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Chapter One
Walkout!
Call it peace or call it treason, call it love or call it reason, but I ain’t a marchin’ anymore.
—Phil Ochs
On Friday, March 1, 1968, I turned on my twelve-inch black-and-white Sony TV to the evening news as I prepared dinner for my roommate, Jim Miller, and myself in the cramped kitchen of our apartment at 1582 Munson Street. The apartment was located across from Occidental College, a small liberal arts institution we both attended in the Los Angeles suburb of Eagle Rock.
As I went about preparing the hamburger-rice hash that had become a staple of our student diet, the lead story froze me in place. Several hundred Mexican-American students had walked out of a high school on the Eastside. What captivated my attention was not only the fact that it was Mexican-American students that had walked out—a first in Los Angeles history—but that the school in the news footage was none other than my alma mater, Woodrow Wilson High.
Immediately after the news report, still clutching at the pan of hamburger-rice hash, I called my sister, Olinda, at our family home in the Los Angeles neighborhood of El Sereno. A junior at Woodrow Wilson High, she filled me in on what had happened. The school principal, Donald Skinner, had decided to cancel the production of a school play already in rehearsal. Skinner thought the play, Barefoot in the Park, was too risqué for the Mexican-American parents who would come to see it. Student leaders at Wilson considered his actions unfair and, that morning, several hundred students walked out. My sister, Olinda, was among them.
“Students were just fed up with school,” she told me. “And when someone started shouting ‘walkout!’ we all just went out.” The following Monday, there were more Mexican-American student walkouts. In the week that followed, more than 4,000 high school students walked out of the four predominantly Mexican-American high schools in East Los Angeles—Garfield, Roosevelt, Lincoln, and Wilson. At Garfield and Roosevelt, students were beaten by police and arrested. Citywide, sympathy walkouts by Mexican Americans at other schools reached a total of 15,000 students. What my sister did not know at the time was that the Wilson walkout, though spontaneous, was part of a larger civic protest that had been in the offing for months and that had been planned to coincide at all four Eastside high schools in late March.
At the root of these walkouts were the deplorable conditions in the four predominantly Mexican-American high schools of the East-side. Student leaders from the four schools had met for several months and had concluded that the only way to bring public attention to their plight was to coordinate a massive walkout of all the schools on the same day. The cancellation of the Wilson High School play provoked walkout leaders at Wilson to jump the gun. But the other schools quickly followed suit. Olinda told me of a community meeting called by parents and students to debate the walkout issue and the “21 Demands” that the student leaders had drafted. I surprised myself by telling her I would try to attend.
Flower Power and Vietnam
At the time, my mind-set could not have been further from the walkouts being reported on the evening news. I was in my senior year in college, majoring in philosophy, minoring in religion. My greatest concern at that moment was the completion of a term paper on the British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. I was also spending much of my time with my future wife, Gayla Beauchamp.
Like many of our generation, in 1968, Gayla and I dabbled in the “flower power” counterculture of the time. The summer before, we had explored San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district, where we enjoyed foreign movies, bookstores, and Bohemian cafes. The sounds of Jefferson Airplane, the Doors, The Lovin’ Spoonful, the Beatles, Ian and Sylvia, and Joan Baez filled our ears, and flower shirts, jeans, and sandals filled our closets. I painted large oil canvasses depicting other-worldly, phantasmagoric scenes when I wasn’t exploring the works of Sartre, Kafka, and Gertrude Stein.
Gayla was petite, alluring, and beautiful, with straight hair that descended halfway down her back. She made sand candles and experimented with silk-screen posters in the style of Sister Corita Kent. During daylight hours, we took long strolls and speculated about the future. At night we studied and occasionally spoke at length about the recent trauma in her life, the suicide of her father a year earlier.
Hanging over this otherwise untroubled student lifestyle was a rumbling thunderhead—the military draft for the war in Vietnam.
During the first three and a half years at Occidental College, the loss of my student deferment seemed to be an interminable distance away. As graduation neared, however, the conflict snowballed. What had once been just a vague possibility for me began to take on a horrifying tangibility too insidious to ignore.
Helping to bring the issue into high relief were the regular letters I received from my close high school friend Dan Rubin. Tall, curly-haired with a perennial smirk on his face, Dan was attending Reed College in Portland, Oregon, and had become actively involved in the anti-draft movement there. Dan’s opinions were particularly important to me since we had been fast friends throughout high school and college and had, over the years, helped to shape one another’s sensibilities.
Recently, he had written that the impending loss of his student deferment had impelled him to petition his draft board for exemption from the Vietnam War as a conscientious objector. To be reclassified as a conscientious objector to war, you had to convince your draft board that you held deep religious beliefs that prevented you from participating. Because so many young men were applying for this exemption, however, obtaining it was a rarity. The determination was made by the local draft board, and many draft boards had decided out of hand not to grant C.O. status at all. Uncertain as to the outcome of his petition, Dan was seriously considering the other option that existed for our generation of anti-war American youth: moving to Canada to avoid the draft.
