I didn’t think about it at the time, but I realize now that I didn’t choose California. California chose me—in the same way it’s chosen millions of Americans before and since—and catapulted me into all kinds of new directions I never would have dreamed possible. That’s what California’s all about.
More than anyplace else, California, with its face turned toward the Pacific and the future, represents a new beginning. In fact, for me, California’s not so much a place as it is a state of mind. It was as far as I could get from my past and as close as I get to the future. After leaving the seminary, I was both uprooted and rootless, which is a good thing to be when you’re in your twenties. And California was the perfect place to land. It offered a whole new life filled with exciting new opportunities I would never have enjoyed anywhere else.
Of course, as I prepared to head to California, there were a lot of unknowns: Outside of teaching school, what was I going to do once I got there? Where would I live? How would I find my way around? How would I make new friends?
In 1967, the population of California was nineteen million. But I only knew six of them, three of whom—Seth and Margery Warner, and Hugh Coughlin—were still in Fribourg. That left Ben and Emily Gershinoff, and their daughter, Rochelle.
Ben and Emily, close friends of my parents, lived across the street from us on Washington Street in Delaware City. I grew up playing with Rochelle and her brother, Richard. Like several of my uncles, Ben had arrived in Delaware City as a young soldier at Fort DuPont, married a local girl, and decided to stay—until he was assigned to occupation forces in the Philippines. He and his family returned to the States and settled in Daly City, just south of San Francisco.
Now married, Rochelle lived with her husband, Jerry Sullivan, and their four kids in nearby Pacifica, where I shared a bunk bed with one of their twins for my first month in California.
Sacred Heart High School proved to be a perfect landing pad for my new start in California. Located at Franklin and Ellis Streets, in the heart of San Francisco, it was known—unlike rival Saint Ignatius, favored by sons of doctors and lawyers—as the school of choice for blue-collar Catholics, sons of police, firefighters, and working-class families. The school was run by the Christian Brothers, where nobody but the principal, Brother Francis, knew that I was actually a seminarian on a leave of absence.
I was paid $600 a month and assigned to teach five classes a day: two freshman French, and three senior religion. I also coached the debate team and took my turn as faculty adviser or chaperone at football games, basketball games, and school dances.
I hadn’t been at Sacred Heart long before the budding radical inside me was put to the test—this time, helping lead a campaign against the bishop! At one of our first faculty meetings, several lay teachers complained they could no longer raise their families on the dirt wages they were paid. So we agreed to press for a pay raise. Our first step was to meet with the priest in charge of Catholic schools for the Diocese of San Francisco. He listened politely but insisted the diocese could not afford to pay its teachers more.
Thus rebuffed by the diocese, the lay teachers convened to decide their next move. It was an emotional meeting. Several teachers described the hardship of trying to support their families. Some talked about taking second jobs. Others admitted they were between a rock and a hard place, because they knew the bishop wouldn’t budge and they didn’t have the necessary state credentials required to get a job in a public school. At which point one teacher raised the stakes and suggested the only way to put enough pressure on the bishop was for us Catholic high school teachers to go on strike.
Many of us immediately endorsed a strike (even though, as a closet seminarian, with neither “chick nor child,” I had the least to lose). Others, already stretched to their limit financially, feared the consequences. Without a Catholic school teachers’ union, some pointed out, we’d be on our own, with no resources to support teachers while on strike. In the end, we agreed to meet again a week later with lay teachers from other Catholic high schools to make a final decision.
Unfortunately, when that moment came, we couldn’t round up enough votes to authorize a strike. I was disappointed, but, a couple of years later, in Sacramento, I rejoiced when I turned on the news and learned that Catholic high school teachers in San Francisco were out on strike against the bishop, walking the picket line. The seeds we’d planted had finally sprouted. My fellow teachers went out on strike—and they won a big pay raise!
The best part of teaching at Sacred Heart was the excitement of living in San Francisco. I soon left Rochelle and Jerry’s home for my own furnished apartment on Clay Street on Nob Hill (the downhill, shabby side of Nob Hill) and began exploring that beautiful city—which, after Paris, is still my favorite city on the planet. I loved walking along the bay, the atmosphere and smells of North Beach, the color and fun of the Mission, the wild scene in Haight-Ashbury, the mysteries of Golden Gate Park. I couldn’t wait to read The San Francisco Chronicle every morning, with its great columnists Herb Caen, Charles McCabe, and Art Hoppe.
San Francisco’s a city with an outsized personality, and in the late 1960s it was on full display, embodied by colorful San Francisco mayor Joe Alioto. Alioto was the perfect mayor for San Francisco: outspoken, flamboyant, in love with life, upbeat, and scary smart. One of his most colorful moves was turning the sixty-third anniversary of the 1906 earthquake into a celebration of San Francisco’s rebirth and renewal. At midnight on April 18, 1969, I joined thousands gathered on the east side of city hall to hear Alioto and other notables memorialize the occasion. As the San Francisco Symphony played the score, the silent classic 1906 was projected on a giant screen over the speakers’ platform. The renowned poet Brother Antoninus, a.k.a. William Everson, read a long, original poem he had written for the occasion, “The City Does Not Die.” And, true to the spirit of the City by the Bay, the crowd rose to the occasion.
At that time, one of the big controversies in San Francisco, every step of which was breathlessly reported in The Chronicle, was whether local bakeries should be allowed to sell presplit English muffins. Public fever ran hot, those supporting the tradition of intact muffins opposing those arguing for the convenience of having them presplit. And, sure enough, in the middle of the earthquake crowd that night stood a lone protestor, dressed in black, holding a black sign with bold white lettering: SPLIT THE EARTH, NOT THE MUFFINS!
In 1967, San Francisco was ground zero for the Summer of Love, centered in the wild hippie scene of the Haight-Ashbury. Walking through the Panhandle, or walking up Haight Street and into Golden Gate Park was, indeed, like walking in a different country, if not a different planet: with flowered shirts, jeans, and beads, the ubiquitous smell of pot, many people of all ages stoned out of their minds, music and dancing in the streets. Mellow, mellow, mellow. But also dangerous for a lot of young people who’d run away from home and headed to the Haight, lured by the promise of free drugs and free love, only to find neither. Nor any free food.
While teaching at Sacred Heart, I became a regular visitor to the Haight as a volunteer, two or three nights a week, in an intervention center called the Off Ramp, located in the basement of a local church. We served coffee and day-old doughnuts to anybody who walked in. As staffers, our job was to welcome our guests, chat with them, and see if they needed any help. Many were teenagers who’d run away from home and were looking for a way, or “off-ramp,” to get back home. We connected many of them by phone with their parents and bought bus tickets for some of them.
