I interviewed Michael on Telegraph Avenue one night in April, 2007, before he knew he was ill. We had great fun hanging out on the street, near the old cafe, while Michael paced and spoke enthusiastically into the tape recorder for over two hours.

Later I will post the entire transcript of the interview. He had many delicious things to say -- some were quite personal and much was historically significant. We were merry that evening, and he was elated to have shown me a "good time" in such a unique manner. The piece below was written for a travel writing class.

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A Few Square Blocks of Berkeley
c. Amy Marsh, 2007

“Hail Mary, full of Grace, help me find a parking place!”

Parking is tight near Telegraph Avenue, and so even Michael Rossman, a grand man of the original Free Speech Movement and the proud son of Jewish communists, is not above invoking the heavenly intervention of a foreign goddess. What worked for his father works for him -- and thus the prayer works a minor miracle for us too as we rush giddily backwards into a suddenly open spot on Dwight Avenue. Such is the power of faith. But I have a feeling our good fortune has less to do with “Mary, Mother of God” and more to do with Michael’s stature as a favorite son of the Berkeley left. Such a man must surely be held in high esteem by local sprites, especially the ones still hanging out on Telegraph.

Aside from serving as a local historian for the Free Speech Movement, and as a political poster archivalist extraordinaire, Michael is also a retired science teacher who worked for many years in two of Berkeley’s private schools. He still co-directs Camp Chrysalis, a popular summer camp for kids. He has written and published at least four books, numerous articles and essays, and quite a few poems too. He studied math and physics in college and loves numbers. He collects rocks, especially jasper. He plays flute, most recently with the Rude Mechanicals, a “Shakespearean punk band.” I saw him perform once, inhabiting the song “Tom of Bedlam” as if it were a second skin. He’s collected experiences, as well as objects, of all kinds. The town is strewn with his ex-lovers, former students and comrades in arms. His long grey ponytail and frequently bare feet are scarcely unusual, yet his sparkling eyes and genial energy, as well as his propensity to engage deeply and humanly, make him a man of unusual charm. He is also a man of striking intelligence. And if all that weren’t enough, he dearly loves dogs and children.

We march past the Shakespeare & Company Bookstore, pause for a few minutes in front of a brightly lit but rather funky cafe. Eventually we settle in front of Amoeba Records. It takes me a few minutes to realize we are leaning against a window filled with pie tins and coffee pots which have been reinvented into robots. A few feet away, a man packs a shopping cart and covers his belongings with a blue tarp. After some fiddling with battery insertion and “testing, testing,” Michael seizes my brand new micro cassette recorder and launches into his stories of Telegraph Avenue, which I quickly come to realize are not just tales of the street and of the movement, but also some of the most important stories of his life.

“I am Michael Rossman. Though I was not born in Berkeley and did not really come to Berkeley for the first time until I was sixteen, the summer of my sixteenth year when I worked at the chemistry lab and got to wander through Berkeley. Afterwards I fell in love with this town. You could walk along these quiet tree-lined streets in the early evening of summer then and you would hear live music coming out the windows of people’s houses where stringed trios or guitarists in rotation would be playing real live music. It was just a wonderful, wonderful place to be.”

By the end of the evening, I’ll see two of the three places where he worked for minimum wage as a young student at Cal. I’ll know what he paid for his first apartment, just a block down from Telegraph on Haste. I’ll hear about places where the first few members of Berkeley’s New Left parlayed and partied. Michael’s tumult of memories will spill names and events which are famous, like Mario Savio and Country Joe MacDonald, as well as names which have sunk into obscurity, such as Il Piccolo Espresso, the first Italian coffee shop in the East Bay.

I’ll also know the exact location where he lost his virginity and how it came to be lost (and even though I gave him a gentle nudge and asked him if he’d like to lose it again, he barely blinked, and just kept on talking...) And so I’ve also heard how he took some buckshot in the hand, running from the cops during a demonstration.

But Michael’s chronicle of Telegraph Avenue begins first with the advent of paperback books and his first discoveries of Berkeley’s legendary bookstores: Creed’s, Cody’s, Moe’s, and Shakespeare & Company.

“Paperback books were relatively new on the marketplace. They were Quality Books, okay, by and large, and I had gotten used to seeking them out in my junior and senior year on mild shoplifting forays in San Francisco. Here in Berkeley there was this little Quality Bookstore in this little cubby hole on Northside, just on Euclid, run by this nice guy called Fred Cody, who was really very friendly and very knowledgeable.”

Uh oh! I was prepared for a few tales of youthful indiscretion, but was I actually going to hear Michael admit to pinching paperbacks from the legendary Fred Cody? I asked him. Michael was aghast.

