On The Road In The 1970's: Part 10

Sticking out my thumb at one of the entrances to a freeway that was heading southeast out of Los Angeles, I did not have to wait too long before a car driven by a young white guy who looked like he was in his late 20's stopped and invited me to "hop in."

"How far are you going?" he asked in a curious way.

"To New York City," I replied.

The driver laughed and said:  "Well, I'm going to San Diego, so my ride won't help that much. But at least I can get you out of Los Angeles and into Orange County, where you can catch one of the freeways that meets up with I-40 going east."

"That sounds like it would help me a lot."

The driver had apparently done a lot of hitchhiking during the years of his early 20's, when he had served in the U.S. military and had, himself, been given rides by many U.S. drivers when he needed to save money by traveling on the road. So, lucky for me, he apparently felt morally obligated, himself, now, to offer a ride and pick-up any hitchhiker in his 20's that he, himself, passed while driving; as a kind of repayment for the free rides other drivers had given him, whenever he had been on the road during his younger years coming home from leave when in the U.S. military.

In addition, from the conversation I had with him in his car, before he dropped me off near one of the beaches in Orange County in the early evening before the sun had set, the driver--now approaching 30 and no longer having the free time to travel around much, himself--seemed to feel some nostalgia for his more youthful days when he had hitchhiked, which seeing me with my thumb out reminded him of.

"You can probably stay around the beach here for the night and then go to one of the freeway entrances and hitch a ride up towards San Bernardino that gets you near to I-40 east," the first driver who picked me up advised, before I thanked him with  a smile, we both wished each other "good luck," I got out of the car with my large knapsack and his car returned to the highway that would take him to San Diego. 

On The Road In The 1970's: Part 9

As Abbie Hoffman once indicated in one of his late 1960's or early 1970's books, when a driver picked a hitchhiker up in the 1960's and 1970's (decades before the 21st-century "gig economy' era of cellphones, smartphones, Uber and Lyft, etc.), one reason might be that the driver just wished to acquire a temporary companion for part of his or her drive to converse with, in order to reduce the boredom of a long drive alone. And having acquired a lot of experience in speaking with a lot of different types of people spontaneously in the USA about their personal lives as a New Left activist/organizer in the 1960's, I found it fairly easy in the 1970's to get a good conversation started and kept going with most any driver who might pick me up when I was hitchhiking on the road in the 1970's.

In the 1970's, if you were still in your 20's and looked like a long-haired freak or hippy, whether bearded or not bearded, a  white man hitching alone could still hook-up with highway drivers who would not be reluctant--and who were often eager--to stop and invite him to "hop in." If the driver who offered you a ride in the 1970's was also a freak or hippy in his 20's like you were, then you would often be seen as a brother or a fellow member of an underground Woodstock nation of outlaws, that the culturally  straight local cops, local authorities, local establishments and "suits", who continued to dress straight and go to barbers who cut their hair shirt, were still trying to suppress around the United States.

And if the driver who offered you a ride in the 1970's wasn't a freak or hippy and looked like one of the culturally straight folks, you often sometimes felt that, in some ways, he or she saw you as a symbol of the freedom that he or she maybe once had or dreamed of having, but lacked now because of things like family economic support pressures and kid-raising or 9-to-5 job responsibilities.

Either type of drivers who picked you up on the road in the 1970's were usually personally generous and personally friendly. Although, if the driver who picked you up wasn't also a freak or hippy long-haired person, you usually had to be more cautious about what you said (especially about saying anything political or anything about religion) until you got a sense from the conversation in the car where he or she was coming from philosophically; and had determined whether he or she might be some kind of right-wing type person. But, of course, if you looked like a freak/hippy in the 1970's, most of the right-wing types who were still gung-ho about the System would generally not be willing to pick you up on the highway.

What you felt from hitching on the road in the 1970's, was that, however morally obnoxious were the businessmen, generals, politicians and super-rich white folks who ruled the USA, the vast majority of people in the United States who you met while on the road, regardless of which state you were traveling through, were still quite friendly, generous, good-natured, kind and often verbally witty and hip on a personal level in the 1970's; and many of the folks you met while on the road who picked you up in the 1970's were also still great and interesting oral storytellers when you conversed with them. You felt that the militaristic dog-eat-dog System and institutions that people who were born in the USA were supposed to accept passively and adjust to living under, while they were alive, did not really reflect the humanistic national character of most people who were born in the 20th-century in the USA or who then lived in the USA in the 1970's.

On The Road In The 1970's: Part 8

Back in Los Angeles in the late afternoon, after returning from Disneyland in Anaheim, I was ready to go on the road again. So, with less than $20 in my pocket, I began hitching back from the West Coast to the East Coast.