As if teaching full-time and volunteering in the Haight were not enough to keep me busy, I also decided to continue my studies and pursue a doctorate in theology. Serendipitously, I applied and was accepted for graduate studies at Berkeley’s Graduate Theological Union—affiliated with, and located just north of, the UC–Berkeley campus—where I signed up for GTU’s program of study in Religion and Society and discovered a whole new world of purpose and meaning.
At GTU, fortune smiled on me once again when I was assigned Dr. Bob Lee as course adviser. A professor at Marin County’s San Francisco Theological Seminary, Bob had authored fifteen books about faith in the real world, or what was loosely called applied theology. He was a committed and very down-to-earth Christian and good family man who stressed the application of faith to real-life events. He taught us the power of the faith community in leading the civil rights movement—whose public face was a Baptist minister, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.—as well as other historic causes, ranging from the abolition of slavery to women’s suffrage to the prohibition of alcohol. He also introduced us to the great work of Reinhold Niebuhr and his epic book Moral Man and Immoral Society.
Niebuhr’s central premise in that landmark work is that we are called upon to operate within and try to improve an imperfect world—a purpose that soon became one of the driving forces of my life. More than anything else, Niebuhr injected a healthy dose of realism into both theology and politics. In The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, for example, he wrote: “Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.”
I’m in good company as one of Niebuhr’s disciples. He was the leading influence on the work of Dr. King. Other leading figures who cite Niebuhr as an influence on their life’s work include Hillary Clinton, Madeleine Albright, John McCain, and President Barack Obama. He was awarded the Medal of Freedom by President Lyndon Johnson in September 1964.
To me, Reinhold Niebuhr’s work is what Christianity—or, indeed, any organized religion—is all about. It’s also the focus of the great Jewish tradition Tikkun Olam, or “healing the world.” And, I believe, that’s what God taught us in the words of the Lord’s Prayer: “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” We may get to heaven someday, but for now, we are citizens of this planet, this country, this city or town, and that’s where our work must be focused—applying the lessons of Christianity in our everyday lives, striving for justice for all, and helping build a better world. And we should reach out especially to the poor and disadvantaged. It’s not enough to go to church on Sunday or accept the world as it is. Our responsibility as Christian realists is to get involved, to transform the world in the cause of justice, and to speak out on the issues of the day. Niebuhr acknowledged “a tremendous urge to express myself.” In that respect, I am his disciple. And in that spirit, I don’t see how you can be pro-war, anti–gay rights, anti–women’s rights, anti-environment, anti–programs to help the poor, or pro–discrimination of any kind—and still call yourself a Christian. Jesus Christ was a liberal. All Christians should be liberals, too.
I also took advantage of my new freedom from the seminary to try dating, which got off to an awkward start. At first, I went barhopping with another bachelor teacher from Sacred Heart, who promised to teach me how to “pick up chicks,” but never did. Totally turned off by that scene, I joined a single dating club at Grace Cathedral. Nice people, wrong church. It was while walking out of Catholic Mass at the Church of Notre Dame on Bush Street one Sunday morning that I met Gisele Favre, a young Frenchwoman in San Francisco on a work permit. Years of teaching and speaking French paid off; we spent the rest of that day together, as well as the next few months. We both loved to dance. Our favorite hangout was a dance club named Sergeant Pepper’s, on Bush Street near Van Ness Avenue, where we danced to the exciting, new sound of the Beatles.
Soon after my arrival in San Francisco, I heard from my good friends Seth and Margery Warner, now back from Switzerland and resettled in Malibu, who invited me down for Thanksgiving. My first visit to Southern California! Seth picked me up at LAX, and we spent most of the weekend at their modest but comfortable ranch house on Point Dume, walking down to the beach every day for a swim and picnic. Even then, Malibu was home to many movie stars and writers. The great novelist and screenwriter John Fante, one of the major influences on Charles Bukowski, lived on Point Dume, as did prolific police thriller writer Ross Thomas, whom I met at one of the Warners’ lively dinner parties. Years later, Johnny Carson built a mansion on the bluff overlooking the little private beach at Point Dume. I ran into him one day, walking back from his tennis court.
There are not enough superlatives to describe what an important role Seth and Margery Warner played in my life. First in Fribourg, then in California, they adopted me as a best friend. I adopted them as my older brother and sister. Living such a wonderful, fun, meaningful life together, they were my role models as a couple. I loved spending time with them, both in Malibu and at their charming getaway in Carmel, and learned so much from both of them. I still think of them as California’s version of Gerald and Sara Murphy, the beautiful young American couple who graced the gathering of ex-patriots on the French Riviera in the ’20s, as chronicled by Calvin Tomkins in his wonderful little book, Living Well Is the Best Revenge.
Margery was the artist, the gardener, a great chef, an avid reader, author of children’s books, and lively conversationalist. Seth was the professor, the intellectual, the connoisseur of bargain California wines from Trader Joe’s, and a colorful raconteur. He introduced me to several of his favorite books, including The Uses of the Past by Herbert J. Muller, which reminds us that we are not the first society to face many of the problems we’re struggling with and that we would do well to look back on, and learn from, earlier civilizations. Seth was also a great fan of The Nation magazine and loved reading out loud favorite passages from Alexander Cockburn’s great, acerbic Beat the Devil column. With great gusto, he enjoyed dismissing most politicians with his favorite word: feckless.
Later, after I moved to LA, I was able to spend more time with Seth and Margery. But in those first couple of years, even while living in San Francisco, they served a very important purpose: the filter through which every one of my girlfriends had to pass. Whenever I felt I was getting serious about someone, I would arrange for us to drive to Malibu and spend a weekend with the Warners. I needed to see how she would relate to them and what they would think of her. As we will see, after several near misses, they helped me make a damned good choice.
One Friday night in early December 1967, I had just left a party at Gisele’s apartment on Nob Hill when I heard her calling after me. There was an urgent phone call for me, she said. Knowing that none of my friends or family knew where I was that evening, I knew it had to be bad news—and it was. Rochelle, not finding me at home, guessed correctly that I must have been at Gisele’s. “I just got a call from Delaware City,” she said. “Your mother died.” I immediately called home. Cousin Billy Stephens answered the phone and confirmed. “Chip, I hate to tell you this, but she’s dead.”
