Remember Attica Blood in the Water The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy by Heather Ann Thompson (Pantheon, 2016) A Review

Remember Attica Blood in the Water The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy by Heather Ann Thompson (Pantheon, 2016) A Review Workers Vanguard No. 1103	13 January 2017

Remember Attica

Blood in the Water

The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy

by Heather Ann Thompson

(Pantheon, 2016)

A Review

On the morning of 9 September 1971, nearly 1,300 inmates—predominantly black and Puerto Rican—took over the state prison at Attica, New York. Four days later 29 of them lay dead, cut down in a hail of bullets fired by New York State Police, sheriffs and corrections officers. Governor Nelson Rockefeller gave the order. President Richard Nixon cheered them on. In the aftermath, the surviving prisoners were subjected to hideous torture and later charged with a total of 1,300 crimes. Among these were kidnapping and, most obscenely, unlawful imprisonment based on taking prison guards hostage, ten of whom were gunned down by Rockefeller’s stormtroopers when they retook the prison.

For many years, Democratic and Republican administrations in Albany, along with the courts, have covered up much of the truth of what took place at Attica, assisted by the same capitalist press that peddled the lie that the prisoners shot the guards. A significant part of that shroud has been peeled back by Heather Ann Thompson in her recent book, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy. Thompson’s book brings to life the dignity and humanity of the prisoners who were treated as little more than dirt by Rockefeller and his ilk. She describes in vivid detail the dehumanizing conditions that gave rise to the rebellion and the racist venom that ran from the governor’s mansion down to the cops and prison guards who hunted down the uprising’s leaders. Thompson got her own sampling of that venom for naming the prison guards who carried out assassinations and torture.

Thompson’s comprehensive history is a result of her many years of diligent archival research and a bit of good fortune in uncovering key sources that had been suppressed. As she notes, “The most important details of this story have been deliberately kept from the public. Literally thousands of boxes of documents relating to these events are sealed or next to impossible to access.” Regarding the most explosive documents she uncovered, Thompson says, “All of the Attica files that I saw in that dark room of the Erie County courthouse have now vanished.”

For millions around the world, Attica became a potent symbol of rebellion against brutal repression—and a stark emblem of racist state murder. To this day it continues to inspire struggles against the racist degradation of black people inside and outside of prison walls. The first issue of Workers Vanguard (October 1971) led with the headline “Massacre at Attica.” We stated bluntly: “The brutal, bloody murderers of Attica are none other than the ruling class of this society,” saying further:

“Rockefeller cut down the Attica prisoners in the manner of his father and grandfather before him—ruthlessly and to protect the system from which his profits spring. From the murder of the Ludlow miners to the present, this family has carried the policies of the armed fist over the entire globe.... The Rockefeller name and the Rockefeller practice symbolize, more than any other, the American capitalist class—a class that will stop at nothing to extend and protect its profitable holdings.”

Attica was an explosion waiting to happen. The 2,200 men warehoused in a facility built for 1,600 were routinely beaten by guards, locked in cells 16 hours a day, rationed one sheet of toilet paper daily, one bar of soap a month and one shower per week—even in the heat of summer. Among the main grievances was censorship of reading materials—no newspapers, very few books, and nothing at all to read in Spanish. It wasn’t an absolute ban—the prison authorities mocked the prisoners by supplying magazines such as Outdoor Life, Field and Stream, American Home and House Beautiful.

Hours after the revolt began, L.D. Barkley, a 21-year-old Black Panther Party member imprisoned for violating parole by driving without a license, read out the prisoners’ powerful declaration: “We are men! We are not beasts and we do not intend to be beaten or driven as such.”

The prisoners called for the minimum wage for prison work (they were paid slave wages of between 20 cents and one dollar per day), accompanied by an end to censorship and restrictions on political activity, religious freedom, rehabilitation, education and decent medical care. They expressed solidarity with the Vietnamese workers and peasants as well as others fighting U.S. imperialism. The main demand was amnesty for participating in the rebellion, along with “speedy and safe transportation out of confinement, to a Non-Imperialist country.” Most likely in mind were Cuba, where the capitalist rulers had been overthrown and a bureaucratically deformed workers state led by Fidel Castro established, or Algeria, a capitalist state governed by left nationalists that had given refuge to Black Panthers in exile.

As Thompson points out, many of the prisoners at Attica were veterans of eruptions over similar conditions at Manhattan’s Tombs detention center and the prison in Auburn, New York, the prior year. The bitter anger that was about to explode at Attica was displayed 19 days earlier when word spread through the cells that prison authorities at California’s San Quentin prison had assassinated Black Panther Party member George Jackson on 21 August 1971. The next day, over 800 Attica inmates marched silently into breakfast wearing black armbands and held a fast in protest. California prison officials had targeted Jackson, along with W.L. Nolen and Hugo Pinell, for forging solidarity of black, Latino and white prisoners. New York officials were no less alarmed by the interracial unity growing among Attica’s inmates.

The prison revolt reflected the growing ferment and struggles taking place outside prison walls, not least the “black power” movement and radical protests against the war in Vietnam. Many of the black inmates identified with the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP) and Puerto Ricans looked to the Young Lords, which was inspired by the Panthers. Playing a leading role in the rebellion was Sam Melville, a white member of the Weather Underground who was serving 18 years for placing explosives in government buildings in protest against the war in Vietnam. As Thompson observes, the presence of such activists “offered Attica’s otherwise apolitical men—like [Frank] Big Black Smith—a new understanding of their discontents and a new language for articulating them.” Smith ended up leading the prisoners’ security force, made up largely of Black Muslims. His group treated the prison guards taken hostage with a humanity that the prisoners had been denied.

For a long time before Blood in the Water, the biggest window into what took place at Attica came from Tom Wicker’s A Time to Die. Wicker, a New York Times reporter, along with radical attorney William Kunstler, was among the outside observers whom the prisoners demanded to negotiate through rather than directly with prison and state authorities. Prison officials granted this one demand, intending to use the observers to convince the prisoners to release the hostages and surrender without amnesty. To his credit, BPP leader Bobby Seale, whom the prisoners also sought as an observer, uniquely refused to be involved in attempts to nudge the inmates toward surrender. Seale made clear the BPP position that “all political prisoners who want to be released to go to non-imperialistic countries should be complied with.”

The retaking of Attica began in the morning of September 13 with a cloud of CN and CS gas dropped from a helicopter that covered every prisoner with a nauseating, incapacitating powder and it ended with a bloodbath. The rebellion’s leadership paid dearly. Barkley, Melville and others were assassinated in the prison yard. Surviving prisoners, including the wounded, were stripped naked, made to crawl through the mud and the blood, then lined up to run a gantlet over broken glass and be beaten by cops and guards wielding what they called their “n----r sticks.” After being threatened with castration, Big Black Smith was forced to lie on a table for five hours with a football tucked under his chin, under threat of being shot if it rolled loose.

For the capitalist ruling class, Attica had to be crushed with particular vengeance because the rebels had begun to see their struggle in political and even revolutionary terms. One of Thompson’s discoveries is Nixon’s celebration of the bloodbath: “I think this is going to have a hell of a salutary effect on future prison riots.... Just like Kent State had a hell of a salutary effect” (referring to the 4 May 1970 National Guard killing of four students protesting the invasion of Cambodia—an extension of U.S. imperialism’s dirty war against the heroic Vietnamese workers and peasants). Nixon added, “They can talk all they want about force, but that is the purpose of force.”

Attica Nation

Thompson, a historian at the University of Michigan and expert on mass incarceration, is particularly motivated by prison reform. She notes that the immediate aftermath of the Attica revolt saw some improvements in food, medical care, clothing, mail censorship and number of showers permitted. However, as she points out, this was followed by an “unprecedented backlash against all efforts to humanize prison conditions in America.”