Strangely, I felt I was absolutely free on a certain level, having no job, no place inside where I was sure I would be able to sleep that night, practically no money left, and no one in the whole world whom I felt both loved the person I had become in the 1970's or cared whether I lived or died; and I, myself, on a certain level no longer cared whether I lived or died, given my conclusion, at this time, that for working-class people in the USA, in the 1970's, life after leaving college was a meaningless one of spiritual, intellectual, emotional, philosophical, political, moral, artistic and sexual death and economic enslavement, within a morally degenerate, imperialist economic system of corporate totalitarianism. I felt that I had made the good fight in the 1960's and early 1970's. But given how bleak the future looked for me personally, even if I didn't make it back East, I then felt I had already experienced the best of what life in the USA would ever offer a working-class person in the way of relative personal freedom, during my years as a college undergraduate; and I then felt post-college/post-campus life in "real world" would continue to be a downhill, deadening experience compared to what life had been like when in college, until the day I died.

But despite these kind of thoughts, I had never been much of a suicidal person, no matter how miserable I felt my personal economic life situation might be or how personally unloved or lonely I felt. Maybe because I had always been blessed and lucky in my personal physical health situation no matter how impoverished I had become in the 1970's. Or maybe because I had always been able to channel any of my personal blues feelings, that might have pushed me into a suicidal mindset, into a source of artistic inspiration for the folk song lyrics, poems, plays, stories and folk song tunes that I had always found it easy to write, since my teenage years in high school.

On The Road In The 1970's: Part 7

I no longer remember much about my night bus ride down the highway from `Frisco to L.A., probably because I must have fallen asleep on the bus and slept through much of the ride before the bus pulled into the Greyhound station in Los Angeles, just a few hours after sunrise, but an hour or two before the Monday morning commuter rush hour into Los Angeles had begun. I vaguely remember that the seat next to me on the bus had been occupied by a culturally straight-looking white guy in his 20's, who didn't seem particularly unfriendly or reactionary, but who, like me, had been more into trying to get some sleep on the bus during the trip to L.A., rather than having any kind of a long, spontaneous conversation between "fellow-travelers."

Inside the bus terminal in Los Angeles, I found an empty bus station locker to store my large knapsack bag for most of the day and then found out from the information desk which commuter bus would take me to where Disneyland was located in Anaheim and bought myself a round-trip ticket for the bus to and from Anaheim. Since I now had much less money in my pocket than the $100 I would need at that time to buy the Greyhound bus ticket that would take me back to New York City, I realized that I was now going to have to hitchhike back from the West Coast to the East Coast. But rather than spending a day checking out Hollywood, Santa Monica or Los Angeles' street life before heading back to New York City on the road, I somehow felt that before I headed back East I wanted to visit Disneyland.

As a child growing up in New York City, I had always wanted to visit Disneyland but had never done so. And, not knowing in the 1970's if I was going to survive economically or physically much longer, I somehow still felt that I wanted to see Disneyland before I died.

Arriving in Anaheim by an outgoing commuter bus later in the morning, I can recall walking down a road from the bus station to the Disneyland entrance and then spending much of my remaining money on the fee that was required in order to enter through the gates of Disneyland.

Once inside Disneyland, I was surprised to see that the rides and structures in Fantasyland, Frontierland, Adventureland, and Tomorrowland seemed much smaller than I had imagined them to be when, as a child, I watched film of them on the 1950s Disneyland tv show. And after maybe spending 2 or 3 hours walking around Disneyland and checking out the 1970s Disnelyand scene, I started to get bored. So I got on a commuter bus that was returning from Anaheim to Los Angeles.

On The Road In The 1970's: Part 6

Only a few hours before I was to leave Berkeley to catch the Alameda County bus that would take me back over the bridge to S.F., where I would then wait inside the Greyhound station until I could board the bus to L.A., a friendly blond-haired, blue-eyed, hip-looking white woman, looking like she was in her 20's, who had a California regional accent, suddenly approached me on the sidewalk of Telegraph Avenue, about three or four blocks away from the campus, while I was standing there with my large knapsack. The young white woman was someone that most men in the 1970's would likely have characterized as a "California beauty."

"Hi!  Did you just arrive here in Berkeley?" she asked, with a friendly smile.

"Actually, I'm planning to leave Berkeley tonight?"

"Why are you leaving?"

"I'm running out of money and I have to hitch back to New York City soon."

Continuing to smile in a friendly way, the young white woman then asked:  "Maybe you'd like to stay around for a few more days and visit the Ashram where I live?"

"You live in an Ashram?" I replied with surprise. And we then got into a 10-minute philosophical/political discussion in which I explained why I probably wouldn't fit in philosophically with the spiritual community that she had found now fulfilled her spiritual needs in the 1970's.

By the 1970's the liberal ideology that the U.S. Establishment's corporate mass media and U.S. public and private school educational/political indoctrination system disseminated did not provide an accurate explanation for why the Civil Rights and anti-war movement of the 1960's could not win its demands for racial equality in the USA and peace in Vietnam. Or why many young people in the USA were brutalized by U.S. police when they protested on campus and in the streets in the 1960's and early 1970's. So many young people in the USA became political radicalized and, for a while, felt that the New Left's neo-Marxist ideology propagated less myths about U.S. society than did the U.S. Establishment's corporate liberal ideology.