There’s no way to soften the blow of losing your mother. Mom and I had our differences, especially as I became a rebellious teenager, often too aggressively asserting my independence. And I knew I had broken her heart by leaving the seminary. But I loved her. And I knew she loved me. She supported me in, and was proud of, everything I did. And I was proud to have such a young, beautiful, vivacious, life-of-the party woman for my mother. She dropped dead of a blood clot, only 47 years old. But if the thrombosis hadn’t claimed her first, the cancer would have. While I was a senior at Niagara, she’d been operated on for breast cancer and never fully recovered from the same cancer that had already taken her mother and sister.
I flew home for the funeral, surrounded by the Cook cousin clan and several of my Oblate colleagues. Mom was buried in Delaware City’s Catholic cemetery, under a tombstone that read simply: ISABELLE F. PRESS. WIFE-MOTHER. During the reception at our house after the burial, I noticed that Dad was missing. I found him upstairs in his bedroom sitting alone, looking out the window, lost in grief. At that point, he and I finally both broke down and cried.
I stayed around for a couple of days, helping Dad make arrangements for someone to help take care of Mary Anne, age eight, and Joe, age six. Then I headed back to the West Coast—but not without a detour to New York to see what was really going on with me and Ginny Howe. She met me at Penn Station, we went immediately to her apartment, and I returned to San Francisco and broke up with Gisele. For the next few months, Ginny and I enjoyed a wonderful, fun relationship, meeting up as often as we could in New York, San Francisco, Malibu, Chicago, and Neenah, Wisconsin, where her parents lived.
Back in San Francisco, I was flipping through my address book one evening, wondering whom I might call or get together with, when I made a great discovery: Just three blocks from my new, second apartment on Clay Street, this one in lower Pacific Heights, lived Vincent, Fred, and John Siciliano—three former campers from Camp Brisson, an Oblate summer camp on the Elk River in North East, Maryland, where I’d served as counselor before going to Europe.
I got to know the Siciliano boys well. They were the only ones who signed up, three years in a row, for the entire six weeks of camp. But I’d never met their parents, because they never came to visit. All we knew was that their father was some big shot in the White House. And, indeed, he was. Appointed by President Dwight Eisenhower, Rocco Siciliano is still the youngest person ever to serve as assistant secretary of labor. He then moved to the White House as special assistant to the president for personnel management, where he arranged the historic June 1958 meeting between President Eisenhower, Martin Luther King Jr., and other prominent civil rights leaders. Rocco later served as undersecretary of commerce in the Nixon administration.
After school the next day, I walked up the street and knocked on their door. Marion Siciliano answered, I identified myself, she invited me in, we talked, she invited me to stay for dinner, I accepted—and never left!
From that day on, I’ve been part of the wonderful Siciliano family—Rocco and Marion, Loretta, Vincent, Fred, John, and Maria—and have benefited greatly from their love and support. Rocco and Marion, in fact, soon started calling me their “fourth son.” We spent a lot of time together in San Francisco and at their vacation home in Alpine Meadows, near Lake Tahoe.
At the time, Rocco was head of Pacific Maritime, a West Coast–based trade association representing shipping companies. His wife, Marion, on the other hand, was a liberal Democrat and a force of nature. She clearly ruled the roost, somehow successfully balancing the raising of five children with remaining active in community affairs. Later, after they’d moved to Beverly Hills, where Rocco took over the helm of the title insurance firm TICOR, Marion became an accomplished painter, whose bold panels are still displayed in several Los Angeles public buildings and museums.
I’m grateful to Rocco and Marion for many things, not just for the good meals but especially for renewing my faith in Catholicism. For a while, in my role as seminarian in exile, I still went to Mass on Sunday mornings, but with less interest every week, because I was so turned off by the pabulum most priests offered as homilies or sermons. In my view, at a time of great, shuddering change across the nation and all over the world, priests never talked about anything of real consequence to the real lives of the real people before them. When I complained about this one day to Rocco and Marion, they invited me to join them the following Sunday in a private worship circle they’d helped organize.
Thus my introduction to San Francisco’s wonderful Underground Eucharist. Once a month, we’d convene in someone’s home for a very special worship service. We’d begin with reading of a passage selected by that day’s host—from scripture, from a favorite book, or from the morning newspaper—followed by a lively discussion about what it meant, what lessons we should take away from it, or what actions it should trigger. For the Eucharist, we then shared a real loaf of bread and a real bottle of wine, blessed by one of two or three priest friends, organized by Jesuit Jim Straukamp. We ended with a potluck lunch or dinner.
And, like the early Christians of Rome, who were forced to meet secretly in the catacombs, we also met in secret to avoid the wrath of the bishop—who, had he found out about it, would have fired the priests involved and somehow penalized those of us who attended.
Even counting all my years in the seminary, those underground “masses” were the most meaningful religious experiences of my life. We were with close friends. We were living our faith. We were talking about real issues and applying them to our lives. To me, that’s what the faith experience is all about. I was sad when a couple of families moved away and our group fell apart. I’ve never experienced anything like it since.
For me, it was back to the institutional church. But oh, what a difference. Having heard of Glide Memorial Church as a real force in community affairs, I decided to give it a try. Actually, I was disappointed in my first visit to Glide because it was so traditional. The ministers all clean-cut, garbed in flowing robes. Members of the choir, in their own colorful robes, arrayed behind the pulpit. The whole ceremony was decidedly old-world for a church with a reputation as a mover and shaker.
But that soon changed dramatically when the pastor resigned and the assistant pastor, Cecil Williams, took his place. Cecil took off his robes and let his hair grow. The choir disappeared, replaced by a live band and a light show. Cecil came out from behind the pulpit, sporting an Afro and a dashiki, and paced up and down the aisles preaching the most powerful sermons I’ve heard anywhere. Soon it was standing room only every Sunday, and Glide became my new home.
Sunday worship was only part of the Glide experience. A social hour was held in the church hall after services, with one of the most economically and socially diverse crowds you’d find anywhere. Williams was far ahead of most pastors in embracing members of the LGBTQ community, and there I had my first encounters with cross-dressers and transsexuals. Many Sundays, I joined a group from Glide that served free meals in Haight-Ashbury’s Panhandle. I also volunteered several evenings in the Black Man’s Free Clinic, founded by Glide in the Western Addition. Glide was where things were happening. It’s the finest example I know of the vital role black churches have played and still play today in the life of American cities.
So it was only natural that, on the evening of April 4, 1968, when I learned of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., I immediately headed for Glide. So did hundreds of others. The church was packed with people seeking the comfort of friends in their grief. There was no organized service. Instead, spontaneously, people just stood up and started talking about what King had meant to them. It was a very powerful and genuine religious experience and a reflection of the true community that was Glide.
