Reed College
I applied to Harvard where my brother had graduated and to Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Both accepted me but I went to Reed. In my adolescent mind, all that mattered was being near good skiing, some of America’s last wilderness and only a twelve-hour drive from San Francisco, which had become the Beat capital of the world. It was also part of my rebellion against the mainstream, and I was tired of following unsuccessfully in my brother’s footsteps.
My parents gave me no direction whatsoever and I never visited either college.
I arrived at Reed after freshman orientation, just in time for classes and found myself in temporary housing with Mike Malloy from Illinois, who thought Reed was a party school. One night, in drunken frustration at his colossal mistake, Mike punched his fist through the cheap wallboard between rooms and soon afterwards departed, leaving me with a new roommate called “Tiny.” He was of course enormous, the son of a lucky Oklahoma dirt farmer who had struck oil. Tiny never attended a class so far as I know. Anyone could get into Reed, but not many graduated. We were a freshman class of 125 and we graduated 75.
My parents paid for basic room, board and tuition, which ate up my mother’s salary at UC Berkeley. I made spending money by opening the Reed College snack bar from 9:30 to 10:30 every night, selling hamburgers and fries and by spending a couple of hours between 11:00 and 1:00 playing poker in Reed’s 24 hour a day game.
Colleges across America had admitted record numbers of Korean War veterans after Eisenhower, true to his campaign promise, had flown to Korea and in the summer of 1953 ended the war. Veterans had a powerful influence on Reed’s classes and on its poker game. They were five or six years older than the rest of us and had been in a war that most people already wanted to forget, so they exuded the bitterness of another generation altogether. Reed’s classes were small seminars of ten to fifteen students, and the mature, serious veterans substantially deepened our conversations with real world experiences.
They brought the ruthlessness of R&R retreats on payday to our poker games, and I thanked Eddie O’Brian for his early training. A small group of consistent players regularly won, while a large floating group of occasional players were our patsies. I still recall, with some regret, a naïve freshman losing his fall semester’s tuition in a single weekend. Other than classes and poker, the veterans took almost no part in campus life.
Reed’s teaching style required students to take the lead in small classes of 10 to 12 while professors listened and helped shape the discussion. It was intense and immersive.
The core Freshman course was Humanities, “The Judaic Christian Tradition,” as they called it in those days of cultural myopia and the white man’s burden. The course was thoroughly secular, avoiding most sacred texts and viewing history as a kind of Darwinian evolution, where, over time, better ideas beat out worse ones. Aristotle advanced Plato with reason. Galileo saw the moons around Jupiter and demonstrated that the earth traveled around the sun. It was a better idea whose adoption was inevitable. When the Enlightenment posited personal freedom and enlightened reason as its basic tenets, they were ideas whose time had come. Reason, logic and science would solve every problem. “Every day, in every way, the world was getting better and better.” It was the basic message of American philosopher John Dewey.
I lost interest in news and politics in the heady Reed environment. It was a relatively calm time. Spring had seen some easing of tension with the Soviet Union after Joseph Stalin died in March. His successor, Nikita Khrushchev, adopted a new Soviet policy of peaceful co-existence.
McCarthy was finally on the defensive. Arthur Miller’s thinly disguised attack, The Crucible, opened in New York City in January of 1953. Scripts began circulating in college campuses in the Fall. Edward R. Murrow presented a highly critical documentary on McCarthy on his See It Now series. The senator himself self-destructed a year later when he launched hearings into the United States army and drew the famous response of attorney Robert Welch, “… have you no sense of decency … ?” The Senate censured McCarthy in September of 1954.
A culture of passive acceptance and frightened conformity made the continuation of McCarthy’s task unnecessary anyway. Under assault from television, America was losing its regional culture in exchange for the processed culture of corporate television. We began losing the tradition of the family dinner, as corporations introduced processed foods in the early 1950s. Prepared cake mixes, processed cheese slices, Minute Rice and frozen fish sticks were all on the market by the end of 1952. Fast food restaurant chains opened in mid-decade. Cheap chain motels. Suburbs. Traffic. Strip malls.
I have no idea what students at other colleges were talking about in the early Fifties, but at Reed we were starting to question the prevailing Capitalist orthodoxy, leading some Portland wags to suggest that Reed should be spelled with one less “e.”
San Francisco was one of the few places in America where a unique regional culture still existed. San Francisco had a long history of independence and a wild streak. It was a union town with the left leaning ILWU headed by Harry Bridges. His union provided a meeting place and some legitimacy for radical ideas. And in North Beach, in the old Italian part town, near the seedy bars and girlie joints of the low life, remnants of an old Bohemia were beginning to stir. Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Book Store opened in 1953.