The Kent State and Jackson State massacres and U.S. government and local police harassment, imprisonment and even killings of Black Panther Party activists and other Movement activists convinced, however, many "stage-in-life" radical youths that changing the world by means of New Left movement political action was not possible; and the U.S. women's liberation movement of the late 1960's and early 1970's convinced large numbers of young U.S. women that the New Left political movement was too patriarchal and male chauvinist to ever create a new world in which all women were free and equal. As a result, large numbers of these dissident and politically alienated "stage-in-life" politically radical youth seemed to get into some form of New Age spiritualism, East Asian religions or some hippie variation of a religiously Christian sect, like "Children of God" or "Jews for Jesus."

Hence, even on a previously politicized campus like UC-Berkeley or on streets like Telegraph Avenue, by the 1970's you were just as likely to be handed a flyer that attempted to recruit you to some New Age, Eastern religious or hippie Christian sect as you were to be handed a flyer for some local protest, that would generally attract fewer supporters than the same political group's previous monthly demo.

Once the young white woman concluded that I was either too intellectual or still too philosophically New Leftist a street person/nomad to be a potential recruit for her Ashram, she soon lost interest in continuing our discussion on the street; and, still smiling and friendly, wished me well, before she headed back to eat her evening dinner at her Ashram. I then started walking down to Shattuck Avenue to catch the Alameda Country Transit bus that would take me into San Francisco; where I would then walk to the Greyhound bus station and wait there for the late evening bus that would take me down to Los Angeles.,

On The Road In The 1970's: Part 5

After spending the rest of my first day in California exploring the Berkeley campus and Telegraph Avenue, I spent the second day taking from Shattuck Avenue the bus that took you back into San Francisco and headed out to Golden Gate Park in San Francisco for the first time. When I got to Golden Gate Park in the 1970's, there were still a few groups of hippies handing out there on weekdays. But nobody walked over to share a joint with me or seemed interested in approaching strangers, like some hippies of the 1960's had often done. After getting bored with walking and then sitting on the ground in Golden Gate Park for a few hours, I eventually took a trolley to the beach to see the Pacific Ocean. And then, before heading back to Berkeley from the Bay Transit terminal, I went back downtown to explore the area near Fisherman's Wharf and afterwards, like more culturally straight tourists, took a ride on one of the San Francisco cable cars.

Starting to get bored with hanging out around Berkeley's campus by my third day in Berkeley, I decided to check out what the 1970's scene was like near Stanford University's campus in Palo Alto, California. Still being into protest folk songwriting in the 1970's, Palo Alto also interested me because that was where Joan Baez seemed to be living in the 1970's; and I probably subconsciously felt that, maybe if I spontaneously walked around Palo Alto, cosmic forces would cause me to bump into her and, as a result of this chance cosmic encounter, lead her to start singing cover versions of the non-commercial protest folk songs I had written, which her mother had liked.

But when I got to the Palo Alto bus station after taking a bus from Berkeley back into San Francisco, walking to the Greyhound bus station and buying a round trip ticket between SF and Palo Alto, I walked around a bit, couldn't find the way to get to the Stanford University campus from the Palo Alto Greyhound bus station, didn't bump into Joan Baez on the street, and decided I should just get on the next Greyhound bus going back to San Francisco, rather than hang around on the streets of Palo Alto.

The town of Palo Alto in the 1970's didn't seem to have enough of an interesting street scene for me to want to wait another 3 hours for the last night bus that would take me back to San Franciso's Greyhound bus terminal. So I ended up getting back to SF from Palo Alto by returning on an earlier bus. And once back in SF, I walked down Market Street again and into the still busy commuter bus terminal, where I then got on the Alameda County Transit bus that would again take me back over the Oakland-SF bridge and back to Berkeley.

After spending the rest of the week just hanging around the U. of California's campus, walking up and down Telegraph Avenue and Shattuck Avenue and streets like Dwight Way and in and out of bookstores and vinyl record stores a lot, I began to realize that I was not destined that week to then cosmically bump into either any old Movement friends from the 1960's, or any new 1970's Movement freaks who lived in California, on the campus or streets of Berkeley, during this trip to the West Coast.

So, despite my vague hope before I got on the road on the east coast that I would spontaneously stumble into some kind of housing situation in Berkeley that would make it unnecessary to quickly get back east to my Jamaica, Queens basement apartment, I concluded that I would spend most of the rest of my money on a ticket for a Greyhound bus that would leave San Francisco near midnight on Sunday; and then get me into the Los Angeles Greyhound bus terminal early the next morning on Monday. Taking the night bus also meant that I would not have to worry about finding a place to sleep for that night, since I could just try to doze off somewhat during the night, while the bus took the interstate highway southward, for the long drive down to Los Angeles.

(end of part 5)

On The Road In The 1970's:Part 4

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.