Inmates today continue to be used as slave labor, face censorship of political literature and conditions at least as dehumanizing and sadistic, including the increasing use of solitary confinement—universally recognized as a form of torture. Brutality by prison guards is a daily fact of life, especially for the black and Latino victims disproportionately singled out for discipline.

The backlash to which Thompson refers is one expression of the bipartisan rollback of the limited democratic gains for black people attained by the liberal-led civil rights movement. Its most glaring manifestation for the past three decades has been the mass incarceration of black people, largely a consequence of the “war on drugs.” This overt war on black people was accompanied by escalating cop terror against the ghettos and barrios.

Today’s plethora of drug laws is an outgrowth of the state repression under the “war on crime” kicked off by Democratic president Lyndon Johnson’s 1968 “Safe Streets Act” and Nixon’s 1970 “Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act” and carried on by Democratic and Republican administrations since. The number of people languishing in U.S. prisons and jails, 2.2 million, is six times what it was in 1971. The costs of maintaining this vast prison complex have led to calls for easing up on the war on drugs.

Prisons are the concentrated expression of the depravity of this society. They are a key instrument in coercing, torturing and brutalizing those who have been cast off as the useless residue of a system rooted in exploitation and racial oppression. The deindustrialization of much of the U.S. that began in the late 1960s drove millions of black people out of the workforce and into the ranks of the permanently outcast. In the calculations of the American bourgeoisie, a substantial part of the black population, who used to provide labor for the auto plants and steel mills, is simply written off as an expendable population. Having condemned black as well as Latino youth to desperate poverty, the rulers whipped up hysteria painting the ghettoized poor as criminal “superpredators,” whom cops can gun down with impunity, and for whom no sentence is too long, no prison conditions too harsh. This demonization of the black population has served to deepen the wedge between white and black workers in a period of virtually no class struggle.

Marxists support the struggle for any demand that meets the immediate needs of prisoners. But under capitalism no reforms can fundamentally alter the repressive nature of the prisons. Along with the cops, military and courts, prisons are a pillar of the capitalist state, whose basic function is to maintain, through force or threat of force, the rule of the capitalist class and its economic exploitation of the working class. In the U.S., where racial oppression is at the core of the capitalist system, any alleviation of prison conditions must be linked to the fight against black oppression in general. We fight to abolish the prison system, which will be done only when the capitalist order—with its barbaric state institutions—is shattered by a proletarian socialist revolution that establishes a planned, collectivized economy with jobs and quality, integrated housing and education for all.

Thompson’s sympathies clearly lie with the Attica prisoners. Yet she evinces a soft spot for the prison guards, whom she sees as victims as well. Her poster boy for humanizing the guards is Mike Smith, a 22-year-old former machinist apparently liked by the prisoners and sympathetic to their demands. Smith, after being taken hostage by the prisoners, was shot by the cops and grievously wounded. Thompson writes, “Like so many other small town boys who had grown up in rural New York Mike needed to make a living, and prisons were the going industry.” Thompson also gives voice to the guards taken hostage and the families of the ten of them whom Rockefeller’s assassins gunned down, who resent the fact that the surviving Attica prisoners won a paltry monetary settlement from the state after nearly three decades.

As Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky pointed out 85 years ago, the worker who becomes a policeman in the service of the capitalist state is a bourgeois cop, not a worker, an admonition no less applicable to prison guards. As we noted at the time of the Attica massacre, “These despicable racist guards are despised even by the ruling class that cynically uses them. The governor not only served notice on the prisoners that rebellion does not pay, and rebellion linked with revolutionary ideas means certain death, but he had a message for the guards too: Keep the upper hand or else!”

The basic function of the prisons is lost on the liberal academic Thompson, whose call for prison reform envisions a commonality of interests between inmates and prison guards—a relationship akin to that of slave and overseer. In a 2011 paper, “Rethinking Working-Class Struggle Through the Lens of the Carceral State: Toward a Labor History of Inmates and Guards,” she declares, “It is time once again for the American working class to pay attention to penal facilities as sites of productive labor and wage competition and to recognize that its destiny is tied in subtle but important ways to the ability of inmates as well as prison guards to demand fair pay and safe working conditions.” Thompson lauds the return of prison guards to municipal unions, such as the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME).

What, then, are “safe working conditions” for prison guards? In our 1971 article, we sharply criticized Jerry Wurf, the AFSCME president, as he threatened a “slowdown” by union guards after the Attica massacre:

“Wurf demanded more and better riot equipment—helmets, tear gas and masks, to be borrowed from police departments if necessary, and hiring of more guards. Yet he had the effrontery to maintain, ‘We’re not at war with the inmates; the state of New York is at war with them.’ What forces does the state of New York employ to make war on the inmates if not the cops and guards Wurf is happy to represent?... No union can represent both workers and the sworn servants of the capitalist class, the police and prison guards.”

The increasing prominence of cops and prison guards—workers’ class enemies—in the shrinking union movement underscores the need for ousting the pro-capitalist bureaucrats and forging a class-struggle leadership in the basic organs of workers struggle.

Three years before L.D. Barkley read out the Attica Brothers’ powerful declaration, striking black sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee, famously walked picket lines with signs declaring, “I am a man.” Today, the racist capitalist ruling class continues to treat black people as if they were less than human and their lives don’t matter. But there is a reservoir of social power in the organized working class, in which black workers, who make up the unions’ most loyal and militant sector, remain disproportionately represented. Under revolutionary leadership, black workers, who form an organic link to the anger of the oppressed ghetto poor, will play a vanguard role in the struggles of the entire U.S. working class. It is the purpose of the Spartacist League to build a workers party that links the fight for black freedom to the struggle for proletarian state power. Workers rule on a world scale will open the road to a communist future in which the modern instruments of incarceration and death will be discarded as relics of a decaying social order that deserved only to perish.

*Writer’s Corner – Ernest Hemingway’s Last Hurrah- “The Garden Of Eden”

Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for the great American writer, Ernest Hemingway.

Book Review

The Garden Of Eden, Ernest Hemingway, Collier Books, New York, 1986

Recently, in a review of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first published novel, “This Side of Paradise” (1920), I mentioned that I thought his contemporary, friend, expatriate and fellow writer Ernest Hemingway had definitively won the battle for “number one” writer of their generation, variously named the post -World War I, “lost”, or “Jazz Age” generation. Paying due respect to the greater literary merit of Fitzgerald ‘s “The Great Gatsby” as, perhaps, the best of the individual novels (or short stories) each produced the respective collective bodies of work of each gave the nod to the “Old Man”. That conclusion, however, was premised on such Hemingway masterpieces as “Farewell To Arms”, “The Sun Also Rises”, and “For Whom The Bell Tolls”, and his sparse, knife-like skill with descriptive language. It did not, could not and, unfortunately, does not, include the present book under review, “The Garden Of Eden”.

Of course, as the Publisher’s Note makes clear, this post-mortem find (Hemingway committed suicide in 1961), brought forth in a shopping bag (along with other manuscripts) to the publisher’s office by Hemingway’s widow, Mary, is certainly the stuff of legend, and a compelling reason for publication. However, beyond the seemingly modern trend to publish every bit of paper that a famous writer every put to pen, the hoopla seems entirely misplaced. I will chalk this one up to mere publishing “trade-puffing”.

Why? Well, this is material, basically another tale from the vaults of that “lost” generation mentioned above, that was covered by Hemingway brilliantly at the time in such works as “The Sun Also Rises”, his masterly effort to define that generation and it malaise (and perhaps, incidentally, his own). This book, or rather rolling “travelogue” from one European “hot spot” to another (in the off-season no less), complete with descriptions of an enormous amount of drinking, early and late, eating in that same condition, and going for the occasional swim should make bells ring in the heads of Hemingway aficionados that something very familiar is being reworked here.

