Interview with Stephen Gaskin

Gaskin, Stephen ; McKiernan, Stephen

Stephen Gaskin (1935 - 2014) was an American Hippie counterculture icon. He was an author of over a dozen books and a political activist. He went to prison in 1974 for marijuana possession and his voting rights were rescinded. Gaskin was a recipient for the first Right Livelihood Award in 1980 and an inductee in the Counterculture Hall of Fame in 2004.

2010-05-13

In copyright

2018-03-29

McKiernan Interviews

138:44

McKiernan Interviews
Interview with: Stephen Gaskin
Interviewed by: Stephen McKiernan
Transcriber: Carrie Blabac-Myers
Date of interview: 13 May 2010
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(Start of Interview)

0:15
SM: First question I want to ask is, before I even talk about your life and your experiences when the (19)60s begin, in your opinion, and what do you think and when did it end?

0:31
SG: Well, the beginning of the (19)60s for me, was a little late because I was finishing up my master's degree, in the real early sixties. And I got my master's, I think in (19)63, I taught (19)64 to (19)65. And the (19)60s began in (19)66 for me. And that was when I realized they were not going to fire me, but I had become too weird to rehire.

1:00
SM: Hmm. And that was when you were in San Francisco State?

1:04
SG: Right, I taught Shree years as San Francisco state, I got my bachelor's there, and my master's.

1:09
SM: Well, obviously, you went off in 1970 form the commune, but-

1:16
SG: We went off in 1970 because [inaudible] tour, we had no idea we were going to make the community. We always say "community", down south people who live in communes are called communists.

1:30
SM: Wow. When did the (19)60s end in your opinion?

1:35
SG: Well, see, people talk about, you know that the (19)70s was such a mess and came apart and stuff but for the (19)70s was the ten years we spent really working smart and loving each other for the work that we did. The (19)70s was make the farm happen so the (19)70 is fine for me. I am not I am not calling things off. I have not forgotten anything. And I am not going to I am not going to [inaudible]-

2:07
SM: When was there a watershed moment for it? Not only for you, but for a lot of members of the boomer generation. Was there a watershed moment when you knew this was a special time?

2:22
SG: Well, my students had to come and tell me when I was teaching at the San Francisco State, and they said, you were fun, and you were smart, you were funny, but you do not know what is happening. I said, oh! And so, they start telling me about it. You got to do a few things for us before we can continue the conversation. Okay, what do I have to do? They said, we will see the Beatles movie, go see the Grateful Dead.

2:48
SM: Oh wow.

2:52
SG: San Francisco State was trying to be kind of new. And they had what they call a mixed media event, which was three teachers reading three different poems and a couple of slides of vectors. I understood the concept but I did not do much. And when we went to see the Grateful Dead, we came in the door to the auditorium and there was a guy in the zebra suit, jumping on a trampoline underneath a strobe light. And you could not even tell what he was.

3:23
SM: Well, that that was a pretty watershed moment!

3:30
SG: And I just suddenly, well I realized that these are my people. And the thing is, I am thirteen years too old to be a boomer.

3:41
SM: Right?

3:42
SG: I am a beatnik. And like they say in the military, you can change from one branch to the other, time and grade, rank and like that. I was able to transfer from the Beatniks to the hippes like that.

3:55
SM: Well, Steven, you know, one thing I have noticed in my interview process is that so many people born in the ten years prior to the boomer period that they, they were kind of boomers, because they have this mentality of like the boomers.

4:11
SG: They kind of built them.

4:12
SM: And yeah, Richie Havens, when I interviewed him was born in 1940. Yeah, and Ritchie says, I am a boomer. I am a boomer. And it is- because it is an attitude. It is a way of thinking,

4:22
SG: I am born in (19)35.

4:26
SM: What you mentioned about your, I get a lot of questions here, but this these Monday night classes that we that you taught when you were at San Francisco State, it says in some of the literature you got up to 1500 students at one time in your class. What were what were some of these experiences over those two years when you taught these classes?

4:50
SG: Well, sometimes we would be in a scholarly way and everybody would be, like one guy came in on the Monday night class one night waving his book. Hey, look at this book, this 'ole monk in the thirteenth century had the same trip, I had last Saturday night!

5:02
SM: [laughs] Oh my gosh.

5:07
SG: We were quite scholarly we were reading a lot, reading all the religions and more we did that. We did not come to San Francisco to convert to religions. We were ransacking religions looking for goodies.

5:20
SM: So subject matter? These students were getting credit for this course correct?

5:25
SG: When it started off, but I had to leave the campus at a time. They got to where they did not peel the political posters off the glass anymore and the revolution taken over San Francisco State.

5:38
SM: Yeah, I know. Yeah. Because you were the president there. I guess he was one of your teachers at one time? Ichiye Hayakawa?

5:46
SG: Hayakawa? I was Hayakawa's student assistant. Hayakawa was one of the media-wise foremost semanticists, general semanticist in the country at that time, although there were about four or five guys smarter than him that did not have the good fortune for his PhD thesis to become a book cult collection.

6:08
SM: Well, he was president during that time when all the student rebellion was happening at the school.

6:13
SG: At the time had split to Ethiopia to get away. They had offered the presidency to all of the faculty and they all turned it down, they say, we are not going to scab and they offered it to Hayakawa and even though he was not full time and even though he did not teach but two courses they made him president anyway.

6:33
SM: What year was that?

6:35
SG: Well golly that would have to be (19)65 or (19)66 something in around there.

6:39
SM: Wow.

6:42
SG: And he came out he came outside wearing a tam o'shanter hat, a very colorful hat thinking he was going to come on like he was a hippie and the hippies snubbed him.

6:54
SM: Oh, wow.

6:57
SG: You know, this is very short time, when in the Free Speech Movement, Mario Savio and those guys pulled up they thought that Hayakawa would like them and he did not. I answered the phone. I told him who it was and he did not like them at all. I am going I am sorry. He does not like you. I do. But he does not.

7:16
SM: My gosh. Yeah, that was (19)64 or (19)65 and that was about the time he became president then.

7:21
SG: Yeah, because he took he took the job when nobody else would do it.

7:25
SM: Wow. Was there any connection with what was going on, on the San Francisco State campus? And what was going on over there at Berkeley?

7:32
SG: Well, we were a little bit different in the sense that they were more the political guys and we was more of the acid guys. But there was not a hard line. It was some of all the same. And I did a class at night that it happened to be in Hayakawa's office with a free speech movement. I was teaching a class that night, one of my an- Francisco State College classes, called a Monday Night Class and so I said, well, we were in solidarity with the guys in Berkeley, according to my understanding that I can say fuck anytime I want, as long as I have the right layers of parentheses and quotation marks around it. And I took a new piece of chalk was three inches long, and used it on its side, take the line about four inches wide. And I wrote FUCK and letters three feet on the blackboard in the front of the room and I went back to the old German origins, you know, and like that, and we thought about it for a while. And I must have said it a couple of hundred times during my class. They were right with me. We were exhibiting solidarity with Berkeley.

8:43
SM: Wow. Those are those were unbelievable times back then. You know, I have interviewed several people [inaudible] in the student protest movement. San Francisco State there was a famous picture of him with African American students look like they were really it was a front of a book cover. I do not know if you remember when the African American students really went after him?

9:08
SG: I do not remember.

9:08
SM: Yeah. So, there was a lot of rebellion. When you think of those years, not only as a student but as a teacher. What was it like being a student what was college life like in the (19)50s or the early (19)60s before this period started?

9:26
SG: Well, that was what I was most likely being more like a beatnik when I was still in school taking class. And I made good grades when I wanted to pay attention. I did not always do it but I did not always pay attention but I graduated cum laude which I used to think was a big deal. And the lady I am married to now was also cum laude. And what I found out was there was a thing that happened to be where I got tired of the papers they were giving. They were so stilted. It was like they were being written for their maiden aunt. I am going to have a heart attack, if they said anything heavy. Something like that. And I complained to them. This is crap you are writing and you are being so careful, you are not saying anything of who you really are and what is really happening. I want to make that assignment for you where I am not going to grade spelling or grammar or anything like that I am more grade [inaudible] and so they sent in a paper like that. And it was a heavy trip man, they like one girl wrote a paper about how her brothers trying to make or give away your half black baby.

10:38
SM: Huh?

10:39
SG: So, the real hard stuff started coming out. And I was knocked out by the, by the content and what I went through a change right there on account of that paper, which was I realized that I loved the students deeply. And I considered the institution to be in the way and not helping out the relationship.

11:02
SM: You said that you were a beatnik. The obviously the beats were very important influence in the (19)50s because they were against the status quo, you know, the Kerouacs, the Burroughs and Ginsburgs.

11:15
SG: The way I got introduced to the beatniks - a friend of mine came to me and says they are having a [inaudible] in the East Coast, where they were having coffee houses, they are drinking coffee, and it goes back in time or Shakespeare when coffee was the dope and folks were uptight about when you talked to much when you did it. There was one down in Laguna Beach, I was in San Bernadino, he says there is one down at Laguna Beach. He goes, do you want it? And we stole the cafe Franken sign, and the plaster cast of the Frankenstein tombstone with a centerpiece and the waitress was in love with the coffee cook and she was spilling over everybody and it was just stoned and sweet and I thought, I think these are my people.

12:12
SM: Did you did you have experiences meeting Ferlinghetti and Gary Snyder and the people out there?

12:18
SG: I met Gary Snyder and was my first Monday night class came out it filled up the bookstore, Ferlinghetti's bookstore, the entire window was my book, and the entire glass of the window was the picture of my paper.

12:36
SM: Wow.

12:37
SG: Because everybody - I had been doing the class for several years by then everybody knew was going to come out. No advertising. It got that way by word of mouth. And it just filled up a printing and we have got another printing and sold out a printing and we had another printing like that. And talking to Ferlinghetti about being in his bookstore and I had been. Some of the guys I liked, what is the name of that English guy?

13:08
SM: Neal Cassady or?

13:10
SG: No, I met Neal over in Amsterdam one time more recently. And Neal [inaudible] I knew Big Brother and the Holding Company, when they were an acoustic jug band with no amplifier.

13:32
SM: Now when did they start? That band?

13:36
SG: Well, they what happened to them, as you may recollect, is they were kidnapped by Janis Joplin. [laughs] And that was what happened to them. And so, I knew the guys in the bands and you know, the guy from a Big Brother and the Holding Company came up to me and reminding me of who he was, I said "hey I tell people I know you."

14:05
SM: Wow. So, you when you are talking about the counterculture in the Bay Area, in the (19)60s and the (19)50s, late (19)50s (19)60s and (19)70s, you think primarily in terms of the music and the way people lived their lives? The lifestyle?

14:27
SG: Well, it was it was modern amplification of the music and rock and roll was happening pretty heavy in Europe and then the first rock and roll I ever heard about was referred to as Rock and Roll Riot Detection and by the time I got into San Francisco the Dead you know, Garcia still had black hair.

14:54
SM: Um hmm.

14:55
SG: And the oh, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Cipolina I think one of the crazy real lead guitarists of our time.

15:11
SM: Who was that?

15:12
SG: Cipolina.