“No! No, I did not! No, I absolutely did not shoplift from him! Do you think I had no sense of morality? (I had to ask!) No, there seemed a difference between a small, friendly, intelligent sole proprietor store and a big impersonal corporate concern...” Eventually Michael would end up working for Fred Cody, when the bookstore moved to its first Telegraph Avenue location, so it’s nice to know he got the job with a clean conscience.

Later in the interview Michael observed, “I was very poor... it’s remarkable how by and large my larcenous proclivities abated sharply after I got out of my early and mid teens, actually. Interesting. I mean there was no moment of reform, you know.”

After that first summer in Berkeley, Michael left for University of Chicago on a full scholarship, at the age of sixteen. He soon returned.

“I came back here... after my first two years of college in Chicago, largely out of a mix of homesickness for being next to the edge of the sea and the mountains and political activity, because the new left was just starting up in my second year at Chicago and I got these letters from my friends about political conversations in the coffeehouses on the avenue.”

“The year is 1958... It’s the last year I drink alcohol, I think, okay? I’m eighteen going on nineteen, and I had a full scholarship, a full four year scholarship, good for any place in the country, and I used it when I went to Chicago and when I decided to leave there they took it away from me. So I gave up the scholarship to come back here, and came here bereft. I worked three jobs. One of them was on campus hashing in the Baptist Student Center serving meals. That’s when I learned to be a really good dishwasher, right? They served kool-aid for their beverage, but it was food. But then I had two other jobs.”

“One of them, I washed dishes in Mario’s La Fiesta Restaurant... for a dollar an hour, okay? This is bottom level pay at the time. My room cost me $35.00 a month, okay, which made a total of $420 for the year. My food was largely covered. So I made the entire year on something like $650. A general student budget at the time would have been $850.”

Michael also worked as a counterman at Il Piccolo Espresso, “during that era when coffee shops were arguably important culturally in the straggling... but robust exfoliations which later came to be called the counterculture, but here is where that stream of beat culture and the emerging activism of the time come and mingle.” Along with the campus coffee house at the back of Steven’s Union, the “Wheeler Oak” tree in front of Wheeler Auditorium, and a basement apartment in a “big, cavernous, rambling apartment building” on Regent Street, Il Piccolo Espresso was one of the important meeting places for members of SLATE.

“SLATE was the umbrella organization under which all the different tendencies of the emergent New Left sprouted before they diverged into separate organizations, okay? So civil liberties, civil rights, ban the bomb, and the agricultural workers, it was all, if anybody did any stuff like that it would be SLATE people because there was no other organization.”

Another important gathering place was Stiles Hall, a “Catholic student mission... that served as one of the really notable seedbed places for the New Left to develop. Partly in its ecumenical spirit but very substantially in its provision of meeting facilities, and posting stuff in its bulletins and so on. So we would gather across from Stiles Hall to go to demonstrations, get car caravans to go into San Francisco.”

Activism in those days also included demonstrations against the HUAC (House Committee on Un-American Activities), and protests at San Quentin against capital punishment. Michael says the only reason he did not get hosed down the steps of City Hall protesting HUAC, was that he was home, sleeping, after an all night vigil against the Caryl Chessman execution. He had, however, spent weeks “digging up parts of testimony in front of HUAC, particularly damning parts, as my historian’s contribution... to be published in the Daily Cal.”

Michael had done some work at a “notable literary magazine” in Chicago as a “lowly acolyte,” and on his return to Berkeley also worked on campus at the Occident, which sponsored monthly poetry readings.

“We had a really interesting group of poets, one of whom later went on to become one of the notable poets of her generation... she was a profoundly female though not in any simple way feminist poet, nonetheless because of her strength and advancement was taken as a feminist icon.” It was with this poet (unnamed for the purposes of this article) that Michael lost his virginity.

It was after a poetry reading... several of us I guess had repaired to Diane’s apartment with a jug of wine to continue ... socializing and banter, poet’s self conscious banter.” The poet “was in her cups” and became weepy. Michael went to console her and “one thing led to another.”

“I found myself in congress with her. This was not a case of passion, but I was, you know, curious and by no means unwilling though it was a rather strange thing to be doing because of course it was without any more elegant kinds of formalities than muddled groping, you know, but it was also very tender and very respectful and so we remained, though we did not pursue being lovers... So after that... the first year I slept with seven other women in the free environment of the time and then I was celibate for a year and a quarter... I was nineteen and new to this business and you know, it’s hard... I had scarcely any idea how to... about long term relationship, you know.”

What with poetry and politics and sex, we had a lot of ground to cover, just within those few small blocks surrounding Telegraph. Michael admitted the content of the interview was, “actually a fragment of a vast tapestry... I’ll leap lightly over the episode of the Free Speech Movement itself, huge as it is, world historic as it is, in terms I believe I can actually defend, to say that... by that act we created a free space on campus where the political spirit could flower, organize, mobilize itself, not always to unmixedly good effects, but in all its sprawling fertility.”

