San Geronimo! a school play, and Freedom School, Freedom Summer, Mississippi during the Civil Rights movement

This is a rather odd, convoluted story. I hardly know how to process it. Seemingly unrelated events converged at rhomboid angles when I tried to find the news clipping on a play I was in, called San Geronimo! in 1965. It was written by Barbara Scott and directed by Stu Rasmussen. The Marin County librarian had no luck finding it, so when Newspapers.com was free today, I slogged through a decade’s worth of newspapers. Sometimes finding what you aren’t looking for is the real story. Synchronicity works in mysterious ways. During Freedom Summer, the good folks of San Geronimo Valley had raised money and made a massive book drive to furnish Indianola Freedom School in Mississippi. Someone’s local son taught there. They needed books. We gave. We sent them 2000 books. I remember being asked to give up some of my books. I belong to Scholastic book services book club and every month I bought armloads of books for $.10 each—that’s where all my babysitting money went, was for books. The organizers included Harold Gregg of Forest Farm Camp, and the Greenbergers—Joan’s father was a guard at San Quentin. One night he took us kids out to dinner. Instant mashed potatoes and salisbury steak in the San Quentin mess hall. Weird. Understand that the San Geronimo Valley, an enclave of artists and musicians, was not mainstream Marin. More like the poverty pool. Jazz pianists Lenny Tristano and Ralf Sutton were fathers of our our classmates. Maurice del Mué painted our WPA school mural.  Meanwhile, during that Freedom Summer, many of Marin’s young folks rallied, they also joined Martin Luther King, marching from the San Francisco Theological Seminary to Selma. Ken Bullock remembers seeing the greyhound busses pull away from the seminary. Unrelated segue no. 1, I was part of that Marin City mounted entourage from the San Geronimo Valley. I played Joseph leading Mary on a donkey, Dec. 1964. Yeah, I was dressed in white bedsheets pulling a recalcitrant ass through the streets of Marin City. Equally weird. Unrelated segue no. 2. More of a prequel as it set everything in motion. Cathy Barbano who lived on our road, was killed in a car crash in Mexico in 1965. Then her grief-stricken father, Ed Barbano shot himself. Meanwhile, there was Selma Alabama. Bloody Sunday, March 1965. Well, Freedom School was razed to the ground, and Mississippi was burning. So SGV folks began raising money and collecting books all over again to help rebuild that school—and our play, San Geronimo! was a fundraiser. Why I had trouble finding the article was because the lead was buried. Literally. I kept seeing references to Freedom School. Curiosity finally got the better of me. I was so sure I would never find that article. Maddening. And lo, filed under the headline of Freedom Summer, there was the slippery article that had evaded detection for decades. Everything suddenly came together. Our fundraiser, the rebuilding of Freedom School was a memorial tribute to Cathy’s father and our playground teacher, Ed Barbano. See Harold Gregg’s rousing letter at the end. What spurred us into action? The abduction and murder of three civil rights leaders June 25, 1964, by the KKK may have been the galvanizing event. Synchronicity works in mysterious ways.

Call Me Skinny, But Don't Call Me Late

In the early years, during those golden days that defined some of my earliest memories, the Lagunitas school bus dropped us off at the highway at the bottom of Arroyo Road, and it was over a mile to my house. Pete Sutton's house was about a quarter of a mile up the road from the highway. By then, I was tired of walking, so I'd follow him home.

I was also nearly a year younger than most of my kindergarten classmates, so I was a baby walking that long walk home. My grandmother did not walk down the road to greet me after school, I was on my own. I guess she figured that because we walked to church in Lagunitas every Sunday, I knew the way. True.

I literally dropped out of kindergarten because the walk to the bus stop was just too far for my short four-year-old legs and, wandering attention span. Too many distractions: the creek, the water nymphs, the gopher snake stretched across the road, shooting stars and milkmaids bordering the road just waiting to be picked.

Sometimes Mr. Dingman would wait for me at the bottom of the road, or, if I missed the bus, he'd angrily honk and pick me up me on the reverse run after he'd collected the rest of the kids in Lagunitas, hollering at me all the while. But more often than not, I stood forlornly at the empty crossroads of Arroyo Road and Sir Francis Drake Boulevard waiting for a school bus that would never come.

By the time I got to first grade, I had to catch the bus. I had to go to school, or else I was a truant. It was the law.

By then I had developed some quirky bus neuroses. I'd dream that I finally caught the bus to school on the wrong side of the road (coming back from Lagunitas—which meant I already missed my bus, this was my second chance at hell). The door hissing like a dragon, and Mr. Dingman's wrath, was the first obstacle. Then, facing down a sea of staring kids frightened me so much I nearly peed my pants and swooned with fear. Finding an empty seat or a friendly face was like running the gauntlet. Clearly, this tripartite dream was based on real-life experience.