15:13
SM: Oh.

15:14
SG: From um, it is tough to remember that name. I had been an English major and then my mother wanted me to be a lawyer and then I ended up being an English major. And I realized I was a creative writing major. And so, I came out as a creative writing major. The thing about a creative writing major is that you get to make up your thesis.

15:43
SM: Hmm.

15:45
SG: It is a group of short stories.

15:46
SM: Right.

15:46
SG: No research, you get to make up your thesis!

15:50
SM: Huh.

15:53
SG: I did that and then on the other side, I was doing general semantics and linguistic study at least the analytical side of the language and the structure of the language. Nothing wrong with the study of a little semantics.

16:09
SM: We you say that when you are around some of these people in two different experiences one in that classroom and another at that club and you say in both instances, I found that people I am most comfortable with. I belong here. Did you feel up to that point, even in your growing up years, with your parents, the years leading up to go into college, even including your military career that you really had not found yourself?

16:39
SG: Yeah, I would say that. I was just doing, you know, after I got in the military, I was supposed to go to school and GI bill, which I did. And I am one of the last people who got out before Reagan screwed the California School System. When I went to San Francisco State to $79 a semester.

17:01
SM: Oh my gosh.

17:02
SG: Not a unit. A semester.

17:04
SM: And what years were those?

17:06
SG: Well, I guess (19)60 - (19)61 something like that I would say. I got it. I took an AA in San Bernadino. And if I uh, well the thing about having that AA is if I had an L I could spell Alabama.

17:36
SM: Yeah you were in the military from (19)52 to (19)55? Right. Now, did you learn anything about war? You were in action over in Korea. You had something, you must have had some feelings coming back from a war?

17:54
SG: Yeah, well, I could not get with the student revolution guys who wanted to send thousands of people up against the administration building and that kind of stuff. I thought that we were supposed to be so media hip and so attractive and neat that we took over that way.

18:17
SM: What was? You were around in during the period many people say is the Summer of Love. Haight Ashbury, that was (19)67. We see all these pictures of Golden Gate Park. It was quiet. He just what was the year 1967 like in San Francisco?

18:38
SG: So, I think that was when we had the we had the first human be- in.

18:47
SM: Please speak up too, thanks.

18:50
SG: So that was just after Woodstock. And we set up in the polo field in Golden Golden Gate Park. And thousands and thousands and thousands of people came.

19:05
SM: Wow.

19:06
SG: I was up on the hill watching it. The meeting was so profound and so powerful, I had to stop and sit down once in a while always walking up to it. A woman there and a mounted policeman: she came up and says, my son is down there! I want to get my son! Help me get my son! Ma'am, all of those people are smoking pot. I cannot go down there.

19:37
SM: Wow.

19:38
SG: And that was also when something happened at later karma which was somebody broke the lines to the stage! The power lines. So, the Hells Angels went out and walked the wires and found them and had a Hells Angel standing on each place the wire was plugged together and protected the jam that way.

19:57
SM: Hmm.

19:57
SG: That is why Garcia had the idea evident for security at Altamont.

20:03
SM: All right, well, that was a disaster.

20:06
SG: Yeah, yeah. Awful.

20:08
SM: Were you at Altamont?

20:10
SG: No, I was with Grateful.

20:12
SM: Wow, because that was the-

20:15
SG: That was one of the low points.

20:17
SM: Some people say that was when everything kind of turned around. But what was it like? The young people, when you look at the boomer generation, you have not only seen them in the classroom, seen them in the communes, seen them in the clubs just experienced them in many different ways, what are their strengths and what are some of their weaknesses in your opinion? Based on the people you knew?

20:46
SG: Well, the strengths and their weaknesses are pretty much the same thing. That was how much they trusted, and how much they were open and how much they were willing to experiment how much they were willing to take along. That stuff is great growth drives, and also can be dangerous. And I loved them and I love hippies still. And in fact, I claim it still. I claim mass affiliation really and say, oh yeah, I am a hippie. And I love the hippies very much and I loved going to rock and roll and I have never had any music that was my own until honor to rock and roll. When I grew up the big hassle was Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby. And I thought Sinatra was a better singer but he was such a dick always slapping valet parking people and stuff like that. And Crosby was a nice family man, and not really very interesting or anything and that was what music was when I was a kid. And when suddenly it was rock and roll, man, oh my goodness! People were doing things with guitars that before Rock and Roll would have been considered a catastrophic equipment breakdown. [laughs] You know, when complete and total feedback takes over a whole amp.

22:17
SM: When, when you when you heard young people say, then and many even who are older today say that we were the most unique generation in American history because we were going to end the war, bring peace to the world, end racism, sexism, homophobia, you know, all those other things would not come to fruition all those things and a lot of progress. But what do you what do you say when you hear that this generation feels at times that they were the most unique in our history?

22:53
SG: Well, I think that they are never, there was never anything like that before you because you have never had the social amplifiers that we had. Loud, and using heavy dope. You know, we were we were amplified and, and it was not that we were hiding what we were doing, we were proud of it, we would be dressed different from other folks so that those with like minds, would recognize us. And I still wear my hair long, although it is a little ponytail like a rat tail and smooth on top. I am not going to cut it. They were very afraid. And when I left on the caravan, I left with twenty-five school buses, by the time I got to the farm I had fifty school busses and four hundred and some people who were committed to give it a go. To try to make something happen. And that was one of the things that used to happen is guys would come up to me it was very successful summer dealing. You ever decide you got to go to the land somewhere, let me know, I will help you buy it. Guys like that would come up to me. And I had no personal wealth. I was on the salary, the salary for a teacher. A first-year teacher is not much. And I love those people. And they came here with me. And we have changed since we came here in a bunch of ways because we were wild, wild and crazy both ways as you know. Some folks could not stand us or understand us but then - oh, I would have been with you guys already if I knew that was who you were.

24:56
SM: Here what happened between when the Summer of Love ended (19)67 because we hear stories about (19)68 was a pretty rough year in San Francisco because the many drugs many more drug people came into the Haight Ashbury area and people left like a, like bees.

25:17
SG: What happened when we were on a caravan, which was 1970, we were gone for seven months on the road. And we got back to San Francisco. It has been taken over by crack and cocaine and heroin and alcohol. We did not use to drink as a culture. Hippies did not used to drink the first time Janis Joplin showed up and put a bottle of Southern Comfort down on top of the piano, people were scandalized.

25:46
SM: Oh, wow.

25:47
SG: Yeah. That we were very innocent in our ways. And when we came back off the caravan, we saw that the scene had gone decadent. And we did not know where we were going to get land. But we thought we, we got a good thing going here. We had a very successful tour. Obviously, I was handed over at the state lines from the cop of one state to the next state, hey, they are okay, do not worry about them do not worry about them. When one thing is kind of fun was when we left the first day we left we got busted at the Oregon/California border and the cops had busted us but they had FBI and state police and troopers and a sheriff and whatnot. And they did not know what to do about us at all. But they came out and took my bus and the guy said, I have orders to arrest of the registered owner this bus, well, it was not my bus. This other guy who said What? Gee! What did I do? So, the guy takes out the papers and says I have orders to arrest Stephen Gaskin. But he arrested me and they took me in. I have to admit. The cops did look a little odd. They were counting the change in this great big [inaudible] full of change and small bills that they had bailed me out with. Hey hold on for a second. I got something on the other line I got to take.

27:18
SM: Okay. You were telling the story about the cop and the busses.

27:32
SG: So, they went into court and they want to know who we were. We are the people who are for peace and who are peaceful about being for peace. This is right in the middle of blowing up the Sterling building-

27:52
SM: In Wisconsin, and then the Weatherman.

27:53
SG: And so, we talked to the judge, and the judge says okay. I will tell you what I am going to do, I am going to let you go into speaking tour. At the end of your tour, you got to come back to this courtroom. And I will know where you were. So, I said, okay, and we took off like that. And we went to a lot of changes. We got back off the road and we came back in there. We went into that that office. And he must have got a clipping service or something because all of the walls of the office were covered with pieces of paper for every parcel and point [inaudible]. They had tracked us all the way.

28:34
SM: Unbelievable.

28:35
SG: And the judge, we went back into the courtroom and the judge said, he said, your presence in the courtroom is an embarrassment and you were free to go.

28:51
SM: Hmm.

28:54
SG: When I wrote the Caravan book, the first chapter is half that story in the last chapter is the other half of that story.

29:05
SM: Oh, wow. I got to get that book. Is that book still in print?

29:08
SG: Yeah.

29:09
SM: Oh, I got to order that book. I have a list of all your books here and they are all fascinating.

29:18
SG: I have got it myself and then you hit me up on my website.

29:22
SM: Yeah, because you got forty Miles of a Bad Road.

29:25
SG: That is my master's thesis.

29:28
SM: Yeah. And then you have Monday Night Class, which is one I love.

29:32
SG: Yeah.

29:33
SM: Then you got The Caravan from (19)72 and the one about Haight Ashbury Flashbacks. And An Outlaw in my Heart, a Political-

29:43
SG: Oh, By Heart was the one I put together when I was running against the Ralph Nader for the Green nomination.

29:50
SM: Wow.

29:52
SG: Best thing about that was I got to be friends with Ralph.

29:55
SM: Yeah, I saw Ralph last year when he was talking about his first now when he went around the country. Tell me a little bit about The Caravan. Obviously, you- where did you meet the people that went on the original in the original buses, or cars?

30:13
SG: They were the Monday night class.

30:15
SM: They were all students.

30:17
SG: They were all Monday night classes.

30:20
SM: Then they were off in the Bay Area, most of them?

30:24
SG: Hold on again a minute.

30:38
SM: So, they were mostly, they were students from your Monday night class?

30:41
SG: Yeah. And they were just, we had people there who had PhDs, people that are who were dropped out freshmen

30:48
SM: Oh my gosh!

30:49
SG: They came to the farm and when we get the farm up to a pretty big population and stuff at one time, the farm had more college degrees than the Tennessee State legislature did.

31:00
SM: Oh my gosh, the original when you finally got there. What was your number at the very beginning?

31:11
SG: When we went back, actually, just to land some people dropped off at that point. We came in with about 280 people.

31:19
SM: Wow.

31:20
SG: And we were we were in Nashville, trying to look for land. And we thought, well, as big as we are, we should have a band. A big creature like this needs a voice we should have a band. Philip says, oh, I got to go trade this guitar in. I cannot do rock and roll with a twelve string, I got to get a real rock and roll guitar. He went to get a rock and roll guitar and the lady at the music store says, nobody has lived on my mother's old home place down in Lewis county for about thirty-five years. You guys can go down there and park. They gave us place to land. I found out that they were kind of wealthy liberals.

32:03
SM: Uh huh.

32:04
SG: And the while we were there looking for a tractor, somebody went out came back to the port subtractor with a wide front wheels and low back wheels. And one guy who had ridden with the Hells Angels said, that was not a tractor. And he went out for a tractor and he found this big old John Deere with wheels about, about seven-foot-high and the guy who sold him the tractor said, you guys should buy my place, its 1000 acres and the road does not go through. We went to the bank down in [inaudible] and asked for a loan. And we got to the bank and they said, well it is not just because you are an out of town hippie, it is also because no one has ever asked for a loan as big as that from this bank before. We went back and told Carlos that. And he said, I trust you guys, I will carry it. And that was that was a very important thing because we did not know it but the FBI had every county clerk in the state primed up to let them know have you tried to buy land in their county because they were going to get us.

