that Berkeley arrest

I'm sure I've told the story before, but I have noticed that while I find my stories fascinating, other people are less moved, and indeed find the stories that they tell much more fascinating, while I tend to think of them as forgettable,  But that's okay it gives me the chance to tell them again.

It was May of 1968, the sound of the Rolling Stones' Street Fighting Man filled the streets of Berkeley.  I was selling the Berkeley Barb on Telegraph Avenue.  It brought in beer money for the house.  The house was Dottie's apartment.  She had a job.  She also had a nogood boyfriend Bob who liked to have a lot of people around, and I was one of them, crashing in a closet donating what I didn't spend on beer to the expenses.  There was one paying resident, Diane, who was a student and her father was a retired FBI guy.  But kind of liberal I guess because when he came for a visit he bought a lot of beer and food for the house.

There was a vacant lot down the street that the hippies had taken over dubbing it People's Park, a place where we could hang out and do our hippie rites.  The city of Berkeley wasn't crazy about this and when some evil capitalists decided they wanted to build some evil capitalist enterprise there the hippies were kicked out.

Pissed off the hippies, pissed off the Berkeley Barb which printed strident editorials.  At about  this time there were big riots in Paris, and I do believe that Berkeleyites were like here are the French grabbing the headlines while here at Berkeley, the acme of radicalism in the US, we were just sitting on our hands.

So we had a big demonstration, lots of hippies, lots of cops and as the two forces met a fuselage of rocks and bottles came from the hippies.  This was a new development, throwing rocks at the cops.  Up to this point demonstrations had been peaceful, along the model of civil rights demonstrations, the idea being that the cops would bash our heads and the general populace would be appalled and then they would end the war, which even at the time didn't make much sense to me.

Me and Bob weren't demonstrating, we were just there to watch and when the rocks and bottles started flying we went back to the house to eat the food and drink the beer that Diane's father had provided.  After many beers we discovered that we were out of cigarettes and went down to Telegraph Avenue to buy more, but actually just to see what was going on.

Tear gas was in the air, there were some fires, there were scattered bands of hippies and cops roving around.  It was clear that we weren't going to be able to buy any cigarettes so we headed back.  There was a cordon of cops blocking our way and we approached with hands up, showing that we meant no harm.  They swooped on Bob and then they swooped on me and the next thing we knew we were in a paddy wagon.  The jail was full of hippies.  There was a rumor that radicals were planning on storming the jail and freeing us political prisoners, which was kind of cool I guess, but we worried about being collateral damage.

I got bailed out the next day, Bob a day or two later.  At our hearing it was revealed that there had been a tall guy with a mustache tossing fire bombs.  Bob was a tall guy with a mustache.  There were a lot of tall guys with mustaches and  I guess they hauled them all in.  We were charged with Assault with a Deadly Weapon.

They dropped my charges after the hearing but Bob was on the hook. Bob was considerably worried, but  I foolishly thought that since he was innocent he could never be convicted.  I had moved back to Champaign following my strategy of moving every time i got a physical notice which postponed the examination and if I never had a physical how could i get drafted.  I cane back for the trial as a witness for Bob.  I think I did alright on the stand.  Diane's father was also there as a witness, and Bob got off on a hung jury.

Happy New Year guys.