But there was more: When I took my new red wool coat off, to hang it on the coathook in the back of Mrs. Ramsey's first grade classroom, I discovered, too late, I had forgotten to put my dress on. There I was in my frilly knickers and grubby undershirt for all the world to see. Kids sniggering. I died of embarrassment every time, as it was a vivid reoccurring dream Freud would've loved to sink his eyeteeth into.

Or I'd dream of catching the bus home, but no one else was on the bus, not even the driver, as it barreled and careened through Lagunitas canyon at dusk, like it was possessed. Forget Stephen King's "Christine." Vroom!

Coming home from school was a different matter. I had classmates to walk with. Sort of. But Jeff Sutton, Joan Lindsey, Diane Moyle, and Billy Joe Bianchi would ditch us little kids, or walk too fast for us to catch up. That left me and Pete standing at the crossroads. (Pete's dad, a pianist, had already gone down to the jazz crossroads at midnight, but that's another story). So I took the easiest route, I followed Pete home. Pete's mom, Chuck (Charlene), fed us peanut butter and exotic store-bought grape jelly sandwiches, and sometimes she even gave me a ride home in the green VW bus. 

To his credit, Peter never ditched me, though he could have. I'm sure I was a little pest. I remember playing in the creek, hiking up to Forest Farm Camp, and building Lincoln logs with him in his room. Kid stuff like that. Jeff was far too cool to hang out with us. I wasn't allowed in the army blanket chair fort. And besides, I was, you know, a girl.

(I don't remember when the school bus started coming up to the bend at Barranca Road to turn around where Joan Lindsey's house was, but that was a year or two later, as more families with kids were moving into the Valley. By then there were so many of us, they couldn't NOT pick us up.)

I was devastated when the Suttons moved to Lagunitas. I'd lost a playmate. No more free lunch. No more reason to drop by the Sutton house as he lived way up the hill. Then, as I got older, I was  too shy. Then, we all got way too cool (or too stoned), and we hardly spoke to each other during that long stretch of gravelly road that transported us across the gawky years of high school and hormones. Or even at College of Marin—though we were in the same pottery class for years.

(What's funny about this aside, is that when Ralph Sutton died, Pete said his father was a man of few words: "every couple of years he completes a sentence." That pretty much summed us up too. Until Facebook came along. This bloggy bit was inspired by a running rantlet with Pete. He's paying me back for all the times I ate his peanut butter sandwiches. It really was a long walk home and his house was the closest refuge…)

Nobody ever had any money in those days, and feeding the neighborhood kids was what families did. I remember eating cereal at 5PM (I thought it was scandalous) with the twins, Adrian and Adair (Lara) Daly. Their house was a mob scene and it was a free for all, with Connie and Mickey yelling at the top of their lungs, not to drink up all the milk or eat up all the cereal. Shannon was a kid of few words, he'd merely hitch the bowl up closer to his gaping maw and shovel it all in before the empty cereal box even hit the ground.

Across the street from the Daly house, Matts Mattsson and his wife, Phyllis owned The Old Viking restaurant behind the old Lagunitas train station. They moved to Lagunitas from New York, where Matts had his first restaurant, in 1964. I often rode horseback with their daughter, Sue, who was a couple of years younger than me. After cold winter rides, he’d feed us at the back door of the restaurant with a plank wedged into the wall as a table. The food was always rich and nourishing. 

What I remember most were the spiked mashed potatoes, rich in cream and garlic, drowned in gravy. pickled herring, the cabbage rolls, and a Scandinavian version of something that resembled wienerschnitzel. Matts, in his thick Norwegian accent, urging us on to eat more, more. Desserts groaning with whipped cream. Added flirty bonus, many of my classmates were busboys there too. Geoff Davis.

The Old Viking in Lagunitas.

Seeking nourishment for an inarticulate hunger, I went from house to house, grazing with the other Valley kids. Scott Weaver's mom made the most outrageous raised yeast doughnuts, I'd eat them, still warm, granules of sugar crystals riming my lips. Nothing else even comes close to those airy doughnuts of memory. Forget Dunkin' Doughnuts. 

Above Speck McAuliffe’s bar, off Cintura, lived the vast Bailey clan. Hard to say which family had more kids, the de Ruttis, the Wilsons, or the Bagleys. I lost count at a dozen. There was "poor" and then there was "really poor." We were all poor. The Bagleys, who were relative newcomers, were in the really poor camp, right out of Grapes of Wrath. After a good game of olly-olly-oxen-free, or kick-the-can, with the Weavers and the Magnussens, we were all skinned knees and grubbier than dirt. No formalities, like washing up before dinner, were enforced. 