33:13
SM: [laughs] Oh jeez!

33:14
SG: And because the guy carried the note himself, we were a stranger [inaudible] before they ever heard about us.

33:20
SM: Oh my gosh.

33:26
SG: Some of what I did was I general. You had to have a to have a general because we were facing an organized thing.

33:40
SM: So, they have been being alerted people all over the area that do not lend money to your group.

33:47
SG: Who they had alerted were the county clerks if we came to do a title search or anything.

33:57
SM: They just did not want your type, around did they?

34:00
SG: Well now, we have all become very effusive. They love us.

34:04
SM: Now, what was the, the actual land that you bought finally?

34:09
SG: Well, first, we bought Carlos's 1000 acres. And it is where the highlands where the Nashville basin is, the rim and this land is off of that rim coming down to the lower land it has got a few pretty flat fields not a lot of hills and we are a deciduous oak forest. And anyway, it turned out that the only interest of the place was through about seven or eight other people's driveways. And we bought the land next door, which had an opening on the blacktop. We did that that that the first piece of land was $70 per acre $70,000 for 70 acres. The next piece of land was $100 an acre. 700 acres, same price but we only got 700 but then we had 1700 acres. And then later on, we have had things happen like Japanese land buying companies come in and buy land on our border and clear cut it and stuff like that. By this time, we were big enough that we just chartered a nonprofit corporation and we started buying everything still had trees on it. But now we are up to having six and a quarter square mile, or 6000 acres. I was talking to a guy in Europe about an acre and a hectare. And we finally decided that we had, we had 1000 hectares. And this guy who happened to be the director of the [inaudible] said, you should secede from the union.

35:59
SM: [laughs] Wow. Of the originals that came back in 1970 are there very many still there?

36:13
SG: Not a lot. But, but we were like with other places you were back to be close to their folks or whatnot, you know, we were a very large and well communicated entity and we talked to each other all over the place. Got people. At one time we had twenty-five other farms.

36:32
SM: Wow.

36:33
SG: We had one in Ireland and we had one in India. Like that.

36:39
SM: Wow. How many people live there now?

36:45
SG: I do not think we are up to 300 right now but it was 1500 people and it was also five hippies hitchhiking on every freeway ramp.

36:56
SM: For a while. Cannot hitchhike anymore, though, can you?

37:01
SG: Not much!

37:04
SM: Now, obviously, people think that hippies were very popular in the (19)60s and (19)70s but that there are not very many left. Hippies. You do not hear about them much anymore, except for places like The Farm and that have lived the life. But your thoughts on that? How many? Are there still hippies out there that are young?

37:32
SG: Well, they do not call themselves hippies but they but they are heavy into communication, and rock and roll and they are on the internet and they are a generation that talks to itself more freely than anybody ever has. And they do not call themselves hippies anymore but you hear it used every now and then. And whenever anybody asks me I always say a hippie of course.

38:03
SM: Do you have you have people that actually read about the farm and say, can I come and live there?

38:08
SG: Oh, yeah. We have, when we were big, we had 256-man hours a week in gate.

38:17
SM: Oh my gosh.

38:19
SG: We had we had 150,000 visitors in our first 10 years.

38:26
SM: And what was the process? See it see a person? Well say in 1972 you had been there two years, what was the process for someone to become a part of The Farm?

38:38
SG: We used to call it soaking. We would make you come and live here for a while and work. And we would advise that do not get involved romantically when you are first coming here. But as you get where you cannot tell the difference between falling in love with somebody and falling in love with the farm. And, and after you soak for a while for sure you want to do it, then we check you out and see if we want you. But the beginning you could be a full partner on a handshake and a smile.

39:09
SM: And you said that they were PhDs, master's degrees, bachelor's degrees, dropouts.

39:17
SG: Our giant book was backed up by a PhD in organic chemistry.

39:25
SM: Why do you think I know you your experience but why do you think so many people that were in that class or heard about that class said I am tired of this world. I want to get away from it. I want to go back to nature.

39:40
SG: Well, I ended up right on the spot where stuff was happening. I would usually you go check out a scene you go to hear about the scene and its already going decadent. But this one happened right around me. I saw it when it first grew and I love it and hippies love me, you know, because I never sold out. I am 75 years old now.

40:14
SM: Yeah, I was reading in the some of the things in the web, the wall street journal called The Farm the General Motors of American communes.

40:23
SG: [laughs]

40:25
SM: What did they mean by that?

40:28
SG: Well, that we had like a motor pool, and we had a school up through high school. And we had medical facilities. Our midwives are world famous, that is what my wife's doing right now she is off talking about midwifery in Europe. And she, lectures to doctors, doctors come to her lectures. And we were good at what we did. And nobody, nobody around our neighborhood, thinks hippies are dumb. In fact, this is just like, how stuff would happen. We were anti-nukers, of course. And at some point, we said, we were anti-nukers, we ought to be able to tell us something is hot. We ought to have a Geiger counter. So, we got a Geiger counter. And that year's Geiger counter was a pig, it weighed maybe 15 pounds had a big signal letter and battery in it is just a pig, it was before digital measurization, pretty much although our guys are into them somewhat. But we had we had that thing and it did not have a dial on it, it just had a light and it (noises) and people would write down a number or anything and at the same time, one of our people who is on the farm to have a baby the little farm issue, she was having twins. So, the midwives got the Doppler effect, fetal heart monitor, for sensitivity to separate the twin’s heartbeat and the guy on the crew who was working on the cluster, checked out that and he went back and he says, look, that little heart monitor our posture has a delay in averaging circuit eventually if we hook that delaying and averaging circuit up to the Geiger we could time it. It would have a dial and we would have a needle. So, we figured that out and put it together. And our Geiger counter was about the size of a pack 100-millimeter cigarette. And when 911 hit we had to hire more people to that company. And right now, in Lewis County our Geiger counter company is the only one of our companies that is big enough and strong enough to have health care for its employees.

43:06
SM: It is a fantastic story.

43:09
SG: And right now, the Geiger counter company is listed as the only high-tech business in Lewis County. That is one thing about the neighbors not thinking that hippies are dumb.

43:21
SM: Well, you got some pretty good people there and you are at the farm. Boy, some really good and, you know, reading your background, I was very impressed with your background and your wife's background, but to see the information you are given me about some of your fellow people, they are in The Farm over the years, it is pretty impressive, but I am going to change my tape. Okay. I am back. One of the interesting things about communes is that when the in the late (19)60s and early (19)70s, a lot of people say the (19)60s ended in around 1973. So, you got to glue those first few years as part of the (19)60s in the (19)70s. But that was when so many people went back to communes and or they-

44:12
SG: Fake unity.

44:14
SM: Yeah. Or they went into a more spiritual feeling. So, they were not going to church as much. And what I have read here, and I like your comments on the critics of communes as a whole, maybe not The Farm, but communes overall, is that this it is about people who dropped out. People who went back to nature, lived off the land became much more spiritual, and they did not have to go to church or synagogues, but they became more inner, inner spiritual. I would like you to your comments on the critics of the communes and define what a commune is.

44:58
SG: First place like I keep saying. We are a commune and total commune is a- the political term and so we say we are an intentional community living together on purpose, because they want to. And the idea is that people have been trying to do that kind of stuff in this country for a long time, the Shakers and those kinds of people like that. And we are not like we used to be in the sense of like, totally collecting did not have to have any money in your pocket and these glasses, you would have a bank lady and like that. And now, we went through changes in 1983 like the world did and people have their own bank accounts and stuff now. And we have come to find out that in Israel, that is a metamorphosis that happens that it is well documented there and it when a kibbutz turns into a musha'a and it this really collective bit like a collective child raising very like. And the musha'a is, people got their own checkbook and their own job and their own money, but they are still collecting. So, we kind of like went like that thing in Israel, using the technicality of that language, I think we are more of a musha'a now but we like to do big projects together and so we still do big projects. Our Plenty organization that we put together. The first thing we did was help the people whose houses had been destroyed by tornados and stuff then we ended up doing a rather large, that diet health program in Guatemala, where we got into a deal with Faith International and pipelined millions of [inaudible] money into Guatemala and organized. We like big projects, but then we were very clear, that Plenty thing belongs to everybody on The Farm. We did not want to have an acronym, we call it Plenty, because there is actually enough if it was fairly strict. So, we explained what Plenty means and that is pretty revolutionary.

47:31
SM: So why, why did The Farm succeed when most of the other communes did not? There may be three or four major communes in the country, and the rest of them are gone?

47:44
SG: Well, I do not know exactly. The first 13 years, I was really deeply involved in everything. And I have not been since about (19)83. I have lived here, I have worked from here but I do not run it. And it was like it went from running Monday Night Class to running The Caravan and now, it would be superfluous for me to try to run things. But you have gone off and been doing things for years and it is really nice to have competent friends. In fact, somebody came to The Farm and do the story and they said they seem to have a religion of competence.

48:38
SM: For example, within The Farm itself, do you each have your own, like homes? And then you have you eat your meals separately? Or do you eat out common area?

48:49
SG: No, we had we, we have community dinners every now and then and also, we will have a community dinner for a cause like the school needs somebody or something who have a community dinner and charge for it. And we do a lot of music and one of the most successful things we have done is our musicians have passed down lots and lots to our kids.

49:17
SM: See, so if you go out on a lecture circuit or your wife for the band goes out and performs or somebody who has a skill goes out in the community and gets paid for it, does that money all come back to the to one big lump?

49:35
SG: No.

49:37
SM: So, you have your own private counts now?

49:40
SG: Oh, sure. Okay. The government you know wants you to have social security numbers and things.

49:49
SM: Right.

49:52
SG: We got to obey the law of the land everywhere we can and I probably am not going to do any more books based on pot. We have got a very good one out now and I do not need any more. I have one called Cannabis Spirituality.

50:16
SM: Well if pot was a very important part was very important part of The Farm.

50:21
SG: It is part of the whole hippie movement. Anything remarkable about our pot stuff is how well we kept away from crack, and cocaine and heroin. We were hash and acid and peyote.

50:42
SM: How do you deal with that it is illegal in most areas? Still.

50:48
SG: What I do in my own personal areas is be cool. And that is what other people have to do to.

50:53
SM: A one a couple other things here. I am looking at that. One of the when there was the period when and you know this and I know it is not true, but when Charles Manson happened, they thought that that was the kind of a cult and that he was part of a small community and then he had the Symbionese Liberation Army that ended up taking Patty Hearst, and they were supposedly some sort of a commune.

51:26
SG: A commune.

51:28
SM: Yeah, commune I guess. They were small groups, but did some bad things.

51:34
SG: Well the thing about Charlie Manson is, he is not by throwing him in the, the prison system of the United States had him when he was a young man and had him for 20 years before there was ever such a thing as the Haight and he was being educated in the penitentiary system and he is not ours. He was a hitchhiker on us, but we did not make him. And what was the other thing?