Oh, the plot. Newlyweds, David and Catherine, he a writer and she a… well, whatever she is, are off on a seemingly endless trip around Europe after his recent completion of a successfully received book. After endless bouts of lovemaking, and the aforementioned eating and drinking, David itches to get back in harness and write again. Catherine, formally, at least, encourages that desire, and moves on to other pursuits in the sexual field, a girlfriend (Marita) for herself… and for David. The story line pushes along from there around this central entanglement and stalwart David’s pressing need to write some tales of his youth in Africa as well as another novel. Needless to say, the wheels come off the cart in a somewhat unexpected way.

Despite various reviews of this book upon publication commenting on Hemingway's character development of Catherine to the contrary, he never really got his woman characters to be anything more than objects, beautiful, crazy or smart. That is certainly the case with the shallow, demonic Catherine, whatever charms she possessed for David, and Marita as well. As I read along I kept on saying Catherine why don't you go write a novel yourself. But apparently this sensible notion is too modern a conceit for those times. Still there is more than enough good, strong use of language that first attracted me to Hemingway to keep him up in that valued number one position. Just not off of this work though.

Out In The Be-Bop Drive-In Theater Night-Circa 2015-With Laura Perkins In Mind

Out In The Be-Bop Drive-In Theater Night-Circa 2015-With Laura Perkins In Mind 

From The Pen Of Bart Webber

Josh Breslin was a man, is a man of institutionalized memories. Part of that came, comes from his long ago minute career as a budding journalist in the alternative media world of the late 1960s and early 1970s when anyone with access to pen and press could, and did, print plenty of interesting material before the hammer fell down and that whole universe fell under the ebb tide of the big bad movement, the counter-revolution as one political wag called it, when the other side, symbolized by the master criminal Richard Milhous Nixon who also happened to be President of the United States, let the whirlwinds of reaction have a field day on our heads. (A couple of the journals that had weathered the storm that he had written for like Rolling Stone which is today just a glossy reprint of Vogue or Vanity Fair for the quasi-hip audience it appeals to in its articles and the consumer-driven advertisements it displays which pay the bill, hence the tiller’s placid reward, and the local Boston Phoenix which went belly up a few years ago after subsisting as a “hook-up” venue do not undermine that ebb tide understanding on the media front.)

Part of Josh’s respect for memory also came from his association with the long gone, long moaned over Pete Markin whom he had met out in San Francisco in the high tide summer of love, 1967 and who came to a bad end in the mid-1970s down in Sonora, Mexico after a high-end drug deal went down the wrong way and he wound up face down in a dusty back alley with a couple of slugs in the back of his head who always, always lived to have about two thousand juicy memory references handy on the off chance that, for example, somebody might quickly need to know Millard Fillmore’s standing among  American Presidents (just above Richard Nixon at last check) and the practice had rubbed off on him.

On a recent night that memory business got a full workout as Josh went back deep into his youth (and the youth of his lady friend, Laura Perkins, who is key to this particular memory flash) returning to the scene of many a youthful misadventure-the still functioning Olde Saco Drive-In up in Maine.              

Drive-In? Well, yes, for those who have only heard about this institution of the high golden age 1950s and 1960s automobile and have no personal knowledge that they really still exist in spots except in “generation of ’68’’ nostalgia movies like American Graffiti  the drive-in. Here’s the skinny (or if you are still in disbelief then go to Wikipedia and check the information out). Back when everybody was dying to have a car from old grand-pappies to barely sixteen year old boys (and it was mainly boys, girls were usually okay grabbing the family car for a night out with the girls, a night “cruising’ the boulevards looking for the heart of Saturday, looking for boys just as Josh and his crowd were “cruising” looking for girls or sitting, sitting in the front close to some hunk with a “boss” car and glad to be the subject of some salacious  Monday morning girls’ lav gossip) the whole axis of night-life changed once everybody realized that you were no longer tied to the house (or at most the neighborhood), were not tied to constantly eating at home, sleeping at home or watching the new-fangled television or go to the local box movie house. In a car-fixated time you could travel and stay in a motel overnight, you could eat, if you dared, at a drive-in restaurant or while away the evening in the snugness of your automobile at the drive-in theater. Hail god car.   

Of course while anybody, child or adult, could do all those things the drive-in movies became along with the drive-in restaurant one of the moments of the teen ritual, although we were all back then brought up on parents taking their children to the drive-in as an easy way to get out of the house what with a double-feature, a snack bar and a playground to entertain the kiddies. That kids’ stuff is just that. The teen drive-in movie scene is the stuff of nostalgia. Josh wasn’t sure when he stopped going to the drive-in except sometime in the 1970s, wasn’t sure when drive-ins kind of folded up and died away of hubris or indifference at some point that he did not remember (after in some cases serving up some soft-core porn to keep an audience) and wasn’t sure if they even existed anymore. Wasn’t sure that is until he was heading to Portland, Maine for a conference and decided to take Route One instead of U.S. 95 up from his home in Boston.

Now that was no random decision since  Josh had grown up in Olde Saco a few miles south of Portland and had been for a lot of reasons of late in an Olde Saco frame of mind after the passing of Rene Dubois his old high school classmate and runaround corner boy back then. As he worked his way up Route One when he got to Olde Saco he happened to look to the right and there kind of hidden from view was an ancient dilapidated crude handmade sign for the Olde Saco Drive-In and moreover that the place was still open for business. He did not have time to stop but that sign, that memory kind of festered in his mind for a few weeks until he decided to go spent a few days (along with Laura) up at an old friend’s house in Wells (an old friend of Markin’s really from North Adamsville down in Massachusetts where they had grown up which is how he had met Jimmy Jenkins the owner of the place back after the summer of love, 1967). One day Josh fervently asked Laura to “take the ticket, take the ride,” an expression that he used when he wanted them to do something out of the ordinary. And going to a drive-in, the Olde Saco Drive-In was not something that he had done in about forty years so he was really doing a memory stretch. Laura at first didn’t want to go, said she had no history and hence no memory for drive-ins since between her shoulder-to-the-wheel no-nonsense parents not being the drive-in movie types and living out in Podunk in upstate New York where she could not remember if there were drive-ins in the area Josh’s big deal was a deflated balloon to her. But she eventually relented after he promised her to do about fourteen different things from taking her to dinner, cleaning up a laundry list (her laundry list) of stuff, to cooking in return which he took as a fair bargain under the circumstances, so they were off.

Now this drive-in thing back in the day had a certain ritual to it, a Josh and his gang ritual anyway. He had already thought after seeing the old place about the travails of childhood when after a long shift at the MacAdams Textile Mill where his father, Prescott,  worked as a machinist before the mills that sustained the town headed south (first to American South then the world South to places like Indonesia and Singapore in search of that greedy increased profit wrought by cheaper wage packets), and Delores (nee LeBlanc and hence her hometown of Olde Saco one of the work stopping points heading south from native Quebec a generation or two before her own), his mother, both work weary would bundle up he and his four sisters and head to the “Olde Saco” for the night’s double feature, some illicit snacks (you were not supposed to bring your own foods in but what was to stop you and it would not be, despite five Breslin children howls, until he went there with his gang that he would learn of the delights at the snack bar-the buttered drenched slightly stale, maybe popped from the night before, popcorn, the fizz-less sodas sickenly sweetly syrup and caffeine clogged, the desiccated cardboard-like pizza light on cheese, sauce and flavor, the greasy grimy hamburgers only saved by slathered ketchups and mustard, no onions, no, onions if you wanted to go in to that good night with a certain she but more of that later, and the food-free, calorie free hot dogs in their grave-like mushy white flour enriched buns that would become his staple on drive-in nights, his sisters too from what they said, from what they said on their date nights if the guy wanted to get anywhere, anywhere at all with them, no cheapskates need apply their motto), and the playground conveniently located at the  end just below the movie screen where he and his sisters would climb the jungle jim, slide the slide, mangle the see-saw and seek heaven on the swings. Kindly childhood thoughts as almost all children would think (and later measured, nicely measured in his parents favor since they really did not have the surplus dough to spent on such “frills” when the rent was always behind and his mother made something of a secular rosary out of her weekly white envelopes on the kitchen table bill-paying chores always short, always damn short although that remembrance too late to do him, or them, any good since they had been estranged so long).