MY START IN POLITICS
At the same time, I was still drawn to politics, encouraged by my friend Rocco Siciliano, who—even though I was a registered Democrat—introduced me to then New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, who was gearing up for a possible presidential run in 1968. At Rockefeller’s suggestion, I contacted his staff about a position in the campaign, but no job offer ever followed.
Eager to get back into politics after being forced to the sidelines during my seminary years, I looked for another opportunity—and found it. Or, maybe, it found me.
In the spring of 1968, nearing the end of my first year of teaching at Sacred Heart, I had a big run-in with the principal, Brother Francis. At a meeting in his office, he pointed to the peace button on my jacket and accused me of being a bad influence on students by taking a public stand against the Vietnam War.
I actually found this amusing. As I pointed out to Brother Francis, in my religion class, we had debated the war in Vietnam for six weeks, after which we had taken a vote. The class was well aware of my own anti-war position, yet the final vote was 15–1 in favor of the war. Obviously, my peace button hadn’t poisoned the minds of too many students. Brother Francis nevertheless ordered me to remove the pin and informed me that Sacred Heart would not welcome me back for the fall ’68 term. In other words, I was fired.
As they say, when one door closes, another opens. About the same time, I heard about an anti-war senator who had dared stand up against President Lyndon Johnson in the 1968 Democratic primary over the war in Vietnam. Not only that, Eugene McCarthy was a Catholic and a former seminarian, a man I could identify with.
McCarthy’s remembered today as one of America’s most colorful and beloved politicians, respected by members of both parties for his courage, honesty, wisdom, and wit. When he retired from the Senate, even Lyndon Johnson sang his praises: “He’s one of those uncommon men who puts his courage in the service of his country, and whose eloquence and energy are at the side of what is right and good.”
I was thrilled, on March 12, when McCarthy racked up 42 percent of the vote in the New Hampshire primary, coming in a close second to LBJ’s 49 percent, and demonstrating that there was, indeed, deep anti-war sentiment inside the Democratic Party. But I still remained on the sidelines, doing nothing other than following news of the primary—until four days later, March 16, when Bobby Kennedy announced he was jumping into the race.
To me, Bobby came across, as he had in his New York Senate race, as an interloper late to the feast. This time, he was trying to steal the challenger spotlight from Gene McCarthy, who’d earned that title by getting in first. Bobby’s attempt to steal the anti-war torch from McCarthy pissed me off so much that the very next day I walked into the San Francisco McCarthy headquarters at Fox Plaza, Ninth and Market, and signed up as a volunteer.
You may remember: When I met and interviewed Senator John F. Kennedy in 1957, he told me the best way to find out if I liked the nitty-gritty of politics was to volunteer for a campaign. Now here I was, eleven years later, finally following his advice—and campaigning against his younger brother, no less. Little did I realize how much volunteering for the McCarthy campaign would determine the course of the rest of my life.
A word about politics. As the grandson and son of a small-town mayor, and as a high school student council president who interviewed a future president of the United States, it may not seem so unusual that I got involved in politics. Indeed, I turned to politics after leaving the religious life for the same reasons many former priests, nuns, and seminarians—Jerry Brown and Gene McCarthy, being prime examples—did so: because it was another form of public service and because if offered a similar opportunity to improve the human condition, without all the trappings or limits of organized religion.
What may be unusual is that forty years later—after my experience as a campaign manager, legislative chief of staff, press secretary, lobbyist, fund-raiser, candidate, state party chair, and political commentator on radio and television—I’m still a believer. Yes, I’ve seen the best of politics and the worst of politics. And I’m still a believer.
For me, politics is about a lot more than winning or losing elections, even though I’ve fought like hell to win every election I’ve ever been involved in. For me, politics is how we make a contribution. It’s how we build a better city, state, or country. It’s all those decisions, big and small, that make this a better world for our children and grandchildren. It’s one of the ways we exercise our responsibility as citizens of this great country. It’s how we create democracy.
Democracy, after all, is not something invented once and for all in 1776 and put on the shelf to collect dust for the next 250 years. Democracy is always in the process of creation. Each generation in turn gets to create its own version of democracy, the kind of democracy it wants to live in. And now’s our turn: to expand opportunities, to break down barriers, and to make sure all Americans enjoy the same basic freedoms in pursuit of the American dream. We do that through the political system. That’s why politics is so important. And that’s why we can never walk away from it.
For my baptism in politics, I spent two or three evenings a week and weekends doing grunt work: answering the phone; addressing, stuffing, and licking envelopes; and handing out flyers. When the end of the school year arrived, I told campaign manager Frank Moran I could put in even more time. Whereupon Frank named me office manager. Who says you need experience to get ahead in politics?
Spring of 1968 was a hot time in California politics, which became even hotter with LBJ’s surprise March 31 announcement that he would not seek reelection. That made it a real rat race between Gene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy on who would challenge Vice President Hubert Humphrey for the Democratic nomination.
In San Francisco, whichever challenger won, McCarthy or Kennedy, the well-connected Burton brothers were in the catbird seat. California State assemblyman John Burton was chair of the McCarthy campaign. Two blocks up Market Street, his older brother, Congressman Phil Burton, chaired the Kennedy campaign.
In effect, because he was the leader of opposition to the war, the McCarthy campaign was the anti–Vietnam War campaign. A strategic part of our campaign was organizing anti-war marches or rallies, most of them in front of San Francisco City Hall. John Burton was always a featured speaker. At one rally, I was assigned to accompany the legendary Jeannette Rankin from Montana, the first woman elected to Congress, a lifelong pacifist, one of fifty members of Congress to vote against U.S. entry in World War I, and the one and only member of Congress to oppose a declaration of war against Japan after Pearl Harbor.
Famed folk singer Pete Seeger performed at almost every rally. And anti-war activist Allard Lowenstein, who had persuaded McCarthy to challenge Johnson after Bobby Kennedy at first refused, would often fly in, totally unkempt, lugging books and papers under both arms, give a rousing speech, and then fly off to another rally in another city. Many of us, myself included, worshiped Lowenstein as a political hero.
It was an exciting time and, working at McCarthy headquarters, I was in the heart of the action. John Burton held frequent news conferences at Fox Plaza. State campaign leaders Jerry Hill, Mike Novelli, Joe Holsinger, and June Degnan held strategy sessions there. McCarthy himself stopped by on a couple of campaign swings through Northern California, always attracting huge crowds. McCarthy was the Bernie Sanders of his time. I never saw such genuine enthusiasm for any candidate, especially among young people, as I did for Gene McCarthy—until Bernie Sanders in 2016.
