in early 1962, Abbie participated in a signature drive to put Stuart Hughes, a dovish Harvard professor who was also cochairman of the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE), on the ballot as a peace candidate in the Democratic primary for senator. It was the first time Abbie had taken his passionate, obsessive, manic energy and applied it to a political cause, “bouncing,” he would write, “from art to politics.”
Having recently left his Worcester State job, Abbie had enough free time to lead the drive in central and western Massachusetts. He organized teams of volunteers to staff tables and knock on doors throughout the region. The blitz worked. Largely due to Abbie’s efforts, the campaign obtained nearly 150,000 signatures and Hughes got on the ballot. Now, partly inspired by the growing civil rights movement, the Hughes organization, and Abbie in particular, used every organizing technique they could learn or invent, from sit-down afternoon teas, bake sales, and car washes, to press conferences and head-to-head negotiations with union leaders, government officials, and city desk editors. By October, polls showed Hughes favored by up to 20 percent of the electorate. Not enough to win but enough to establish an important statewide power base for future elections.
Just as the Hughes campaign was gaining momentum, the Cuban Missile Crisis came along, and Hughes went on record attacking President Kennedy for his brinksmanship. To do that in Massachusetts was like attacking the pope in Rome, and in a matter of days the support that had been building for Hughes evaporated, and he eventually lost the race badly.
Despite the discouraging conclusion, it had been an exhilarating few months for Abbie. He had participated in a significant way in a powerful grassroots campaign that had introduced him to Worcester’s close-knit community of civil rights activists. In particular, he had met Father Bernie Gilgun, a fiery and impassioned orator, who with other Catholic activists had just opened the Phoenix, a local storefront meeting place, and D’Army Bailey, an angry black Clark University student who had been thrown out of the University of Louisiana for civil rights activities.
But Abbie still didn’t know what he wanted to do with his life. Alarmingly, shortly after the November election, sick at heart on account of his marriage not working out, he packed two suitcases and left for New York City, leaving his wife and son with hardly a word of explanation. He got a job at the new Baronet Theater on Third Avenue near Fifty-Ninth Street and found an apartment across town on West Seventy-Sixth Street in Manhattan. Within a few weeks he was calling to tell me, not how his job was going, but that the best place in New York City to find a piece of ass was Bloomingdale’s department store.
I had been drafted into the army in the summer of 1961, during the Berlin Wall Crisis, and then managed through a friend of Dad’s in the National Guard to get preenlisted into the Guard, where I would be a medic in the 121st Battalion. My training consisted of weekly meetings in Worcester, weekend duty once a month, plus two weeks in the summer, until February 1962 when, after the longest bus ride of my life, I arrived for basic training at Fort Dix in New Jersey, followed by O.J.T. (on-the-job training) at Walson Army Hospital, which was attached to Fort Dix. That was when I first began to hear about a “police action,” soon upgraded to an “incursion,” in Southeast Asia. They told us that “there was a possibility that in thirty days we’d ship off to Saigon.” The idea wasn’t necessarily unappealing. I’d always wanted to be a doctor or veterinarian and here I was learning emergency surgery, suturing, patient care. I was single, and the Far East sounded attractive.
Then, one by one at first, and then in a trickle, black plastic body bags started arriving out of the side doors of cargo planes returning from Southeast Asia. There weren’t many, but I remember seeing them, staring at them, wondering what they meant, and not coming up with any answers at all. The hard heaviness of those body bags, unyielding of meaning, was my introduction to the Vietnam War, somewhat different from Abbie’s a few years later. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to try to put a stop to the body bags coming out of those planes, any more than a few years later it wouldn’t have occurred to Abbie not to try and stop them. We were traveling different roads, although we didn’t know it yet.
After basic training ended, I was still returning to active duty for one weekend a month as part of my National Guard duty. Abbie had recently been promoted to manage the Baronet’s soon-to-be-opened twin theater, the Coronet, right next door. Sometimes, before returning to Worcester, I’d go into New York and visit Abbie, and together we would go down to the Village to see Lenny Bruce or Odetta, the two artists he admired the most at the time. Abbie was making the best of things and trying to enjoy himself, but, although he didn’t want to admit it, he felt alone and confused without Sheila and Andrew. Living in his cramped studio apartment, without friends, the contrast between his present existence and the full life he’d left behind in Worcester was unbearable to him.
