Fifty Years
This fiftieth anniversary of the JFK assassination has special meaning for me. It was a gloomy Friday afternoon on November 22, 1963. It was my last day at my junior high school in Barrington, NJ. My parents had sold the house where I grew up for $13,500. My father Thomas F. Campbell, Sr. had built it himself. In the next week we would be driving across the country to live in San Diego where my father had dreams of better employment as a construction worker. The warm, sunny climate of San Diego meant for him more days of work, uninterrupted by bad weather. For me, it meant realizing my dream of visiting Disneyland.
Southern California and Disneyland were on my mind as I went to my last class of the day, but that changed when I walked into the classroom and heard that the President might have been been shot. There was much confusion over what had really happened. Someone in the office switched on the intercom system. Woodland Junior High was a fairly new building when I attended and featured an intercom with speakers in every classroom. We all fell into a hush as news from CBS radio came over the speaker. It was not long before we heard Walter Cronkite confirm our worst fears that President Kennedy was dead. We were so stunned we didn’t know what to say, but I had to go through the process of finishing that last day of school by turning in my textbooks and picking up the paperwork that would get me enrolled in a new school on the other side of the country.
I remember the following weekend as being so surreal. The weather was cold and cloudy with periods of rain. If we turned on the radio, we would hear only very solemn classical music. On television, there was nonstop news coverage of the event. These were the background sounds as my family packed and prepared for our move. The television was on that Sunday when Jack Ruby shot Lee Oswald. I would like to say I was among the people who saw this live event, but my attention was focused on my packing. By the time I was able to look at the screen, Ruby was already being taken away and Oswald was being carried to an ambulance. Even watching a replay, I could not see a gun or anyone being shot.
The trip took about a week. My parents decided that they would drive the family station wagon down the coast through the deep south and then west to San Diego. Their reason for taking this route was to avoid possible bad weather in the midwest. They had hired a professional moving company to take our furniture to California. We drove all day and stayed at motels at night. It was my first time outside of the northeast and my first venture into the segregated south. That experience further awakened my conscience to the cause of civil rights, especially seeing the separate restrooms for blacks and whites. Traveling through the south, I felt like I was in a different country. This can’t be my United States, I thought to myself. Sadly, it was.
I experienced my first ferry ride when we got the Chesapeake Bay. A bridge and tunnel system was under construction, but was not ready when we got there to cross. As we waited for our ferry, my older brother Joe bought a copy of his favorite science magazine. I was excited that the issue had a picture of Walt Disney on the cover. Inside that issue, we saw a disturbing report that Southern California was way overdue for a major earthquake along the San Andreas fault. What was I getting myself into? I thought to myself. Would I even survive long enough to get to Disneyland? Oh, well. Too late to turn back now.
Thanksgiving was celebrated on the road. We had turkey dinner at a restaurant near our motel. The next day was my father’s birthday. For us, it was just another driving day. I don’t remember any special celebration. It was now one week after the assassination.
Turning west in the northern part of Florida, we spent a night in Tallahassee. After driving through Alabama and Mississippi, our next major stop was New Orleans. The motel where we stayed was in an industrial part of town. I just remember seeing railroad yards and freight trains. It didn’t look like the French Quarter. My parents were not impressed with New Orleans either.
Then we entered Texas where we would spend the next two days. By this time, we ended up on Route 80 that would take us all the way to the Pacific Coast. I did not know that Route 80 would take us right through Dallas. I am not sure my parents knew either. At least they did not share that with their four children. When we got to Dallas, I asked them if we could find the place Kennedy was shot, but they refused, saying that we needed to keep driving. As it turned out, we didn’t need to find Dealey Plaza. It found us.
Suddenly discovering we were traveling on the same street that Kennedy’s motorcade traveled less that two weeks before, we begged our parents to stop. They refused and kept on driving. I held my Brownie camera to the side window and took a photo of the grassy knoll that was still covered by wreaths. Of course, the picture that developed was so blurry that I eventually threw it away.
