Watergate burglary scandals not far into his second term. Prior to that, the hasty departure of his corrupt Vice President Spiro T. Agnew helped to set that stage. So Nixon had picked the pristine pure Congressman Gerald Ford ®, of Grand Rapids Michigan, veteran Speaker of the House, to replace the disgraced former Maryland governor as his “Veep.” Then the scandal-free moderate GOPer Ford became our Chief Executive after Nixon got the bum’s rush. It was a dull one-term hitch for Ford until he was defeated by Governor Jimmy Carter, the well-to-do peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia, in the 1976 Presidential election as the first Democrat to serve since the ill.-fated Lyndon Johnson.

I TAKE UP LONG DISTANCE RUNNING

As part of my recovery from alcoholism I started to take up long distance running as a form of therapy and health-enhancement in late 1972. I also joined the Central YMCA in San Francisco for weight training, and took Yoga classes to increase my bodily flexibility. After separating from Tina, I dropped meat from my diet to becoming a practicing lacto-ovo vegetarian, except for fish and chicken, quitting the bird 15 years later. I’ve maintained a healthy life-style ever since. I commenced running about five days a week, increasing my mileage as I went along. On Columbus Day, 1973, I ran in the annual Italian-American 10 and 5K around Oakland’s Lake Merritt in Oakland, completing the 5K in my first organized race. From then on I became hooked for a number of years as a running rather than alcohol addict, jeopardizing my knees instead of my liver. My big goal for 1974 was to do the annual spring Bay to Breakers 7.6 mile run in San Francisco from the foot of Howard Street, through Golden Gate Park to the beach. But by the time of that Bay to Breakers I had already completed my first marathon in San Mateo in February, a boring four-looper alongside the Bay Shore Freeway. It was a delight to run the road and mountain trail races all over northern California which became a Saturday and Sunday habit into the 1980s. During the spring of 1974, I joined the every-bloke and lass running club Dolphin-South End Runners, founded in 1967 by an old-time San Francisco Communist hod-carrier Walt Stack (1908-1995), a salty, fun character who enjoyed dirty jokes and drinking, who ran ultra-marathon distances as a back-of-the pack slogger who didn’t take himself all that seriously. “Start Slowly and Taper Off” was the T-Shirt motto of the DSE. Walt presided over the Sunday DSE award ceremonies at all the races with ribbons as prizes. In reference to the elite runners who would be the top finishers in these most informal races, Stack would always admonish them: “You hot shots up front, don’t think you’re all that high and mighty, cuz it’s us slobs and turkeys in the back of the pack that make you guys look good!”

I don’t want to bore you with details of the hundreds of races I plodded myself as a middle or back-of-the-packer during my late forties and through my fifties. Except for some that were of special significance to me. So I’ll conclude this chapter by citing two of them in 1975: The Pike’s Peak Marathon and later in the Summer, the first World Masters Track and Field Championships in Toronto. Pike’s Peak was a Walt Stack specialty that he trod every year for maybe a decade and invited all DSEers to join him for the fun. So I took a two-week vacation for it to get in some altitude training on a rugged course of holes, branches and rocks called the Baar Trail which began in Manitou Springs, rose through numerous switchbacks to a half-marathon distance at the wind-blown bare crest of Pikes Peak, around 11,000 feet in elevation. Get near the top and you’d hear marmots calling from their holes dug into the dirt. After acclimatizing myself to the elevation in stages, I did negotiate it both ways once for its full marathon plus length, by jogging, walking and intermittently resting throughout the day. Race day my plans were to only run it to the top and hitch-hike back to the Springs. Hundreds showed up for the ordeal, many of them my DSE friends. Most of us stayed in a rustic set of cabins in Manitou operated by a middle age couple I’ll call Lee as I’ve forgotten their names. The Lees threw us a big spaghetti pre-run supper the evening before. Walt displayed his Hod Carriers Union Local jacket on his window, as he and a few cronies got pretty pickled late into the evening. Yet there he was at 6AM at the start line race day morning, cracking jokes, with his endearing profanities. I was satisfied with my own strong performance only made possible by my altitude training preparation. Unfortunately, a lot of my DSE friends, men and women, didn’t have that readiness and really suffered, not making it to the top. Although it took him next to forever, our DSE guru Walt Stack roughed it both ways, grunting and shouting in high spirits. A most memorable, joyous experience for me.

1975 WORLD MASTERS IN TORONTO

Masters runner and prominent race travel impresario David Pain of San Diego, organized a charter plane trip for us from the West Coast to the inaugural World Masters Track and Field Championships in Toronto. Along the way we made a stopover at the US Masters Track & Field Championships in White Plains, New York, in which I had entered as well. Awards in all of these were made by five year age groups, both men and women, starting with Submasters age divisions 30-34, and 35-39, and continuing in Masters groups age 40 and up. In White Plains I ran the 5,000 and 10,000 track runs in the M45-49 group with middling results. The 5000 was OK but the 10,000-meters with its 24 plus laps on the track was tedious and not enjoyable. I much preferred roads, streets and trails. In Toronto, I had registered for the 5000m track run, a 10K trail run and the marathon. I did satisfactorily on the first two but didn’t perform all that well compared to some talented former Olympic international athletes who competed.

My marathon, on paved country roads, turn out a disaster. I befriended a runner from Germany in my age group at the start line and we ran at the same pace for some miles. Actually, though we ran abreast I found our pace a bit too intense considering our marathon distance. About eight miles along I slowed down and waved him on. By that time I was beginning to hurt. I began to cramp the further I proceeded and felt the pain increasing, slowing down to a creepy crawl. At that point I heard a familiar voice behind me chattering away: “Harry, did you hear the one about the old lady who pissed in her shoe?” It was Walt Stack running bare-headed and bare-chested with his race number pinned to his shorts. “For Christ’s sakes, Walt, will you just shut the fuck up. I’m in no mood for jokes!” The old gnome just smiled and went on ahead with his unique “survival shuffle,” as he called his running, leaving me moaning and groaning in his wake. Somehow I managed to struggle on to Mile 21 where I collapsed on the roadside, writhing with cramps. No long after, the race “meat wagon” picked me up and drove me to a nearby emergency hospital where I fell asleep following sedation, suffering from intense dehydration. Finally, I was taking to the classroom where our street clothes were stored and had recuperated enough to take the bus to the Toronto University apartment where I was lodged. Thus ended my first World Masters Championship adventure.

Yet I’ve never been happier with my life than all these years following my recovery from those earlier times when I allowed alcohol to almost destroy my life. Many exciting times have followed, not only in running but in race walking, track and field, and in triathlons in my late fifties. I also discovered my favorite creative second career as an actor on stage and screen and in play translation from Finnish to English and directing the results in stage readings. But much more on that later. I’ll meet you all again soon in 1976 with Memoir #25.

End of Installment 24