No, what drove Josh these days were the teenage drive-in movies where he had come of age in the Olde Saco night. Of course it started with larcenous intent (nice legal term courtesy of Sam Lowell, the lawyer friend of Markin also met after they headed back East together in the summer of love year 1967) when the late Rene Dubois, a year older than the rest of the guys since he had just come down from Quebec and was in a special language immersion class (although they didn’t call it that then but something like special needs, or for dumb kids or something) for a year before joining the regular class who got his driver’s license first and more importantly since he worked at La Croix’s Garage over on Main Street after school and on weekends his first car an old beat up ‘53 Chevy that he worked on to bring back to life (as he would do with a succession of cars up to a “boss” ’57 two-toned white and cherry red naturally Chevy that was nothing but a “babe” magnet and not just for teeny-bopper girls either). But before the girls started cluttering up Rene’s life (as they would through four freaking marriages, a bushel of kids, and a bevy of grandkids) he was the “max daddy” of the road taking his corner boys like Josh to the Olde Saco Drive-In.

Here is where the larceny comes in though. In those days admission was something like three dollars a head for the nightly double-feature (Josh urged that he not be quoted on that price for like lots of things these days that number seems to have come out of the mist of time and may be totally wrong but the price cheap anyway although not cheap enough for “from hunger” working class projects kids like him) so what they would do is pig-pile three or four guys in the big ass trunk (occasional sightings of 1950s automobile models still on the road and a recent visit to an automobile museum out in San Diego only confirmed to Josh what he remembered about how big the trunks were then, and how big bad ass the engines were too, and although today’s are quite a bit more efficient there was some psychological lift then in being seen in those big ass cars, certainly the girls would turn their heads something he had not seen anybody with today’s zip cars and minis), maybe depending on size a couple of guys in the rear seat wells so for about  six bucks (remember the guess-aspect please), the admission Rene and whoever was riding shot-gun paid (later correctly split up among the total number admitted since that was the whole point) half the freaking neighborhood got into the show for less than a dollar.

Now one might ask, aside from the silly question of the morality if not the legality of such moves whether the admission booth attendant would not get wise to the whole scene. What are you kidding this poor cluck probably got about a dollar an hour for his or her work and was not worried about playing “copper,” not when that person probably was running the same scam when he or she was going to the drive-in. The important thing is that later, later when it wasn’t about “from hunger” guys but meeting carloads of girls from the neighborhoods who were using the same “technique” sometimes Josh and the boys would con some poor girls into the trunk and since it was tight quarters “cop” a quick feel wherever that stray hand landed (the only really acceptable kind of “copping” when you thought about it) a quick feel and maybe get them “in the mood” for the fogged up window scene every guy dream of.  (Later Josh would tell one and all out in California he blushed more than the girls when he pulled that maneuver although he caught more than his fair share of “in the mood” girls, he was not known by the moniker the “Prince of Love” in the great summer of love night, circa 1967, for nothing).  

Josh laughed when he thought about that silly larceny and that “copping” kids’ stuff but later, come junior and senior years of high school the ritual became much more serious when three was a crowd time, when it was important to be able to separate out a bit and go to what was named the “sweat box” by the local guys, the place where the single guy with a single girl placed their automobile away from the prying carload of younger teen guys or girls and better still from prying eyes of young parents, grown suddenly old and responsible once the kids started coming, shielding their kids from the fogged bound cars at the back of the lot. The “sweat box” was the section where if one asked a quick question about the plot of the film one would get some strange answers while the parties were straightening out their clothes. Josh said if you really thought about it no parent would go within fifty yards of that “passion pit.”

Not all of Josh’s memories of the Olde Saco Drive-In were great big cream puff dreams. Later after the big “cultural revolution” that was the 1960s lost steam guys like Josh (and more dramatically the moaned for late Pete Markin) were left stranded for a while, lost their moorings. Like the time Josh was down on his own luck and forced to sneak back to Olde Saco and stay low for reasons that best not detain us here. Here’s how he told the story:

“Mimi Murphy knew two things, she needed to keep moving, and she was tired, tired as hell of moving, of the need, of the self-imposed need, to keep moving ever since that incident five years ago with her seems like an eternity ago sweet long gone motorcycle boy, Pretty James Preston. Poor Pretty James and his needs, no, his obsessions with that silly motorcycle, that English devil’s machine, that Vincent Black Lightning that caused him more anguish than she did. And she gave him plenty to think about as well before the end. How she tried to get him to settle down a little, just a little, but what was a sixteen old girl, pretty new to the love game, totally new, but not complaining to the sex game, and his little tricks to get her in the mood for that, and forget the settle down thing. Until the next time.

Maybe, if you were from around North Adamsville way, or maybe just Boston, you had heard about Pretty James, Pretty James Preston and his daring exploits back in about 1967 and 1968. Those got a lot of play in the newspapers for months before the end. Before that bank job, the one where as Pretty James used to say all the time, he cashed his check. Yes, the big Granite City National Bank branch in Braintree heist that he tried to pull all by himself, with Mimi as stooge look-out. She had set him up for that heist, or so she thought. No, she didn’t ask him to do it but she got him thinking, thinking about settling down just a little and he needed a big score, not the penny ante gas station and mom and pop variety store robberies that kept them in, as he also said, coffee and cakes but a big payday and then off to Mexico, maybe Sonora, and a buy into the respectable and growing drug trade.

And he almost, almost, got away clean that fatal day, that day when she stood across the street, a forty-five in her purse just in case he needed it for a final getaway. But he never made it out the door. Some rum brave security guard tried to uphold the honor of his profession and started shooting nicking Pretty James in the shoulder. Pretty James responded with a few quick blasts and felled the copper. That action though slowed down the escape enough for the real coppers to respond and blow Pretty James away. Dead, DOA, done. Her sweet boy Pretty James.

According to the newspapers a tall, slender red-headed girl about sixteen had been seen across the street from the bank just waiting, waiting according to the witness, nervously. The witness had turned her head when she heard the shots from the bank and when she looked back the red-headed girl was gone. And Mimi was gone, and long gone before the day was out. She grabbed the first bus out of Braintree headed to Boston where eventually she wound up holed up in a high-end whorehouse doing tricks to make some moving dough. And she had been moving ever since, moving and eternally hate moving. Now, for the past few months, she had been working nights as a cashier in the refreshment stand at the Olde Saco Drive-In Theater to get another stake to keep moving. She had been tempted, a couple of times, to do a little moon-lighting in a Portland whorehouse that a woman she had worked with at her last job, Fenner’s Department Store where she modeled clothes for the rich ladies, had told her about to get a quick stake but she was almost as eternally tired at that prospect as in moving once again.