We gleefully ate the wilted vegetables Mr. Bagley couldn't sell from his vegetable truck. There were so many of us, the Bagleys set up a couple of doors on sawhorses in the bulldozed lot, and we'd have at it. Mountains of white welfare rice with salt and butter, watery zucchini and catsup under an indigo sky and wavering stars never tasted so good.

Billy Joe Bianchi's grandmother dragged me into her kitchen and fed me raviolis and spongecake, saying, "Mangia, mangia." "Eat, eat." And so I did. As I tucked in, she grated cheese rinds into a big jar; and when the golden sponge cake hanging upside down in its cake pan, was cool, it'd slough onto the table, whispering unintelligible secrets, and we'd eat divine food of the gods. Billy Joe usually ditched me to do chores, so I was fair game for Mary Bianchi's brand of cheek-pinching ministrations. After all, she'd fed my grandmother's children too. 

One of my best friends, Stephanie Stone's newly blended family was so large, they never even noticed another ravening mouth at the table. New step-mom Helen was doing a bang-up job feeding her small army. Shopping was a field expedition. We'd load the shopping carts with gallons of condensed milk and field provisions. Then a dozen of us would stand in the cattle truck all the way home, leaning into the turns over White's Hill.

Micaela Miranda Wall's stepmom Betty Lang, a potter, held an open larder policy too. Dense homemade honey wheat bread and slabs of sharp cheddar, and garlicky salads, so hot it burned your tongue. My job was to rub a clove of garlic into the wooden salad bowl. I practically lived at Micaela's house when we were tweenies. We'd get long skirts from the Goodwill and slit them in two to make twin miniskirts. We were peas in a pod.

I'd also head over to another neighbor's across the way for Second Dinner. They didn't have kids, but they had a TV, which was part of the draw, I'm sure. There was only one or two channels to choose from, and there was also a lot of snow—depending on the vagaries of reception so far from civilization.

During the summer months, I used to peer through a knothole in the fence, watching kids play in the pool until Barbara Scott took pity on me and invited me in for a swim. I learned to swim late in life, I was ten. I was floating on a big sausage balloon and it popped in the deep end. My grannie dragged me down to Barbano's Summer Camp across from Pete's house, for my first swimming lesson. But lessons cost money so, after I mastered the dogpaddle, I finished learning to swim at the Scott's pool. Barbara Scott put me to work, lifeguarding the little kids, babysitting, or making props for a play she was producing.

I was never turned away from anyone's table. It was as if I was trying on different families, to see how they all lived. For the most part, the common denominator was a large family. I had only my baby brother, and my parents had dumped me off at my grandmother's house by the time I was four. So I had issues of abandonment. I was like a stray dog turning up at the dinner table.

You'd think my grandmother wasn't a good cook, but she was. I rarely missed a meal at home either. She'd already raised eight kids, so we were unofficial numbers nine and ten. She was done with parenting. The way I was eating, I should've been the size of a house. But I was a lonesome, skinny little kid, so skinny, that Jimmy Bohman, who was at least a year younger than me, used to sneer, and call me "Flaco" and "Skinny" at school.

I must've had a tapeworm or something, I ate like a horse. And I was horse crazy too. Horses were my saving grace, they offered me a steady circle of friends, they also exponentially expanded my dining horizon, and getting home was a piece of cake. But that's fodder for another tale.

Now I'd give anything to be able to eat like that—and still be called Skinny too. Guess I'll nibble on these words instead.

A Largely Unsupervised Childhood

I had a largely unsupervised childhood, and instead of bikes, for wheels, we had donkeys, then we had ponies, and later, when we were teenagers, we graduated to horses. When we were young, we weren't allowed take the donkeys across the highway, but that didn't curtail us—we found many backroads and firetrails to travel far and wide.

We found novel ways around the restrictions placed by my best friend Stephanie Stone's parents—who otherwise left us all alone. We played until dark, no one was ever watching us, or asking where we were going—as we rarely knew where we were going until we got there and back again. Oh but the adventures we had.

We used creek culverts as byways to cross the highway. That meant we had to leave the donks tied up as they couldn't fit into them. The one at Arroyo Road/Creek was spidery. Luckily they were daddylonglegs.

We'd take the fire lane past Dougie Jarret's places to Bellefuelle's (woodlady) and tie them up, then break the rules—crossing over at Tamal Road. We interpreted in shades of gray. We slant-rhymed parental negotiations with childish logic. Steph's parents said we couldn't take the donkeys across the highway—not ourselves.