52:04
SM: The Symbionese Liberation Army.

52:06
SG: Well, Symbionese Liberation Army, they liked this fancy made up names but they were more of a publicity stunt. They were not going to take anything that was not a revolution or do anything like that would not make any permanent changes or anything. That is not who we are. We vote in our elections here. And when we were big, governors and senators came to our door to talk to us about it. I am a friend of Al Gore's.

52:44
SM: Oh, very good.

52:46
SG: He was by Congressman. And I think the supreme court stole that election completely

52:56
SM: I agree. Life would have been a little different. I think we still might have been attacked though at 911 but still.

53:08
SG: Well the thing about the thing about that stuff is we got to make peace with the Islamic world we cannot cut them off in little pieces and say this is a bad piece and we are going to blow it up and we act like that about a fifth of the world every time we blow up some a little village with a drone.

53:36
SM: A couple of other things regarding just the way the media in the culture of television and movies have portrayed communes. Is Easy Rider? Those scenes when Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper I think Jack Nicholson is in there too, but when they come into this one commune there is that scene and they are kind of talking to them, oh, this would be great because they were referring to all the top potential sex partners they could have within the within the commune that that was very well portrayed in that movie. And then another thing about in (19)98.

54:21
SG: They are rich movie actors.

54:25
SM: So that was really just Hollywood doing a Hollywood thing?

54:29
SG: Complete Hollywood bullshit.

54:31
SM: Yeah, because there was a you may have it. I have a major collection of magazines. There was a Life magazine on the cover with the commune. Do you remember it in the late (19)60s, where it showed a family and a commune and at the top of it says communes and it is very good article that talks about, you know, they, they were not having they had a white they did not have six wives? But there is, there is still that feeling out there that maybe men and women are having more partners than they should.

55:03
SG: They were in the (19)60s but that has consequences, children and stuff. And people want to have the best deal they can for their children and they did not want it to be a haphazard mess because they had to sort it out for the kids.

55:19
SM: Right?

55:22
SG: I do not mind challenging the mores of society I have never been afraid to but I am also not afraid to agree with them when they are useful and necessary for the safety and sanity of everybody else.

55:37
SM: How do you deal with that? I have asked this question, everybody. It is a general question. We have the in 1994, or Newt Gingrich came to power. He kind of he and he still does make commentary about the (19)60s and (19)70s that basically the problems we have in our society today are the problems of the breakdown of the American family, the drug culture, the you know, only one parent at home, lack of respect for authority and basically, culture going astray. And of course, George Will, when he gets chances he'll make commentaries. And Mike Huckabee even does it on his television show. And I remember when John McCain was running for president, he made commentary about Mrs. Clinton, that she was kind of like a hippie. Just general comments degrading the period and the time. How do you respond to those kinds of people when they make general statements?

56:41
SG: Well, there is a pretty good school of thought that being a hippie is an ethnicity.

56:50
SM: Mm hmm.

56:51
SG: And that people do it like they, they get racist about it. And that is the thing. I could cut my hair and get a necktie and if I kept my mouth shut, nobody would ever know.

57:05
SM: Right.

57:06
SG: But I will not and everybody knows I will not and you know, proud of my hippie forebearers and what we have done about it is we are not treated that way. We are not treated that way locally. The neighbors come here. We used to we had to ask the neighbors how to sharpen a chainsaw when we got here. And we had people come to be our electricians, our, our tech company is very strong and we are friends with our neighbors, we had a series of debates with the preachers. We had six or seven Church of Christ preachers come every Wednesday for weeks and then they had one up in Nashville in a big hall with about five or six preachers on stage and me. And the one old guy who said that he was the cult expert in Tennessee said that there are 309 nine cults in Tennessee but that The Farm was not one of them. And then had this you know, discussion in front of all these people and it got to the point where the preachers finally said, I cannot make them out to be Christians no matter how hard I try. But I really wish mine lived as well as they do.

58:38
SM: If someone was to ask you, why was The Farm started and then please define the purpose of The Farm. What would your answer be?

58:53
SG: Well, there was a giant worldwide revolution going on and much of it was being blown off on fireworks and wasted and we wanted to fix that very intelligent sweet good directed energy and make it last and give it a history. I have always said that one of the things that we are doing is to redeem the good name of the hippies.

59:18
SM: You obviously have lived a life of activism to not only obviously, when you when The Farm has experiences like I know you have helped with the improvements for the poor. There have been various causes as you were reading in some of your literature about saving the trees, even saving the whales, helping people down in Guatemala. I mean, where there is a tragedy around the country, a group of you will leave the area, your home, to help. That is activism. Could you define what an activist means to you, and any other activist experiences you have had in your life?

1:00:07
SG: Well, I really was not an activist before I was a hippie but me and my wife, we were both activists, and so is everybody else on the farm. If you see something wrong, you should fix it. And I believe that is in the Good Book too it says, what though your eyes need to do your hands should both do it and that is why Plenty started off, we helped a guy that had bad luck with tornadoes then we got word that Honduras at that time, it had a bad crop year, and they were starving. And so, we went to the Mennonite Central Committee and we said, if you guys would give us the money to buy the beans for them and get them shipped down there. And then we needed more muscle down there and we got hooked up with Canada and we were moving government level money. And it is because we are honest, and we have vision, same with the hippies. And so, it is our way, in the first place. Second place is really necessary to do it and we have been we have had people down in Haiti for a long time. I have a press card in Haiti myself. And we have places down in Belize, Honduras they used to call it. That is an interesting kind of Indians. There is Guatemalan Indians, Mayan's speaking Spanish, Belize Indians/Mayans speak English and another old tribe called [inaudible] who are escaped black slaves who are culturally a Mayan. [laughs] We have people just like that come through here now and then. In front of our bus [inaudible] lovely [inaudible] and it said "out to save the world."

1:02:36
SM: That is nice.

1:02:37
SG: Might as well be framed.

1:02:41
SM: If you are in a, I always do these little scenarios if you were in a college classroom today and you were a guest speaker just for that particular day, maybe you were introduced by the professor, the teacher could even be a large High School and a young person stood up and said, geez, you know, that must have been scary leaving San Francisco and going in those cars and vans, not knowing where you were going to end up. What gave you the courage to do it?

1:03:21
SG: That is like the people who say, where did you park 50 busses? Where did you park the caravan? I said red zones, loading zones- [laughs]

1:03:32
SM: Well, yeah, really what I am getting at here is what is the life lesson that others can learn from when they look at the caravan and the eventual development of The Farm but most importantly, it is like a young person leaving home for the first time it is that risk-taking. What does the caravan mean for life?

1:03:55
SG: For several hundred of us and we were well head-smart and pretty big. You know nobody is going to jump on us. Nobody is going to go up and attack a thousand hippies fine. And we would be good. And people got to like us and we made friends with people right along the road. We had a baby, at Northwestern, the first one my wife saw delivered before she was a midwife. And we had another baby in Ripley, New York and we were parked in front of a church and the cops asked what we were doing and she said we are a caravan but we were having a baby and now we need to stop. Oh. Okay, follow us and we will show you where to park and they parked us downtown on parking meters. [laughs]

1:04:44
SM: Wow.

1:04:45
SG: And we had the baby and when the baby was born, the church rang a bell.

1:04:52
SM: Was that the first baby from The Farm?

1:04:55
SG: The one at Northwestern was the first one.

1:04:58
SM: Okay.

1:05:01
SG: There was another one in Rhode Island and a doctor came to see us. His name was Louie LeFer, Louie the Father and he came in and showed them how to do heart message on a baby to help them get started and showed him a bunch of good little tricks and stuff, which they used in the next two birthing. And what I see is that doctors love our midwives. They just love them. And treat them good and take care of them.

1:05:36
SM: I would love to interview your wife when she gets some time. You know, maybe during the summertime, if that might be possible.

1:05:45
SG: Maybe so she does it quite a lot. We both do a lot of media.

1:05:53
SM: Well I know I sent you and I sent you the master email. I can send one to her or you can just share hers, whichever is okay. I noticed that you say your politics is beatnik?

1:06:06
SG: Yeah.

1:06:07
SM: And, that your religion is hippie.

1:06:11
SG: Right.

1:06:12
SM: So just define that a little bit better.

1:06:19
SG: Well, beatniks came out of an artistic thing. It was artists. In fact, before beatniks were bohemian, and it went like that all the way back to a couple of guys sitting with Socrates. And uh, I do not know I am not sure if I understand that question very well.

1:06:57
SM: Well, it basically I was reading that when someone asked you what your religion was you said hippie, and you did not say Methodist or Catholic or, and then your politics instead of saying Democrat or Republican you said beatnik.

1:07:13
SG: Right, right. Well, I we brought some of the first Jews anybody had seen down into Tennessee. And this one guy, someone was questioning him about his religion and being Jewish you know and he said hey, man, I like the red parts.

1:07:39
SM: [laughs] You mean something very important, because when you are talking about the (19)50s, and you think about the Red Scare that was everywhere, McCarthyism in the early (19)50s, even, even the late (19)40s and then to the-

1:07:52
SG: I was in the Marine Corps from (19)52-(19)55.

1:07:54
SM: Right. And then when you talk to you, you made some references I do not know what was jokingly or serious about the fact that when you say commune people think communism. Was there a fear? Was there a fear that was why people did not speak up that much in the (19)50s who may have had attitudes like the beats?

1:08:15
SG: Well there were people in the (19)50s like that but they were more in the arts. They were not you know, I loved Lena Horne when I was a little boy. She was an activist about it you know. She did not have to act like she was black. Nobody would have known if she decided not let them know. But she would do that. She stuck with it. I felt respect for that.

1:08:56
SM: What were the when you look at the counterculture. Counterculture is really defined as being challenging to the status quo in so many different ways. It is not- it is what people oftentimes look upon is not the normal it is then it is not the abnormal, it is just not normal. Theodore Roszak wrote the book The Making of a Counterculture where he talked about the different consciousness. How do you define counterculture?

1:09:29
SG: Well, in the first place, its spontaneous. It is not made by somebody. When I was running for the Green nomination, I was at one thing and this guy had done and said the socialist thing pretty well. You know, and I got my turn to talk and I started off the first thing was what he said and like that, and that caught on so good that the Green people all over the United States were using that to say they agreed with the previous speaker, you know, what he said and like that was a useful thing, you know that he did not have to be in a relationship of the opposite. You know? And one of my favorite things is the only thing that anybody else needs to know about your religion is how groovy it makes you. No need to tell them anything else. Show them how groovy you are.

1:10:45
SM: You talked about the books you have written. But were there any special books that had an influence on you in the (19)50s and the (19)60s in the (19)70s, that were written by other people?