In the early spring of 1963, Abbie was blamed for problems that had occurred during the grand opening of the Coronet, and he quit. Without a job he began to realize how much he missed Sheila and their life together and kept calling her to tell her so. He wanted to come home and make a new start. Our whole family became embroiled in the discussion, with Dad against his returning to Sheila, whom he didn’t like, and Ma in favor of his going back to her, because she was afraid of what might happen to him alone in New York City. In February or March, Sheila visited Abbie in New York, then it was Abbie’s turn to visit her. And in the middle of the chaos, Abbie and Sheila decided to make another go of their marriage. Abbie returned home to Worcester. Soon afterward, Sheila discovered she was pregnant again. Abbie got a job as a regional salesman for Westwood Pharmaceuticals.
This was the year when Timothy Leary got himself tossed out of Harvard for meddling with the minds of undergraduates and took his experiments to a millionaire heir’s mansion in upstate New York, where psilocybin was replaced with the stronger LSD. But Abbie still hadn’t heard of Tim Leary, or the words “Tune in, turn on, drop out.” He needed something else in his life, but didn’t know what. Sheila decided that what Abbie needed was a cause he could believe in, and that his finding one would help save their marriage.
The Westwood job, with its good salary, free time, and company car, made intense political activity possible; after six months or so, Abbie found he could keep up appearances working at the job no more than ten hours a week. And Sheila constantly encouraged him in his political attachments, partly because she saw their shared political activism as the only hope for their marriage. They bought a house in Worcester. Their second child, Ilya, also called Amy, was born on November 11, 1963. This was the time of Abbie’s real beginning, the time when he chose the path that he would pursue, without straying, for the rest of his life. But it wasn’t his family life that made it so. Increasingly, life for Abbie began and ended with his work in the civil rights movement. In his autobiography, he would refer to 1963–1965 as “filled with the cry of a movement at its purest moment.”1
The assassination of JFK on November 22, 1963, colored that moment with the taint of tragedy, since, despite everything, young people in America felt a sense of kinship with the president. As Abbie wrote of that day, “Kennedy heated our passion for change, and when he was killed that chilly day in November, we mourned. Kennedy often lied to our generation, but nevertheless he made us believe we could change the course of history. Inspiration can come from strange and unusual places.”2
Together with Father Gilgun and D’Army Bailey, Abbie organized a takeover from within of the placid local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) chapter by recruiting large numbers of new members and setting up a Direct Action Committee to bypass the established leadership. The combination of Abbie’s energy, Bailey’s righteous anger, and Bernie Gilgun’s passionate speeches mobilized people in Worcester in a way that nothing else could have. “An Irish priest, a Jewish salesman, and a hungry black law student,” Abbie would write: “We were the perfect American Trinity.”3
Meetings that had attracted two dozen people now attracted hundreds. Within months, the three had transformed the local NAACP into one of the most militant chapters in the country and had started up a local Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) chapter as well. There were voter registration drives. Discrimination suits were filed against landlords. Stores were picketed. Daycare centers were established. At the Worcester Student Association, which Bailey started up, students were assigned the task of researching the minority hiring practices of local companies. Then the consortium of organizations organized protest marches and boycotts against companies with unfair practices.
I remember one day at Worcester Medical Supply when Dad got a call from the Wyman-Gordon defense plant, one of Worcester’s largest employers and an important account of ours. After picket lines had failed to elicit a more equitable hiring policy, the demonstrators had switched to civil disobedience, lying down before the front gates, preventing the trucks from entering the plant. Abbie was among the first to lie down in front of the trucks. Someone had recognized him and called Dad.
As Dad listened to the report of his son’s actions, his face turned bright red and then deathly pale. He could only understand what Abbie was doing as an attack on himself personally, an attempt to embarrass him. In his autobiography, Abbie remembers Dad coming to the demonstration and describes the confrontation in a humorous light: “‘Okay! Okay!’ says my father. ‘So it’s what you believe in. But do you have to get your shirt so dirty?’”4 But, in reality, Dad could neither understand nor forgive Abbie for what Dad saw as the shame his eldest son was bringing on the family.
In February 1964, Abbie began publishing The Drum, which served the local activist community by listing movement activities, analyzing pending civil rights legislation, reprinting the texts of freedom songs, and promoting fund-raising events. And as “program director” for Gilgun’s Phoenix, Abbie organized Friday-night discussion programs, inviting people like Father Robert Drinan, the dissident Jesuit priest from Boston College who was later elected to Congress; Howard Zinn, the radical historian from Boston University; and Dorothy Day, the editor of the Catholic Worker whom Abbie had once heard speak at Brandeis.