Or we'd dink on down to Yerion's Garage as it was technically on the same side of the road, so we weren't technically crossing the road. It was probably more dangerous than crossing the road as there was no shoulder. The lure? We could get a huge RC Cola for 15 cents—we'd hunt for coke bottles along the road (3 cents each), until we had enough to buy one.

By the time we were mounted on horseback, the world was our oyster—or it was about as far as we could ride there and back by nightfall. Only real rule: we couldn't bring the horses home wet. Even riding into nightfall wasn't a huge deterrent. However, missing dinner was.

Full moons, we'd ride up Mt. Barnabe—magical. Surreal. A few times we bit off more than we could chew. That buggy ride to Mt. Tam became epic trying to get home when the gates were locked on the Pine Ridge fireroad above the San Geronimo Ridge. We could lift the buggy over the fence, but searching for a portogee gate under a full moon, to squeeze Christian's horse, Brandy through, was a challenge. 

We played with fire too. Frozen orange juice can rockets powered with firecrackers, matchhead torpedoes. Roasting raw oatmeal, or corn-chips in a coffee can. We liked that burnt taste. We knew better than to light a fire in the barn—we were careful. We knew the consequences.

Not so, for my little brother whose match experiment resulted in a grassfire backside the house. Luckily my grannie was able to put it out before it raced up the hill—and there was enough water in the tank. He was very careful afterwards. 

Fort-making was another important unsupervised activity where we learned to repurpose found objects and recycle wood. Elaborate treeforts, hobo camps—we were always creating structures.

Christian Burkhart's treefort was like a real house with windows—and a telescope trained on the Stone's bedroom window. Hay forts were the best. They didn't require smuggling tools and stealing nails. We were engineers and doctors (um, think I'll leave that one unexplored), rocket pilots and architects.

We built the scaffolding of our playtime to the sky and back. For that freedom, I am ever grateful. For it sustains me even now. There was a wild freedom, limitless imagination, and daydreaming were our closest companions. 

I feel sorry for the kids of today who have every playtime minute structured. It creates a paucity of imagination.

This piece was inspired by The Atlantic feature article, The Overprotected Kid

RIP Jack Gilbert

Joy Harjo, Bob Hass & Linda Gregg

I met Linda Gregg backstage at the Watershed Poetry Festival in Berkeley in September—Bob Hass said, Maureen, do you know Linda Gregg?

And my jaw hit the floor.

I told her about an after-school softball game I watched at Lagunitas School—the Gregg twins were on 2nd & 3rd base, Billy Joe Bianchi hit a home run and when they ran, they were so freckled and golden, I was in awe.

Someone was up at bat. Maybe it was Liz Haas. Or one of the Farley boys. I remembered them from catechism class.  I think it was Lagunitas vs. Nicasio. It was a foul ball that rolled right down the third base line and turned out at the last minute, so everyone had to retrace their steps.

I was about 6 or 7, so baseball was a mystery to me—but Billy Joe was my neighbor (family friends). So, I watched the game and cheered  as he brought them all home.

Linda was a little blown away by the baseball story—expecting something more modern, perhaps—her role as a major poet and me as sycophant—instead it was about a childhood softball game.

As it turned out, her sister was in the audience, too. So I got to meet the Gregg twins together again. I always want to call her Alma, but that's the name of Linda's seminal poetry book—if women can have a seminal books, that is. But perhaps her sister was Linda's Alma. Louise lives in Tomales. The weather has taken its toll on her. She favors the same plaid shirts as did her father. Tough no-nonsense women, the Gregg twins. 

Linda & Louise Gregg

Linda had just come from seeing Jack Gilbert. She said that he wasn't doing well. His mind may have taken flight. But he always knew her. A bond that deep.

I'm racking the brain as to how the story is possible as they are 10 years older than me but Lagunitas was such a small place in those days and I started school early—perhaps they also started school late, to make the timeline work.

Or, they were already in high school. I remember someone saying they were 8th graders—and that seemed like such an impossible distance in time, I couldn't fathom it. Maybe Carol Manning remembers it better.

Summer Camp

As a kid growing up in West Marin in the 1950s & 60s, I lived in a place where we never went to camp but kids from all over the US came to camp where we lived.

It was an uneasy mix as the Forest Farm summer campers were from the land of faraway (mostly the eastern seaboard—NY) and they had no notion they were guests in our land—they weren't nice to the natives. Nor was Old Man Gregg.

Camp counselors and campers hailed from the far reaches of the known world and descended upon Forest Farm Summer Camp each June, founded in 1944 by the Greggs. They may as well have been Martians.

