Gravehopping.

    Har Jehuda Cemetery is a 27-acre Jewish cemetery on Lansdown Avenue in Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania. Julius Moskowitz, a Russian Jew, founded the cemetery in the 1890s as a burial ground for Eastern European Jews. A large portion of Har Jehuda borders the backyards of about fifteen row houses on Bond Avenue, the street where my father and mother began their married life.  

 

 

  Har Jehuda had magnificent trees that to my five year old eyes seemed different than any tree in the neighborhood. They were tall and expertly pruned narrow trees that somehow reminded you of landscapes in Israel. A high wire fence and a small border wall with a pathway on top of it marked the border of the cemetery facing our back yard.  Children often walked along the top of the wall because it afforded a good glimpse into the heart of Har Jehuda.

     During one walk along the wall I spotted an old woman kneeling by a tombstone. Her face was close to the earth, there was a black scarf on her head and she was weeping copious tears. Curious, I studied her for a moment then walked away so as not to be noticed but when I returned a few minutes later, she was still sobbing. Not being able to feel or relate to that kind of pain at age 5, I still felt a nagging, mild distress inside.  

 

   

  The image of that old woman kneeling by a tombstone has stayed with me all my life. In some ways it has come to symbolize the impermanence of life.  

 

   When my family moved to the farmlands of Frazer, Chester County, there was another cemetery near our house.   

   Philadelphia Memorial Park on Phoenixville Pike is a bronze flat marker cemetery although there is a small, older section of upright markers, some with pictures of the deceased attached to the tombstones. This upright marker section is no longer used and most, if not all, of the tombstone pictures have disappeared. The ten acre non-sectarian cemetery has a massive bell tower that rang out hymns at various times during the day. The hymns would resound throughout the area with great power, although a  neighbor of ours complained about the music, calling it a religious infringement on his rights as a non-believer. He would often complain to me when I went to his house (I was the neighborhood paperboy) to collect the weekly subscription fee. 

 

 

     “That tower has to go!” he’d grumble, as if I had anything to do with the programmed generic songs that didn’t quite strike me as hymn-like at all. 

 

 

      Philadelphia Memorial Park, founded in 1929, became the repository of hundreds of bodies in April of 1951 when the American Mechanics Cemetery at 22^nd and Diamond Street in Philadelphia, was uprooted by the Philadelphia Housing Authority for the construction of a housing project.  

   In her 2012 Blog, ‘A Journey into the Past, Patricia Marie writes:

  ”When Mechanics was opened between 1848 and 1849, the location at 22^nd and Diamond Street was considered a rural area. After the Civil War, industry and housing took over and when the city wanted to build housing projects, it was cheap and easy to take over old cemeteries. Headstones were disposed of and bodies removed to mass graves in other cemeteries and then it was discovered that all bodies were not removed but built upon. If a lot owner had the money to move their loved ones, then they could do so. Most people did not have the money, therefore, their loved ones were removed by the city and placed elsewhere in mass graves.” 

 

   Not far from Philadelphia Memorial Park was Haym Salomon Memorial

Park, a Jewish Cemetery opened in 1883. Singer Jim Croce, who grew up in the Bywood and Drexel Hill section of Upper Darby, is buried here. Croce died in a plane crash on September 20, 1973, after performing at Northwestern State University.

   Philadelphia Memorial Park was a great place to ride your bicycle or take a long walk. In the spring, the cemetery became alive with the scent of flowers and freshly mowed grass. There, among the hills and fields of Chester County, the cemetery was a good place to observe the occasional circling hawk or the low flying pheasant.

      In the wintertime with the grounds blanketed in snow, Philadelphia Memorial Park became the perfect solitary escape, made for personal reflection -–as well as a “sanity safe space” when you wanted to get away from the mayhem of a large family.

      Graves were dug around-the-clock in Memorial Park. The sight of small “digging” tractors and gravediggers carrying shovels put you on notice that your life was not forever. Even more disturbing was the sight of a fresh grave with mounds of soft earth coming to a slight peak topped with colorful wreaths with the name of the deceased on gold or silver ribbons.

           Dear Dana, Forever Loved

          Little Gregory, Always in Our Hearts

          Precious Aunt, You will Always be Remembered

       Philadelphia Memorial Park was also very much about the living. I learned how to ride a bicycle (no hands!) there. Later, there were driving lessons with my mother or father beside me at the wheel. The Park was also an infamous necking and smooching nook (on summer evenings, the action accelerated considerably). With friends during hikes we would try not to walk over fresh graves but approximate where the interred coffin was underground and then walk around it. When we didn’t get this right and inadvertently stepped on someone, we would mumble a cursory, “I’m sorry.”  