Dan was following through on a mutual understanding that the two of us would leave the United States and move to Canada rather than fight in a senseless, immoral war. We knew one could cross the border as a tourist and then request immigrant status. Dan was already involved as a volunteer on the Portland leg of an “underground railroad” that moved American youth through California, Oregon, and Washington in a series of safe-houses leading to Canada. Escape was the easy part. It was the aftermath upon which Dan focused most in his letters: Once in Canada, could we enroll in graduate school? What kind of jobs might we find? What was our risk of arrest if we returned to the States? Was our possible expatriation to be as final and definitive as it seemed? The gloom of our uncertain futures weighed heavily upon us.
Another person with whom I discussed the war and resistance to the draft, was my roommate, who was also considering applying for conscientious objector status. In Jim Miller’s case, however, the decision-making was doubly hard because his father was a retired army colonel, a career man, who expected his son to be patriotic and do his duty for his country. While we both agreed that we would resist the draft, Jim didn’t feel that Canada was an option for him. He felt that the war was morally wrong. If he was denied C.O. status, he intended to fight the war effort by going to jail rather than flee to Canada. “I feel like history is running up on us,” he told me in his typically poetic fashion, “and it’s going to leave us bloody and fallen to the ground.”
All of this prodded me into working on a first draft of my conscientious objector argument. With only a few months to go before graduation, and already having received notice to appear for my pre-induction physical at the end of April, my stomach became increasingly knotted with anxiety.
The Shaping of Dissident Ideas
My opposition to the war was nothing new. I had first voiced my opposition to the war in high school when, along with Dan Rubin and another friend, Chuck Villalobos, we had articulated our views about the futility of war. At this time, in the early 1960s, we spoke of war in the abstract—this was before Vietnam had become a household name.
As three young minds coming to terms with the world about us, we spent many an afternoon debating war and the issues of justice, equality, and human progress raised by the emergent civil rights movement. It was an explosive time, as television images of police dogs attacking civil rights demonstrators in the South demonstrated in graphic detail. Like so many others our age, we were in a time of intellectual growth and philosophic questioning.
For me, personally, it was also a time for challenging beliefs and precepts that had been instilled in me as a child. I had begun to see many of these notions as limited, flawed, or, in some cases, completely ludicrous.
I read voraciously, particularly on topics related to history, politics, philosophy, science, and the civil rights movement. Although I was neither intellectually nor emotionally prepared to discard the religious beliefs at the core of my being, my readings raised questions about these convictions, and I anxiously sought answers. I battled with myself on issues that troubled me deeply but which I did not discuss with anyone.
The bulk of these questions concerned the existence of God. If God existed and was, by all accounts, a good and loving God, why then was there injustice and poverty in the world? The arguments posed at the Emmanuel Baptist Church, the Spanish-language church my family attended, was that the injustice we saw in the world had a purpose that only God understood. This rang hollow to me. I saw reports on the evening news of a civil rights movement that sought to free Negroes from years of discrimination. If I were a true Christian, shouldn’t I be part of that struggle? And if this was the role of a true Christian, then why were so many Christians I saw at church apparently oblivious to the civil rights movement?
These were questions that I could not properly raise in the traditional environment of my home. As luck would have it, however, my intellectual and philosophic musings found another outlet: in the home of my best friend, Dan Rubin.
Dan’s parents, Sam and Adele, had come to Los Angeles from Chicago in the early 1950s. Sam was an accomplished artist with a rebellious spirit and a caustic wit. His independence melded with innovative artistic techniques to produce highly original works of art. Adele was a working mother who set high goals for her children and supported the family as a credit manager for a wholesale floor covering firm. Although they lacked material wealth, the Rubins led an immensely rich intellectual and cultural life. They fostered in their two children, Dan and Helen, an appreciation for nature, the arts, and intellectual reasoning that stemmed from exposure to literature, great painters, and classical composers. The two-story Rubin home, perched on Pyrites Street in the Rose Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles, reflected this lifestyle. Musical instruments populated their home: a piano, a violin, a guitar, a banjo, a mandolin, and several flutes and recorders. Their walls and furniture were adorned with Sam’s projects: crayograph prints (a technique he pioneered), clay sculpture, and beautiful oil landscapes.
Weekends at the house were events full of excitement and intellectual ferment. Often this would include a jam session where adults and children were encouraged to play music together. At other times, the afternoon barbecue might include a poetry reading, a discussion of current affairs, a book someone had read, or the unveiling of one of Sam Rubin’s latest creations. I gradually adopted the Rubins as surrogate parents. In their open support for questions I raised, their accepting attitude toward new ideas, and their enthusiasm for artistic creativity, I found an environment for intellectual growth that was missing in the more traditional working-class background in which I had been raised.