We went around the corner and stood in front of the historic mural on Haste Street.

“So the FSM makes a free space, okay, and in the next few years this process happens where the campus political culture, which is actually partly rooted in a thin fringe of beatnikism around campus... that fringe starts to expand... and extend producing a counter-community and... we start using... we start claiming and using space. First it’s the plaza in the FSM... Then we start massing for demonstrations in Telegraph Avenue, which the police tear gas, and beat, okay, and then we form up there, mobilize, to march down Telegraph Avenue to try to go to the induction center. Two marches in the fall of ‘65 and both times we’re met at the Oakland border by police who deny us entrance to the city, okay, but we’re using, we’re using this street.... As I saw it at the time, you see, it was a territorial imperative. Here’s an emerging community/culture needs to claim its own public space and this was our public space.”

Standing in front of the mural, with students and other Telegraph habitués sweeping past us, Michael gestures, and now the stories tumble out, all over each other in a sweeping summation of all that went on to make Berkeley what it is today:

“So here is this gorgeous mural, okay, which I carried my ... son on my shoulders to look at it while Osha and his crew were painting this and it carries us downstream from that piece of time, okay, it doesn’t go back into the earlier times particularly. There’s a history of activism here. You can see pages and pages of it, it acknowledges that there’s a history before this, okay. But it (the mural) starts up basically in ‘64 with the FSM, which is all, you know, Mario’s on the police car, here’s the University involved in the military-industrial complex.”

“Okay, so... we get the emergence of the antiwar movement, okay, and the Black Panthers, okay, and I’ve gotta explain, okay. We are wearing longer hair after the Free Speech Movement and publishing odd things and on the corner, at the desk on Cody’s appears this little shoddily produced comic book, only it’s “comix,” okay, and it’s “Snatch!” It’s the first issue of “Snatch,” which is... Robert Crumb’s first notable public effort.”

“So the culture is mutating at this moment. This is the spring after the Free Speech Movement, you know. The rock dances are brewing in the city. The Jabberwocky’s happening here. Country Joe is living behind the Jabberwocky and playing there as an acoustic musician. Our group stopped playing, I guess, before the Free Speech Movement. We were the Chutzpah Trio... the second of two recorder consorts I organized here. This one was sharply ambitious and we played Renaissance, Baroque and modern recorder stuff and thought that we were the only publicly performing recorder consort this side of the Mississippi and we may well have been but I mention this not so much as to pat myself on the back as an index of the eclecticism of the musical mix that was offered at the Jabberwock, which went through flamenco guitar, and through emergent songwriters as well as the old timey stuff, So these emblems of the yeasty culture brew that was happening then that all centered on Telegraph Avenue, including down aways. Whereas now for many years a substantial part of it has migrated to the La Pena area (Shattuck past Ashby).”

“So street sellers appeared, kids loitered on the streets in their raggedy colorful clothing and passed joints, and cops came and beat on them and sympathetic merchants like Fred Cody... opposed that and tried to argue against it in civic quarters with the government which was then still then in the hands of what you’d call liberal Republicans and very moderate Democrats, at best. And so Cody called together a number of people, about eight or nine people, including I (sic) who had gotten some cachet from (being) a leader in the FSM, and we formed something called the “Better Berkeley Commission,” whose first act was to make citizen patrols to follow the police with a legal observer to make sure that they didn’t do illegal things in trying to clamp down on the young people who were proliferating their culture along the avenue. And... historically speaking, it was actually from us doing that, that the Panthers got the model of doing police patrols, though we didn’t do it armed. The Panthers came to do it armed, but we actually did the first police patrols. So the first police patrolling, which was the start of the community control of police movement, happens on this strip, these four blocks right here, for those reasons.”

“So meanwhile the University can’t understand, the administrators can’t understand, why their students who had seemed so tractable and good when they were known as the “Silent Generation,” have gone progressively crazier and crazier and crazier. I mean first it’s sympathy pickets at Woolworth, then it’s demonstrating against HUAC in 1960, then it’s all these Civil Rights demonstrations, the shop-ins, the sit-ins, the Sheraton Palace, and the auto row up there, you know, and then the Free Speech Movement. The students are getting crazier and crazier, wilder and wilder. The University administrators can’t understand why and they fall to a medical model, that’s essentially an artifact of Cold War culture, that it’s non-student agitators, non-student commie agitators moreover, who are responsible for unsettling these normally tractable kids. Thus totally misunderstanding what was going on, but they really didn’t understand it. You can name the people who were involved in this misunderstanding.”