Then one night Josh came in. Came in for popcorn and a Sprite she remembered, although she did not remember on that busy summer night what the charge was. He kind of looked her over quickly, very quickly but she was aware that he looked her over and, moreover, he was aware that she knew that he had looked her over. The look though was not the usual baby, baby come on look, but a thoughtful look like he could see that she had seen some woes and, well, what of it. Like maybe he specialized in fixing busted-up red-heads, or wanted to. She knew she wasn’t beautiful but she had a certain way about her that certain guys, guys from motorcycle wild boy Pretty James Boy to kind of bookish college guys like this one, wanted to get next to. If she let them. And she hadn’t, hadn’t not since Pretty James. But she confessed to herself, not without a girlish blush, that she had in the universe of looks and peeks that make up human experience looked him over too. And then passed to the next customer and his family of four burgeoning tray-full order of hot dogs, candy, popcorn and about six zillion drinks.

A couple of nights later, a slow night for it was misting out keeping away the summer vacation families that kept the drive-in hopping before each show and at intermission, a Thursday night usually slow anyway before the Friday change of the double-feature, Josh came in again at intermission. This time out of nowhere, without a second’s hesitation, she gave him a big smile when he came to the register with his now familiar popcorn and Sprite. He didn’t respond, or rather he did not respond right away because right behind him there were a couple of high school couples who could hardly wait to get their provisions and get back to their fogged-up car and keep it fogged up. They passed by him and hurried out the door.

Just then over the refreshment stand loudspeaker that played records as background music to keep the unruly crowds a little quiet while they waited for their hamburgers and hot dogs came the voice of Doris Troy singing her greatest hit, Just One Look. Then he broke into a smile, a big smile like he was thinking just that thought that very minute, looked up at the clock, looked again, and looked a third time without saying a word, She gave him a slight flirty smile and said eleven o’clock and at exactly eleven o’clock he was there to meet her. Maybe she thought as they went out the refreshment stand door she would not have to keep moving, eternally moving after all.

A couple of fretful months later one nigh Mimi slipped out the back door of her rooming house over on Atlantic Avenue and Josh never heard from her again. Josh figured that after telling him about Pretty James one lonesome whiskey-drinking night she had to move, keep moving tired or not.”

So not all the old time Olde Saco Drive-In dreams worked out. And in the big scheme of things in Josh’s life, some ups, some downs stirred memories, good or bad, of drive-in movie times would usually rate pretty far down on the list. But these semi-retired days Josh has had time to think about old time things. Like a lot of guys, gals too but he wouldn’t speak for them since he had only talked to his guys about those old days he wished to have a re-run on such things knowing full well that you “can’t go home again,” the past is dead and gone. Hell, didn’t he know that when he tried to rekindle some old high school friendships and wound up giving it up after he realized that time had swept whatever they all had in common away. Know too when he tried that last reconciliation with his family that it was too late. Hell even a simple thing like planning to go to class reunion got all balled up when some old flame, or kind of old flame, wanted to start something up again now that she was “single” (after three divorces) and Josh too (ditto on the divorces, the number as well). So he had had to nix that plan.     

And that is where Laura came in, Laura who had “saved” him from some tiresome lonely old age when they finally got together, finally figured they were “soulmates” as she called it (and he agreed).  See Josh figured some things maybe can’t be worked out from the past but something simple like a trip down memory lane at the Olde Saco Drive-In might be a kick. Like was mentioned before Laura was very cool to the idea but since they were staying nearby, the weather was warm and the double-bill (yeah, they kept the double-bill tradition alive) while not her usual arty films were probably passable flicks she finally agreed. So on a Wednesday night they drove the twenty miles or so up to Olde Saco from Wells with a certain amount of excitement now that they had decided to do the thing (Laura with her drive-in-less youth was now curious about the whole ritual).

When Josh drove up to the admissions booth he noticed that the old standard per carload idea was also still in effect, verifying what he had already told Laura about the old time larcenies. (By the way he can confirm that times had changed, that inflation had worked its ways in the forty or fifty years that have passed since now a carload was twenty dollars and that is a number that he had no trouble remembering since it was his treat.) As he passed his money along he kiddingly mentioned to the attendant that he had twelve people in the trunk but instead of some incomprehension on his part the kid told Josh that he had a few nights before had to check a couple of trunks and found them filled with teenagers. The tradition lives! (Although Josh felt some chagrin later over the kid playing “copper” on the deal).         

As Josh and Laura found a spot, a little out of the way since they had passed a number of carloads of families with kids not sitting in the cars like the old days but spread out in front of their spots with lawn chairs so they could have a little quiet. Josh remarked that except for some overgrown grass the place looked pretty much the same as in the old days with a few exceptions. First off there were no speakers, you know, the ones on the posts that you clipped to your slightly opened front door window (and half the time in your rush to get out of the place in less than an hour as the traffic jam began at the exit you forgot the damn thing and not a few would be down on the ground after a night’s work). Nowadays, as Laura noticed on the screen, you tuned into a numbered station on your car radio. Okay, progress can’t be stopped and those silly speakers were really a nuisance. Another thing was that the old time playground that he and his sisters played in as kids were gone, replaced by a couple more rows of car spots. The most striking thing though was, probably as a matter of saving dough, the refreshment stand area looked almost exactly as it had, except maybe a new coat of paint about ten years ago, when he spied Mimi behind the counter back in the 1970s with the same “menu.” (Don’t tell Laura, please don’t tell Laura that Josh had some pangs about Mimi on seeing that stand, okay).

Actually the most striking thing about the evening though was not the same old stand but that there was not a speck of an indication that the old “sweat box” section was still around. And it made sense when he and Laura were talking about the subject during intermission. Kids have about twenty other ways of entertaining themselves, are more committed to mall-rat-dom and other locales these days so things do move on. Josh had not expected any such replication although it would have heartened him if it had. It was okay and they had a nice evening.

Hey, what about the double-feature, what about the movies. Well, Josh said he was not sure but he thought one was a spy movie, something out of the Cold War, and the other was a flipped out romance. And he said Laura agreed. When he named the two titles though when I checked they had nothing to do with spies or romances, one was a star-wars type movie, the other a gangster movie. Yeah, some things never change at the drive-in, well almost never except Josh complained about how hard it was to maneuver these days with these damn bucket car seats and the console in the middle, and about how they forgot to bring paper towels to wipe off the fog from the windshields.           

Out In The Black Liberation Night- The Black Panthers And The Struggle For The Ten-Point Program -Eleven-In the Beginning

Out In The Black Liberation Night- The Black Panthers And The Struggle For The Ten-Point Program -Eleven-In the Beginning   

…they came out of the hard okie/arkie white trash Hell’s Angels- dominated mean streets of Oakland, Oakland out in sunny California at the end of the American continental line. The place where the staccato faux -Spanish style (speaking unknowingly of earlier conquistador invasions) was to close out dreams, dreams of plenty, dreams of an ocean’s worth of good times.  They came out of the cop- infested army of occupation on those dark 1960s negro streets (the streets that they wanted to make black, proud black, devouring that old Spanish negro alien word, and deed). They came out of the mid-1960s hard reality that while their brothers and sisters in Selma, Montgomery, Lake Charles, Albany (GA), Greenwood, and all points south, south of the American slick democracy had gained something, something worth fighting (and dying) for that they, Oakland, Watts, Harlem, Cleveland, Newark, and all points North and West, north and west of American slick democracy, had been left behind. That they too had to face down their own copper nightmare, their own ghetto-imposed wanting habits nightmare, wanting some decent sweat-less non-grinding job, wanting their own cozy bungalow (white picket fence optional in the laid-back Frisco Bay night), wanting their own take a vacation out in the high Sierras, wanting above all to stop being cop looked at every time they went onto the white streets of  town, hell the black streets too, and to get rid of their own subtle damn neighborhood (and maybe not so subtle when they started to rile up the okies and arkies) Mister James Crow.