   Visiting this place of death was not depressing but often had the opposite effect of making us more hung go for life.

     A good friend of the family’s who died at age 20 in 1972, is buried in Memorial Park. James H. Dye, Jr., was a rare specimen of a human being, articulate and intelligent well beyond his years.  During the Presidential Election of 1964, Jimmy and I engaged in boyish political debates. I’d lampoon him for the Barry Goldwater stickers he put all over his bicycle while he would shake his head in mock disgust at my support for Lyndon B. Johnson, the president who would show his gall bladder operation scars to reporters and photographers just one year later.

      As a boy I was often brought to the family’s burial plot at Westminster Cemetery in Bala Cynwyd. 

 

 

      Westminster Cemetery was founded by the Danish Catholic Church in the mid-1860s but reopened as a non-denominational cemetery in 1894.  The family tombstone was purchased by my great grandfather, William Bartholomew; it is centrally located in the so called Catholic section. An older family plot can be found in Saint Mary the Assumption Cemetery in Roxborough. It’s a small churchyard cemetery that holds the remains of my great, great grandparents, John and Catherine Schnitzius Nickels, both born in Germany around 1830. 

 

 

 

 

    My great aunt was always taking me to Westminster when she wanted to see if the gravesite was in good order. Was the grass cut?  Were the weeds pulled? Had too many birds defecated on the tombstone?

    She’d bring me to Westminster and talk about our long buried relatives, and she’d also show me-- for the one hundredth time-- how her name was already chiseled into the tombstone with a birth date and a black space for the year when she would die.

   The blank space, of course, always made her death all the more certain. (One can always fantasize that they will be the first to beat the Reaper). She had her name engraved, I suppose, to make sure that when she died her name would be listed just the way she wanted it to be listed. Survivors don’t often get things right when it comes to death and funerals. My great aunt was a meticulous dresser but when she died at age 97 she was buried in a multicolored housecoat, garish beyond belief, something she never would have worn in life.  

 

 

   It’s to my great aunt that I owe my fascination for history and tradition, as well as my fondness for cantaloupe, sliced fresh oranges and liverwurst and onion sandwiches on whole wheat bread, layered with the brownest mustard, of course.   

    

    In his poem, ‘My Grandmother’s Love Letters,’ the poet Hart Crane writes:

 

    Yet I would lead my grandmother by the hand

     Through much of what she would not understand;

     And so I stumble. And the rain continues on the roof

     With such a sound of gently pitying laughter.

 

 Thom Nickels

Contributing Editor

 

 

   

     

     

   

       

   

     

        

        

 

Father George Wm. Rutler & the Female Security Guard

 

y Thom Nickels• Fri, Dec 18, 2020

By Thom Nickels

Contributing Editor

The Church of the Good Shepard in Rosemont has been a staple of Philadelphia’s Main Line for many decades. It’s one of those signature buildings that anyone driving along Lancaster Avenue will recognize as an indicator that they are in Rosemont and not, say Wayne or Devon. The Church of the Good Shepard has always had a high liturgical life, meaning that it is more Catholic than Protestant, much like Saint Clement Episcopal Church in Center City.

Years ago the pastor at the Church of the Good Shepard was Father George William Rutler, an erudite, witty and theologically savvy man. For nine years he served at that parish and then, in 1979, Fr. Rutler was received into the Roman Catholic Church. He later wrote that the Episcopal Church was a post-Christianremnant.

"It is a vivid but tragic example of what happens when you abandon a serious commitment to the teachings of Christ,” Fr. Rutler said. "Demographically, the Church of England will not exist in 20 years,” Father Rutler informed writer Steve Skojec of ‘One Peter Five’ earlier this year. Fr. Rutler’s beef with the Episcopal Church had to do with the ordination of women as priests and bishops, something that he called "a demographic catastrophe.”

After his reception into the RCC, Fr. Rutler was sent to the North American College in Rome for additional seminary studies. He was ordained to the diaconate in Rome by William Cardinal Baum in 1980 and ordained to the priesthood at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York by Terence Cardinal Cooke in 1981.