“Yeah, so, they thought not only was this, all the unrest among the students, due to infection from foreign agitators, basically, but they also came to think that the agitators had a central locale, and guess what block in town they fixated on? This one! That entire block there they bought up to build, nominally, to build apartments on, student housing on, but as became obvious... they were going to take a long time, if ever, to actually get around to it. What they did was they bought up the block and they razed it... They thought this block was kind of like the living warren center for the student radicals.”

“It was real close to home, right? The SLATE gathering house was right in the middle of the next block, you know... And for this... as a center for that kind of infection, okay, you had here Cody’s selling smut, you had... the coffee house with its air of disrepute, and... you know, one must admit it, they were poetically justified. If they wanted to put their fist down in one place to try to stamp out the infection, they were poetically justified in doing that precise block.”

“So that block, it gets razed completely and this wasteland sits there for, I don’t know, I forget for how long it is, is it nine months or is it a year and a half? It’s a very long time. It’s just unused, as kind of a casual parking lot, and finally people organize People’s Park and that’s where all the People’s Park conflict happens.”

“A block down here, just on the corner of where I first lived when I came to Berkeley, is where I’m running across the street and I get one little shotgun pellet in my hand, right here, okay. And as I’m describing this, I’m standing right underneath, right, this is the roof right here, up here, where James Rector, who is here pictured lying down bleeding, is shot by the cops, shot by the Alameda Sheriffs Department forces with the shotguns which have buckshot rather than bird shot, you understand, and he lies bleeding to death on the roof and it’s a block down here that I get hit by one ping only, which leaves this little black dot in me for weeks, which is how long it takes me to write... the longest, most passionate poem of my life, about all that stuff, the park poem. So that’s how... well, how poetry is sprung by life along the street. That was my epic poem of 1969 summing up what was going on with us as I saw it then, I guess you would say. It’s a poem that’s cast in the form of a rally on Sproul steps or in a park, a park where a succession of speakers deliver a succession of views, so it’s a dialogue, a public meeting or a meeting of the public inside me.”

It’s really dark now on Telegraph, and getting colder. Both of us realize we’re cold and Michael’s about ready to wind up.

“Anyway, so, this block, this particular block and this whole stretch here are intensely charged with personal memory and experience for me. This is where I worked, this is where I got my culture, this is where I got laid, this is where I got shot at, this is where, you know, I wore bells and feathers, this is where I took pictures, this is where I marched down to go get hit on by the cops. Yeah. And let’s go pick up a bite to eat at Mario’s which is still there after all these years, and the name has changed, but it’s still the Piccolo, you know? Coffee house culture has changed radically in the years since...”

And so we ramble on across the street to the Mexican restaurant, where Michael had washed dishes as a kid, and he got his “ritual green enchilada” and I got my cup of Mexican hot chocolate, and I stared at the multicolored paper hangouts hanging like banners from the ceiling, and I wondered how long they’d been there, floating like clouds at sunrise over the hard wood tables and chairs.

And when we got back to the car, Michael fished for his keys. He never locks his car doors, so I was already inside, settling into the seat, rolling the window down. “Hey, are my keys in the ignition?” he says. I look. They’re there, all right.

Hail Mary, full of grace...

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As a friend and lover of Michael Rossman, who died on May 12, 2008, I have a few unique offerings to post here, including a lengthy transcript of an interview I did with him on Telegraph Avenue in April, 2007 and the unpublished article I wrote which was based on it. And I have some other bits and pieces perhaps to add.

I loved him and I admired him. I saw him close up, and I could also view him from far away, as a man who gave himself over to a number of important movements for social change, and who was changed himself in the process. I read his books and I attended to his observations.

Michael was a notable and complex person: Free Speech Movement veteran and archivalist, political poster collector and archivalist, a writer and poet, a musician, and a naturalist and science teacher. He ran a summer camp for children. My own child went to camp with him twice. He had a family of his own, which he dearly loved. He had many friends, lovers and colleagues from many communities. I am under the impression that most of his friends had known him for years.

His own writing can be found at mrossman.org and he had a Live Journal blog as well. Others have already written commentary and obituaries, and have added memories to his LJ blog. In the days that come, I will add the material I have (some of it has to be retrieved from an ailing computer). May this material contribute, in a small way, to public knowledge of this man. The best source of knowledge and appreciation is, of course, the wonderful writing which Michael was able to publish online before his death.

I am sorry he's gone. More sorry than I can express. He was a luminous and eccentric person, a devoted friend, and a kind but somewhat haphazard lover. Later, I will probably add some of my own personal (but not overly intimate) memories of the man, but not just yet. It's too soon. Others are mourning as well, probably even more intensely than I. I don't wish to disturb them. May my own grief at his passing find some relief in this form of public tribute.
AM