1:10:56
SG: Well, in (19)49 or it was (19)45, my family was living in an army cold weather base in Colorado [inaudible] and my father was a civilian housing manager, and I went to school there. I stole and burned quite a lot of things. And that base was at the end of the war. They were cutting the barracks up and taking them away and stuff and they were going to burn the library. My mother was scandalized by that we had an old (19)39 Cadillac four door and she went over the library and picked out the stuff she thought would be good and picked out a carload of it that we kept. And what she got me was Fools Bet by Mark Twain, Melville, Robert Lewis Stevenson and those guys. And that was what I read growing up. And then when I was an English major, and I am taking a degree in English, I find it is my old friend! My friends from when I was a kid, these guys are American writers. All right. And that is some of the real philosophy of our thing. And I go back through that kind of writers like Thoreau and people like that, and I do not go on a classical religious paradigm as my father never would church, my mother never went to church. My children, say, man it is so cool that your dad got us out of the church.

1:13:05
SM: Was there any movies that when you look at the movies that have been produced and, on the screen, are there when you talk about the boomer generation in the (19)60s and the (19)70s? Or is there is there anything that is realistic to you?

1:13:25
SG: In movies? I think the main thing about movies is that they are not realistic. That is what they are for so, I do not know what you mean by realistic.

1:13:38
SM: Were there any movies that cause a lot of Vietnam vets say that when they see these movies, that is not the way it was.

1:13:46
SG: Yeah well, I is not a Vietnam vet I am a Korean War vet. In fact, I am the kind of a vet that when I see generals on the screen with [inaudible]- [laughs]

1:14:16
SM: A couple other questions here. This is a very important question I have asked everyone. And that is this business about healing. Boomers, of course, were born between (19)46 and (19)64. And the 1960s, the certainly the assassinations of a president, a senator and a civil rights leader. The riots in the cities, the burnings of the cities, certainly the 1968 convention, there was a lot of turmoil. There is a lot of division, as you well know and you live through it just like I did. The question I am asking is this. Do you who feel that the boomer generation is still having problems with healing, due to the extreme divisions that tore this nation apart in their youth? Divisions between black and white, male and female, gay and lesbian and straight. Divisions between those who supported authority and those who are against it, those who criticized the war and or supported it, as well as the troops? And what role has the wall in Washington DC done with helping to heal the nation beyond the veterans?

1:15:36
SG: The Wall?

1:15:36
SM: In other words, what I am asking is, do you feel the boomer generation will go to its grave like the Civil War generation not truly healing?

1:15:45
SG: I think that we are healing and we are healing other people, and that we are continuing bringing healing on down through history. It is the most loving, and healing and humanistic and best philosophy that I have seen. And I have read the other stuff you know but my wife and I, she is writing things now and one of the things that amuses her quite a lot is that guys who we consider to be heavy philosophers have ideas like that men have 32 teeth and women have 28 and to a midwife, that just an inexcusable level of stupidity. [laughs] Philosophers do not make philosophy they pick it out of the society and learn about it. Tim Leary said that he was a stand-up philosopher. Like a stand-up comic.

1:16:56
SM: Um Hmm.

1:16:58
SG: And I think my friend Paul Krasner who was a very good friend of mine who was like that too.

1:17:04
SM: Yes.

1:17:06
SG: And I think I am kind of like that. I am supposed, where I go, I am supposed to make them like me. When I went to penitentiary, I knew exactly what my job was. I was to show them a class act. And I did, and the result of that was that the news was coming to see James Earl Ray every week. And that was kind of a drag. And then I was there, they would see me for more fun and so got to where I was getting three televisions and two newspapers every week until they got so sick of that talking in Nashville that they sent me out to this place where I got put in the hole. And a counselor said I will tell you what, you can stay at my office until they find you. And there were always people helping me out like that. That was what I was about. And my folks went up to you know, get me out of the hole. And Mr. [inaudible] said let him rot, and they pushed me down and they had this guy Bass, Mr. Charles Bass. And Bass was a minister of corrections who had risen from a guard and when they saw him, he said, I am not worried about people who family come out for and he spun me out of the hole and put me in the trustee camp and gave me my mail that had been held back for several weeks and let The Farm bring me vegetarian food. I told him, I said I mentioned you in my book I was talking to him on the phone, I mentioned you in my book. He said when people came to my house, I show that to them.

1:19:03
SM: Wow. So, you believe then really that a generation like this does not have a problem with healing?

1:19:10
SG: I think we are healers.

1:19:11
SM: Okay.

1:19:12
SG: We are doing everything from a better diet. You know, we are talking about the hippie diet. Hippies are going to live a long time and not have, you know, not have high blood pressure diseases. I have been you know, watching my diet and eating vegetarian stuff for a long time and my last heart appointment the doctor says, I have the heart of a teenager and I should be congratulated. I had a prostate examination they say you get an A plus on this exam. [inaudible] I am a very healthy old dude.

1:19:46
SM: You have never had diabetes huh?

1:19:49
SG: No diabetes.

1:19:51
SM: Which is one of the most rampant disease in the country right now.

1:19:54
SG: Yeah. And it is the diet.

1:19:59
SM: When we asked Senator Muskie that question, I took a group of students and Senator Muskie basically, I he did not say anything about 1968 because he was at that convention. Basically, what he said is we have not healed since the Civil War and he was referring to the racism that was still in the country. So

1:20:18
SG: Yeah.

1:20:19
SM: That was what he was referring to because the Civil War in the south a lot of people have not healed according to him.

1:20:29
SG: Yeah, well, we live down here in the middle of all that kind of stuff.

1:20:37
SM: Did you have a generation gap with your kids?

1:20:44
SG: One of my kids decided that he would follow my military thing and became a martial artist that has a black belt in Jujitsu. The other is a computer guy and does that kind of stuff. My other son turned out to be the house holder yogi and I think I am also a house holding yogi.

1:21:10
SM: Because at that period when you were teaching that was when the generation gap between the boomers and their parents was really in its heyday.

1:21:22
SG: Well, my daughter's a boomer and she is quite proud of me.

1:21:30
SM: So, you obviously you were in the commune, but you did not have any like disagreements over politics or anything?

1:21:39
SG: [inaudible] We do not we do not use that word in that way here, we just do not do it.

1:21:50
SM: Why In your opinion, why did the Vietnam War end?

1:21:56
SG: Ran out of money?

1:22:01
SM: And uh-

1:22:01
SG: I think the people in the streets had a lot to do with it. I had a different experience. I came home Korea people said, where you been? You know? We already knew, in Korea we knew what was going to happen. One of the guys had written a little song. (Singing) Pardon me boy, is that an Indochina convoy? Uncle Sam has my fare it is just a trifle to spare. Come to Yokohama Harbor about a quarter to four. Sink a submarine and then you are looking for more. Dinner on the liner. Nothing could be finer than to have your ham and eggs in Indochina.

1:22:44
SM: Hmm.

1:22:45
SG: We knew that [inaudible] was next.

1:22:48
SM: You were a Korean War vet now Vietnam vets were not welcomed home were Korean War vets welcomed home?

1:22:55
SG: Nobody knew they came home. [laughs] And do not think, there were people who were supposed to be for peace who were dumb enough to be bad to soldiers. And I really hate that and regret that. But veterans, veterans, I am straight with veterans and they are straight with me. I am very grateful for my experience that allowed me to bridge that gap.

1:23:24
SM: Let me change I got this [inaudible] Alright, I am back. I guess I get a series of questions. I am going to ask them some of the personalities of the period. But the other thing I want to ask you was the button issue of trust the boomer generation is, as I see, it oftentimes is labeled as a generation that does not trust because so many lies were seen in their leaders, whether it be Watergate with Nixon and certainly the Gulf of Tonkin with President Johnson, you have the body counts that McNamara used to give on a weekly basis and we knew they were not truthful. So a lot of the boomers grew up with their leaders lying and they did not trust leaders and so obviously, this probably came up in some of your classes at San Francisco State where students just did not trust anybody in a position of responsibility or authority, whether it be university president, a corporate leader, or congressman or a senator and or even, you know, anyone your thoughts on the issue of trust, as you have seen him in your life, not only through your experiences in the (19)60s in San Francisco, but your life on The Farm?

1:28:54
SG: Well, the thing about Monday Night Class was, especially after it got bigger, was my role became much plainer and it was that I could not discriminate against questioners. And that if I did not know something I had to say, I do not know. And if I answered a question for somebody, they were the one who got to say was the question answered. I did not stand up in front of my class. I sat in a chair, talking to them. I did not use a microphone to talk to 1000 people. And it meant that it was like meditation with a conversation on top. And the way I treated people set the standard for how easy it would be for them to speak themselves so nobody was afraid to speak up in Monday Night Class. And I also had to be easy to call down. If I said something wrong or something I was supposed to roll right away for it, and do not argue about it. And none of that stuff bothered me, it was going to be obviously the right way to do it. But it developed a conversational style. And also, to talk to a bunch of people like that. There are things that happen, like sometimes you'll see the room catch a joke. And it is like watching the wind on a wheat field. Just really, really close to everybody's mind. And the day the students were shot at Kent State. It was a Monday. And I had Monday Night Class. And about 100 people showed up very noisy, about we got to get guns! They are trying to kill us you know, you cannot be all peaceful like this you got to get out there and do it. And so, I am having that argument with them. And somebody comes up and gives me, a little girl gives me a piece of candy and as I pop in my mouth, she looks so mischievous, I thought- oh! And sure enough, I been loaded a big chunk of acid.

1:31:11
SM: Oh, no.

1:31:12
SG: So, coming onto acid and having this argument about violence. And I finally got to a place where I said look here. All these nights I have been coming in here and saying love and peace. You guys have been saying yeah, yeah! Yeah, yeah. I repeat it and you say yeah, yeah. I say love and peace and the whole audience answered me: yeah, yeah. And that showed me that the violent guys were just a little thin fringe in the back. And they noticed it too. They were very well outnumbered by [inaudible] people.

1:31:47
SM: Well.

1:31:48
SG: So, we had that argument about it. And that was what we did. When heroin came, we talked about that. When crack came, we talked about that. We talked to all that kind of stuff. When Scientology came we talked about that.

1:32:06
SM: Hmm. Did you bring guests in? Or was it just you in the students?

1:32:13
SG: Well, no, I did not bring guests in.

1:32:19
SM: Yeah, Kent State. I just got back from the four days there. This is the 40th anniversary.

1:32:24
SG: Yeah.

1:32:25
And it was phew, it was an event that really shocked everyone. April 30th Nixon gave his speech and then on the fourth with the killings of May. So, was that room full that night when?

1:32:42
SG: Oh, yeah.

1:32:42
SM: How many were students were there that night?

1:32:44
SG: It was about [inaudible]

1:32:47
SM: Wow.

1:32:48
SG: The thing is I do not call people [inaudible] I do not call people [inaudible]

1:33:03
SM: Some said that they wanted to go and create violence, others did not. Did anybody talk about the police? What were the main issues on the student's minds?

1:33:13
SG: Well, the guys who had come to class for the purpose of disrupting and trying to turn it toward a violent thing were strong in what they were saying. The usual people who came to class felt that it was an attack on their consciousness and that they did not want to part of it.

1:33:32
SM: What happened at San Francisco State in the in the days after?

1:33:37
SG: Oh, we had we had we had one time where everybody was thrown off the campus by the police. There were hundreds of cops there. So, I was kind of assaulted. On the way out, I stopped in front of each cop, cops all lined up. I would go up and stop in front of each cop and looked him in the eyes until we had caught his eyes. And then I would stop at the next one and I did that to every cop on the line all the way up because I knew I was right and they were wrong.

