Market Street in San Francisco looked interesting as I
walked from the Greyhound Station to the Bay Transit Terminal during the
morning rush hour, opposite to the way most of the commuting workers, who had
come into San Francisco from across the Bay or from a MUNI trolley or cable car
in a neighborhood elsewhere, were scurrying. But I was eager to first make my
pilgrimage to Berkeley and walk down Telegraph Avenue and across the campus,
before I did any exploring of San Francisco for the first time.
When I first visited Berkeley in the 1970s, the BART subway
that connects Berkeley to San Francisco had not yet been completed. So the way
people living in Berkeley and Oakland who wished to use mass transit to commute
to a job in San Francisco did so was to take one of the Alameda County buses
which drove across the Oakland-San Francisco bridge and into the Bay Area bus
terminal. Hence, during the weekday morning rush hour, when I first walked into
the Bay Area bus terminal and tried to figure out which bus I would have to hop
on to reach Berkeley, the terminal was filled much more with morning commuters
from the East Bay area than it would later be in the decades after the BART
subway line was more completely built and more people began using BART to get
to work, rather than taking a bus from Berkeley to SF.
I can't remember much about my bus ride from SF to
Berkeley--from the same bridge that the Greyhound had taken me a few hours
before, but in the opposite direction--except that I still found it interesting
to look out of the window as the bus drove across the Oakland-SF bridge. What I
do recall, though, is that I felt excited, when the bus reached its last stop
on Shattuck Avenue in Downtown Berkeley, and I eagerly walked up the hill
towards Telegraph Avenue, where I walked into the lobby of the first old
building on Telegraph Avenue near the the campus that I noticed having a sign
indicating it was some kind of hotel or SRO kind of place.
In the 1970s, you could still usually arrive in a town and
walk into some kind of motel or hotel or SRO and, without having made a
previous reservation, obtain a vacant room to rent for a week. So when I
interrupted the book-reading of the dressed-up and bored-looking white woman in
her 20's who was sitting behind the check-in desk of the small hotel lobby and
asked if a vacant room for a week's stay was available, she coldly gave me the
key to one of the vacant rooms, in exchange for me giving her a cash payment
for a week's stay.
The room was very small, but it had a bed for me to sleep
on. I no longer can recall whether or not it had its own bathroom or whether
hotel guests had to share a bathroom in the hall with each other. Whether or
not the room had its own bathroom likely mattered little to me, since, whenever
I needed a john during the day or evening while in Berkeley that week, I usually
just used the one in the campus student union building.
I spent very little time inside the hotel room during my
week in the Bay area. Being bearded with long hair at that time in the 1970's,
I didn't need to waste any time shaving in the morning; and, since the hotel
room lacked a refrigerator or kitchen or hot plate, I fed myself on what I ate
outside of where I was staying.
Each morning during my stay in Berkeley I would buy myself a
freshly-squeezed glass of orange juice from the stand that was then set up at
the entrance to the University of California campus at the top of Telegraph
Avenue. Then I would usually buy a scrambled egg breakfast with toast in some
local restaurant near the campus; and that would keep me from feeling hungry
again until the evening.
Most of my first day in Berkeley was spent walking around
the UC-Berkeley campus, sitting on the steps, ledges or benches near the plaza
around Sproul Hall, where the large student rallies of the 1960's used to be
held, and hanging out there for a few hours watching the students walk by;
before later walking off campus and back towards Telegraph Avenue, where I
spent the last few hours of sunlight browsing in bookstores and vinyl record
shops.
Campus buildings like Sproul Hall and campus plazas like the
one in front of Sproul Hall seemed much smaller in size in the 1970's than I
had imagined then being in the 1960's after seeing photographs of the
UC-Berkeley campus protests. I had hoped that, by just hanging out on
the UC-Berkeley campus for a few hours each day during the week I visited, I
would bump into some New Left activists in their 20's whom I had known in the
1960's who might be politically active underground or aboveground in the 1970's
on the West Coast, still active 1970's New Left activists that I hadn't known
in the 1960's, or 1970's students who were carrying on the 1960's tradition of
Berkeley student protests in the 1970's. But nothing like that happened to me
during the time I hung out on Berkeley's campus for the week.
By the 1970's Berkeley's campus seemed as dead--after the
level of direct U.S. military intervention in Vietnam was reduced following the
Nixon administration's massive "last gasp" Christmas bombings of
civilian targets in North Vietnam in December 1972--as was Columbia's campus in
the post-1972 period of the 1970's. Rows of Movement people standing behind
tables and handing out leaflets or having political discussions near the campus
entrance or around Sproul Hall plaza was no longer part of the Berkeley campus
youth scene by this time in the 1970's.
I had hoped to also bump into some street musicians singing
topical protest folk songs on or around the Berkeley campus or along Telegraph
Avenue. But during the week I spent a lot of time hanging out in Berkeley, the
street musicians who were playing the most near the campus and attracting the
largest student audiences on the street were just then musicians who played
bluegrass instrumental music in a skillful way. Browsing in the bookstores and
vinyl record shops off-campus also didn't lead to any verbal encounters with
any politically and/or culturally radical non-students in their 20's or current
UC students during my stay in Berkeley.