Morning, noon, and night, the San Francisco McCarthy office was always swamped with volunteers. The music of Carole King’s Tapestry album filled the air. It was my job to hand out daily assignments to volunteers and keep them busy.
One day, Frank Moran’s girlfriend, Joan, showed up with Carol Perry, a girlfriend of hers from Providence, Rhode Island, who was spending the summer in San Francisco in between her first and second years of graduate school at Boston’s Simmons School of Social Work. Joan asked where the two of them might be most helpful that day. Without thinking about it, I dispatched them to Fisherman’s Wharf to hand out flyers announcing an upcoming McCarthy rally.
As they walked out the door, I glanced at Carol again and quickly realized how strikingly attractive she was and what a dumb move I’d made. Fortunately, she and Joan both returned to volunteer the next day, when I could find plenty of work for Carol right there in the office. By this time, my relationship with Ginny had ended—sadly, but on good terms. Carol and I soon struck up a friendship, started dating, and, thanks to Gene McCarthy, the rest is history. We were married less than a year later. And thirty-five years later, Carol and I hosted a birthday party in our home in Washington to celebrate Gene’s eighty-seventh birthday.
As I write this, Carol and I have enjoyed forty-eight wonderful years together, and I can’t believe how lucky I am. First, to have met her. Second, that she’s put up with me all these years. For her, given my schedule, frequent career changes, often impatient and petulant nature, and zero interest in or aptitude for all those household chores husbands are supposed to take care of, but I don’t, it hasn’t been easy.
For me, it’s been a dream. Carol is Audrey Hepburn beautiful. She’s a talented artist and weaver. She’s even more liberal than I am, politically. She’s quiet where I am loud, graceful where I am clumsy. She may seem meek, but she has nerves of steel. She’s a great cook. She’s a devoted mother and grandmother. She’s a loyal and warm travel companion, lover, and friend. Almost fifty years later, I still feel about Carol the way Abigail Adams felt about husband, John, at the same period in their marriage. When her sister asked her in February 1814 if she would still marry John if she had her life to live over again, Abigail wrote back: “Yet after half a century, I can say my first choice would be the same if I again had my youth and opportunity to make it.”
But 1968, as anyone who lived it will remember, was also the worst of times. The glory of that primary season, sadly, ended in tragedy at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles shortly after midnight on June 5. Just a week before, May 28, McCarthy had upset Kennedy in Oregon and moved into the California primary with a head of steam. We worked like hell that last week, confident we could carry California for McCarthy over of Kennedy—and then crush Hubert Humphrey at the Chicago convention. But our hopes were dashed as we gathered at McCarthy headquarters the evening of June 4 and saw the votes pile up for a narrow Kennedy win. I left the party as soon as McCarthy conceded, rather than wait for Kennedy’s victory speech. As soon as I got home, shortly after midnight on June 5, I turned on the radio and heard the horrible news that Kennedy had been shot. He died the next day, twenty-six hours later, at Good Samaritan Hospital.
The assassination of Bobby Kennedy alone was a tremendous shock. I didn’t dislike him. I admired him greatly. I just identified with Gene McCarthy more. But coming only two months after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., and only five years after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Bobby’s murder seemed to take all the joy and meaning out of politics. We limped through the summer, still pretending we could make a difference in Chicago. Yet, deep down inside, we knew it was all over and didn’t want anything more to do with politics as usual.
The night of August 28, we young McCarthyites joined the official gathering of San Francisco Democrats in a North Beach restaurant to watch the proceedings from Chicago—which meant, mostly, watching footage of Mayor Daley’s goon squads beating up anti-war protestors in Grant Park. Then the voting started. As soon as the Pennsylvania delegation put Humphrey over the top, we stood up en masse, put on black armbands we’d brought along for the occasion, and paraded out of the restaurant.
One week later, we formed a new organization called VNP, Volunteers for New Politics, determined to support only those candidates, Democrat or Republican, who met our high ideals. Pro-war Hubert Humphrey was not one of them. In fact, I can’t even remember whom I voted for that November. I simply may not have voted. I did not vote for Humphry.
Whatever option I took, I learned a powerful lesson about spite voting and refusing to vote: Don’t do it! Clearly, Humphrey would have made a much better president, but thanks in part to a lot of people like me, we got stuck with Nixon.
I was reminded of that mistake again in 2000, when so many Democrats cast a vote for Ralph Nader for president, even though he couldn’t possibly win, just to spite Al Gore. That’s how we ended up with the Florida recount and the Supreme Court’s decision to cancel the election and appoint George W. Bush president of the United States.
That was the end of the McCarthy campaign, in all respects but one. By this time, I was enjoying Carol’s company so much that I didn’t want to lose her. So, one night, while driving across the Golden Gate Bridge to join friends in Marin County for dinner, I suggested she might want to stay with me in San Francisco. Happily for me, she agreed, drove back to Boston to pick up her stuff, stopped in Providence to explain everything to her parents, then drove back to California.
For a while, Carol and I shared an apartment together in the Haight with a couple of roommates, then got our own place in the Upper Haight, on Buena Vista Terrace, with a magnificent view of downtown San Francisco and Mount Diablo—for which we paid the grand sum of $150 per month.
Carol comes from good, solid New England Quaker stock. You’d be hard-pressed to find two better people on the planet than her parents, Tom and Mackie Perry. Tom was a general surgeon at Rhode Island Hospital in Providence, an avid birder, and an accomplished bird photographer. Mackie supported Tom’s career, shared his passion for birding, managed the family beach house in Weekapaug, and for many years served on the board of Laurelmead, the retirement home they helped establish off Blackstone Boulevard in Providence. Both were active members of Providence Friends Meeting, very active in Quaker affairs, and very well informed on local and national issues. And, of course, very devoted to their daughters, Carol, Margaret, and Phebe, and their grandchildren.
Back in San Francisco. I enjoyed my volunteer work for McCarthy so much, I asked John Burton for his help in finding a paid job in politics. A couple of days later, he told me he’d scoured the entire Bay Area and found only one politician with a job opening: Roger Boas, successful Pontiac dealer, running for reelection to the San Francisco board of supervisors. John’s famous for never pulling his punches. He didn’t this time, either. “He’s a real asshole,” he warned, “but at least it’s a job.”