And so they, okay, okay, Huey and Bobby they, started putting together a little group, a little group of students and the young bucks from the ‘hood  (neighborhood , okay, but who else would you expect to start stuff like that, insurrection kind of stuff, out in sunny blood-stained California, even a California by that freaking fog-bound bay ), corner boys really, under a simple proposition-voting and the such might have been okay in that all point south night down in America but in land’s end that didn’t mean jack. What meant jack was to get that damn down presser man, the guys in blues, the almost totally white guys in blue off their backs, and let the brothers and sisters breath.  And so they, black proud, and black smart, decided after looking at history a little, fog-bound black history as fogged as that rusted colored golden gate bridge once Mister Whitey got through with it, that the only time that Mister Whitey paid attention was when proud black warrior-savants pressed the issue, defended themselves against that slave market and jim crow night. And so they looked to the mighty 200,000 strong of the Union black army in Civil War times, hell, even the brothers who bled arms in hand with that prophet angel-avenger Jehovah John Brown at Harpers Ferry fight, and the mighty southern struggle Robert F. Williams over across the land in Monroe, North Carolina just a few years back and said enough. So they righteously armed themselves. And said in some small recess of the brain they knew that this too was worth dying for.                      

The original "Ten Point Program" from October, 1966 was as follows:^[39][40]



1. We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our black Community.

We believe that black people will not be free until we are able to determine our destiny.



2. We want full employment for our people.

We believe that the federal government is responsible and obligated to give every man employment or a guaranteed income. We believe that if the white American businessmen will not give full employment, then the means of production should be taken from the businessmen and placed in the community so that the people of the community can organize and employ all of its people and give a high standard of living.



3. We want an end to the robbery by the white man of our black Community.

We believe that this racist government has robbed us and now we are demanding the overdue debt of forty acres and two mules. Forty acres and two mules was promised 100 years ago as restitution for slave labor and mass murder of black people. We will accept the payment as currency which will be distributed to our many communities. The Germans are now aiding the Jews in Israel for the genocide of the Jewish people. The Germans murdered six million Jews. The American racist has taken part in the slaughter of over 50 million black people; therefore, we feel that this is a modest demand that we make.



4. We want decent housing, fit for shelter of human beings.

We believe that if the white landlords will not give decent housing to our black community, then the housing and the land should be made into cooperatives so that our community, with government aid, can build and make decent housing for its people.



5. We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in the present-day society.



We believe in an educational system that will give to our people a knowledge of self. If a man does not have knowledge of himself and his position in society and the world, then he has little chance to relate to anything else.



6. We want all black men to be exempt from military service.



We believe that black people should not be forced to fight in the military service to defend a racist government that does not protect us. We will not fight and kill other people of color in the world who, like black people, are being victimized by the white racist government of America. We will protect ourselves from the force and violence of the racist police and the racist military, by whatever means necessary.



7. We want an immediate end to POLICE BRUTALITY and MURDER of black people.

We believe we can end police brutality in our black community by organizing black self-defense groups that are dedicated to defending our black community from racist police oppression and brutality. The Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States gives a right to bear arms. We therefore believe that all black people should arm themselves for self defense.



8. We want freedom for all black men held in federal, state, county and city prisons and jails.

We believe that all black people should be released from the many jails and prisons because they have not received a fair and impartial trial.



9. We want all black people when brought to trial to be tried in court by a jury of their peer group or people from their black communities, as defined by the Constitution of the United States.



We believe that the courts should follow the United States Constitution so that black people will receive fair trials. The 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution gives a man a right to be tried by his peer group. A peer is a person from a similar economic, social, religious, geographical, environmental, historical and racial background. To do this the court will be forced to select a jury from the black community from which the black defendant came. We have been, and are being tried by all-white juries that have no understanding of the "average reasoning man" of the black community.



10. We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace. And as our major political objective, a United Nations-supervised plebiscite to be held throughout the black colony in which only black colonial subjects will be allowed to participate for the purpose of determining the will of black people as to their national destiny.



When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.



We hold these truths to be self- evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly, all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But, when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariable the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.

Honor Colonel Shaw And The Massachusetts 54th Black Volunteer Regiment

Honor Colonel Shaw And The Massachusetts 54th Black Volunteer Regiment

FEBRUARY IS BLACK HISTORY MONTH

Those familiar with the critical role that the recruitment of black troops into the Union Armies in the American Civil War usually know about the famous Massachusetts 54th Regiment under Colonel Robert Gould Shaw which has received wide attention in book, film and sculpture. Those heroic black fighters and their fallen leader deserve those honors. Glory, indeed.

Although Shaw was hesitant to take command of those troops after suffering wounds at Antietam, when he accepted, he took full charge of the training and discipline of the regiment. Moreover, as the regiment marched into Boston to cheering crowds before embarking on ships to take them South each trooper knew the score. Any blacks captured (or their white officers, for that matter) were subject to Southern ‘justice’, summary execution. Not one trooper flinched. Arms in hands, they fought bravely at the defeat of Fort Wagner and other Deep South battles, taking many causalities.

I have remarked elsewhere (in a review of William Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner)that while the slaves in the South, for a host of reasons, did not insurrect with the intensity or frequency of say Haiti, the other West Indian islands or Brazil that when the time came to show discipline, courage and honor under arms that blacks would prove not inferior to whites. And the history of the Massachusetts 54th is prima facie evidence for that position.

I should also note that the Massachusetts 54th was made up primarily of better educated and skilled freedman and escaped slaves unlike the black troops recruited from the plantations in the Deep South in the 1st and 2nd South Carolina Volunteer black regiments. Thus, one might have suspected that they would not be up to the rigors of Southern duty. Not so. After reading a number of books on the trials and tribulations of various Union regiments, including the famous Irish Brigade, the story of the 54th compares very favorably with those units.

However, so as not to get carried away with the ‘liberalism’ of the Union political and military commands in granting permission for black recruitment it is necessary to point out some of the retrograde racial attitudes of the time. It took a major propaganda thrust by Frederick Douglass and other revolutionary abolitionists to get Lincoln to even consider arming blacks for their own emancipation. Only after several severe military reversals was permission granted to recruit black troops, although some maverick generals were already using them, particularly General Hunter. As mentioned above there were qualms about the ability of blacks to fight in disciplined units. Moreover, until 1864 black troops were paid less than their white counterparts. The Massachusetts 54th is also rightly famous for refusing pay until that disparity was corrected.

One should not forget that the North in its own way was as deeply racist as the South (think of the treacherous role of the Southern-sympathying Northern Copperheads and the Irish-led anti-black Draft Riots in New York City, for examples). This reflected itself in the racial attitudes of some commanding officers and enlisted men as well as the general paternalism of even the best white commanding officers, including Colonel Higginson of the 2nd South Carolina. It was further reflected in the disproportionately few blacks that became officers in the Civil War, despite the crying need for officers in those black regiments and elsewhere. Yet, all of these negatives notwithstanding, every modern black liberation fighter takes his or her hat off to the gallant 54th, arms in hand, and its important role in the struggle for black liberation

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night- “You Are On The Bus Or Off The Bus”- The Transformation Of “Foul-Mouth” Phil Into “Far-Out” Phil- With Writer Ken Kesey In Mind

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night- “You Are On The Bus Or Off The Bus”- The Transformation Of “Foul-Mouth” Phil Into “Far-Out” Phil- With Writer Ken Kesey In Mind  

The Chiffons performing their classic Sweet Talkin’ Guy

From The Archives Of Allan Jackson

[Perhaps you missed it in a previous take, dated February 23, 2017, on the mighty Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters who set a certain bar for drug, sex, and rock and roll in the early days of what would be the great Generation of “68 jailbreak in the earlier part of the decade by the by-line listed, as here, “From The Archives Of Allan Jackson.” A causal reader or somebody who has not been paying attention to the not too distant past fierce internal struggle that roiled this site between the younger writers, dubbed, self-dubbed “the Young Turks” and the old guard around previous site manager (and a founder member of this publication when it started in hard copy times along with me and a few others) that very same Allan Jackson around the direction of the site that it was understood that he had been either retired or purged depending on your point of view. In any case to end the controversy and move forward it was agreed in negotiations between me and the new site manager Greg Green after Allan had lost a vote of no confidence that his name was not to be mentioned again.

