Cancel culture redux: High School 1327. Go π-rates!

In the summer of 2020, the City of Larkspur took down Dennis Patton’s quixotic sculpture of Sir Francis Drake in the wee hours of the morning for “safekeeping,” and then warehoused it. Dennis Patton was devastated. He said it wasn’t a statue, it wasn’t an embodiment of the man, nor an effigy of Drake—it was a sculpture, a metaphor for a dream. A dream deferred, apparently. Last month, the City of Larkspur decided to sell the sculpture for $100,000. They offered the artist first option to buy it back, if he refuses, then it will go to the auction block. To Dennis, Marin embodied “the Free Zone for intellectual and spiritual advancement.” But now the tables have turned. We are myopically challenged.

And then that same Marin group that stripped Dixie school of its historic name (expunging Coast Miwok Marie Dixie’s name because it reminded them of the South), fired up with bloodlust worthy of the KKK in full drag, also went after my old alma mater, demanding that the school’s name, and the highway that bisects Marin, needed to be changed.

Last July, the Tamalpais Union School District met behind closed doors, excluding public input, thus violating the Brown Act, then pulled the words Sir Francis Drake off the facade of my alma mater “to protect it from vandalism.” It wasn’t a case of Vox populi, don’t kid yourself, but a case of a select handful of people imposing their ideologies upon the rest of us. Its interim name, High School 1327. Go π-rates!

In the year 2020, the battle to rename our high school tore communities apart. It rent us asunder. People voted on myriad names, they drew blood. It was a draw. Not one name won. We couldn’t see that it was a supreme irony that one name that actually mattered, didn’t even make it to the nomination process—that of our beloved Drake algebra teacher, the Olympic medalist runner, Archie Williams. So much for being woke. Yeah. It seems we were lost, and also blinded by rectivism. Second time around, Archie’s name was finally added to the roster. It was a lopsided landslide. Victory, not so much. I am divided by how this process was handled, pirated away from the majority at the hands of a few. Fascism, much?

The Sir Francis Drake High School class of 1970 will be the first to have a high school reunion for a school with its historic name expunged and erased. Interesting times. The phoenix of cancel culture rises from the ashes. Welcome Archie Williams High School. It could be worse: High School 1327. Still I wonder what Archie would have thought of all this. Prime number?

• Cancel culture
• Retroactive racism and the BLM movement
• Anne Kent Library roundtable on SF Drake history

Blue Willow

Book of Knowledge, Children’s Encyclopedia, 1917,  PD Wiki

WHEN I was a child playing at the seashore, I imagined the Coast Miwoks wrapped in bright silk brocades, supping from celadon bowls, dining from blue and white plates painted with rural scenes of China. When Sir Francis Drake the Pirate landed here in Nova Albion in the summer of 1579, claiming Point Reyes for the Crown, he left behind a legacy of coins, glass beads, and his cargo of exotic silks and porcelain from China. Later shipwrecks offered up inlaid rosewood tables, ornate carved chairs waiting for an audience to gather on the beaches. Tabula Rasa. Feathered cloaks for the wind.

Perhaps I became a writer because I ate morning cereal from a story painted inside a Chinese Blue Willow bowl: two birds on the wing. It’s spring: fruit trees bloom beneath a surreal tree near a temple. Though a path of light invites us to the temple, a fence stops us because we are not Chinese. Though I am four, I know this, for my grandmother takes me to Chinatown to buy new pieces for the set. Old men in black robes with thin grey plaits down their backs, kow-tow to her, offer me sweets. I stare, round-eyed at the rows of pale celadon melons glowing with a mysterious verdant resilience beneath a grotesque curtain of plucked fowl hanging by the neck. Gateway to another world. Here, we are all immigrants.

When no one’s looking, I climb over the temple fence. (Later I will find a gate, learn the story of the lovebirds—changelings: to escape her father’s wrath, the forbidden lovers find each other on the wing. A story that includes European colonialism and the Far East—a Chinese story from an English design by way of the Dutch, or was it the Portuguese? Evolving into Blue Willow pottery, ideas shipped back and forth across the oceans.)