In 2013, he became pastor of Saint Michael the Archangel Church in Manhattan after a flurry of parish assignments, including a stint as pastor of the Church of Our Savior beginning in 2001. At the Church of Our Savior Fr. Rutler restored the Traditional Latin Mass and employed artist Ken Woo to fill the sanctuary with exquisite iconography. After his assignment to St. Michael the Archangel in Hell’s Kitchen by Cardinal Dolan, the new modernist pastor at the Church of Our Savior abolished the Latin Mass in Fr. Rutler’s old parish and ordered the removal of Woo’s iconography.

Over the years, Fr. Rutler made a name for himself in conservative Catholic circles. His list of accomplishments, books, accolades, TV and radio appearances would fill this column.

Skojec recalls hearing a talk by Fr. Rutler in college. "I went to a talk by him in college and was delighted by both his intelligence and dry wit, savoring most the quips he made to himself as he was pawing through the selection of teas at the refreshment table: "Decaf, decaf, decaf — all this Novus Ordo tea. I’m looking for the Tridentine tea!’”

Fr. Rutler’s life changed drastically in the wee hours of November 4, Election Night, 2020, when an overnight security guard in his parish, Ashley Gonzalez, 22, relaxed on a sofa in Fr. Rutler’s office as the priest reviewed the latest Election returns on his computer. Reports say it was close to 1 AM. Fr. Rutler had given Gonzalez permission to use his office as a time-out space while making her rounds.

Gonzalez claims that while relaxing on the sofa, she began to hear the sounds of a pornographic movie on Fr. Rutler’s computer and claims that when she turned to see what was happening she noticed that the priest had his hands inside his trousers. (The New York Timesreported that Fr. Rutler was engaged in masturbation.) Gonzalez then videotaped the goings-on, filming the priest from behind so that the viewer gets only a side view of the face at the computer screen. The computer screen is blocked out, so the viewer cannot see the alleged pornographic images.

According to The Times, Gonzalez texted a relative saying she feared she was about to be raped. When she got up to leave the office, she claims that Fr. Rutler tried to prevent her from leaving. Gonzalez says that Fr. Rutler threw himself against her and put his hands on her breasts, in effect trying to prevent her from leaving. Gonzalez says she was able to push the priest away from her and leave the office and run out onto 34^th Street where she immediately contacted Black Ops Private Investigators.

As a result of these allegations, Fr. Rutler agreed to temporarily remove himself from the parish although he vehemently denied Gonzalez’s charges. Police and the Archdiocese of New York are currently investigating the incident.

What is odd about the story is that a priest of Fr. Rutler’s position and reputation would watch gay pornography in front of a security guard, and then proceed to touch himself in a flagrant manner while the guard was observing him. Even if Fr. Rutler thought that Gonzalez was asleep, watching porn with the audio turned up is an invitation to be discovered. It’s also pure madness. Behaving in such a way is career/reputation suicide, reminiscent of a Kamikaze mission.

Even if Fr Rutler was in full stress mode about the Election and had been drinking heavily, it is unlikely that he would want to pull the plug on his career in such a careless fashion. Only a person suffering from a form of dementia would be so careless.

Another puzzling element in the official story is Gonzalez’s charge that the priest attempted to rape her.

How do you go from watching gay pornography to attempted heterosexual rape in less than 4 minutes? There are probably many bisexuals and sexual libertines who could easily manage such gymnastics, but is it likely that a 75-year-old priest, who has had an unblemished record for all his priestly life, would be such a person?

When I viewed a news clip of Gonzalez describing the incident to a reporter, I was shocked at how young Gonzalez looked. She also happens to be pretty but in a strangely boyish way. As I listened to her talk about the incident, there seemed nothing rehearsed in her description. Gonzalez kept repeating how shocked and disgusted she was, and that she would never be returning to St. Michael the Archangel. Her testimony, I admit, bordered on the authentic, but was it?

It’s no crime to watch gay pornography, whether you are a Senator, president, a bilingual Archbishop or a golf caddy. Who among us has never surfed into the "darker” corners of the Internet at one time or another? Porn is the wall-to-wall carpeting of the Internet, as common as commercials on You Tube. Was the whole thing a set up? Did Gonzalez want to embarrass Fr Rutler or blackmail him in some way? Was she was acting on behalf of a third party?

Gonzalez’s accusations have the sensationalistic quality of a B-movie script written by a high school student.