The official story goes that the Greggs welcomed everyone—they built their own pool when a Chinese counselor was told she couldn't swim at the Woodacre Improvement Club. But we local kids were never invited to swim at the Woodacre Improvement Club or in the Gregg pool. Ever. No matter how much we drooled. Funny how that goes.

Somebody At Forest Farm Summer Camp must've had a sense of humor: SAN RAFAEL. Calif. (AP) —A sign posted recently on the office door at the Forest Farms Camp by owner Harold Gregg reads, please keep door closed so bird won't eat our cat." The bird is a turkey vulture. (Miami Herald/Lewiston Evening Journal/The Evening Independent, etc., July 26, 27, 1965). 

 I actually do vaguely remember the sign. Only I didn't get the joke at the time.

The FBI was interested in the Greggs for suspicious activities, but then anyone who moved to Marin and Sonoma from Hollywood or New York was under investigation during the paranoid era of McCarthyism—including my best friend Stephanie's mother, Johanna Stone, a former Russian translator for the UN.

Mrs. Gregg was OK—she was a former teacher who was originally from Petaluma, so she was nicer to the local kids than her husband, Harold. I believe cookies may have been involved.

Harold Gregg, a New Englander, dressed in plaid shirts, thin and dour as they come, taunted Jack Gilbert when his daughter Linda brought him home. The apocryphal story goes: Old Man Gregg said Jack wasn't a real man, but a sissy poet.

Jack got his macho out and shimmied up a Doug fir to fell it with a chainsaw. Something went horribly wrong—the tree split in the middle and Jack came plunging to earth like a sad soft Icarus.

Linda Gregg ran off to Greece to care for Jack Gilbert whose wings were forever clipped. He was sentenced to the wheelchair—and she became a famous poet. Most people know Forest Farm Camp as Serenity Acres—the rehab place where Jerry Garcia died. But that was long after Harold died.

Forest Farm Camp was a commune before that. One of my high school classmate ran away from home and lived there in the 1970s when Claire and Jim Felson owned it from 1966 to 1976. She later told us wild stories of musicians who lived there and even wilder parties. Chalk it up to the times we lived in.

Mrs. Barbano—who also ran Barbano's Lagunitas summer camp on Arroyo Road, just down the hill from the Greggs, opened up her pool for swimming lessons—that's where I learned to swim at the ripe old age of ten. Old Man Barbano's daughter was killed in a car accident in Mexico. He wasn't right in the head after that.

Old Man Barbano gave up the summer camp business and rented the dorms out to musicians including Big Brother and the Holding Company. Yes, Janis Joplin. When the grief got to be too much for him, he shot himself in the head. We were walking home from high school when they brought the gurney out. It was the first time I saw a dead man. But not the last.

There were other camps in the San Geronimo Valley but I don't know their names. Perhaps someone else will remember the stories of the summer camps. The transient folk. Certainly people came in droves from the Bay Area to Camp Taylor ever since the turn of the 19th century. Some families camped out all summer long along the banks of Papermill Creek and Devil's Gulch. Research fodder for another blogeen.

STOLEN RIDE

STOLEN RIDE

                                                      —for Nathan

Bright copper against the afternoon sky,

they were better than day dreams.

Like young girls they coyly bared their necks,

pulled the tall oats with such surety,

ears and feet in a slow syncopated tandem waltz.

In love with their beauty, I was ten.

With ropes concealed behind our backs

Micaela and I climbed the steep hillside.

Honey-voiced, we approached, they leaned

into us as we scratched their necks.

The wind lufted their manes like prayer flags.

I was ten, I idolized the lake country of their eyes.

The ropes arranged themselves.

As if by magic, we were transported

to the ridges that opened like a path

leading us deeper into the mystery.

I was ten, in love with their flint-hooved surety.

The kingdom of the air was ours.

Our hearts flying, fists clenching manes,

raw horsepower unleashed the green blur

of meadows, the flight of birds, our teachers.

I was ten, enraptured with their velocity.

We could not bear the separation at dusk.

Alive, they filled the barn with their breathing.

Mesmerized by the rhythmic grinding of their teeth,

we felt proud, gathered armloads of grass.

Our secret safe in the abandoned barn,

we went home bursting with excitement.

Ours! Ours! I was ten, in love with their loveliness.

The red light of the sheriff’s car

worried the curtain, the blood rose

like lava and settled, that dread chill

icing my toes. He said “We still hang

horse thieves around here.”

In trouble with the law,

I stood there, ten, afraid to breathe.

In love with their beauty, I was ten.

5/4/94