It was early December when we arrived in San Diego. It was nothing like New Jersey. It was more like a tropical island. There was a strong Hawaiian influence in the architecture, and it was the first time that I saw surfers. The regional shopping mall in Mission Valley was not enclosed like the ones I knew in New Jersey. People strolled along the open walkways and plazas in their shirtsleeves. It was December. I knew that a San Diego Christmas would be radically different from the ones I had experienced before.
When my parents bought a house in Pacific Beach, they paid $19,000. They were shocked to find real estate more expensive than South Jersey. My mother was pregnant during our trip west. She gave birth to my younger brother John in February at the old Scripps Hospital in La Jolla. Her obstetrician was a man name Graves who did not drive a car, but traveled everywhere by bicycle. Around this time, Beatlemania was starting to take over the radio airwaves. The Kennedy assassination was beginning to fade in our memories, and, yes, I eventually got that trip to Disneyland.
Bob Filner’s resignation speech
As a former San Diegan, I have been following the Bob Filner story with special interest. I did get to meet and work with Bob Filner in 1976. I was working on Tom Hayden’s campaign for U.S. Senate. Filner was also involved in that campaign. Hayden would lose to the incumbent John Tunney in the primary, and Tunney would then lose to S.I. Hayakawa in in the general election. After his loss, Hayden and his then wife Jane Fonda tried to start a grassroots political movement they called the Campaign for Economic Democracy. Filner announced plans to run for San Diego school board.
When I moved to Berkeley in 1980, I did not follow San Diego politics as closely. Through the years, I discovered that Filner was able to move from the school board to the city council, and then to a seat in congress. When I learned he was running for mayor of the city, I realized how far San Diego had come to actually consider a progressive for mayor. I was also pleased that Filner’s Republican opponent is a gay man. This was definitely not the same city I left in 1980. I was happy to hear he won the election.
Then the news came out about Filner’s treatment of women, and I realized how much I did not know about this man who I worked with in progressive politics in 1976. It became clear to me that Filner needed to resign. I found myself on the same side as those who have organized to recall him.
Listening to Filner’s resignation speech, I continue to be perplexed by this complicated man, feeling both sorrow and anger for what he has done to San Diego. He refuses to accept full responsibility for his actions. As soon as he made apologies to those he has hurt, his speech turned into an attack on his political opponents. He characterized the campaign against him a “lynch mob.” He pleaded he was being denied “due process” in fighting charges that have not been proven in court.
We certainly don’t want to deny Bob Filner his right to a fair trial on sexual harassment charges or other possible charges of misspending public money. However, no one was the right to hold public office. Being mayor of San Diego or any other city is not a right; it is a privilege. When an office holder loses the trust of the people he represents, they have the right to remove him from office. He is incapable of doing the job they elected him to do.
Bob Filner ended his resignation speech by talking about his vision for the future of San Diego and his accomplishments toward those goals. He spoke of a walkable, bikeable city that could grow economically while still protecting the climate. He spoke for a more inclusive city that brings more minorities into power. That is the Bob Filner we wanted to be mayor of a major city.
When I met Bob Filner in 1976, San Diego was a textbook case for urban sprawl. Its inferior bus system was further decimated by Proposition 13 in 1978. The area was totally dependent on cars and freeways for transportation, as housing developments sprouted up miles from civic center. I would like to see San Diego live up to the dream Filner expressed in his speech, including the enactment of a climate protection plan. A new mayor could realize that dream.
It is interesting that Filner concluded his speech with a quote from Ted Kennedy when he conceded to Jimmy Carter in 1980. Kennedy remained committed to the long term goals of success despite the short term setback of a lost election. But Kennedy, like Filner, had his own personal demons. Toward the end of his life, Kennedy was able to conquer those demons. Redemption is possible for Bob Filner, too, but he needs to start taking full responsibility for his actions and stop looking for others to blame.
