On The Road In The 1970's: Part 1

On The Road In The 1970’s: Part 1

By the 1970’s, I realized that, for a working-class person in the United States, working in a 9-to-5 factory cage or skyscraper office cage for 50 years meant intellectual, moral, spiritual, artistic, political and emotional death during the workday for 50 years. And by the 1970’s I also realized that, for the working-class student in the United States, the kind of life that you experienced on campuses or around campuses like Columbia or Berkeley in the 1960’s was life in an ivory tower fantasy world, representing only a temporary 4-year reprieve from the real world of off-campus, enslavement, repression and alienation experienced by the majority of U.S. working-class people.

So by the 1970’s I no longer felt it mattered very much whether I lived or died, since the future for me looked completely bleak personally and completely bleak for the majority of working-class people who lived in U.S. society under the post-1970’s U.S. economic/political system of corporate totalitarianism, hip capitalism and feminized imperialism. Yet before I died in my physical form in the 1970’s, I still wanted to see the West Coast, and especially to visit Berkeley and the Bay Area, in the 1970’s.

By the end of my freshman year at Columbia in 1966, I wished that I had tried to figure out a way to afford to enroll at University of California-Berkeley in Fall 1965, rather than only applying to Columbia and CCNY, because I mistakenly assumed that living and/or studying in Manhattan near Harlem would give me the most meaningful and stimulating college undergraduate experience. And were it not for the Fall 1966 re-founding of Columbia SDS as a more mass-based campus group, my subsequent involvement in Columbia SDS as a steering committee member and participant in the 1968 Columbia Student Revolt, I would likely have totally regretted that, while applying for college, the lure of living and/or studying in Manhattan near Harlem caused me to rule out trying to figure out a way financially to enroll at U. of California-Berkeley.

Carrying only a large knapsack, from my early teenage years as a boy scout, I went to the Port Authority bus station, near 42nd Street and 8^th Avenue in Manhattan, on an early September weekday evening, to buy a $100 one-way ticket from Greyhound that would then allow me to ride from New York City to San Francisco, on a bus that would get me to the West Coast in 3 days. And, aside from the clothes I wore and the clothes in the knapsack, the only important things I brought along with me on the bus were my bus ticket that would get me to California, the keys to the basement apartment in Jamaica in which I still lived in as a tenant, and maybe about $150 in 1970’s money.

The Greyhound bus to California left around 11 p.m. or midnight from the Port Authority bus station and, because it was a night during the week and not a Friday, Saturday, or Sunday night, was not very crowded. So until the bus reached Omaha, Nebraska, early in the following evening, no other passenger was sitting next to me. And I was able to stretch out over two seats during the first night on the road of the bus, as the bus drove first down the New Jersey Turnpike to Philadelphia, then across Pennsylvania on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, and then through Ohio and Indiana and Illinois.

Four decades later, I can’t recall talking to anybody  else on the bus or anything memorable happening on the bus, during the period that it traveled from New York City until the time it reached Omaha, Nebraska.