Big time famous orthodox priest, a holier-than-thou type who condemns gay marriage and homosexuality is caught at the computer watching two men have a go at it. The famous priest doesn’t attempt to hide the fact that he is watching porn but in fact flaunts the deed by feeling himself up. The young female security guard then starts videotaping the priest, at which point the famous holy man jumps up and puts his hands all over her breasts. The young security guard then shoves the priest and runs out onto 34^thStreet. The priest then disappears from sight, his reputation left in tatters.

This bizarre incident is in total alignment with the sensationalistic, irrational and sci-fi like events of 2020.

New York Poet John Giorno: Sex, Art, Death, and Enlightenment

The life and times of poet John Giorno (1939-2019) can be found in the memoir, Great Demon Kings: A Memoir of Poetry, Sex, Art, Death, and Enlightenment (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), published one year after Giorno’s death. Giorno, a poet, knew everybody in the fascinating New York City arts and cultural world of the 1950s, 60s and 70s. Giorno’s range of friends and acquaintances was shockingly wide and diverse.  

   I “knew” Giorno years ago as the Beat gay poet who published a book of poems entitled, Cancer in my Left Ball. Giorno was also interviewed by Gay Sunshine magazine in San Francisco and by Fag Rag in Boston. Fag Rag was a revolutionary gay liberation publication edited by Walt Whitman scholar, Charley Shively (1937-2017). I wrote for the publication briefly in the late 1970s.

     Giorno’s memoir tells heretofore unpublished stories about Allen Ginsebrg, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac and artists Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg and many others.  

   Giorno worked on Great Demon Kings for twenty five years and finished the book just one week before his death. He never saw it in print.

    What struck me most about this memoir was its honesty. 

 

 

    As a student at Columbia University in 1956, Giorno told a friend: “The reason I dislike Columbia, is that everyone is here to become lawyers, doctors, businessmen, and professors. Their aspiration is to get some horrible job making money to support a wife and children, a bourgeois life imprisoned in suburbia…”

 

 

       When a friend of Giorno’s urged him to read Allen Ginsberg’s HOWL, his whole life changed.  “I held HOWL in my hand and I wanted to scream, to explode…Clear light and absolute bliss rang in my heart…”

     Giorno went on to read Jack Kerouac’s books and came to trust Kerouac’s understanding of the world. Life dealt Giorno a serendipitous blow when he met Kerouac at a party on May 31, 1958. “It was like being struck by lightning,” he recalls. “I was young and beautiful and that got me what I wanted and all I wanted was sex.” Giorno was also lucky to have wealthy parents who indulged his penchant for the bohemian life.

      “Jack was wearing a short-sleeve shirt, and I could see his muscles, and he had an amazingly handsome face.” The two men conversed and then a bit of magic happened. “I was drunk and so was he, and we staggered, our cheeks brushed against each other. We could have kissed.” Kerouac looked at Giorno and whispered, “Why are we here?” But this dance of intimacy was broken by a jealous Allen Ginsberg. Giorno recalls: “Allen swam in like a great white shark. He destroyed love through jealousy and possessiveness.”

      Giorno would have run-ins with Ginsberg throughout the years, at one point calling him a “pushy Jew,” for which he later apologized. Ginsberg, for his part, made it known that he never much cared for Giorno’s performance poetry.

 

 

     Giorno met Andy Warhol at the artist’s first one-man show at New York’s Stable Gallery. The year was 1962 around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. “I took hold of Andy’s soft hand, which dangled from his wrist.”  In 1963, while attending a Jasper Johns opening, Giorno spotted Warhol which led to a mutual friend inviting them both to dinner and then a dance performance at the Judson. At the end of the evening, Giorno told Warhol that he’d like to see him again. Entranced by Giorno’s good looks, Warhol said, “What about tomorrow night?”

     This was the birth of their love affair. The memoir indiscreetly details all of Warhol’s sexual fetishes, especially the time when the artist crawled across the floor to tongue-polish Giorno’s shoes. Through Warhol, Giorno’s circle of friends grew. He was meeting people like John Cage and Philip Glass although he already counted among his inner circle Village Voice columnist and dance critic, Jill Johnston (author of Lesbian Nation). Giorno and Warhol spoke every night. At this time the poet had a job on Wall Street and was known as an anomaly among his fellow writers and artists.