Tweet for the #Climate
This past spring I wrote an article for my Quaker Meeting’s newsletter. In it, I affirm my commitment to tweet at least once per day on climate change. I started on Earth Day and will continue until Election Day in November. So far, I have been able to live up to that commitment, though on some days I have counted retweets. If you believe that climate change is a major issue in this election and that candidates need to address climate and energy issues, I invite you to use your tweeting power to get the word out.
My article in the May 2012 edition of the Strawberry Creek Monthly Meeting newsletter:
Tweet for the Climate
Over the weekend of Earth Day, I was feeling frustrated about the coming election. The two parties have chosen their nominees for the fall, and the serious campaigning for the November election has begun. Unfortunately, what we have been hearing and seeing from those parties is anything but serious. The media has focused on back and forth arguments over which candidate takes better care of dogs or if raising children qualifies as a job. I felt like I was stuck in that old Monty Python “argument” sketch. It appears that everyone is avoiding the issue which most scientists agree is the biggest environmental challenge we face today–climate change. I began to wonder what I could do get our national conversation back to this issue which is being ignored. I tweeted the following that weekend: “Tired of seeing 2012 election campaign going to the dogs. For #Earth Day, I want to see candidates address #climate change & reducing GHGs.” I got some nice responses on Twitter and Facebook, as my tweets also update my Facebook status.
Then I had an idea. What if I tweeted about climate change every day between Earth Day and Election Day? It is not much, but it is something. And doing something is better than doing nothing. Sending one tweet per day is not a difficult commitment to make. It is probably the easiest thing I could do.
There is, of course, a lot more we can do in our personal lives. The Dime-a-Gallon Dream Fund is one way that we become aware of our own behaviors and work to reduce our dependence on fossil fuel. Yet, we know there need to be changes on a national and global scale. It is easy to feel overwhelmed over what needs to be done. We can’t do everything, but we can do something. And doing something is better than doing nothing. If you have a Twitter account, I invite you to take a few minutes to send one tweet each day for the #climate. I use the hashtag with climate so that others using that as a search term will be able to read my tweets. The idea is to bring attention to this environmental challenge. This can be my cyber witness for the environment.
Send one tweet per day for the climate. Let our leaders know you will not stay silent. If you want to read my tweets, I am @tomyamaguchi on Twitter.
For what it’s worth-writing to the President
Yes, I know it is very doubtful that President Obama reads the emails that we send. Even if it gets read by some lonely volunteer, I guess that is something. It did feel good to take a few moments last weekend to write how I felt about his position on marriage equality, as well as put it in context with an issue which has even more weight for me-climate change.
My email to President Obama:
It has been several days now since you announced your personal feelings about marriage equality, and I wanted to be among those to thank you for your consideration of this issue. Even though I am gay, I can understand the challenges that many have over the acceptance of marriage for gays and lesbians. After considering the arguments, I created a blog post on how I evolved on the issue.
https://tomyamaguchi.wordpress.com/2009/09/03/weighing-marriage-equality/
As proud as I am that the President of the United States supports full marriage rights for same sex couples, the reality is that the issue continues to lose at the ballot box. Your announcement came after the big loss in North Carolina. So I have no illusions that this issue will be resolved soon.
Now, here is a bigger reality check. The planet is warming due to human activity. Many people do not understand how serious this is or are in denial that this is even a problem. Even though the civil rights of LGBT people are very important to me, the future of our planet and our climate is a more pressing concern. That is why I am using my Twitter account (@tomyamaguchi) to send a tweet a day for the climate. I started on Earth Day and will continue to Election Day. I know you want to address climate change in the 2012 campaign. I want every candidate for every public office in the country to address this issue. It is too important to ignore. We need to know where our candidates stand on climate change to be able to cast an informed vote.
Thank you for your support for LGBT equality and for all the work you have done. May we be able to thank ourselves in the next few years for providing a livable planet to our children and grandchildren.