1:34:06
SM: Yeah, that was a big issue back then is when do you bring in police from off campus and not just choose your own police and that had to be done by the administration was this where Hayakawa got in trouble?

1:34:21
SG: This goes back to the 1700s you know, town and gown. You know, that same thing. We were peaceful. Everybody knew we were peaceful. And there were people who were not but, that they were welcome to come to class and hear what we said.

1:34:41
SM: Did you ever talk about the Black Panther Party across the bay and what the Black Panther Party was doing?

1:34:50
SG: I did not know him but I would shake hands with him and say hi. And there was also one of them, this one guy point guy that was part of that bunch of guys who was an artist. And the best guy I saw in that bunch of guys, he was so good. And he used to, he knew how to do one of those old dances. Throws a little dime to a little black boy and goes dance for your trip. He knew how to do that. The problem with it was, he was really good at it. And he would do that and the other guys would say make it stop, make it stop augh! And he died because they asked him to start H. Rap Brown's car and it was bombed.

1:35:48
SM: Let us say that again? Uh.

1:35:51
SG: This is the guy Ralph Featherstone. Featherstone. And he was the guy who started H. Rap Brown's car but it had been bombed and they killed him.

1:36:02
SM: Somebody sent a bomb in Brown's car.

1:36:05
SG: Yeah.

1:36:06
SM: Unbelievable. And where was that car located?

1:36:09
SG: I do not know.

1:36:09
SM: Oh, Okay, right here in the Bay Area?

1:36:12
SG: I do not think so.

1:36:13
SM: Oh, okay.

1:36:14
SG: I met Ralph Featherstone when we went to San Francisco State college to do the Mississippi challenge for the Mississippi delegation because of the ride. So, I went, I got to meet a few guys, you know up at the, Mo Udall. Udall said, I agree with guys. And my name starts with a "U" and by the time it gets to me, I want to know whether it is going to make it or not. And if it looks like it is going to make it, I will go on with you.

1:36:46
SM: Right.

1:36:46
SG: If it looks like it is going to make it.

1:36:49
SM: Another issue that happened around the time you were at San Francisco State was People's Park over in Berkeley.

1:36:55
SG: Yeah, I got in a little trouble for that. I said that it was an unreasonable expectation, they could not take real estate away from somebody because they wanted to it was not going to wash and the establishment was not going to allow it to happen. And it was going to cause bad confrontations. And it got somebody killed!

1:37:14
SM: That is right, the guy on top of the building.

1:37:17
SG: And I did not like I did not like the general way. Bad tactic, bad strategy.

1:37:28
SM: Did the students ever talk about Governor Reagan? Because he was tough on students.

1:37:34
SG: Yep. Well, the thing about, about Ronald Reagan is that when I was a little boy in Santa Fe, about 12-13 years old, if I would go to the movies, walk about two and a half miles into Santa Fe to see my weekend movie, and if I came to the movie house, and it was a Ronald Reagan movie, I would turn around and go home without seeing the movie that weekend. I could not stand him. I still cannot stand him. If he is not doing a part he has no more expression in his face than a potato. He was not a smart man. What Reagan did! Reagan did not do shit except for he was an actor for some.

1:38:23
SM: I know I interviewed Ed Meese down in Washington, his attorney general.

1:38:27
SG: Yeah.

1:38:28
SM: And he had picked Ed Meese to be his top person when he was governor. He did not know him until that point. But Mr. Meese had been involved with the Free Speech Movement as the assistant district attorney of Alameda County. So, he had already been involved with the Free Speech Movement (19)64- (19)65 but under Reagan, he was in charge of coming down hard on students in (19)69 at People's Park.

1:38:55
SG: Yeah.

1:38:57
SM: So, before I get into some specific questions I am just got names before we end this. Are there any other, we have talked about, you talked about People's Park, you talked about Kent State, you talked about drugs. What were some of the other topics that you talked about with the students? What were what was on the boomer’s minds when they came into that class? Just general issues?

1:39:23
SG: Well, I did thumbnail sketches on all the world's major religions. And that was one of the things that we talked about it. I used to say take all the religions and put them on old fashioned IBM cards, and stack all the old religions up like that and some of the holes would go clear through the stack.

1:39:50
SM: Hmm.

1:39:51
SG: That was what we were interested in. What would have gone clear through the stack?

1:39:57
SM: Did you talk about any of the other movements like the Women's Movement or the Gay and Lesbian Movement or the Native American, American Indian Movement they were very big too.

1:40:08
SG: Yeah, I, when they did the Longest Walk from Oakland to Washington DC, plenty gave them an ambulance for the run. And I went on that run. And when I got the DC, I saw that the security guys- those guys who had red threads braided into their braids to identify that they were security was keeping the press away from the old guys.

1:40:36
SM: Hmm.

1:40:37
SG: I was friends with one of these Indian chiefs, Oren Lyons, he's one of the Mohawk traditional chiefs and I went to Oren, because I knew him and I said look Oren, the security guys are keeping the press away from the old people and the old people are prettiest thing you have got. They should not be doing that. They should be facilitating the press to get to the old people. So, they had a meeting with the [inaudible] that night, and he expressed my opinion to the meeting and they agreed. He came back out and it was like that. And he told me that I was the hippie elder.

1:41:14
SM: Hmm. When you look at you ever see had all these experiences of the musicians that were in the Bay Area, whether it be the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane. My golly, I remember learning that Boz Skaggs was from there along with the Huey Lewis and the News and Tower of Power, the list goes on and on in the Bay Area. What musicians and artists that you felt were the most important they had the greatest influence on the boomer generation, in your view?

1:41:51
SG: Musicians and artists?

1:41:54
SM: Yeah, what musicians? When you were at San Francisco State did you ever talk about the musicians in your classes?

1:42:03
SG: Oh, I know. I had musicians in my class. And- [laughs]

1:42:10
SM: I mean, did you talk about what was happening in the music scene?

1:42:13
SG: We had quite a hot discussion one night about who was St. Stephen.

1:42:17
SM: Who was who?

1:42:18
SG: St. Stephen.

1:42:20
SM: Okay.

1:42:21
SG: [singing] Was a rose in and out of the garden. He goes country garden wind in the rain, wherever he goes, people are complaining.

1:42:31
SM: And that created discussion for a couple hours?

1:42:35
SG: Yeah! Some people thought it was, some people thought it was not. I had to kind of go easy because I had been over visiting Garcia concerned about Pig Pen he was getting to be a real bad alcoholic. I want to talk to Jerry about it and I did not know it but one of the, one of the guys that wrote the lyrics was in the next room with the door open while I was there talking to Jerry. And we had all this discussion. And that guy is the guy that wrote the lyrics for St. Stephen.

1:43:09
SM: Oh my god.

1:43:10
SG: Stuff out of my mouth from that visit while I was at Jerry's that I recognized.

1:43:14
SM: What was his name?

1:43:16
SG: I think it was Hunter.

1:43:17
SM: Oh, wow.

1:43:17
SG: I think that was the one. I had a couple of them.

1:43:24
SM: So, you knew Jerry Garcia. Who were some of the other personalities in the Bay Area that you got to know?

1:43:31
SG: Well like I said like I said, I knew Big Brother and the Holding Company before they had amplifiers and that I was a family you know, I did not play anything. I was just unabashedly a fan. And I you know; the Airplane came up with Grace. Wow! The Airplane's got a girl! And then Chester brought Janis up from Texas, then Big Brother had a girl. All that stuff is interesting stuff going on at the time and I suppose people there were some people that just put me out there, nirvana. I love rock and roll.

1:44:22
SM: Did you get to meet Janis?

1:44:25
SG: What say?

1:44:26
SM: Did you get to meet Janis Joplin?

1:44:28
SG: Oh, yeah. She did not like me very much.

1:44:31
SM: What was she like?

1:44:32
SG: Well, the hippes were scandalized when one by two turned up and set a bottle of Southern Comfort on top of the piano because we did not drink hard liquor. The hippies were all surprised by that. But you know, her stuff was kind of blues, that is hard on you to sing. And I had to respect to her heavy weightiness in that class. I liked it most it was raising divine.

1:45:12
SM: She died of an overdose of drugs I believe did not she?

1:45:15
SG: Yeah. And not the kind, nothing that I would take either.

1:45:19
SM: What was? What did she die from?

1:45:22
SG: It was not reefer.

1:45:26
SM: Was she drinking and taking medicine at the same time or?

1:45:30
SG: I think I think that she was like, I cannot talk about other people's dope.

1:45:35
SM: Okay. Yeah. And you knew Grace Slick too then? And how about Stevie Nicks? Did you know her?

1:45:43
SG: Who was the second when you said Grace Slick? Grace. Yeah, I did not know Grace, but I admired her greatly.

1:45:51
SM: And Stevie Nicks is the other one that camp out of the came in the area.

1:45:55
SG: Stevie Nicks?

1:45:55
SM: Yup.

1:45:57
SG: No, that is after my time.

1:45:58
SM: Yeah okay. Any other any of the other political people that you get to meet in may be activists like Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis that group?

1:46:13
SG: I went up to Abbie Hoffman's place up on the St. Lawrence Seaway and let my boy Sam drive his boat. I was at Abbie's last gig and it was funny bus but Leary and Abbie and what was his name? One of the Black Panthers.

1:46:30
SM: Bobby Seale.

1:46:32
SG: Bobby Seale and when the guy introduced us, when he introduced Bobby Seale out in the suburbs it would have been a scary thing but now it is just Bobby Seale, but now it is just Bobby Seale's new outdoor cookbook.

1:46:46
SM: Yeah, did not I think Paul was the moderator was not he? Paul Krasner?

1:46:53
SG: No way, not with that one.

1:46:55
SM: I know he moderated one of those programs.

1:46:57
SG: Yeah. Yeah. And the thing about Tim was that he was a technician. And when it was his turn to talk, he leaned up and he put the first syllable right into that microphone and made the room rain. And he had the intention.

1:47:19
SM: Okay, I am going to, I am just going to list some names here that I do this, I finish each interview with this. And then I have a question on the legacy. But these are just personalities or terms from the era when boomers were young. And that is (19)50s, (19)60s, (19)70s and (19)80s so and you can just get quick responses, these are either personalities or terms or events. First one, first two are just your thoughts on Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda?

1:47:52
SG: Well, there was good leftists and stuff like that. That was fine. I did not mind Jane Fonda that they were not hardcore hippies or anything they were media people who were sympathetic.

1:48:09
SM: John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy.

1:48:12
SG: I cried when John was killed.

1:48:15
SM: Where were you? Obviously, people remember where they were when that happened. Do you remember the exact moment that you heard it?

1:48:22
SG: Yes, I came down out of my apartment on Castro Street in San Francisco right at the entrance of the tunnel, I came out and everybody was weird. I could not tell what it was but people were weird. I just walked up to somebody says what happened? And he knew I did not have to explain, he said: They killed Kennedy.

1:48:40
SM: Oh, wow.

1:48:43
SG: I could tell, the street was just freezing.