    New York City at this time was very provincial when it came to gay artists and writers being honest about their sexuality. Giorno writes, “The old guard Abstract Expressionists had been notoriously homophobic. Only straight guys, like themselves, were great painters. Gay artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns didn’t talk about their sexuality, and shunned homoerotic imagery in their work.”

 

     In 1964, Warhol asked Giorno to star in his film, “Sleep,” a 5hour, 20 minute film that shows Giorno sleeping. Giorno writes that he gave Warhol the idea to do a painting of Jacqueline Kennedy in the black funeral veil she wore at her husband’s funeral. Giorno was with Warhol the day that John F. Kennedy was assassinated. “We both started crying, weeping big fat tears. We pressed our faces together and kissed. It was the first time that we had properly kissed. It had the sweet taste of kissing death. It was exhilarating.”  Through it all Warhol kept saying, “I don’t know what it means.”

     Giorno’s relationship with Warhol dissolved over time but by this time the poet was traveling to Tangier to visit Jane and Paul Bowles. He found   Jane Bowles to be seriously crazy and returned to New York.

    Giorno’s friendship with artist Robert Rauschenberg became a love affair after the two men drank multiple cups of tea and smoked joints. “He had a beautiful body, soft skin and firm muscles. It was like making love to Alexander the Great or Emperor Hadrian. His body radiated the worldly power of great accomplishment.”

      Ruaschenberg, formerly married with children, “had an unspoken rule that no one was allowed to write about his being gay, under the threat of excommunication and wrath of hell, and nobody did.”

   In the 1950s, gay was the kiss of death; as a result, Giorno found Ruaschenberg’s use of heterosexual images to be self serving.  Ruaschenberg and Giorno did collaborate on a number of projects and performance pieces.  Then Ruaschenberg took an extended trip to Los Angeles where he met and bonded with Warren Beatty. Giorno recalls, “With that new friendship came Shirley MacLaine and rich beautiful Hollywood movie stars, drugs and alcohol, a world that was over-the-top.”

      While Ruaschenberg was hobnobbing in Hollwood, Giorno was getting feelings that the relationship would soon end.  He describes how he sat down on a park bench and began to cry. “It was at that moment that Bob Ruaschenberg and I broke. For no reason, nothing had happened; nothing had changed in our relationship. I believed it was precognitive recognition.” The break did occur shortly after Ruaschenberg returned from Los Angeles.

    From Ruaschenberg, Giorno would become lovers with Jasper Johns but first he established an intimate connection with William Burroughs.      “Thin, gentlemanly, and courtly, he dressed in imitation Brooks Brothers suits. He had the power, a strong magnetizing quality, to attract people to him. Every night we got completely drunk on bourbon and water, smoked endless joints and cigarettes, and took whatever drugs appeared as gifts.”

 

 

    Burroughs told Giorno: “Why would anyone want to go to bed with me, I look like someone from Bergen-Belsen.” Giorno told him that he wanted to thank William for being a great hero of gay sexual freedom. “I wanted to reward him for his noble efforts. He had the most appalling taste, attracted to puny street boys from London and Tangier. I wanted to offer him bliss.”

   Jasper Johns, Ruaschenberg’s former lover. now became Giorno’s lover.  Giorno declares: “Ruaschenberg was too crazy, Warhol was too over-the-top, the Abstract painters were dying gods, and minimal and conceptual artists were still forming. Jasper had caught the golden ring,”  

   Johns, with his southern charm and (mostly) stable WASP lifestyle, was with Giorno when the poet’s creation, the Dial-a- Poem program (famous poets reading their works on a toll-free line) reached new publicity heights, with articles about it in The New Yorker, the New York Post, the BBC and the Christian Science Monitor. When The New York Times did an article on Dial-a-Poem, Giorno’s name was catapulted into the stratosphere.

    Giorno then did what many poets did in the late 1960s and early 70s: he handed out mimeographed poems in the street as a form of activism. The Vietnam War had gotten Giorno interested in politics but unfortunately Giorno’s obsession with politics contributed to a breakup with Johns.

   Years after first meeting Jack Kerouac, Giorno ran into him on the corner of Third Avenue and Seventh. “Jack was wearing a flannel shirt and a brown corduroy zipper jacket with the collar up against the chill. He was just a nice, overweight guy, with a hangover, who was smiling and gentle, with warm eyes.” Kerouac had just made a fool of himself on William F. Buckley’s show, Firing Line, doing the live interview while very drunk. On Buckley’s show, Kerouac called Allen Ginsberg “That Jew!” and generally came off as moronic. Giorno writes that the former Adonis’ face was “beat up and bloated.”