Man up! #fail
Man up! #fail
Why we may have women’s lib and the LGBT rights movement to thank for bringing mental illness out of the closet
In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, “Aubrey Huff opens up about his anxiety attacks,” the Giants baseball player revealed the events that led him to seek professional help after experiencing extreme anxiety and panic attacks. For those of us who have experienced similar attacks, even if in a more milder form, the symptoms are the same; shortness of breath and the fear that one is having a heart attack. We can all applaud Aubrey Huff for his willingness to discuss his illness publicly. I believe that Mr. Huff and the rest of us can thank both the feminist and LGBT rights movement for his courage to seek treatment and talk about it in a major newspaper.
Once upon a time, men were expected to suffer mental illness in silence. They were told to “man up” and “take take it like a man.” As Mr. Huff says in the interview, “I was always taught that people who had anxiety issues were just weak-minded people.” Going public with his decision to seek treatment took a lot of courage. Fortunately, Mr. Huff has grown up in a post-Stonewall world. Those of us who came of age before Stonewall remember how the rigid assignment of gender roles imprisoned women and men in a world of unrealistic expectations. Men were expected to be strong, confident, and protective of women. Women were considered weak: emotional, fragile, and dependent on men. That world started to crack with the rise of feminism in the sixties. The gay rights movement, that led to the inclusive LGBT community, was the next logical step after women’s liberation.
Remnants of pre-Stonewall thinking were still caught in Aubrey Huff’s head when he suffered his first panic attack. Mental illness can’t be a real illness. It is all in your mind, in a world of feelings. If you can’t control what is in your mind or control your feelings, you become feminized, and you are no longer a real man. Fortunately, Mr. Huff was able to break out of that outmoded thinking by coming out of the closet of anxiety and seeking the help he needed.
“I almost wish I had broken my leg than had that,” said Mr. Huff. In a world where men are only allowed to feel pain for obvious, physical injury, we can understand this wish. “I can control that,” he added. “I know what’s happening. This, I didn’t know what was happening. You can’t control it. It’s scary.” Men must always be in control in this fantasy, pre-Stonewall world.
Now, as we learn more about the brain and psychology, we know that mental illness is a real, physical illness. Scientists are discovering the biological origins to diseases of the mind. Failure to treat these illnesses can lead to death. Untreated PTSD has led many of our veterans to commit suicide. Like the male athlete, the male soldier believes he is expected to just “man up” and take care of himself.
For a man, the real fear that exists with homophobia is that he is not man enough. Even if he is not sexually attracted to other men, he fears his own vulnerability and weakness. Homophobic men bash homosexual men because the gay man represents what the homophobic man fears in himself. The homophobic man carries the irrational fear that he may become gay simply because his masculine self identity falls short of an unobtainable ideal.
LGBT people have made tremendous gains in the past few decades, but we still have more work to do. There are those, such as the pastor Sean Harris, who still cling to the values of a pre-Stonewall world. Pastor Harris was recorded telling his congregation in a North Carolina Baptist Church that fathers should “crack” their sons’ limp wrists. The audience responded with cheers and laughter as he urged fathers to punch their boys to ensure they would start acting like men. Although Pastor Harris apologized for his “poor choice of words” that advocated violence against LGBT people, his beliefs remain unchanged. Pastor Harris believes that God created men to be men and to act as men and for women to act and be as women. There is no room for transgender people in that view. Just be what God made you, even if that concept of male and female has no connection to reality. It is not surprising that he focused much of his outrage on the relationship of fathers and sons, advancing the discredited belief that fathers are responsible for making their sons turn into homosexuals. Even the notion that boys who exhibit feminine behavior will always grow up gay is false. Many heterosexual men were once beaten up and bullied when they were boys simply because they acted like sissies. I know a few of such men, myself.
Heterosexual men can thank both women and gay men for their own liberation. They have been liberated to be able to seek treatment for mental illness without fear of stigma. To Aubrey Huff and his family, best wishes for a full and complete recovery. May you be able to truly say in the future, “it gets better.”