Comedy
The first real break in the cultural conformity of the early 1950s came from comedians, and the first of those to reach a national stage was Harvard mathematician Tom Lehrer. He came to my attention during winter break, 1953. I was home from college and my brother was back from Harvard graduate school. He told us about this extraordinary instructor of mathematics with a wicked sense of humor who George had seen at various Harvard parties. He was one of many Harvard students spreading the word.
Lehrer’s national reputation depended on a new invention becoming popular in 1953, the long-playing record. It was made of durable vinyl and could be dropped without breaking (unlike the old 78’s). I still recall (with horror) a friend skidding his first LP’s across the floor to show how tough it was. Long playing records held a full hour of vastly superior sounding music, and “High Fidelity” became the buzz word. Equipment to play the new recordings was available in kit form, so even students could afford a system.
Kids began to have music in their bedrooms, and thus could make their own choices about what they listened to, in a way never before possible. LP’s were light enough to mail around the country, and in collections could easily be hauled from home to college, from dorm to off-campus apartments, so new sounds traveled quickly even if they weren’t played on the radio, which Tom Lehrer’s early raunchy songs would never be.
In the repressive 1950’s, Tom Lehrer’s lyrics were shocking and reassuring at the same time. They confirmed that there were other people who didn’t buy the Cold War rhetoric.
Be prepared! That’s the boy scouts’ marching song,
Be prepared! as through life you march along.
Be prepared to hold your liquor pretty well,
Don’t write naughty words on walls if you can’t spell.
Be prepared! to hide that pack of cigarettes,
Don’t make book if you cannot cover bets.
Keep those reefers hidden where you’re sure
That they will not be found
And be careful not to smoke them
When the scoutmasters around
For he only will insist that it be shared.
Be prepared!
Be prepared! That’s the boy scouts’ solemn creed,
Be prepared! and be clean in word and deed.
Don’t solicit for your sister, that’s not nice,
Unless you get a good percentage of her price.
Be prepared! and be careful not to do
Your good deeds when there’s no one watching you.
If you’re looking for adventure of a
New and different kind,
And you come across a girl scout who is
Similarly inclined,
Don’t be nervous, don’t be flustered, don’t be scared.
Be prepared!
The song is a catalogue of shattered myths: boy scouts are drinkers, dope smokers and hypocrites who would sell their sisters for a good price and ought to be carrying condoms for spontaneous sex!
Figuring he could sell at least 300 copies, Lehrer recorded one of his performances and issued his own LP in 1953. After several months of local sales, he began getting orders from all over the county as college students like my brother shared the album with family and friends.
Lehrer was tweaking noses. In “I Wanna Go Back to Dixie” he sings of “old times there are not forgotten, whipping slaves and plantin’ cotton, and waiting for the Robert E. Lee.”
The old “Dope Peddler” “spread joy wherever he went” and in Werner Von Braun, the former Nazi rocket scientist who used slave labor to build the V2’s that attacked London, Lehrer comments,
“Once the rockets are up,
who cares where they come down,
that’s not my department, says Werner Von Braun.”
Everything was up for mocking from America’s handicapped to the Wild West where atomic testing made the scenery “attractive and the air radioactive in the land of the old AEC.”
Lehrer’s humor was sophomoric wise cracking, just what the Society of Cynics would have liked to pull off. It was still Marlon Brando in The Wild One, rebelling against “… what have you got?” But Lehrer was just the beginning of a remarkable comic revival.
San Francisco Comedians
Cambridge may have produced the first new comedian with Tom Lehrer, but San Francisco quickly became the center of a new comic revival. The City by the Bay was already world headquarters for a growing “Beat” generation. Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti in June of 1953 had opened City Lights Bookstore on Columbus Avenue, just off Broadway, in the heart of North Beach. It was America’s first entirely paperback bookstore, and we all flocked to it. San Francisco’s bohemians now had another unofficial headquarters in addition to the venerable Café Trieste across Broadway, which served the best cappuccinos in America.
Over winter break in 1953, when I was back in Berkeley, I became aware of small, gritty clubs where folk singers, poets and jazz ensembles performed outside the mainstream. They were supported in part by Korean War veterans who had retreated to such clubs around military bases while on R&R in Korea and Western Europe. The clubs became the setting for the sharp edge of new kind of subversive humor. Mainstream comedy was as timid and moribund as the rest of cultural life in the early fifties: tired comedians telling tired jokes about motels and mother in laws, despite the heroic efforts of Milton Berle and Bob Hope.