1:48:46
SM: And then the next everybody remembers the next four days around the TV set. Were you around it to?

1:48:52
SG: Somewhat but I did not have television. I had to go to somebody else’s. I did happen to be around a television set when Martin Luther King gave the "I have a" I got to see that. It was very eerie that they shot him the next day.

1:49:08
SM: Yeah, Bobby Kennedy.

1:49:11
SG: I loved Bobby too. He did not have a chance to develop but he would have been a heavy weight with a chance to develop and in those days look how easily it passed by that it was a Muslim that killed him. These days that would cause a fire.

1:49:32
SM: How about Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern?

1:49:36
SG: They were good guys and they tried hard and I appreciate them but I thought they the Clean for Gene was a bad idea.

1:49:49
SM: Hmm.

1:49:49
SG: He did not want the hippies to look like him. He wanted. They believed in him for his philosophy but he was not visibly supported by them. So, they put out the word Clean for Gene.

1:50:02
SM: So that turned a lot of people off towards Senator McCarthy?

1:50:05
SG: I think so.

1:50:07
SM: I wish he knew that because he was advised to do that.

1:50:10
SG: Yeah.

1:50:12
SM: That was not his idea.

1:50:13
SG: Good!

1:50:14
SM: No, because I already interviewed the guy in my book project here, who gave him the idea.

1:50:21
SG: Ahh.

1:50:21
SM: So that that did not come from him originally. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X.

1:50:31
SG: Well, I was, in the beginning was a gringo enough that Martin Luther King embarrassed me because of his passion. And Malcolm X. You know, I got to like Malcolm X. I liked him pretty well. And it was one of the interesting things about him was when he went to go visit Islam and he came back. Islam is not a racist religion.

1:51:02
SM: Hmm mm.

1:51:03
SG: Of course, he had to do something to get him killed.

1:51:08
SM: Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew?

1:51:15
SG: Cheap ass politicians.

1:51:17
SM: How about Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford?

1:51:24
SG: Ronald Reagan. Like I said, I would not go to a movie that weekend. A Ronald Reagan movie. Gerald Ford got a bum rap. He was not as dumb as they made him out to be.

1:51:34
SM: How about Dwight Eisenhower?

1:51:36
SG: Now there is a general and a president, you know? And a guy that had the nerve to say the thing that they get people to say yet: It was clear and present danger to allow undo power of the United States military industrial complex.

1:51:55
SM: You are right.

1:51:56
SG: Best thing a president ever said.

1:52:01
SM: Hubert Humphrey.

1:52:04
SG: Called him Hugh the Jew but I kind of liked him.

1:52:06
SM: How about Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin?

1:52:10
SG: Well, I was at a gig with Jerry Rubin and I said something to him and he said: I did not mean you Stephen! People over thirty.

1:52:19
SM: Remember he was on the Phil Donahue show, and he really gave it to Phil Donahue.

1:52:23
SG: I was on the Donahue show.

1:52:29
SM: Who was on Donahue?

1:52:30
SG: Yeah.

1:52:31
SM: You were?

1:52:32
SG: Yeah.

1:52:33
SM: Really? What year was that?

1:52:35
SG: Well, it was kind of a spoof because Donahue was just about to Marlo Thomas and so he was running a bunch of shows, several a day to build up a little honeymoon time for him. And so, I got some kind of a crew, I never got to meet him. He did not come to the farm. He sent a crew down here. The lady from the crew was having an affair with one of the techs and stuff. Then I got to go talk to him and so I never got to - he did not have a clue who I was when we went on the air. And he said how many billionaires had I cashed out!

1:53:12
SM: How many what?

1:53:14
SG: Millionaires had I cashed out into our commune.

1:53:19
SM: Oh my gosh.

1:53:22
SG: This is Marlo fixed him up, she civilized him. But he did that to me and the result of that was we are coming down on Chicago in our Greyhound bus and the semis that are passing us say - hey look at that their bus man, hey, you guys got any wacky tabacky? Another time, though, we were in the Greyhound and a driver coming the other way said, to look at that old Greyhound, pretty as Dolly Parton in a wet t-shirt. [laughs]

1:53:53
SM: What are your thoughts on Chicago Eight because that was a very big trial.

1:53:58
SG: I knew somebody from then that [inaudible] those guys

1:54:03
SM: That was you know, that was both Rubin and Hoffman and Hayden and Huey Newton and Dave Dellinger and Lee Weiner.

1:54:16
SG: Well, I already told you about the guys I knew.

1:54:17
SM: Yeah. That was well, that was a big event in (19)68. What do you think about the women leaders? I have not been talking about them yet, but Gloria Steinem, Betty Freidan, Bella Abzug, the feminists.

1:54:33
SG: I like them fine they have a hard road to hoe and if they get shrill with it and like that but I am very impressed by their courage although I still think that, it was Johnson who called Bella Azberg was not it?

1:54:59
SM: I am not sure.

1:54:59
SG: [laughs]

1:55:03
SM: Yeah, when we talked one of the big issues within the movements itself, the civil rights, the antiwar, gay and lesbian, American Indian Movement, all the movements basically it was the sexism that took place within the movements in the (19)60s and the (19)70s. It is a lot of reasons why the women left the, the antiwar movement and joined, joined well, started the women's movement, the second wave, so to speak. How has when that happened with the movement, you obviously had men and women in the communes. How are women treated in the commune?

1:55:47
SG: Do not do not call it a commune. If you get in the habit of it you will put it on the page if you get in the habit of calling it that.

1:55:53
SM: The Farm.

1:55:54
SG: The Farm, exactly.

1:55:58
SM: I correct myself, sorry.

1:56:04
SG: [laughs] The way it was on the farm is that there was one pick-up on the farm that would start and it belonged to a midwife.

1:56:17
SM: I did not quite hear that. Say that again?

1:56:21
SG: I said that the way the farm was about that stuff, if there is only one pick-up on the farm that ran it would belong to a midwife.

1:56:28
SM: Okay.

1:56:29
SG: Our, we had guys who went to medical school from the farm and came back as doctors. And so, we had midwives and doctors instead of being the other way. It is one of the reasons that our midwives are so uppity. I love uppity women.

1:56:43
SM: Well that is that is a positive thing then. Your thoughts on the Black Panthers themselves the Huey Newton's, Eldridge Cleaver, Kathleen Cleaver, Bobby Seales, H. Rap Brown.

1:56:53
SG: You know, I understood it and I loved them a lot but I was just sorry that they were so involved with the guns.

1:57:08
SM: Good point. Would you would say the same thing about the Weatherman?

1:57:11
SG: Yeah.

1:57:12
SM: Yeah and the American Indian Movement went that direction too.

1:57:17
SG: Being a combat veteran I had to carry dead and wounded back out of the rice paddies. It gets rid of making guns seem romantic pretty well. What was the last thing you just said there about?

1:57:29
SM: They were the names of the Black Panthers: Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown that you already mentioned.

1:57:37
SG: I met Stokely. I did not meet H. Rap Brown buy my friend got killed starting his car.

1:57:47
SM: He is in jail now. You want to want to talk about American Indians? Yeah, the American Indian Movement was between (19)69 and (19)73 very strong. They took over Alcatraz and then ended up at Wounded Knee where there was violence.

1:58:09
SG: I know the two guys who got busted.

1:58:20
SM: Dennis Banks.

1:58:21
SG: Dennis Banks and what is his name?

1:58:25
SM: The other one.

1:58:26
SG: Russell Means.

1:58:27
SM: Russel Means. Yeah.

1:58:28
SG: I have a funny relationship with Russell Means he knows I got juice. He does not know why. [laughs] I saw him at a thing with him one time and I said 'Hey, Russell, you are really doing good.' And the look he gave back to me said, who the fuck are you to tell me how I am doing?

1:58:48
SM: He has done pretty well. He has been in movies.

1:58:50
SG: Yeah, well, they called Hollywood before he had ever been in the movie.

1:58:53
SM: Right?

1:58:55
SG: But also, we were at a thing and in Taos and we were supposed to hold it down to ten minutes and Russell says well I expect brother Steve will try to hold it down but I do not know if I can or not.

1:59:09
SM: Wow. Well you know, Alcatraz was happening when you were teaching that class. I believe.

1:59:14
SG: Very likely.

1:59:15
SM: Yeah. Because that was (19)69. And it might have been an issue too. Couple more names here, Dr. Benjamin Spock.

1:59:25
SG: Well, he was considered the godfather of the movement and all that and he said one thing that was like, true, but I was kind of sorry he said it. He said that they did not really pay any attention to us and we knocked all the windows out of the Senate [inaudible] building.

1:59:43
SM: He was in the group that levitated the Pentagon.

1:59:47
SG: Yeah and [inaudible] was in that.

1:59:51
SM: And Norman Mailer was there too. He wrote a book on how about the Barrigan brothers Philip and Daniel Barrigan.

1:59:59
SG: Oh, that is what you call a good Christian!

2:00:03
SM: Walter Cronkite.

2:00:05
SG: I love the one right in the middle of the shit totally hitting the fan. The biggest, best circulation magazine cover was Cronkite and at the wheel of his yacht and it was obviously the ship of the day.

2:00:26
SM: Daniel Ellsberg.

2:00:29
SG: Great dude. Great dude.

2:00:33
SM: How about Walt Disney?

2:00:36
SG: You mean?

2:00:38
SM: The man who created the dynasty?

2:00:43
SG: Dynasty?

2:00:44
SM: Disney, Disneyland, Disney Studios.

2:00:49
SG: I kind of like the dope smokers that used to work for him before he started hiring people who smoked dope.

2:00:55
SM: He is more influential than people realize with the TV in the (19)50s.

2:01:02
SG: Yeah. Well I did not have TV in the (19)50s.

2:01:05
SM: You know, it is interesting Howdy Doody is another one because somebody wrote an article that Howdy Doody was the reason why the (19)60s began, can you believe that?

2:01:18
SG: No.

2:01:18
SM: [laughs] Just a few more here, Jackie Robinson and Muhammad Ali.

2:01:24
SG: Well, I feel that the thing about them is like when Joe Lewis went and knocked Max Schmelling down. And it was that is one of the ways that people can get out is athletics because they break out of their cultural shell that way that those guys showed to break things out that way. I have to admit that I had to smile when he was trying to talk about what kind of a boxer he was and he says just look at me. I am pretty. I am pretty!

2:02:07
SM: [laughs] Yeah. How about Robert McNamara and John Dean?

2:02:18
SG: John Dean was the one they called the young man with the dirty hands of the clean mind. And he has still got a good reputation on the tube, he used to talk all the time. McNamara, the guys were just what do you call them? Apparatchik?

2:02:35
SM: Yeah. How about Watergate and Tet?

2:02:40
SG: Tet? The Tet Offensive?

2:02:44
SM: Yeah.

2:02:46
SG: Well, Watergate was good because it got Nixon in deep personal shit. But the Tet Offensive that was just them finishing kicking us out of Vietnam was not it?

2:03:03
SM: Yeah, Tet was in (19)68, which many people believe is why LBJ decided to withdraw. Because even though we beat them back, they, they had the opportunity to attack us all over the countries of Vietnam that is.