Lyrics to Tattoo by Pete Townshend:
Me and my brother
Were talking to each other
‘Bout what makes a man a man
Was it brain or brawn
Or the month you were born
We just couldn’t understand.
Our old man didn’t like our appearance
He said that only women wear long hair.
So me and my brother borrowed money from mother
We knew what we had to do
We went downstairs past the barber and gymnasium
And got our arms tattooed.
Welcome to my life tattoo
I’m a man now, thanks to you
I expect that I’ll regret you
But the skin-graft man won’t get you
You’ll be there till I die
Tattoo
Now I’m older
I’m tattooed all over
My wife is tattooed too
A-roody-to-to
Rooty-tooty-to-to
Rooty-tooty-to, tattoo too
To you
It’s the end of the year as we know it (and I feel fine).
It has been six months since I have posted to this blog. My last blog posts were at the time of my housemate Bob Berry’s death. Poor Bob missed the End of the World–twice. The second was actually a rescheduling of the first that was supposed to happen on May 21. That one on October 21 turned out to be a dud, as well. Maybe the Mayans can pull off a better show in 2012.
Bob would have also enjoyed the political theater of Occupy Wall Street and the various Occupy camps that sprang up locally. He was a big fan of Adbusters, the organizing force behind OWS. I know he would have spent a fair amount of time at the camps.
I enjoyed how OWS took advantage of the new media: Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Ustream. For all the mistakes OWS has made, we have to give them credit for getting the attention of the mainstream media and redirecting the national dialogue to the inequality of our economic system. I hope this leads to something positive in 2012.
So here is my Tech Year in Review: how I use the various social networks.
Thanks to Twitter, my WordPress blog and Tripod website have not been totally quiet. My tweets are displayed on those pages, as well as on my Facebook page. I have noticed that those posts to Facebook from Twitter get more responses on Facebook than on Twitter. To me, it indicates that Facebook is the more social of the two. I do spend more time on Twitter, however, using it mostly as a news source. When I see something that interests me, I like sharing it with others by retweeting.
I am also slowly warming up to Google Plus. I don’t share much there since there are not enough people I know on G+ to share it with. Most of the people I know are on Facebook. Occasionally someone asks me to network with them on LinkedIn. I approve the request if I know them. Otherwise, I am never on LinkedIn. Same with MySpace which I joined in 2006. I never got into it. Facebook was the first social networking site I actually found useful. Twitter was the second.
More disappointments in 2011:
For awhile I had my hopes up for a high speed train linking the Bay Area and Southern California. Those hopes are rapidly fading. Maybe someday, people will realize it is worth the investment to get people out of cars and airplanes for distances of 500 miles or less. Unfortunately, it won’t be in 2012.
The Fukushima Daiichi meltdown frightened people away from nuclear power again. The truth is that the real disaster was the tsunami. The only workers that died at the plant had drowned, except for one who died of a heart attack. The radiation exposure to people outside the plant was minor. The risks from nuclear power continue to be quite small compared to the risks from climate change. Maybe we will be able to generate enough power from wind and solar so that we won’t need nuclear power, but it has to be affordable. So called renewables are still too expensive for the poorest people of the world.
On the bright side, the bicycling community continues to grow and get stronger. A new bike crossing in South Berkeley makes it easier to ride into Emeryville and West Oakland. I am happy to be healthy enough to continue to enjoy the rides.
So goodbye 2011. Goodbye Steve Jobs. Goodbye R.E.M. Goodbye Bob, Betty, Bick, Rich, Sandra, and all the other folks who were bright lights in my life who are gone now.
Hello 2012 and the Mayans. See you on 12-21-12.