Often Abbie and Sheila hosted dinners for visiting activists at their home. And there were movement slogans painted on signs on their front lawn. Abbie and Sheila both led Friday-night Phoenix discussions, his on Maslow’s self-actualizing philosophy, hers on sexism in Henry Miller’s writings during a panel on Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. To illustrate her point, Sheila read aloud a steamy section from Miller.
In early 1964, Abbie was enlisted as a worker for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). And although Abbie went south only briefly for Freedom Summer that year, he mobilized support groups in the Worcester area to raise funds. And in August he traveled to Atlantic City to support the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party which was attempting to loosen the stranglehold of the one-party South at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. And after Prospect House was founded in Worcester, modeled after the Freedom Houses in Mississippi, Abbie became heavily involved in its ongoing programs.
In the spring of 1965, the Voting Rights Act was passed by Congress, officially institutionalizing civil rights as what ’60s historian Todd Gitlin would later call “an apple-pie issue.”5 But this nod from the Johnson establishment came too late to mean as much to the activists whose accomplishments it encoded into law as it would have had it come earlier. Immediately, Abbie organized a sit-in at the Worcester FBI offices protesting nonenforcement of the new law.
Abbie was making plans to spend the summer doing civil rights work down south, while Sheila stayed home with the kids. In a letter to Father Gilgun, Abbie tried to describe the spirit that moved him. The portrait he painted of himself was telling. He was first and foremost, he said, “a guy who loves action”—and who hated the status quo. As to why he was headed down to Mississippi, the reasons Abbie gave Gilgun weren’t just political; they were personal. He needed the Movement, he said. He wanted to be with people who were deeply committed to change.
Abbie left Boston for Jackson, Mississippi, at the beginning of July. On July 2, FBI agents filed their first report on Abbie’s activities. The report included mention of an authorized phone tap on Abbie’s home.6
Abbie arrived in McComb, Mississippi, and Americus, Georgia, at a time when the solid front of the civil rights movement was beginning to break apart. In McComb, Abbie taught U.S. history, arithmetic, and reading at a freedom school. On an almost daily basis, he participated in marches, got arrested, made bail, and marched again. When he returned north, he brought with him not only a wealth of new organizing experience but also a newfound humility based on a recognition of the distance that can exist between the organizers and the people they are trying to organize. This was something Abbie hadn’t felt in Worcester, where the people he was organizing, and even the people he was organizing against, felt almost as close as family members. But in the South, he entered a more complex historical reality.
One day while he was teaching in McComb, the casket of a local black soldier killed in Vietnam was brought into the school, and Abbie was shocked to find that none of the black students were willing to talk about it: “It was difficult for a middle-class white to understand their resignation in the face of death. That was the moment I most felt the separation between myself and those I wanted to organize. It was an emotional chasm no amount of good feelings could overcome.”7
In the fall of 1965, Abbie and Sheila participated in Worcester’s earliest peace demonstrations. And as the anti-war movement gained force, it called forth a much more widespread and hateful countermovement than anything Abbie had experienced previously. After all, opposing the government during a war has always been the least popular thing anyone can do in America. Protesters were called traitors and Communists. Organizers received threats. A bomb was left on a porch. Protesters were thrown to the ground and beaten while police looked on. Suddenly it looked to Abbie as if the challenge up north might be an even harder battle to win than the fight against racism in the South.
Around the same time Abbie was broadening his political activities to include the early actions of the anti-war movement, he was also beginning to experiment with drugs. It was already more than a year since Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters had set out on their journey around the country seeking enlightenment or drug-induced madness in a beat-up bus they called “FURTHER.” But it was still a few years before a whole generation would begin to seek alternative realities through drugs. Abbie first tried LSD with his friend and former roommate Manny Schreiber. Manny, now an army psychologist, had access to the drug because the army was conducting secret experiments with LSD as a possible weapon of war. Pretty soon Abbie and his Worcester artist friend Marty Carey were doing acid and smoking grass whenever they could get hold of it—still not very often in 1965 and early 1966.
I’m looking at a photo of Abbie taken on January 21, 1966. He’s standing up at a local political meeting in Worcester, wearing the SNCC “uniform”—white shirt, thin, dark tie loose at the collar, and cotton suit with narrow lapels. But his hair is still combed up high over his forehead like he’d walked right off the set of West Side Story, a vestige of his high school days, and there is as much mischief as earnestness in his eyes. I believe that by then he’d set his course in life, knew how important a choice he’d made, but perhaps still didn’t understand what the lasting ramifications would be.