Somehow Allan, who had been rumored to be doing anything in exile from feeding the Mormons out in Utah whatever they wanted to hear as long as they let him write copy in their kept newspaper (even commenting positively on the white underwear issue he was so desperate for work) to tending bar at Joe-Joe’s in La Jolla and living with a twenty something surfer girl to running a high end whorehouse in Argentina with Madame La Rue, found out Greg had been nipping at the archives looking for some fresh insights into the baby-boomer generation, that Generation of “68 mentioned earlier. Yes, Greg had finally figured out what some of us, friendly to him or not, already knew was that the generation or two after the 1960s doesn’t read book reviews, films reviews, music reviews or left-wing political comment. Doesn’t read period for all practical site purposes and so he has tried to “lure” the old base back with some retro music-laced archival material.

Problem. Greg problem. Since Allan Jackson has been purged and is a non-person around here the series he was running The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night has been done under the byline of Frank Jackman. Allan went crazy when he heard what had been done since he had never copyrighted the stuff, didn’t feel a need to. Some of Allan’s old friends, including Frank who went back to high school with him as I had, met with Greg and convinced him it would be best to give Allan a credit for a series that he sweated for something like two years over. All Greg would do was what you see in the by-line that maybe these were lost papers from the desk or something without stating outright that Allan had written or edited the whole thing. Enough for now. Jack Callahan]                     

*********

A while back, a couple years ago now I guess, Sam Lowell the recently semi-retired Boston lawyer from our high school class looking for some things to fill up his spare time and to respond to the nostalgic feelings that he had been having once he reconnected with a couple of his old corner boys from our North Adamsville High days in the early 1960s, Frankie Riley and Josh Breslin started writing little sketches about “what was what” back in the day. That “what was what” could have been anything from the local meaning of “submarine races” (that is simple, this was just an expression to denote what those who, boyfriends and girlfriends, were doing who went by midnight automobile down to Adamsville Beach and eventually came up for air and you can figure out what they were doing that required such a motion without any further comment); the grooming habits of working-class guys like Sam before the big school dance (plenty of Listerine, plenty of Old Spice, plenty of Right Guard, plenty of Wild Root hair oil, and new shirt and pants from the “Bargie,” a local pre-Wal-Mart institution for the chronically poor to look good for one night); the midnight “chicken run” down the back roads of Adamsville (self-explanatory for any brethren who craved a fast “boss” car, the ’57 Chevy being the prize of prizes), or the nefarious way to get six to eight males and females into the local drive-in for the price of two (easy, a snap, just load up that big old trunk and have said occupants stop breathing at the admissions booth).

Sam made a few people laugh beside Frankie and Josh when they placed his stuff on their Facebook pages and got a response from several of our old high school classmates asking for some more sketches (and other “friends” who came of age in the early 1960s and had similar stories to tell and get a chuckle over as well). Sam felt “compelled” to reply.           

A lot of what helped Sam remember various events from those days was going to the local library, the main Cambridge Public Library, and check out materials from their extensive holding of classic (ouch!) rock and roll compilations. One commercial series which covered the time period from about 1955 to 1968 in many volumes also had time-appropriate artwork designs on the cover of each CD. Those covers brought to Sam’s mind the phenomenon that he wanted to write about. In this case, this 1966 case, the cover art detailed the then almost ubiquitous merry prankster-edged converted yellow brick road school bus, complete with assorted vagabond minstrel/ road warrior/ah, hippies, that “ruled” the mid-1960s highway and by-ways in search of the great American freedom night. The “merry prankster” expression taken from the king hell king “hippie” philosopher-king of the time author Ken Kesey and his comrades who Tom Wolfe immortalized in his “new journalism” book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. That cover triggered memories of his own merry prankster moments with another corner boy from high school that he went west with in that year, Phil Larkin, and what happened to Phil when he “got on the bus” looking, well, “looking for the garden,” the Garden of Eden is what they called the adventure between themselves then. Sam said wistfully after he had finished the sketch that “We never found it in the end, but the search was worth it then, and still worth it now.” That is about right brother, just about right. But let Sam explain why he said that.

*****

A rickety, ticky-tack, bounce over every bump in the road to high heaven, gear-shrieking school bus. But not just any yellow brick road school bus that you rode to various educationally “good for you” locations like movie houses, half yawn, science museums, yawn, art museums, yawn, yawn, or wind-swept picnic areas for some fool weenie roast, two yawns there too, when you were a school kid. Two yawns because the teachers were trying to piece you off with some cheapjack sawdust hot dog with a Wonder Bread air-holes bun, some grizzled hamburger, ditto on the bun, maybe a little potato salad from Kennedy’s Deli for filler, and tonic (a New England localism meaning soda) not your own individual bottle but served from gallons jugs into dinky Dixie cups. [Sam not knowing until much later that the teachers had pitched in to buy the provisions from their own pockets, belated thanks.] And certainly not your hour to get home daily grind school bus, complete with surly driver (male or female, although truth to tell the females were worst since they acted just like your mother, and maybe were acting on orders from her) that got you through K-12 in one piece, and you even got to not notice the bounces to high heaven over every bump of burp in the road. No, my friends, my comrades, my brethren this is god’s own bus commandeered to navigate the highways and by-ways of the 1960s come flame or flash-out.

Yes, it is rickety, and all those other descriptive words mentioned above in regard to school day buses. That is the nature of such ill-meant mechanical contraptions after all. But this one is custom-ordered, no, maybe that is the wrong way to put it, this is “karma” ordered to take a motley crew of free-spirits on the roads to seek a “newer world,” to seek the meaning of what one persistent blogger on the subject has described as "the search for the great blue-pink American Western night." [Sam an inveterate blogger since the first days he found out about that medium.]

Naturally to keep its first purpose intact this heaven-bound vehicle is left with its mustard yellow body surface underneath but over that “primer” the surface has been transformed by generations (generations here signifying not twenty-year cycles but numbers of trips west, and east) of, well, folk art, said folk art being heavily weighted toward graffiti, toward psychedelic day-glo hotpinkorangelemonlime splashes and zodiacally meaningful symbols. Mushroomy exploding flowers, medieval crosses, sphinxlike animals, ancient Pharaoh’s pyramids, never-ending geometric figures, new religion splashes whatever came into a “connected” head.  

And the interior. Most of those hardback seats that captured every bounce of childhood have been ripped out and discarded to who knows where and replaced by mattresses, many layers of mattresses for this bus is not merely for travel but for home. To complete the “homey” effect there are stored, helter-skelter, in the back coolers, assorted pots and pans, mismatched dishware, nobody’s idea of the family heirloom china, boxes of dried foods and condiments, duffle bags full of clothes, clean and unclean, blankets, sheets, and pillows, again clean and unclean.

Let’s put it this way, if someone wants to make a family hell-broth stew there is nothing in the way to stop them. But also know this, and know it now, as we start to focus on this journey that food, the preparation of food, and the desire, except in the wee hours when the body craves something inside, is a very distant concern for these “campers.” If food is what you desired in the foreboding 1960s be-bop night take a cruise ship to nowhere or a train (if you can find one), some southern pacific, great northern, union pacific, and work out your dilemma in the dining car. Of course, no heaven-send, merry prankster-ish yellow brick road school bus would be complete without a high-grade stereo system to blast the now obligatory “acid rock” coming through the radiator practically, although just now, as a goof, it has to be a goof, right, one can hear Nancy Sinatra, christ, Frank’s daughter, how square is that, churning out These Boots Are Made For Walkin.’