Bob Berry obituary in Berkeley Daily Planet
Gar Smith, a friend of Bob Berry, wrote an obituary that was published in the Berkeley Daily Planet on June 15. I did not get to read it before it was published. It is a very lovely tribute, but I should correct his comment about Bob’s library. He wrote, “Bob’s friends are now hoping to find a new home for this vast collection, many of which are related to conspiracy research. Suggestions may be forwarded to:https://tomyamaguchi.wordpress.com.” I did write in my announcement of Bob’s death that Bob was leaving many books that would need new homes. I have learned that, as Bob did not leave a current will, we will need to go through probate before disposing of any property. This includes all of his books. We are currently cataloging his collection. I expect we will be keeping them for awhile.
For Bob Berry’s memorial, delivered 6-10-2011
I would like to read a quote from one of Bob’s favorite books, Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle. Vonnegut, in the role of a spiritual leader named Bokonon, wrote “ Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.”
My travels with Bob started with a conversation about bicycles. When I met Bob at a party in San Diego we shared our bicycle commute stories. My story was of an 19 mile uphill ride from the beach community of Ocean Beach where I then lived to Kearny Mesa in order to start work at 6:00 am. Bob, a former Ocean Beach resident countered with his own Berkeley to San Francisco commute. Bob was then working as a loader for a small, overnight, freight airline called Zoom Zoom. Bob referred to Zoom Zoom as a hippy Marxist airline, though he wasn’t sure which Marxist faction described the operation, Groucho or Harpo. Each afternoon, Bob rode on BART with his bike from Berkeley to Daly City Station, the terminus of the BART system in San Francisco at the time. Then he rode to SFO to start his job on the graveyard shift. All night, Bob would load and unload Zoom Zoom’s fleet of DC3s that connected to various parts of the west coast. At dawn, he would catch the final flight, with his bicycle on board, from SFO to Oakland Airport. From there, he would ride to BART’s Coliseum Station. If he made it there before 6:30 am, he would take the train back to Berkeley. If he arrived after that time, he would not be able to bring his bike on board, since bicycle access was restricted during commute hours. That meant he had to pedal back home from East Oakland, almost 11 miles. This daily routine continued until the Marxist airline was, at least according to Bob, put out of business by the CIA. But that’s another story.
The dance continued when my then wife Melissa, our pre-school age daughter Dharma, and I relocated from Southern California to live with Bob in Berkeley. It stretched on for three decades. It included buying and sharing a house in West Berkeley, raising Bob and Melissa’s daughter Avila, numerous bicycle rides, weekend long Grateful Dead concerts, anti-war demonstrations, and flea market excursions to find books on obscure history and conspiracy theories. It has been a long, strange trip.
I would like to finish with one of my favorite recent quotes. It is from Joan Rivers who said, “Just laugh at everything. If you can laugh at it, you can live with it.” That describes how Bob dealt with all the insanity of the world. He laughed at it all, taking nothing or anyone seriously, including himself. After reading all those books on conspiracy theories, he finally had the answer. “It is all one big conspiracy,” Bob said, “to keep me entertained.”
Bob, the laughter we shared will live in my heart until I die. So thanks for the dancing lessons. You were a good dancing partner.
Blessed be.
AIDS at 30, some personal thoughts
Today is being remembered as the 30th anniversary of the start of the AIDS epidemic. June 5, 1981 was the day the Los Angeles Times reported on the mysterious deaths of gay men by the Center for Disease Control. I seemed to have missed seeing that article though I was a regular reader of the LA Times then. Being in a house of news junkies, 5 daily papers usually ended up at our house every day. It was actually an article in the New York Times that caught my attention. I do not remember the date, but I know it was not long after I moved into my West Berkeley house on June 24 of that year. I was regularly riding my bike to a job I had in Point Richmond and stopped every morning at a newspaper rack on San Pablo Avenue in Albany (that’s Albany, CA) to pick up the national edition of the New York Times. Then I would browse it a bit when I got to work and read it more thoroughly during the morning break.