2:03:22
SG: Well, Vietnam was when we took over a place that was being held in an evil political grip from the people who was holding, which was the French. And we just took over somebody else's old Colonial got there and we had to pay the bill for life was ours.

2:03:46
SM: How would you define the hippies? in comparing them to the hippie?

2:03:53
SG: Era? Okay, he was International.

2:03:59
SM: They were they were much more political than the hippies though, would not you say?

2:04:03
SG: Yeah, but politics is not bad when you need it.

2:04:07
SM: Right?

2:04:08
SG: The politics if you are comparing politics to inspiration and stuff.

2:04:14
SM: Yeah

2:04:14
SG: You want to give people guns and things, they got to know.

2:04:14
SM: I have three slogans here that that I have asked each person that I have interviewed, that define the boomer generation, and these are the three slogans: Malcolm X: "by any means necessary" which is symbolizing the more violent aspects, the guns, the radicalism. Then you have got the Bobby Kennedy who gave that those words: "Some men sees things as they are and ask why I see things that never were and ask why not." That was kind of the activist mentality and all the movements without violence. And then what I call the more hippie mentality which is the which was on the Peter Max posters that were so popular in college campuses in the early (19)70s which said, and I had one in my room: "You do your thing, I will do mine. If by chance we should get together, it'll be beautiful." And the only other quote that somebody said to me was "We shall overcome" which symbolic of the civil rights movement. Do you think those kinds of define the boomers?

2:05:18
SG: No, no, I do not think so.

2:05:35
SM: Do you have some that you feel would define them?

2:05:46
SG: I do not think of them as the boomers. I think that that is a that is a psychological and media kind of a thing. And it does not have a lot of magic to me.

2:06:06
SM: But the term may not but do the- do the way the people that were living at that time, the younger people, does that kind of cover them? Or are there some quotes that maybe are better?

2:06:21
SG: Well, the first one of that bunch of the ones that you gave me, well, I like this

2:06:32
SM: The Malcolm X?

2:06:34
SG: What was this?

2:06:36
SM: By any means necessary.

2:06:37
SG: Oh no, I do not like that one. By any means necessary is a threat. By any means necessary is trying to justify guns. I do not like that.

2:06:51
SM: Bobby Kennedy's is okay. The Bobby Kennedy ones, okay?

2:06:57
SG: Yeah, I like that. I like that.

2:06:58
SM: How about the Peter Max one?

2:07:03
SG: It is okay. But it gets kind of long and involved, it is not what I am picking out as the writer [inaudible]

2:07:13
SM: Are there any words that you think could better define?

2:07:25
SG: People who talk about how the (19)70s was a drag? When the (9)70s was happening, we were building the farm and we some of our great, finest years. It is like that. I, I sort of parted company [inaudible] when I came out on the road and we came here [inaudible]

2:07:56
SM: You know a lot of people do when they compare the (19)60s in the (19)70s they really put the (19)70s way below the (19)60s.

2:08:03
SG: Yeah.

2:08:04
SM: Particularly after (19)73.

2:08:07
SG: Yeah well, we built The Farm at that time. We were very strong. And you know, we had a United Nations grounds pass because we were an NGO united nation. We were powerful political [inaudible] categories and stuff.

2:08:28
SM: A lot of reasons why people attack the (19)70s as they think of disco music and-

2:08:35
SG: Yeah.

2:08:36
SM: And the lack, and the dying of activism. I think that is oftentimes-

2:08:40
SG: Our guys said they might start a band called the Cisco Ducks.

2:08:47
SM: Oh, that would be interesting.

2:08:50
SG: Which is "Disco sucks" Y.

2:08:52
SM: Yeah, I remember that. Ok, a couple more and then we are done. Vietnam veterans against the war. Your thoughts on them?

2:09:01
SG: Well, the Vietnam War was such a hard on the other people thing, that the guys were just used up like that. And I got big compassion for Vietnam vets and [inaudible]

2:09:15
SM: Have you visited the wall in Washington?

2:09:17
SG: No.

2:09:18
SM: Oh, okay. Have you seen it though? on TV or?

2:09:22
SG: Yeah, sure.

2:09:23
SM: Have you talked to any vets? What do you think that wall means to this nation?

2:09:29
SG: Well, it was supposed to make them notice that a lot of young men were sacrificed but I do not. Let us see Kurt Vonnegut has the place where this guy says we are not going to have any airplanes fly over and celebrate the war heroes. What we are going to do is what we ought to do all of the guys who were in power and had anything to do with it, are going to [inaudible] fluid rub mud on themselves and crawl around on the ground and oink like pigs.

2:10:09
SM: Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.

2:10:15
SG: Clinton was skillful but unreal. And Jimmy Carter was really real it could have been more skillful.

2:10:24
SM: How about George Bush, the first?

2:10:32
SG: Some rich guy that had no business in politics.

2:10:39
SM: How about the Catonsville nine. Are you aware that? That was the Barrigan brothers.

2:10:44
SG: Well, I thought that they were they were good priests, that is what priests are supposed to do, stand up for everybody.

2:10:52
SM: How about My Lai-

2:10:54
SG: Massacre?

2:10:56
SM: Yes.

2:10:58
SG: Well, there is so much illegal violence in the cleanest war that none of its clean and violence as a way to just threatening people and bullying.

2:11:22
SM: And people think that and a couple other instances is the reason why Vets were not treated well when they came home. Not so much by Americans as a whole but by organizations, veterans’ organizations. Angela Davis and Timothy Leary.

2:11:42
SG: Well, I like Angela Davis accept its a dumb thing to carry a pistol into a courtroom. It was a stupid thing to do and it ruined her reputation. And Tim Leary, I always thought of him as Uncle Tim. Because your uncle does not care what you do as much as your dad does.

2:12:02
SM: Right. And we already mentioned The Weathermen. The year 1968. Just the year.

2:12:15
SG: I met the love of my life who I am still with 40 some years later.

2:12:23
SM: John Lennon.

2:12:25
SG: I liked John Lennon. I was in Germany and when I talked it was being translator. And so, I talked about that when he says, "train car with (...?). He translated it and then I turned to my translator and said, you did not say [inaudible]

2:12:48
SM: Still there?

2:12:50
SG: Yeah.

2:12:50
SM: Okay. Yeah, Barry Goldwater and William Buckley.

2:13:01
SG: Goldwater is an honest whatever he is. And Buckley is not. Well, he was kind of a gross old fart but he had a hard row to hoe and he did pretty good.

2:13:34
SM: How about the Little Rock Nine and the Free Speech Movement?

2:13:39
SG: The Free Speech Movement like I said, I answered the phone when they called [inaudible] but I do not know about that nine? Which nine?

2:13:49
SM: The Little Rock Nine were the, they refused entrance to the school, Little Rock, Arkansas.

2:13:58
SG: I guess I missed those guys.

2:13:59
SM: When the Port Huron statement, which was the SDS manifesto, and the Peace Corps.

2:14:07
SG: Peace Corps was a good thing.

2:14:10
SM: When the best history books are written they are often written 50 years minimum after a period takes place. So, the (19)60s some of the best ones should be written in 10 years. But some say that the best books are written once the generation has passed on, which is one day all 74 million boomers will no longer be around. Your thoughts on what do you think historians and sociologists will be writing in saying about this period, and the young people and you know, they still got 20 more years of life, even though the oldest is 63, and the youngest is 47. So, they are, they are still going to do a lot of things yet. But-

2:15:02
SG: A revolution is that thing that those who can do and those who cannot teach. I did not like being in the penitentiary but it did not hurt me a bit as far as my immediate history.

2:15:23
SM: And you were in the penitentiary for selling drugs?

2:15:26
SG: No, I never sold dope. I was in the penitentiary because guys on the Farm were caught growing grass. I did a year.

2:15:34
SM: Okay.

2:15:38
SG: I had the best penitentiary stay outside of Martha Stewart. I mean the warden would come out and get with me in the yard. One time the guy says, well you are vegetarian, I am a vegetarian, what do I do? And basically, they said, go line up with the black Muslim which I not know what they were talking about. I got there. The black Muslim was not in the chow line, he was pre-arranged [inaudible]

2:16:06
SM: Wow.

2:16:07
SG: So, I said, [inaudible] somebody said I should ask you guys about vegetarian food and the guy says someone has been in the [inaudible] And then when they found out who we were and where we were at, I was in the chow line and that same leader that afternoon was behind me in the chow line. And he kind of shouldered me in the back a little bit and [inaudible] white means 'very clean brother'.

2:16:40
SM: I guess, is there any questions that you felt I was going to ask that I did not?

2:16:49
SG: Well, I do not know. The thing is, I do not depend too much on the on the aphorisms and the media, they use aphorisms like they are important but they are not really that important.

2:17:08
SM: So, you do not like that term? Boomer.

2:17:10
SG: No, not really.

2:17:11
SM: Yeah, because you know, the group that followed Boomers are Generation X.

2:17:16
SG: I can hardly hear you.

2:17:18
SM: Okay, can you hear me now?

2:17:20
SG: Better?

2:17:21
SM: Yeah. The group that found is Generation X, and today's young people are Millennials. So, it is something that educators put on and they call the Greatest Generation, the World War II generation and then the Silent Generation, which was only five years. So, it is the way people put labels on and I found by doing this project that most people do not like the labels.

2:17:49
SG: Yeah.

2:17:50
SM: My last question is this. If you do not like the Boomer Generation, what would what would the Vietnam generation? Woodstock generation? The Protest Generation, what? How would you label the generation?

2:18:06
SG: What generation?

2:18:08
SM: The generation born after World War II.

2:18:16
SG: I do not know that is not how I do my nomenclature. I do not sort names is to maybe complicate things.

2:18:29
SM: He just more really and not-

2:18:32
SG: I cannot get you over your phone anymore.

2:18:34
SM: Are you there? Can you hear me?

2:18:37
SG: Barely.

2:18:38
SM: Well, I am done.

2:18:40
SG: Year what?

(End of Interview)

2010-05-13

Stephen McKiernan

Stephen Gaskin

138:44

English

Binghamton University Libraries

audio/mp4

Sound

2 Microcassettes

Audio

Authors; Political activists--United States; Hippies; Gaskin, Stephen--Interviews

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Sexual Relations; Free Speech Movement; Baby boom generation; Women's Rights Movement; Sex; Drugs; Rock n' Roll; Vietnam Memorial; Healing; Free Speech Movement;  Kent State; Jackson State; Watergate; Government Corruption; Woodstock; Hippies; Yippies; Students for a Democratic Society; Weatherman; Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.; Malcolm X; Eugene McCarthy; George McGovern; Lyndon B. Johnson; Black Panthers; Samuel Ichiye Hayakawa; Sixties; The Farm; Stephen Gaskin; Ina May Gaskin; Tennessee; United Nations NGO; Community; Activism; H. Rap Brown; Ralph Featherstone; Mo Udall; Black Panthers; Oren Lyons; Jerry Garcia; Grateful Dead; Tim Leary; Pig Pen; St. Stephen; Bobby Seale; Stokely Carmichael; Russell Means; Beatnik; San Francisco State; Midwife.