San Francisco’s Beat master of ceremonies was a twenty-seven year old Italian named Enrico Banducci, who opened a tiny club called the hungry i on Columbus Ave, across the street from Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Bookstore, past Vesuvius Bar where the sign over the door read, “We’re just itching to get away from Portland, OR.” I assumed that Reed students devised that one.
The hungry i was named by Eric ‘Big Daddy ”Nord.” It stood for “hungry id” and was always written in lower case “to be cool,” Banducci explained. The club on Columbus held about eighty people and featured the usual run of obscure folk musicians doing respectful renditions of Woody Guthrie, grungy poets reading to a base or small jazz ensembles trying to sound really cool, the kind of music where you snapped your fingers to the offbeat. The audience included kids like me looking to belong to something that seemed genuine and Korean War veterans looking for solace and maybe our college dates.
In 1953, Banducci moved the hungry i to an abandoned wine cellar on Jackson Street that sat 300 people. He modeled the club on the little cafés he had visited in Paris. The sign outside read: ‘Club des Artists’ and ‘The Left Bank of San Francisco. Dinners from $1.25.’ Banducci wanted the hungry i to be part coffeehouse, part cabaret, part European salon. ‘I think sandals and sables ought to mix here,’ he said.”
The night’s performers were scrawled in bright pastel colors outside on the club’s brick wall. On Christmas Eve, 1953, it was the name of an unknown comedian, Mort Sahl. San Francisco’s resident trendsetter, Chronicle columnist Herb Caen, didn’t mention him until May. Terrence O’Flaherty, San Francisco’s other denizen of the dark, didn’t get around to Sahl until July. By then, standing in line was common for a Sahl performance.
On my first night over spring break, I moved slowly down the steep flight of stairs to the cellar, worked my way past a big bear of a man standing behind a rope, Enrico Banducci himself, who was invariably at the door, taking our tickets and dropping them in an empty wine vat. Finally, we slid into swayback director’s chairs with glass holders built into the arm. The room was heavy with cigarette smoke. I have no idea what the drinking age was, but no one ever asked, and glasses of red wine appeared in chipped glasses. A low stage sat in front of a brick wall.
The multiple thrills of European sophistication, existential conversations about Camus and Becket floating through the dense cigarette smoke, cheap red wine and the sense of being literally in the underground, were almost overwhelming at 19 years old. To top it off, Alvah Bessie, one of the famous Hollywood 10, announced in his sonorous voice, “The next president of the United States … Mort Sahl!” And Sahl came on dressed like a graduate student from UC Berkeley with a folded newspaper under his arm, asking, “Are there any groups I haven’t offended yet?” And then he laughed his terrible, hacking, self-conscious laugh and everyone relaxed as Sahl started to express the things that were on all of our minds, but that we couldn’t speak.
Sahl had started in the burlesque houses and strip joints of Los Angeles, with standard comic routines. Then he discovered that between jokes, when he would throw in a political aside – “that is when they began to laugh. At the end of the third week, I broke the sound barrier and I was in.”
His breakthrough and most quoted joke went like this. “Have you seen the Joe McCarthy jacket? It’s like the Eisenhower jacket only it’s got an extra flap that fits over the mouth.” Other edgy jokes of the period, “Joe McCarthy doesn’t question what you say so much as your right to say it.” Another standard … “For a while, every time the Russians threw an American in jail, the Un-American Activities Committee would retaliate by throwing an American in jail, too.”
When Herb Caen finally discovered Sahl, he wrote, “Sahl has been there 18 weeks and I like to keep up on things. He’s very funny … I don’t know where he’s come from, but I’m, glad he’s here.” That summer Terence O’Flaherty, wrote “Down at the hungry i they’ve got a brisk young comedian named Mort Sahl – a refreshing relief after an overdoes of folk singers at this North Beach spa. His humor is something very special.”
In the summer of 1953 a new LP record called The Investigator, began to circulate confirming my sense that comedy was cutting edge. It appeared on an obscure label named "Discuriousities" without any credits, to keep the distributors out of trouble. Word of mouth had it that The Investigator began as a Canadian Broadcasting Company radio show, written and produced by a Canadian lefty who had been deported during the McCarthy hysteria. Ed Sullivan called The Investigator “communist propaganda” and many media mavens agreed, but The New York Times liked it, although they feared the satire might cause friction between the United States and Canada. About 100,000 copies were sold during 1954 and 1955, mostly in the U.S. According to the New Republic, President Eisenhower played it at a meeting of his cabinet.