I was in the closet then and was debating coming out. We had just moved to the Bay Area, and I saw attitudes toward gay people beginning to change. I had a wife and young daughter and did not want to hurt or abandon them. Then I saw the article about a mysterious gay cancer and wondered if living openly as a gay man was such a good idea. As the weeks and months past, I read more stories and became more frightened. I was frightened enough to stay in the closet for the next decade. Keep in mind that how the disease was spread among gay men remained a mystery for several years. No one knew how easy it was to transmit. Staying closeted for me meant staying alive.
The first AIDS death of someone I knew was a neighbor who had worked as a nurse. I am sad to say I did not know him well. Years later, a former housemate died of AIDS. She had serious substance abuse problems, including severe alcoholism. When I started attending New College in 1991, one of my classmates was in the last stages of the disease. I was able to get know him in the last few months of his life. He was one of the founders of the Radical Faeries. When he died, there was a lovely memorial at his flat in the Haight where his ashes were passed around for everyone to hold.
The year before I returned to college was the year I finally had the courage to come out as a gay man. Though I regret my decision to not come out earlier, I have had no regrets since then. In this month of Pride, 2011, it is good to reflect on how far we have come. AIDS still exists, but it is no longer the death sentence it was 30 years ago. It is 100% preventable and eventually will be curable. Of equal importance is the change in social attitudes toward gay people. Both public figures and everyday people are coming out with increasing frequency. Being gay is no longer controversial. Same sex marriage is slowly becoming legal, state by state. What a joy to see this happen in my lifetime.
A Rainy Day in Berkeley
Rain in June is a rare event in the Bay Area. This has been a good opportunity to sit down and catch up with writing projects I had previously promised to myself and others. One is a statement I plan to read at the memorial for my deceased housemate Bob Berry this coming Friday. I will print that here later. I am reminded of some rainy days past.
In January of 1980, Melissa, my wife at the time, and I were in the process of making the final decision to relocate to the Bay Area. We decided to take a week’s vacation to stay with Bob in his South Berkeley basement flat. I had just finished my first full-time political job.
The previous summer, I quit a job at a contact lens factory and went to work for Bill Press. Press had left his job for Governor Jerry Brown and was wanted to qualify a ballot initiative to create a tax on the profits of oil companies. I was drawn to the initiative campaign because the money was intended to fund public transportation and alternative fuels. I was sick of seeing support for buses dwindle in San Diego, especially after the passage of Proposition 13. I wanted to live without a car, which was I found to be a heavy financial burden with my minimum wage factory job. I was happy that I was a able to ride a bike to work every day because no bus could get me there that early in the morning.
Ironically, the job of gathering voter signatures all across Southern California forced me to drive hundreds of miles each week. The job took longer than expected, as well. We stood out in front of shopping centers over Thanksgiving and then the busy Christmas shopping season. We finally finished after New Year’s, and I was exhausted. I needed a vacation and a chance to get away from the Southland.
Bob said we could sleep on his floor for a week. He knew we were seriously considering a permanent move. When we got there, I planned to just park my truck to walk and ride the bus the rest of the week. However, there was one damper to our vacation I did not take into consideration. January is the start of the rainy season, and the Bay Area gets a lot more rain than San Diego. It was raining when we got there, so we decided to wait to go out until the weather cleared up. We sat around, listened to KSAN, and read Bob’s books while he was at work. After a few days, we realized the weather was not going to clear up. We were starting to get cabin fever.
Our daughter was four years old, so we decided to take her to the San Francisco Zoo. We stopped in Chinatown and bought umbrellas that were colorfully painted and made of bamboo. We took the streetcar to the zoo where we walked all day in the pouring rain. I remember having a good time, although I learned something about the lacquer on those umbrellas we bought in Chinatown. When they get wet, the umbrellas have a strange and unpleasant chemical odor. They don’t last very long either.
It rained the entire week, but I had already decided before we left that we would be returning to Berkeley to stay. We loaded up all our possessions in our Datsun pickup and completed the move in one day. That was February 29, Leap Day, 1980.
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