It didn’t take me long to discover that John was right. For my job interview, sitting on the patio of his weekend retreat in Stinson Beach, Roger read a list of prominent San Francisco political names, asking me which of them I knew personally. Answer: Zero. Roger concluded with typical bluntness: “When it comes to politics, you don’t know shit from Shinola. But Johnny Burton says you’re okay, so you’ve got the job.”
At first, I served as Roger’s administrative assistant, working out of his Pontiac dealership on Geary Street or his tiny office in San Francisco City Hall. Six months later, he named me manager of his reelection campaign, and we opened a campaign office at Eighth and Market Streets, just a couple of blocks from city hall. At the time, Roger also served as chairman of the California Democratic Party. Executive director Don Solem ran the party from his office next door.
In the middle of Roger’s campaign, on April 6, 1969, Carol and I got married. We had to scuttle our original plan to be married in the Siciliano home on Clay Street once the family moved back to Washington. But fortunately, Carol and I were adopted by Jim and Mary Anna Colwell, good friends from the Underground Eucharist group, who lived with their five kids in a rambling old Victorian on California Street in the Western Addition.
The evening before—Saturday, April 5—we gathered with family and friends at the Alta Mira Hotel in Sausalito. Carol’s father and Seth Warner each offered warm toasts and tributes. Early the next morning, Carol and I showed up, with our friend Jean-Max Guieu as witness, at the rectory of a nearby Catholic church, where we were secretly but officially married by Father Dominic, another Underground Eucharist regular. Jean-Max and I then hooked up with another friend, Mike Witte (who, after graduating from medical school, later founded the wonderful West Marin Clinic) and went out to Ocean Beach for a little bachelor party on Ocean Beach, smoking a couple of joints to celebrate.
Later that day, we gathered in Jim and Mary Anna’s living room. Our priest friend Dominic presided over a nontraditional, combined Quaker/Catholic wedding ceremony: silence, followed by a couple of readings—including a passage from Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, the hippie favorite of the time—and the sharing of bread and wine. Carol’s parents, grandparents, and sisters, Margaret and Phebe, were there from Rhode Island. My father and Dot and Grandmom Press flew out from Delaware for their first ever visit to California. The wedding reception was held right there at the house, after which Carol and I drove down to Carmel for our honeymoon in Seth and Margery’s vacation home.
As newlyweds, Carol resumed her graduate studies in social work at San Francisco State, and I continued managing Roger Boas’s reelection campaign.
We also got involved in our first boycott—the nationwide grape boycott organized by César Chávez and Dolores Huerta to pressure growers to pay farmworkers a living wage and allow them to form a union. Carol and I joined the protest in front of the Safeway on upper Market Street. It was my very first picket line, the first of many. On the spot, I vowed never to cross a picket line. I never have, and never will.
While the grape boycott enjoyed great success in establishing better working conditions for farmworkers under the banner of the United Farm Workers Union (UFW), the struggle to achieve safe working conditions and a living wage for both permanent and seasonal farmworkers continues today.
Later, I worked very closely with leaders of the UFW in Jerry Brown’s 1976 presidential campaign and often participated in meetings with the great César Chávez. He’s one of the most impressive people I ever met but also one of the most humble. He seldom spoke up in meetings, and when he did so, he spoke softly, almost as if asking permission to speak. Yet there was no doubting his moral authority and power. He radiated goodness and inner strength.
In 1993, as Democratic state chair of California, I attended César’s funeral in Keene and helped carry his casket for part of the procession from the church to his final resting place. The UFW now thrives under the leadership of Arturo Rodriguez, César’s son-in-law.
Carol and I also became involved in events across the bay, where tensions left over from Vietnam War protests erupted in confrontation over plans by UC–Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement to create a public space north of campus for open debate, called People’s Park. At first, university officials recognized existence of the park, but they were soon overridden by Governor Ronald Reagan, who had previously called Berkeley “a haven for communist sympathizers, protesters and sex deviants” and who now ordered the California National Guard to clear the park, erect a chain-link fence around it, and take over downtown Berkeley and the university campus.
The next day, I called our Jesuit priest friend Jim Straukamp, who answered the phone: “Hello. Occupied Berkeley.” I laughed and accused him of exaggerating. Whereupon he described how Berkeley had become an armed National Guard camp and insisted that we get off our liberal asses and join the movement. Which we did. On May 30, 1969, Carol and I joined a crowd of thirty thousand in the now-famous People’s Park March, protesting Reagan’s military occupation of Berkeley. It was a peaceful protest but eerily unnerving to march past row after row of California National Guardsmen, rifles drawn, some of them sitting on tanks, their turrets pointed directly at us.
As for my paid job, I can best describe working for Roger Boas as a baptism by blood. Most of the time, he was a total asshole, probably the coldest, crudest, meanest, most heartless human being I ever met, and working for him was often a total humiliation. My daily assignments included picking up several newspapers for him every morning and dropping them at his door, then driving him to various meetings around town, where I was ordered never to speak to him, not even to say, “Good morning,” unless he spoke to me first. And, of course, I was always to call him Mr. Boas.
That arrogance sometimes got in the way of my job as campaign manager. At one point, Roger complained that we had no young people volunteering for his campaign, and asked me to do something about it. So I got to work and invited a whole bunch of politically-active friends to my apartment for a 6 to 8 p.m. “meet and greet” with the candidate. Roger arrived 15 minutes early. At the stroke of 6, when only a few people had arrived, Roger demanded that I introduce him to speak. I suggested we should really wait till more people showed up. Fifteen minutes later, he insisted: “You introduce me now, or I’m walking out of here.” I did. He spoke. He left. My apartment was soon jammed with friends and potential supporters, all of whom had a great time, few of whom had heard the candidate, and none of whom volunteered for the campaign.
But here’s the contradiction. At the same time, Roger could be one of the most charming people alive: witty, engaging, caring, knowledgeable, great fun to be around, with a wicked sense of humor and infectious laugh. That’s the side of him most people saw, and it explains why he was such a popular man about town: successful businessman, civic leader, sought-after tennis partner, and host of a highly regarded weekly show recapping world news on KQED-TV. True, no man is a hero to his valet, but Roger was more Jekyll and Hyde than anyone I ever met.
As difficult as it was working for Roger, some good things actually came out of it—like meeting John Monaghan. John was the quintessential seasoned San Francisco political pol. Recently retired from running his own Irish bar, he was hired by Roger as a campaign consultant and sidekick. Every evening, Roger, John, and I worked the campaign circuit, with John providing insightful campaign analysis while at the same time keeping us in stitches with his running commentary on all the other candidates.