John Drainie, a gifted Canadian actor played McCarthy, or the Investigator as he is called in the radio drama. To prepare for the part, Drainie drove from Toronto to Buffalo to watch the Army McCarthy hearings several times and caught McCarthy’s exact nuances. In the drama, the Investigator has made his way to heaven and taken over an investigating committee that includes Torquemada, Cotton Mather and Titus Oates. They sit in judgment on Socrates, Milton, Jefferson and other champions of liberty, declaring them "subversives," and sending them to hell. All goes well, until the Investigator sends a subpoena to the Chief, God, because “there is no one so high as to be immune from investigation if there is the slightest suspicion.” The drama ends with a ranting Investigator sent to hell, where the devil rejects him, finally returning to earth as a babbling idiot.
It’s only in hindsight that Lehrer, Sahl and the Investigator seem part of a comic revival. In 1953 they felt like three isolated voices in a wilderness. The whole scene of cultural rebellion was tiny. All of hip San Francisco could be put together in the Longshoreman’s Hall and in a few years it would be.
Folk Music
Comedians assured us that we weren’t crazy, the emperor’s cloths were in tatters. Folk music captured our souls. In the spring of 1954, Pete Seeger came to Reed and gave a concert to a packed house, singing old labor and anti-fascist songs from the 1930’s and ‘40’s, telling stories with each song, giving us a progressive history of the last few decades. It was a revelation, a burning ember of movements for social justice that had seemed utterly crushed by the Anti-Communist Crusade.
Folk music had revived after World War II, led by Pete Seeger and Lee Hays when they formed a musical group called the Weavers in November of 1948. They had a big hit in 1950 with a single of folksinger’s Lead Belly’s “Goodnight, Irene.” Other hits followed: “So Long It’s Been Good to Know You” written by Woody Guthrie and “Kisses Sweeter Than Wine,” written by the Weavers. Folk music purists and many progressives considered the Weavers commercial success a sellout. For most of their career Seeger and Hays had specialized in labor songs and protest music, singing with Woody Guthrie, Josh White, Lead Belly, and Cisco Houston. They called themselves the Almanac Singers and were the official musical group of the CIO. They supported Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party campaign for president in 1948.
The Weavers career ended abruptly in 1951 when Decca records dropped them from their catalog after Pete Seeger was mentioned in Red Channels, a notorious, privately published list of people of who might have communist associations. Once your name appeared in Red Channels, you could no longer find work. A planned Weavers’ television show was canceled, and the FBI placed them under surveillance. By 1953, unable to book concerts and blacklisted from appearing on television and radio, the Weavers disbanded. Seeger survived by performing at summer camps and schools like Reed.
The lyrics of the songs Seeger sang at Reed were a step beyond the revolt of the early Fifties comedians. Seeger’s songs were not wise cracks at the establishment nor erudite indictments of foolish government policy. They were songs that called for action … bravery, idealism, intelligence, and hope. I know it sounds corny today, an indication of how naïve we were. But when Seeger sang about brave young men in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade who fought fascism in Spain in the 1930s, we were inspired. He sang about the hard lives of working people, mine disasters and factory fires, ships lost at sea and the struggle of workers to organize. Viva La Quice Brigada. Union Maid. This Land is Your Land, Talking Union Blues, We Shall Overcome. We shared, albeit remotely, in the bravery Seeger sang about by attending and cheering the concert of a blacklisted singer.
Other forms of music grabbed me in the early Fifties. It didn’t take much. The commercial music of the time was simply “do wop” terrible. I listened to classical music before I discovered jazz in the small San Francisco clubs and blues on a radio station coming in from northern Mexico. Jazz played at all the small clubs in San Francisco and breakout artists like Miles Davis were getting commercial record contracts. Capitol Records released first a ten-inch and later a twelve-inch LP led by Miles Davis called the Birth of the Cool.
Blues were entering mainstream white culture by 1955. Bill Haley & His Comets released “Rock Around the Clock” in January (by July it was number one on the American charts). Alan Freed produced the first rock and roll concert on January 14 of 1955. In May Chuck Berry released his first single, “Maybelline” and Little Richard released Tutti Frutti.
All of these new musical trends were exciting. Jazz took traditional melodies and reconstructed them, much as we would have liked to reconstruct American society! Blues were about a world of raw emotion and violent drama completely denied in the white music of the Fifties.
The new comedians tweaking the nose of the Establishment, underground folk musicians calling for social justice and blues and jazz musicians were all shaking the white picket fence. But it is only in hindsight that they were a harbinger of growing social movements to come.
Dreams of Paris
1950s’ pundits talked about a huge gulf between “high culture” and “low culture” (or mass and popular culture). High culture was the repository of a society’s highest aspirations expressed in its classical music, ballet, fine art and serious literature. Understanding and appreciating high culture required hard work, education and experience. It was the culture of the upper classes and intelligentsia.
