Alum Reflects on Life at Berkeley High in the Nineteen Sixties

For those of you accustomed to the geography of Telegraph Avenue, Moe’s Books, crushed between a donut shop and an herbs shop, holds appeal in its many-storied depths. Steve Wasserman, political journalist and Berkeley High alumnus, credits Moe as a teacher integral to his early interest in writing and political activism. He describes the relationship thus: “I showed up at Moe’s home, the cigar-chomping, irascible, acerbic, by turns witty, sometimes taciturn man, who always seemed to reject most of the used books you wanted to sell to him and favored only a few. You could see the crestfallen faces of tenured professors and star graduate students when they attempted to sell their books to Moe, and he would look through them, pluck out two or three gems, and shove the remainder back at them, saying that they weren’t worth his time or anybody else’s… He was the ultimate arbiter of what was good, what was bad, and what was genuinely ugly.”

Moe was an impetus for Wasserman’s early involvement in the political upheaval of the time, beginning with the delivery of the Berkeley Barb, the underground newspaper. “You could declare to Moe that you wanted to sell newspapers and he’d give you a batch of the papers. I graduated from delivering the Berkeley Daily Gazette to the politically more radical and culturally more liberated Berkeley Barb.” Wasserman was very in tune with the what was happening in Berkeley, as he stated, “There was a whole cultural upheaval swirling about us. People were growing their hair long. People were smoking pot. LSD hadn’t yet been banned. In fact I remember taking it in 1966. I was 14. I remember dropping acid one month before it was actually outlawed. Going up to Indian Rock with some friends, and imagining that there was some sort of Yin Yang swirl of clouds over the distant Golden Gate Bridge. But at the same time high school was high school. There were cliques and divisions, and for most people it was a pretty straight experience.”

Not so for Wasserman. “In the Spring of 1969, I had run for student body president, and was elected in a very contentious election. [The contention] had to do with our rather anarchic yippee politics. At once, both aiming to occupy those offices of what was called the BOC [Board of Control] which was the student council, but at the same time poking fun at it, and making something of a mockery of it. To tell you the truth, one of the things we didn’t realize was that by doing so, we had inadvertently offended many of the black students on campus who far from wanting to mock these symbols of power, even though we believed that the power was greatly circumscribed by the rules of the game, they themselves had never actually held those positions in any great number. So to watch, what seemed to them, rather entitled and spoiled white kids making a mockery of the very things they yearned to embrace, how to put it, pissed them off a lot.”

In response to the most critical article titled “The Reign of Steve Wasserman” that appeared in the 1970 yearbook by Merrit Clifton, stating of Steve’s term in presidency, “Steve tried, and failed, partly because he made a few serious mistakes, and partly because circumstance conspired against him. Good intentions alone could not overcome the problems of Berkeley High School.” Steve replied, “Merrit Clifton was a very conservative kid who characterized what we sought to do as a failure at almost every turn. On the other hand, we felt we shook things up and added a little pepper into the pot. Particularly, in the spring of 1969 when People’s Park occurred, and the city was occupied for nearly a month by the National Guard, my friends and I organized what we were pleased to call a ‘Sleep-In’, where several hundred Berkeley High School students refused to leave the campus, and camped out with sleeping bags, proclaiming our fear that the streets were full of military police and national guardsmen, and we did not feel it safe to return to our homes.

“A direct outgrowth of the protest that we organized in solidarity with the People’s Park movement, was the idea to found a radical high school student union. It was also during that summer that we decided to raise money and establish an underground newspaper. A group of about half a dozen to a dozen students got together to do what we could to transform the consciousness of our fellow high school students. We wanted to free ourselves from any administrative control, and we didn’t think the Daily Jacket quite provided that form. The appearance of Packrat [underground newspaper] led to my suspension as well as a couple other people who were suspended for distributing it without authorization on the high school campus. That led to a huge racket, which went to the School Board. Lawyers got into the act, and our rights of free speech were at issue.”
“We did all our typesetting in the Black Panther Party headquarters. They loaned us their typesetting machines on Shattuck Avenue right across the street from the Starry Plough. We used to go up there, and we’d be patted down, and there would be sandbags in the party headquarters, because they feared random attacks by opponents, or worse, police attacks. We were sort of the adopted mascots of a number of Panthers. I never found the Black Panther party to be a racist organization. On the contrary, they always opposed a certain kind of black nationalism in favor of a broader appeal. As I say, one of my closer friends was a guy named Ronnie Stevenson, who would ultimately and unfortunately be accused of the murder of someone who was shot to death outside the Panther Party headquarters one grim night.

Ronnie Stevenson at the age of about 17 or 18 went underground and fled, there was a warrant for his arrest. For years afterward, one would hear rumors. He was in Cuba, he was in Algeria, or he was in some other place in the world. Just before my tenth high school reunion, he resurfaced and it turned out he had not fled to any of those countries, but rather had gone to New Jersey and under an assumed name, was organizing workers in an auto plant. He returned to Berkeley and got himself a National Lawyers Guild lawyer. The charges were ultimately dropped. He went back to school and ultimately went to UC Berkeley, and ended up I believe teaching in the elementary schools in Richmond.”

Looking back, Wasserman states that, “If I have a regret, I regret that the politics of that period seemed to descend into a kind of infantile identity politics. Instead of placing an emphasis on unity, there came to be a rather good test: hyper-emphasis on particular cultural, racial, ethnic, or gender identities. I think this has had a most pernicious effect ultimately and has tended to divide people instead of to unite people. Ultimately the politics of the [19]60’s which I had hoped would flower or bloom into a social movement that would braid together many different strands instead fractured and fragmented into a kaleidoscope of fractious mini-movements each with their own agenda. Each often set one against the other that competed for attention. What began as a hopeful movement to unite people, in the end seemed to coarsen into a kind of caricature of its best ambitions. I regret that.”
The next chapter in Wasserman’s life opened post high school graduation, “I graduated in January 1970, then a month later went off to Cuba to cut sugar cane with the Venceremos brigade, the American blockade against Cuba. I never did consider myself a Communist. I aspired to be a revolutionary that would overturn the political and economic order of the Untied States. I considered myself opposed to the rapaciousness of Capitalism, to the idea of the United States imposing its political order on other countries, and I certainly considered myself someone who wanted to see a more just and equitable distribution of wealth…I came back and to my surprise found that I’d been admitted to Cal.”

Wasserman, now living in New York, never compromised his principles, “I ended up in New York because one day in 1975, Susan Sontag, [one of America’s more compelling intellectual critics] came to my apartment in Berkeley and dedicated one of her books to me, where she wrote ‘Steve’ and drew a big arrow, and then scrawled ‘New York,’ exclamation point. I’ve always had the idea that I wanted to test myself against what I thought was the nerviest, most driven place in America. A place which seemed comprised of intelligence, and rewarded a certain kind of grasping ambition more than any other place in America. I was only interested in testing myself against others of like-minded zeal.”

In conclusion, Wasserman gives a shoutout to certain old teachers who, he says, were “absolutely besotted with excitement and were really engaged. They were able to make texts we were studying come alive. They made it possible to read “Waiting for Godot” by Samuel Beckett, and to make it feel like it was a commentary on the very historical period we were living through. They had a great excitement and lust for life that they were able to communicate to their students.”

Photos:

• Steve Wasserman