It was also a joy working with Roger’s publicist, Marion Conrad. Out of her home at 1948 Pacific Avenue, Marion ran the most successful public relations company in San Francisco. She was beautiful. She was smart as a whip. She was sharp-tongued and profane.
Two experiences with Marion, I’ll never forget. One morning, Roger, Marion, and I met in his campaign office, reviewing names of possible contributors. As Roger’s secretary, Rita O’Laughlin, read out each name, Roger would cite a dollar figure he thought they were good for—$500, $1,000, $5,000. Marion or I would then add our own comments, then Rita would write down the agreed-upon ask. When she came to the name Joe Holsinger, Roger exclaimed, “Cocksucker!” Shy Rita blushed royally. I held my breath. Marion couldn’t hold back: “Roger, really! Couldn’t you use a less profane term? Couldn’t you call him a cunt-lapper?”
Months later, I made a special trip to Marion’s office one morning to tell her the good news: Carol was pregnant. Without even looking up, Marion said, “You phony intellectuals. I knew you’d fuck!” God, I loved that woman, as well as her husband, Hunt, successful lobbyist, and brother of the great writer Barnaby Conrad.
Roger’s election campaign was a free-for-all. There weren’t just two candidates, there were ten or twelve—all running for one of three empty seats on the board of supervisors. A few, like Roger, were running for reelection; the rest were running for their first time—including a dynamic, charismatic young lawyer named Dianne Feinstein.
Whichever candidate received the most votes would automatically become chairman of the board, and that was Roger’s primary goal. But even though successfully reelected, he lost the number one slot. Dianne Feinstein topped the field of candidates, became chair of the board, and began her historic political career.
During that campaign, I may have been working for Roger, but I became a big fan and friend of Dianne’s. Unlike Roger, she was very relaxed on the campaign trail, very persuasive in her arguments, easy to approach, and great company. She and I have remained good friends ever since, and she and her husband, Dick Blum, have always been among my biggest supporters. Dianne and I haven’t agreed on every political issue. No matter. She’s been there whenever I needed help, and, over the years, she and Dick have included Carol and me in many delightful social events in their home.
That campaign was also my introduction to Dianne’s campaign manager, Sandy Weiner. Unlike me, Sandy was a seasoned pro, veteran of many successful campaigns, with a sardonic take on politics in general. He quickly became a good friend and mentor and, before long, my new boss.
Pat and Owen Martin, friends of Roger’s, were another direct gift of the Boas campaign. One of San Francisco’s most popular and colorful couples, they lived on Nob Hill’s Sacramento Street, across from Grace Cathedral, where they entertained lavishly almost every night. Owen showed up one Saturday to walk precincts for Roger in the Sunset District. He and I hit it off, and Carol and I soon became regular guests in their home.
Owen was a real gadfly. A highly successful businessman, owner of a school-uniform company, Owen usually greeted his dinner guests wearing a bright green tracksuit. Pat was an incredible chef, who night after night turned out fabulous meals with ease. Joe Hughes was their live-in man-about-town, who came to dinner one night and, literally, never left. Their three Weimaraners had the run of the house and were invited to take any empty seat at, and eat off, the table. Needless to say, it made for interesting dinner parties.
I remember many wild evenings at Pat and Owen’s, where it was not unusual to find the mayor, the police chief, TV anchors, top reporters, and other San Francisco luminaries all mixed together. One Sunday morning, Pat called with a last-minute invitation to brunch. When Carol and I showed up, there were only two other couples present: the top two columnists for The San Francisco Chronicle, Herb Caen and Art Hoppe, with their wives.
OMG. Caen and Hoppe were like movie stars to me. I was nervous just being in their company. But Pat immediately put us at ease, introducing us as good friends, and then noting that Carol was not only obviously pregnant but already past her due date. The baby could come at any minute. At which point Art Hoppe asked, “And when and where was the baby conceived?” Which I thought was not only an impertinent question but impossible to answer. When I told him we had no idea, he laughed and said, “That’s because you’re so young. At my age, you’d definitely remember!”
Roger Boas was indirectly responsible for one other high spot in my early political career. One night, I drove him to dinner at the Italian American Athletic Club in North Beach, where Governor Ronald Reagan was guest of honor. Excited to finally see Reagan in action, I was disappointed when Roger shook a few hands, then ordered me to drive him home. Which I did, only to turn around and beeline it back to North Beach, just in time to see Reagan take the podium.
The man known as “the Great Communicator” was every bit as impressive and entertaining as his reputation. He brought the house down with his famous story about the new father who didn’t know how to change a diaper. His wife explained:
For a baseball fan like you, it should be easy. Here’s what you do: Spread the diaper in the position of the diamond, with you at bat. Then fold second base down to home and set the baby on the pitcher’s mound. Put first base and third together, bring up home plate and pin the three together. Of course, in case of rain, you gotta call the game—and start all over again.
I learned an important lesson from the master that night: Audiences want to be entertained first and informed second—and never bored or lectured to. The perfect speech formula is: Start out by making them laugh; give them some good meat to chew on in the middle; and close with another good laugh, inspiring story, or uplifting message. Works every time.
Nearing the end of the campaign, I’d grown so sick and tired of being treated like shit by Roger that I told John Monaghan I couldn’t take it anymore and was going to resign. Wise old John gave me some of the best advice of my life. “I understand,” he said. “I couldn’t take it, either. But look at it this way, kid: This is your first political job. You’re going to win this campaign. But if you quit now, you’ll have a reputation as a quitter, and you’ll never get another job in politics. If you stay with it, you’ll soon have a winning campaign on your résumé and you’ll be able to get any political job you want.”
Thus convinced, I put on my asbestos suit and hunkered down for the rest of the campaign. Roger easily won reelection, and when he walked into the office the next morning, I handed him my resignation.
IDEAL POLITICIAN
The big question was: What next? Despite winning my first campaign, the combination of my own unhappy experience with Roger Boas and the violence that scarred the political process in 1968 had soured me on politics. Yet, somehow, I still wanted to stay involved in public policy.
Which is why I was so excited to pick up a copy of the Pacific Sun, Marin County’s popular, free weekly newspaper, and read about a man named Peter Behr.
Behr was a lawyer and member of the Marin County board of supervisors who had most recently led the successful Save Our Seashore campaign to create the Point Reyes National Seashore. Here was a man with a cause, a conservationist, and a man I could believe in. I made a cold call to Peter’s office and introduced myself. He invited me to lunch two days later at San Francisco’s Stock Exchange Club (now the City Club).