In the spring of 1966, Westwood Pharmaceuticals gave Abbie a gentle push in the right direction when they finally realized how little Abbie had been doing for them and fired him. The company car he now had to return carried “SNCC” vanity plates Abbie had purchased on his expense account. Meanwhile Abbie and Sheila’s marriage had deteriorated to the point where they had begun talking divorce.
In August 1966 I married Joan Bressman, whom I’d first met three years earlier. All I’d seen in Joan at first was a typical Emerson College coed. But then her parents happened to drive up in their rickety Nash Rambler—not exactly an ostentatious display of materialistic values. I started talking to Joan and immediately got a taste of her caustic sense of humor. We went on a few dates, and before I knew it I was in love. Dad loved Joan from the very first time he met her. After the fiasco of Abbie’s first marriage, Dad took to “my Joanie” as he called her, as if she were the first rose of summer, someone to give him hope of grandchildren continuing the family traditions.
We got married in a weekend-long affair at the Malverne Jewish Center (respectable, but not religious) near her parents’ home on Long Island. On Saturday, the day before the wedding, Abbie arrived passing out joints to all my friends. For most of them, it was their first time. On Sunday, in his black tux, with closely cropped hair, Abbie still looked like a man with success on his mind, but it was just an illusion. He was happy for me but not necessarily proud of what I was doing—marrying the nice Jewish girl from Long Island, running the family business, etc. And although he had a good time that weekend, his life was already moving elsewhere. To anyone who asked, Abbie would say his marriage to Sheila was over. He was going forward with the divorce, not yet clear about what he would do next. Sheila came alone to the wedding ceremony and left soon after. I don’t remember seeing Abbie and her together at all. Without its having been planned that way, my wedding was a kind of celebration for Abbie as well, his farewell to the life he’d known.
A few weeks later, Abbie again filled two suitcases with his belongings and gave his bowling balls and television set to his friend Paul Cotton. He moved Sheila and their two kids into an apartment on Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge. The house they had bought together was sold.
Sheila had been the catalyst, the transformational force, for change in Abbie’s life. During the years that he pursued her, married her, and tried to make their life together work, she had represented all his best impulses. It was while he was with her that Abbie committed himself to the highest principles. He was now a radically different person from when he’d first left Worcester, and most of that metamorphosis had happened in the fertile angst of his relationship with Sheila. He had found his calling, thanks in large part to her. But despite Sheila’s influence, and despite their passionate lovemaking, they had never been happy. Their marriage had failed. Abbie was moving on.
For Sheila’s move to Cambridge Abbie borrowed friend and fellow activist Dan Dick’s Volkswagen van, and Dan went along to give a hand. On the hour-long ride, Abbie talked almost nonstop about how hard it had been to keep the marriage together, and how hard it was now to have to leave it behind. But writing about the move later, the image Abbie liked to use is revealing: He said he felt like “a kid shortstop being called up to the majors.”8
One subject that never came up during the drive to Cambridge was Lenny Bruce’s recent death from a morphine overdose, on August 3. I think the death of the artist he most identified with may have felt to Abbie like a brush with his own mortality, and impressed upon him the urgency of getting on with what he had to do.
Abbie’s divorce from Sheila wasn’t officially granted until November 4, 1966, and not finalized until May 1, 1967, less than seven stormy years after it began. But by late September 1966, just weeks after leaving, Abbie had already put his old life behind him. This time there was no talk about missing Sheila. That chapter in his life was officially closed, this time for good.
Years later, Abbie would look back on his Worcester experience with pride and satisfaction: “The things that I learned in the early sixties in the social movements were lessons that I carried with me throughout my career . . . how the ball of wax is put together, and more importantly, how to take it apart: how power structures control people and how they divide people, how the gaps are between the mythology of what is said and reality as it exists; the hidden oppression and the hidden resistance to oppression.”9
He was off to find the ’60s, and now, finally, the new youth culture he was looking for was out there and ready for him. The irony was that Abbie, who will always be associated in our minds with that youth culture, was turning thirty now and a good ten years older than most of the people who would share it with him, and ten years politically more experienced. By the time the youth of America began to awaken to the anti-war movement and the counterculture that went with it, Abbie had had a long running start.