I am in love with the blue language of the teapot offered up each evening, and the insistence of silver spoons against teacups calling us to vespers. My grandmother says the designs on the edges of the bowl are like hieroglyphic Greek keys—a symbol for clouds, or, the Almighty. (She knows that I will search for celestial dragons in the mountains of the world, for I was born a wanderer during the tail end of the Year of the Dragon.) Every morning I’d wait for the two lovebirds to meet mid-air. Messengers from the otherworld. If they emerge through the thin layer of milk, upside-down, did it change the story? They say birds are the kisses of Aengus Óg, the Love God. My grandmother urges me to finish the last two swallows of milk—because babies are starving in China. My eating habits will become inexorably linked with the welfare of those poor babies.

I gaze deep into the milky scene: A fisherman in a junk casts his line into calm waters. Distant islands. I’m trapped within the white heart-shaped void between island, trees and slender birdwings. No children. I hardly notice three men dressed in robes on the bridge, who, after morning prayers, leave the temple, carrying the tools of my profession: walking stick, scroll and lantern. As they approach the archway, so like a Japanese torii gate, the ancient willow, roots bared by time, weeps and leans into the east wind, small hands of branches claw the air as if to follow them. Every day they’ll begin the journey but never reach the portal, the birds will never quite meet mid-air. Soon my grandfather will die, the dinnerware and our family will scatter when we move north to the Point Reyes Peninsula. Only a platter and a teapot will survive the uprooting. My grandmother and I will drink tea from it for decades. And the platter will bear the holiday bird at family gatherings.

But from my coffee mug made during the height of the Cold War, modern Blue Willow—not from the English copper engravings of the 18th century—tells another story. Memory reemerges with a different historical slant. The two birds meet mid-air, but have grown into fat, complacent pigeons, the fisherman still fishes, but the boat is farther from shore and the fish don’t bite. Our eyes are no longer drawn to what lies beyond the uneasy sea. The islands are gone. Three men still cross the bridge, they’ve lost more than priestly robes: the first one carries on his walking stick a bundle of rags, the second man still carries a scroll—what is written on it we cannot decipher—the third has lost his lantern. They are centuries from home. The shining path to the temple is dark, the celestial gate is gone—bringing us that much closer to the land. And so I am alone on the edge of the continent, dancing on the brink of I know not what.

© 1997 revised 2000

Article on the art murals at Drake Drake High School, Dec. 1969

I never realized that the art murals at Drake High School were cause for consternation. Liz Haas posted this article on Facebook, dated December, 12, 1969. The mural was in room 219, I think that was Mr. Lucy’s room, and the other mural was in the ceramic lab, on the third corridor. I knew them well. Blast from the past, to say the least. The farthest back I can publish anything is 1970. So it’s a year out of sequence.
Added 6/21/2020

School busing discontinued because of Reaganomics 1/11/1970

The IJ says Mon., Jan 11, but there was no Mon. Jan 11th in 1967, '68, '69, or '70.

Good old Reaganomics slashed funding for our school bus services. We were the first to feel the ramifications of it, as few families had cars, the San Geronimo Valley was poor. But this meant we were hitchiking in earnest—twice a day, every day, rain or shine, just to get to school. Which meant you never knew when you would arrive at school, or when you'd get home. You never knew where you'd be let off, so no matter what, you were walking a mile or two. For me, hoofing it to school was 8.7 miles over White's Hill, one way. That's 17.5 miles a day. Sir Francis Drake Blvd. was not set up for walking. It was quite dangerous going over White's Hill. No bike lanes then. Walking for pleasure is one thing, forced marching to and from school every day that distance is another thing—especially during storms. Not to mention the time involved—all this because Ronald Reagan cut back back school funding.

See the full story here.
Shank's Mare and Reaganomics