And the driver. No, not mother-sent, mother-agent, old Mrs. Henderson, who prattled on about keep in your seats and be quiet while she is driving (maybe that, subconsciously, is why the seats were ripped out long ago on the very first “voyage” west). No way, but a very, very close imitation of the god-like prince-driver of the road, the "on the road” pioneer, Neal Cassady, shifting those gears very gently but also very sure-handedly so no one notices those bumps (or else is so stoned, drug or music stoned, that those things pass like so much wind). His name: Cruising Casey (real name, Charles Kendall, Harverford College Class of ’64, but just this minute, Cruising Casey, mad man searching for the great American be-bop night under the extreme influence of one Ken Kesey, the max-daddy mad man of the great search just then). And just now over that jerry-rigged big boom sound system, again as if to mock the newer world abrewin’ The Vogues’ Five O’ Clock World.

And the passengers. Well, no one is exactly sure, as the bus approaches the outskirts of Denver, because this is strictly a revolving cast of characters depending on who was hitchhiking on that desolate back road State Route 5 in Iowa, or County Road 16 in Nebraska, and desperately needed to be picked up, or face time, and not nice time with a buzz on, in some small town pokey. Or it might depend on who decided to pull up stakes at some outback campsite and get on the bus for a spell, and decide if they were, or were not, on the bus. After all even all-day highs, all-night sex, and 24/7 just hanging around listening to the music, especially when you are ready to scratch a blackboard over the selections like the one on now, James and Bobby Purify’s I’m Your Puppet, is not for everyone.

We do know for sure that Casey is driving, and still driving effortlessly so the harsh realities of his massive drug intake have not hit yet, or maybe he really is superman. And, well, that the “leader” here is Captain Crunch since it is “his” bus paid for out of some murky deal, probably a youthful drug deal, (real name, Samuel Jackman, Columbia, Class of 1958, who long ago gave up searching, searching for anything, and just hooked into the idea of "taking the ride"), Mustang Sally (Susan Stein, Michigan, Class of 1959, ditto on the searching thing), his girlfriend, (although not exclusively, not exclusively by her choice , not his, and he is not happy about it for lots of reasons which need not detain us here). Most of the rest of the “passengers” have monikers like Silver City Slim, Luscious Lois (and she really is), Penny Pot (guess why), Moon Man, Flash Gordon (from out in space somewhere, literally, as he tells it), Denver Dennis (from New York City, go figure), and the like. They also have real names that indicate that they are from somewhere that has nothing to do with public housing projects, ghettos or barrios. And they are also, or almost all are, twenty-somethings that have some highly-rated college years after their names, graduated or not). And they are all either searching or, like the Captain, at a stage where they are just hooked into taking the ride.

One young man, however, sticks out, well, not sticks out, since he is dressed in de rigeur bell-bottomed blue jeans, olive green World War II surplus army jacket (against the mountain colds, smart boy), Chuck Taylor sneakers, long, flowing hair and beard (well, wisp of a beard) and on his head a rakish tam just to be a little different, “Far Out” Phil (real name Phillip Larkin, North Adamsville High School Class of 1964). And why Far Out sticks out is not only that he has no college year after his name, for one thing, but more importantly, that he is nothing but a old-time working-class neighborhood corner boy from in front of Salducci’s Pizza Parlor back in North Adamsville, a close-by suburb of Boston.

Of course back then in town Far Out Phil was known, and rightly so as any girl, self-respecting or not, could tell you as “Foul-Mouth” Phil, the world champion swearer of the 1960s North Adamsville (and Adamsville Beach) be-bop night. And right now Far Out, having just ingested a capsule of some illegal substance (not LSD, probably mescaline) is talking to Luscious Lois, talking up a storm without one swear word in use, and she is listening, gleam in her eye listening, as ironically, perhaps, The Chiffons Sweet Talkin’ Guy is beaming forth out of his little battery-powered transistor radio (look it up on Wikipedia if you don’t know about primitive musical technology) that he has carried with him since junior high school. The winds of change do shift, do shift indeed.

[Sam and Phil were on that hell-broth road about a year, maybe a little more, until Phil faced an ugly draft notice from his “friends and neighbors” in Adamsville and figuring no other course, no jail, no Canada, no conscientious objector application came on the horizon to move this son of the working class from his fateful decision to accept his draft induction. Sam, another son of the working-class with a congenial heart problem (which his then drug intake could not have helped but we were young then and expected to live forever) and therefore 4-F decided to apply for law school and spent the next three years tied down to law books, court decisions, memoranda, and how to survive the bar exam.]       

Honor Colonel Shaw And The Massachusetts 54th Black Volunteer Regiment

Honor Colonel Shaw And The Massachusetts 54th Black Volunteer Regiment

FEBRUARY IS BLACK HISTORY MONTH

Those familiar with the critical role that the recruitment of black troops into the Union Armies in the American Civil War usually know about the famous Massachusetts 54th Regiment under Colonel Robert Gould Shaw which has received wide attention in book, film and sculpture. Those heroic black fighters and their fallen leader deserve those honors. Glory, indeed.

Although Shaw was hesitant to take command of those troops after suffering wounds at Antietam, when he accepted, he took full charge of the training and discipline of the regiment. Moreover, as the regiment marched into Boston to cheering crowds before embarking on ships to take them South each trooper knew the score. Any blacks captured (or their white officers, for that matter) were subject to Southern ‘justice’, summary execution. Not one trooper flinched. Arms in hands, they fought bravely at the defeat of Fort Wagner and other Deep South battles, taking many causalities.

I have remarked elsewhere (in a review of William Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner)that while the slaves in the South, for a host of reasons, did not insurrect with the intensity or frequency of say Haiti, the other West Indian islands or Brazil that when the time came to show discipline, courage and honor under arms that blacks would prove not inferior to whites. And the history of the Massachusetts 54th is prima facie evidence for that position.

I should also note that the Massachusetts 54th was made up primarily of better educated and skilled freedman and escaped slaves unlike the black troops recruited from the plantations in the Deep South in the 1st and 2nd South Carolina Volunteer black regiments. Thus, one might have suspected that they would not be up to the rigors of Southern duty. Not so. After reading a number of books on the trials and tribulations of various Union regiments, including the famous Irish Brigade, the story of the 54th compares very favorably with those units.

However, so as not to get carried away with the ‘liberalism’ of the Union political and military commands in granting permission for black recruitment it is necessary to point out some of the retrograde racial attitudes of the time. It took a major propaganda thrust by Frederick Douglass and other revolutionary abolitionists to get Lincoln to even consider arming blacks for their own emancipation. Only after several severe military reversals was permission granted to recruit black troops, although some maverick generals were already using them, particularly General Hunter. As mentioned above there were qualms about the ability of blacks to fight in disciplined units. Moreover, until 1864 black troops were paid less than their white counterparts. The Massachusetts 54th is also rightly famous for refusing pay until that disparity was corrected.

One should not forget that the North in its own way was as deeply racist as the South (think of the treacherous role of the Southern-sympathying Northern Copperheads and the Irish-led anti-black Draft Riots in New York City, for examples). This reflected itself in the racial attitudes of some commanding officers and enlisted men as well as the general paternalism of even the best white commanding officers, including Colonel Higginson of the 2nd South Carolina. It was further reflected in the disproportionately few blacks that became officers in the Civil War, despite the crying need for officers in those black regiments and elsewhere. Yet, all of these negatives notwithstanding, every modern black liberation fighter takes his or her hat off to the gallant 54th, arms in hand, and its important role in the struggle for black liberation