Low culture was entertainment, something to amuse and distract the masses: pop music, crime novels, romantic Hollywood comedies, game shows and soap operas. While high culture was a force for moral and political good, low culture was unsophisticated, emotionally distracting, and intrinsically corrupting. The pundits weren’t sure what to do with blues, jazz and folk music or the “sick” comedians. High and low culture don’t make much sense any more, but the division was orthodoxy in the Fifties,
High culture began in Greece and was exclusively Western. In Freshman year at Reed, my world shrank to a room full of classics in the Judaic/Christian tradition. Mid way through the second semester, I grew sick of stuffing my brain with more book learning. I needed to live instead of read about living.
My fascination with Paris was literary. It was the romantic center of so many novels I’d read. It was where Hemingway and George Orwell hung out in the Thirties with Gertrude Stein and Picasso, where American leftists and African American intellectuals like Richard Wright and James Baldwin fled in the early Fifties to avoid the Anti-Communist Crusade.
The United States was still densely provincial. Portland was almost rustic in 1954. Berkeley had one coffee shop where a dollop of whipped cream and a sprinkle of cinnamon on a lousy cup of coffee transformed it to Viennese Coffee. It made you feel sophisticated for twice the price of a regular cup. Even San Francisco had only one decent coffee shop and a single interesting bookstore.
I wanted to sit in the Café du Flore in Paris where Sartre, Camus and Becket were discussing existentialism, braving cold, rainy weather with my collar turned up, drinking espresso with the rich smell of Galois cigarettes, tobacco crumbling on my lips, scribbling furiously in my journal as I took notes for the great American novel … my generation’s dream.
There was also sin. Hadn’t I read somewhere that young women danced topless in the clubs of Montmartre and that unexpurgated editions of James Joyce, Henry Miller and D.H. Lawrence could be purchased in bookstores on the Left Bank? I convinced my parents to allow me to take a year off from college, live at home while I worked and saved money for the trip that I would start in January with the promise that I would return to Reed in the fall.
After two days on a tomato packing line at the Heinz factory on San Pablo Avenue in Berkeley, I got a job at a Chevron gas station by promising them that I was on the management track. You had to pump people’s gas in those days. I wore a neat, white uniform and a cap with chevrons to indicate I was a manager in training. My boss reminded me that the president of Chevron had started in a gas station. When I quit in January they said I'd never get a job with Chevron Oil again. I had learned a couple of important lessons. I would do anything to spare myself from mind-numbing jobs like gas station attendant, and I was lousy at hustling people to buy stuff they didn't need. The best thing about the job that I remember is the cops coming by at closing time to keep an eye on me, because mine was the last station before the tunnel to Walnut Creek and had a history of armed robberies.
My skiing and mountain climbing companion Doug Strong planned the trip to Europe with me. He was my best friend from high school. We had skied together, tramped through the Sierra and spent summers digging ditches in the foothills. His father was head of the philosophy department at UC Berkeley. He had an older sister who was living in Germany with her husband, an architect for the US military occupation, who could be helpful in getting us a car. Doug’s older brother dreamed of being a rancher one day and he may be the only person ever to be arrested for rustling in the Berkeley Hills. There were still a few ranches in the 1950’s, and a few cattle, and Doug’s brother would sneak onto one of the ranches, ride a horse bareback and practice throwing a rope at the cows, until the Berkeley police busted him one night.
I liked Doug because he was many things that I was not; he was physically big and fearless while I was slight and physically cautious. He pushed the limits of rock climbing and extreme skiing, and I tagged along, made courageous by Doug’s daring. I think Doug liked me because like his own family, I was far out of the high school mainstream, an alienated rebel. Doug had the smoldering good looks of a fifty’s movie actor. I looked like a nerd. We never talked grand ideas. In that regard, I was as alone as ever.
Travel was a formal affair in the Fifties, and as we set off from San Francisco’s small international airport, Doug and I were dressed in suits, pressed shirts, and ties with cheap imitations of a Burberry raincoat. As measured by time, the world was much larger in 1955. We left San Francisco on January 5th and flew for twelve-hours on a four-engine prop plane that sat about sixty people to New York’s Idyllwild (now Kennedy) International Airport and then staggered onto a bus that took us to the Manhattan docks.
Our boat was the Ryndam, a small Dutch liner that was suppose to make Europe in nine days, but it was the captain’s last voyage and he gambled on outrunning a North Atlantic storm to get home early. He lost. It took us fourteen days, most stormy enough to keep all but a hearty few in their cabins.