In the Company of Rebels. Chellis Glendinning

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СКАЧАТЬ from view, he continued to ride this new arc of political action, taking on an issue that would affect all of Berkeley: rent control.

      As a long-time tenant, he joined with the city’s varied housing organizations as well as its outraged renters—and gave the effort his all. He helped write the bill that in 1972 would make Berkeley the first U.S. city to impose restrictions on unrestrained rent increases and landlord evictions for actions not considered “just cause,” while requiring landlord payment of interest on security deposits. In 1976 the California Supreme Court under Chief Justice Wright handed down a landmark decision: he granted victory to the basic principles of rent control, including the right of municipalities to enact their own legislation. At the same time, though, the judge invalidated the Berkeley initiative for its procedural favoring of renters at the expense of the rights of landlords. Ergo, in 1978 Marty and others drafted a new rent roll-back ordinance mandating that eighty percent of landlord property-tax savings be rebated back to tenants as rent reduction. It was approved by the voters. Emboldened, Marty and his allies wrote a comprehensive ordinance in 1980. It too passed. Marty was elected to serve on the first Berkeley Rent Board, and thirty-plus years later the legislation is still in place. Marty is sometimes called the Father of Rent Control, although he likes to clarify by saying: “Well, maybe … but I was not a single parent.”

      Rent control easily morphed in his mind into a proposal for limits on house-sale prices. This new wrinkle was formulated in 1989 during a morning run with a friend; the two were kibitzing about skyrocketing prices that divided citizens into the landed class and the forever-renting peon class, thus driving minorities and senior citizens from the community. To Marty, an increase in sale price calculated at the national average of six percent of original cost would be more reasonable and just than the typical increase in chic Berkeley that, in one year, had shot up by thirty-five percent—making a $150,000 home sellable overnight at $202,500. Marty’s jogging partner revealed the idea in his weekly East Bay Express column and from there it went viral, appearing in the San Francisco Chronicle, Wall Street Journal, and various venues of the national press. Alarm also went viral, with Marty’s progressive friends pronouncing it too radical, and one Berkeley politician withdrawing for fear that her career would go belly-up for association with its “Father.” A co-author of the rent-control bill, attorney Myron Moscovitz, proclaimed in a 1989 San Francisco Chronicle article, “I don’t think the proposal has a snowball’s chance in hell.” Marty also began to receive hate mail, death threats, and answering-machine messages like “You are scum” and “Schweinhund.” His response: “We’re living in a democracy, and this can be voted on. They don’t have to kill me, sue me, or leave hate messages.” Just the same, he pulled back.

      Walking his talk as a housing activist, Marty lives now in a one-bedroom apartment in the Parker Street Co-op that a collective of twenty-four households formed in 1991. A splendid side effect of going on TV to hype the house-sale proposal was that an old acquaintance, a woman he had once dated, saw the show and called him up. They began what has been, so far, a thirty-plus-year love affair culminating in their 2011 wedding, although—true to form of the inventiveness Marty is known for—they still live in their separate pads. In his, over the kitchen sink, he boasts an R. Crumb cartoon of the infamous 1960s bearded sage Mr. Natural proudly washing dishes. And, indeed, the man “Keep(s) on Truckin’”—as of this writing, launching another controversial campaign, this one to raise Berkeley’s minimum wage.

      Among those Bohemians, rebels, and deep heads who pursued higher education, the magnifying glass that renders focus to their lives might reveal a vision gone wildly askew in regards to the field in which they majored and what they ended up doing. But as you will see in coming chapters, when all is said and done, Marc Kasky, with his master’s in urban planning, indeed spent his life practicing city planning—just in a non-conventional way; while economics major Jerry Mander ended up warning people about the dangers posed to democracy and environment by the corporate-dominated global marketplace. Marty too: though he never held a “real” job in his chosen field, his offerings surely magnify the realm of … experimental psychology.

TOM HAYDEN: POLITICAL ANIMAL

      (1939–2016)

      From SDS to Occupy Wall Street, students have led movements demanding a voice. We believe in not just an electoral democracy, but also in direct participation of students in their remote-controlled universities, of employees in workplace decisions, of consumers in the marketplace, of neighborhoods in development decisions, family equality in place of Father Knows Best and online, open source participation in a world dominated by computerized systems of power.

      T.H., “PERSONAL STATEMENT: FIFTY YEARS LATER, STILL MAKING A STATEMENT,” THE MICHIGAN DAILY, 2012

      Forty-some years after the fact, round about 2005, I had the chance to tell Tom Hayden that back in the ‘60s when he lived in a Berkeley commune called the Red Family, I had had a mad crush on him. The truth is I fell into infatuation the moment I heard his voice on KPFA-FM reading the text of his 1962 Port Huron Statement that laid the basis for the peace-justice-equality movements of the 1960s. But it wasn’t until the later ‘60s that he moved to Berkeley. His arrival—much-touted in Bay Area political circles—was almost too much for my twenty-one-year-old hormones to handle. I attended a teach-in on Canada-bound draft avoidance so I could look at him. But there sat his girlfriend on the panel, ever so lovely and sophisticated in her super-wide navy bellbottoms.

      I saw him again at a planning meeting at Bill Miller’s house in the Claremont district during the citywide 1969 uprising in protest of the university’s fencing of a plot of land citizens had crafted into a people’s park. Just a handful of us came to the meeting, and Tom reported that he had learned from his Deep Throat within the Berkeley Police Department that a mass bust was in the works. I was spellbound sitting just a breath away from him, listening, taking his presence in. Indeed, I got arrested at the bust along with some 400 others in May of 1969, was carted off to Santa Rita Detention Center in a windowless prison bus, was corralled into a claustrophobia-producing solitary cell with a bevy of some fifty terrified, exceptionally loud, and disorganized women, and in the end was saved from more lengthy prison time by left-wing pro bono lawyer Bob Treuhaft.

      Then in June, the month after the People’s Park uprising, there was a new demo on the Berkeley campus. That was the moment I realized that we long-timers in the streets had unwittingly, by all appearances through tacit psychic connection, developed a group method in which we would come together, burst apart, come together, then burst apart again depending on if the police were on the attack or not. But this new crop of protesters … well, they were proving to be an insipid shade of naïve green. As summer vacation was upon us, they had arrived in our skillful midst from all directions to have their “Berkeley Experience,” and they knew exactly jack shit about how to maneuver as a unified mass. Tom was there under the Sproul arch doing his best to direct this herd of cats—with no success at all.

      As you can plainly see, I didn’t have a lot of quality contact with the object of my adoration in Berkeley. Stay tuned, though: decades later he would change the course of my life. By 2005 he was married to a spirited Canadian actress named Barbara Williams. He’d survived a heart attack and was ever so aware of the fleeting nature of life. He had traveled to New Mexico for a Christmas reunion with his family from the days when he was married to Jane Fonda. We were crossing the parking lot of the Santuario de Chimayó, and I made my confession. We both had a good laugh.

      Is Tom most notorious for his role in starting Students for a Democratic Society in 1961? Or for his civil-rights activism in the South and in Newark? Or for being the theoretician of the Chicago 8 along with Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Bobby Seale, David Dellinger, Rennie Davis, Lee Weiner, and John Froines? Is he most known for his work as a progressive California State Assemblyman and Senator? Or for his twenty-plus books? Is he most recognized СКАЧАТЬ