Native Daughter in a Strange Land: 1970
I’m experimenting with serializing my new book as I’m writing and revising in the hopes it unsticks me in the process. Here’s the second installment.
Read the Prologue if you missed it.
As soon as it began, 1970 was a bad year for San Francisco Bay Area, but a very busy one for the local television news business, where my Dad was a rising star behind the cameras. My Mom often talked about feeling like a single parent, raising three girls while her husband essentially lived at the station.
The Vietnam War was in its bloodiest period, spreading into Cambodia and Laos, and without a discernible end. The city was still numbly shaking off the hangover of the Summer of Love two and half years earlier, which had alternately thrilled, shaken, inspired, and terrified the city and the nation. When the free love and music died away, the city was left with a complement of lost and drug-addled young people still waiting for a revolution that turned out to be fleeting.
My mother would take my sisters and me to the Children’s Playground in the Panhandle of Golden Gate Park near our rental home. The grass was littered with hypodermic needles, and the homeless people on the swings would pepper her with catcalls and vulgarities as my sisters played on the merry-go-round and I slept in her arms.
In Los Angeles, members of the hippie commune gone wrong known as Manson Family were on trial for their brutal murder spree of the previous year. Altamont, the massive concert dubbed “Woodstock West” held an hour outside San Francisco, had ended in the middle of a set by the Rolling Stones with the shooting death of a young black concert0-goer by members of the Hell’s Angels.
Dreams of free love dissolved and impatience began to reign, particularly among youth who were seeing the promises of change and progress devolve as government and institutions retrenched. Inequality, war, and economic injustice picked at the American psyche. In 1970, the country was on the verge of a full-fledged civil war. Nowhere did that seem more imminent than in the Bay Area.
Alcatraz, the island home of a decommissioned federal prison in the middle of San Francisco Bay, was occupied by dozens of American Indian activists, claiming it as Indian land.
Initially buoyed by sympathetic national media coverage, visits from celebrities including Jane Fonda, Buffy Sainte-Marie and Marlon Brando, some willingness by Nixon’s White House to negotiate, and broad public support, the occupiers held on, determined to outlast all of the efforts to dislodge them. But soon the occupation was beset by internal power struggles and a federal blockade cutting off supplies, electricity, and fresh water. It would finally end after 19 months when the last 15 occupiers were forcibly removed by a huge contingent of armed federal agents.
The city was just more than a year into the terrifying campaign of the Zodiac Killer, who had murdered five people in the Bay Area. Tensions were especially high in San Francisco since the killer’s most recent strike, in October 1969, was the first (and eventually only) known Zodiac murder inside city limits — the execution-style murder of cab driver Paul Stine in Presidio Heights. But the Zodiac continued to toy with police and media by sending anonymous letters to newspapers, including peculiar coded messages, daring law enforcement to stop him. Three days after I was born, he reportedly abducted a pregnant young mother outside of Modesto, CA. Unlike most of his victims, she escaped.
The Black Panther Party, based in Oakland, was under constant siege: Bobby Seale and Huey Newton were in prison, Fred Hampton had been murdered by Chicago police, and the FBI’s COINTELPRO was sowing dissent and distrust in the ranks. George Jackson and his “Soledad Brothers” were on trial in Marin County for the murder of a white prison guard — killed in retaliation, it was presumed, for the prison-yard shooting of black inmates who were actively petitioning the federal government to expose the prison’s racial abuses. In Oakland, the BPP ambushed police officers with fragmentation bombs. Eldridge Cleaver, thrown out of the BPP for criticizing it as too mild in its methods, founded the more militant splinter group called the Black Liberation Army.
At San Francisco State University, the Black Student Union had been agitating and striking for a full two years to protest racist admissions policies, the lack of a black studies program, and college administration’s active cooperation with the ROTC and selective service during the Vietnam War.
Meanwhile, the trial of the Chicago 8 was underway, holding the country’s rapt attention. Including Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Tom Hayden, and Bobby Seale, the Chicago 8 were tried for conspiracy and inciting riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. In Berkeley, of course, the atmosphere was righteous outrage. On February 16, 1970, a crowd of several hundred gathered to protest in support of the Chicago 8. The protest devolved into a riot in which 100 businesses were vandalized.
Sometime the same day, a homemade bomb packed with heavy industrial staples was placed on the windowsill at the Park Station of the San Francisco Police Department. Among the officers on duty that evening was Sgt. Brian McDonnell — a 20-year veteran of the SFPD and father of three. When the bomb exploded, shrapnel severed McDonnell’s jugular vein and a staple lodged in his brain. McDonnell died two days later; nine other officers were wounded. Suspicion immediately fell on the Panthers and the Black Liberation Army. But because San Francisco also had been such a locus for the antiwar movement in the preceding years, the anti-war sabotage group known as the Weather Underground — which had grown as a more militant splinter group from the Students for a Democratic Society — was also under suspicion. The FBI had its eyes trained on the City by the Bay.
It isn’t hard to understand why my mother wanted out. That summer, we packed up the olive-green Ford Torino station wagon and lit out for the north — Marin County, to be exact.
Next: Angela Davis, Janis Joplin, The Grateful Dead, and a budding modeling career?