In contrast to the Rubins, the outlook of my parents was traditional and conservative. My mother, María Evangelina Mercado Armendariz Farley, who had been born in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, in 1922, was a devout Christian whose formal education had ended at the fifth grade. As a teenager, she worked at a department store in El Paso, Texas, to help support her family across the border. She had gotten the job without being able to speak a word of English, but quickly taught herself with the help of other clerks by memorizing the names of all the items in the store inventory. Dark-haired, vivacious, with striking Indian features, my mother had a portrait of the world construed by deeply felt fundamentalist religious beliefs—though her reality was confined by the pragmatic struggle to maintain a subsistence income for herself and her children. She worked in a variety of low-paying jobs that included working in a sweatshop, packaging noodles at a spaghetti factory, decorating pastries at a bakery, and, in later years, tending to the elderly in their homes. All of this she did willingly, at great sacrifice to herself, in order to help provide my two younger sisters, Olinda and Rosalba, and me with clothing, school supplies, and other essentials.
Edward Shelton Farley, my Anglo-American stepfather, was the primary breadwinner of the family. My biological father had abandoned my mother and me when I was two years old, and Eddie was the only father I knew as I grew up. He was tall, ruggedly handsome, and had a quiet, easygoing disposition. But his job as a steam fitter’s assistant for the County of Los Angeles brought in only a modest salary. Because of this my mother worked and, as soon as I was of age, I also took on part-time jobs.
My stepfather had been raised in a mountain community on the outskirts of Hinton, West Virginia. A warm, generous, and honest person, he was also a romantic born out of his time. I learned this when I was fifteen years old, when he took our family back East to visit his birthplace.
As we walked through the waist-tall grass that had overgrown the dirt road leading to the homestead, I recalled the many stories he had told my sisters and me about his rustic childhood. He always spoke of his childhood fondly. To hear him tell it, his home had been a mansion. It was here that his family had weathered winter storms huddled by the warm fireplace. It was in the surrounding hills that he had spent warm summers scampering down hillsides with his brothers as they made their way to the local swimming hole.
When we finally reached the site, we found a tiny, rotting log cabin that resembled a shack more than a home. The stone fireplace had crumbled. A few rotting boards were all that was left of the floor, and the walls looked like they would cave in with the slightest breeze. As I read the disappointment in his face, I suddenly understood why my father felt so out of place, so estranged, in the modern world. He longed for the simpler, bucolic past of his childhood—at least as he remembered it—where he had few responsibilities and time to himself. As an adult, all of this was gone. It was all that he could do to face the daily challenges of contemporary life—Los Angeles traffic, a low-paying job, nightly calls from irate bill collectors, and trying to be a father to three children.
As we made our way back to the car, I realized why my stepfather’s favorite escape was plucking Carter Family songs on the guitar we shared (the first song I learned to play was The Wildwood Flower) and watching his favorite television westerns. My stepfather would have been happier as a cowboy in the West of a bygone era than battling freeway traffic and smog in urban Los Angeles.
Not surprisingly, he was a fervent traditionalist and a political conservative. He labored at a job that got him to work early and returned him home late. This left him with little time or energy to engage in political debates or to indulge my intellectual questioning. The few times that he did comment on political issues, his words echoed with stone-graven concepts acquired long ago.
Once, when I was seventeen years old, I wrote to the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) for information about their goals and philosophy. The Congress of Racial Equality was a middle-of-the-road organization that sought gains in civil rights articulated by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. During the 1960s, it was one of the civil rights organizations to which non-Negroes were allowed to join, and I was eager to do so. As luck would have it, on the day the CORE material arrived, my stepfather intercepted the mail, and when he saw what it was, he tore the information to pieces and threw it into the trash.
When I found out what he had done, I confronted him. I was outraged. “How dare you open and throw out mail addressed to me!”
He replied with neither malice nor anger. “No boy of mine is going to belong to a Communist organization,” he said. “The Negro movement is influenced by Communists and you’ll have no part of it.”
My response to my father’s actions was to place another mailbox next to the one on our front porch. At the time we lived at 4803 Carnegie Street. I labeled the second mailbox “4803½” and from then on received my mail at this address.
By my junior year in high school, Dan, Chuck, and I had forged an intellectual alliance. By challenging each other’s arguments and beliefs, we eventually developed a mutual position against war and in support of the civil rights movement. Fueled by the music of Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, and others of the folk era, Dan Rubin and I performed as a folk duo. Dan played banjo, and I played guitar. We founded the high school folk music club and performed at school and at private functions.
Our repertoire included anti-war songs such as Two Brothers, Blowin’ in the Wind, and Masters of War. We even composed our own anti-war song, And the North Winds Blow, in which we compared humanity to the lemmings of the arctic tundra:
And, are we not like the lemmings?
Running to our suicide?
Building our bombs, to an end in vain?
It was not until college, however, that my anti-war sentiments consolidated into an integrated world view. In my freshman year, I became friends with a professor of English n...