Peter and I immediately hit it off. But I was thrown when he told me the reason he’d wanted to get together: He was planning to run for the California State Senate—and wanted me to run his campaign. Here I was, trying to get out of partisan politics. Yet, here he was, trying to lure me back in—working for a Republican, no less! Nothing decided, we agreed to stay in touch.
Meanwhile, Sandy Weiner, Dianne Feinstein’s former campaign manager, offered me a job in Weiner & Co., his new campaign management/advertising firm. Not having heard from Peter Behr, I accepted Sandy’s offer, whereupon he informed me he’d already signed up one new client on condition that I be assigned to run his campaign.
You guessed it. That candidate was none other than Peter Behr—who still wanted me to run his day-to-day campaign but also wanted the experienced hand of Sandy Weiner overseeing the operation.
Sandy put together an exciting team of young professionals, including Regina Forbis, Greg Lipscomb, and Rob Coughlin. Peter Behr was not our only candidate. We also managed the successful campaigns of Arlen Gregorio for state senate and Wilson Riles for state superintendent of education, and the losing campaigns of Sam King for governor of Hawaii and California millionaire Norton Simon for U.S. Senate. I traveled a couple of times with Riles, a wonderful, charismatic candidate, but was assigned full-time to the Behr for Senate campaign.
To this day, the Peter Behr campaign of 1970 is the best campaign I’ve ever been part of. For one thing, Peter had a devoted army of followers left over from the Save Our Seashore campaign, led by the formidable Bunny Lucheta. Carroll Joynes, a friend of Peter’s daughter Trudy, left Stanford to volunteer full-time for the campaign—and went on to become one of my closest, lifelong friends. But the best part was Peter himself. He was a phenomenal candidate. He had boundless energy, was quick on his feet, smart as a whip, loved meeting people, knew the issues inside and out, and was very thoughtful and caring toward his staff and volunteers.
Behr was running for the district vacated by the retirement of Senator Jack McCarthy: Marin, Napa, and Solano Counties. As a moderate, or “Rockefeller,” Republican, Peter had wide bipartisan support. Our real challenge was in the Republican primary against right-winger Ray Schoen, who accused Peter of being a Marxist and Socialist. Sound familiar? I was so impressed by Peter I decided to reregister as a Republican—until I saw the grief he took from his own party in the primary and came to realize that for too many in the Republican Party there was no room for a moderate like him, let alone a liberal like me. Which, of course, is even truer today.
On Sandy’s advice, we first commissioned a poll, which showed that Peter’s name recognition was sky-high in Marin County but practically nonexistent in Napa and Solano counties. It also showed strong public support for environmental protection, Peter’s long suit. We then put together a campaign budget.
One Sunday morning, I drove to Mill Valley to deliver the bad news to the candidate. Peter and I sat out by the family swimming pool, where I nervously presented our recommended budget for the state senate race: $80,000! To my relief, Peter took one look at it and said, “I think that’s reasonable. I just wanted to be sure that, if worse came to worst, I could pay for the entire campaign out of my own pocket.”
Again, Peter was a joy as a candidate. He loved campaigning, and it showed. He had the strong support of his wonderful wife, Sally, who worked alongside volunteers at the campaign office. Peter and I were on the road almost every day in a Chevy Camaro he’d had retrofitted to drive on propane—on top of which was a specially made sign: PROPANE-FUELED CAR. Remember, this was in 1970, long before anybody was talking about alternative fuels.
No matter the audience, no matter the issue, Peter never trimmed his sails. One night, at the Marin Rod and Gun Club, Peter himself raised the issue of gun control. After admitting that he supported tougher gun control measures, Peter told them, “That’s the difference between me and my opponent. Agree or disagree with me, you’ll always know where I stand on every issue.”
The greatest coup of our campaign was the brainchild of press secretary Charlotte Riznik, an intrepid reporter recently retired from The Marin Independent Journal. Even though the Save the Seashore campaign had created the Point Reyes National Seashore on paper, the park would never become a reality until sufficient funds were appropriated by a bill then moving through Congress and headed for the president’s desk.
Charlotte swung into action. Through the intermediary of attorney Lew Reid, who had served on the staff of the FCC, Peter was invited to the signing ceremony in the Oval Office, and Charlotte persuaded the Associated Press to post a photo of the signing on the wires. Result: That very afternoon, The Marin Independent Journal featured a front-page photo of Peter Behr standing behind President Richard Nixon as he signed the Point Reyes National Seashore legislation.
With that million dollars’ worth of free publicity, Peter won the Republican primary and, six months later, defeated Democrat Mike Peevey to become California’s newest state senator. Then things happened fast.
Ten days later, Carol and I welcomed the birth of our first son, Mark Thomas Press. One week after that, Peter offered me a job in Sacramento as his chief of staff, which wasn’t as easy a decision as it might appear. I had a great job with Sandy Weiner. Carol and I had a fabulous apartment and a lot of friends in San Francisco. And I was well along in my graduate studies at Graduate Theological Union.
Before making a decision, Carol and I did a little homework. First, we spent a weekend with friends Phil and Marilyn Isenberg, former neighbors from Buena Vista Terrace, now living in Sacramento, where Phil worked for Assemblyman Willie Brown. They convinced us that Sacramento was an okay place to live, at least for a while. They also suggested we drive up to their favorite art gallery, the Candy Store in Folsom, run by the one and only Adeliza McHugh, who represented such great California artists as Bob Arneson, David Gilhooly, and Roy de Forest. Adeliza persuaded us to purchase our very first original piece of art, a small ceramic Gilhooly sculpture, for fifty dollars—for which we agreed to pay her five dollars a week!
Next, I sought the advice of Bob Lee, my course adviser at Graduate Theological Union. I explained my dilemma: I had this great job offer, but I was also really committed to finishing my doctorate in theology. What should I do? It may have seemed difficult for me, but it wasn’t for Bob. He responded immediately, “I don’t think that’s a hard decision at all. In fact, I’ll tell you what: If you don’t take that job with Peter Behr, I’ll resign from GTU and I’ll take it!”
One thing for sure. Three active years in San Francisco—challenging the Catholic bishop, protesting the war in Vietnam, counseling runaways in the Haight-Ashbury, volunteering for Glide Methodist’s community outreach programs, joining the grape boycott, and working for Gene McCarthy—had turned me into a full-fledged progressive. In effect, I got my degree in progressive politics from San Francisco and was ready for graduate studies in the state capitol.
Indeed, I was ready for a new challenge, and in Sacramento I found it big-time: a new job, a new baby, a new city, a new home, a new decade. So began some of the best and most eventful years of my life.