  “Kerouac and I looked in each other’s eyes for a long moment. Love arose in each of our hearts. There was a sexual energy and unexpected possibility. We rested for a moment in the glimmer of our hearts.”

     And then Giorno was off. “I said good-bye. I had a day of appointments, and was already half an hour late.”

 

Thom Nickels

Contributing Editor

 

 

                                 

               

 

Back To The Square And To The Brattle Theater

 

City Safari: Back To The Square And To The Brattle Theater

By Thom Nickels• Wed, Dec 02, 2020

In 1969 the French café and bookstore near the Brattle Theater in Harvard Square, Cambridge, Massachusetts, was the talk of the town with its new editions of old and modern French classics. New wave French fiction like the works of Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute, were especially featured there plus reissues of Genet, Camus and Andre Gide.

The books were special French language editions, in some cases translated into English but not always. They also had a unique smell comparable in some ways to the smell of a new car. I didn’t visit the bookstore often but when I did I liked to look at the titles lined up in rows on the handsomely varnished wooden racks that gave the books the look of specialty Venetian deserts.

A Goddard film, Week-end, was a favorite at the Brattle Theater, Cambridge’s movie theater of note. The Brattle kept recycling Week-end, a film about gorgeous women smoking in bed, multiple automobile accidents and traffic jams. Week-end was recycled as often as the filmCasablanca and always drew an intellectual crowd. When something occurred on screen that audiences didn’t like--- usually a remark or a visual interrupted as being anti-woman—people in the audience would hiss.

 

 

I soon came to associate the Brattle with the sound of hissing snakes although audiences there never hissed when Casablanca was shown. Old school classic films were not judged as severely as contemporary films. At the Brattle, one saw films, not movies. It was crucial that you got the terminology right. A ‘movie’ was what the dumb pro-Nixon Vietnam War supporters saw. A ‘film’ was what enlightened intelligent people saw. Mixing the two branded you as someone not worthy of watching a film at the Brattle.

 

 

Hissing was the sound that defined most Harvard Square audiences. Self assured intellectuals hissed at an Anais Nin lecture I attended and at plays at the Loeb Theater. Generally, Harvard Square was spared the indignity of frivolous mainstream movies and movie theaters. That type of theater was reserved for Central Square, where many of the indigenous Cambridge working class people lived. Central Square was bordered by neighborhoods like Somerville, a hot spot for Vietnam War draftees. Cambridge’s second intellectual neighborhood (where there was more hissing) was near MIT, accessible via the MBTA at Kendall Station.

 

 

 

I lived in a rooming house on Kirkland Street (Kirkland Manor), just across the street from the world famous Fog Museum. Kirkland Manor was populated with students, hippies and young people who had drifted to the Boston-Cambridge area because they had heard it was the "Berkeley of the East Coast.” Julia Child lived in the same neighborhood so it was not uncommon to see her out and about in the local shops.

 

Walking through Harvard Yard in those days offered many surprises. One day it might be a pop up antiwar protest, a teach-in, or an AWOL solider standing by the James Harvard statue. On most days there were no surprises, just students walking back and forth between classes.

 

My daily path followed a familiar pattern: on the way home from work I’d check out the bookstores, peek into Hayes Bickford cafeteria (where Susan Sontag sometimes ate during her grad student days). I frequented the Pewter Pot Muffin House, a popular student and hippie hangout where the waitresses dressed as colonial wenches. For less than three dollars you got a mug of refillable coffee, a large muffin and a small pot of Boson Baked Beans.

 

 

 

I soon realized what an insolated bubble Harvard Square was: it was a place divorced from the world’s gritty realities. The people there, nearly all students, didn’t seem like real people at all. Students were not real people but people in formation and transition. After graduation they would leave the academic bubble for real cities and towns and begin their real lives.

On the weekends, one could always attend a weekend Be-in in the Cambridge Common. There one could observe hippies with drums and tambourines, women in long dresses and beads, shirtless men in jeans and headbands, lots of stoned solitary dancing, smoky smells and drugs and occasional small children and babies strapped papoose style to mothers’ backs. (Fathers carrying babies was a feminist innovation that would take many years to develop.)

 

My friends in Boulder, Colorado would write me letters about the hippie invasion into the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. This was creating some controversy with the locals. The hippies did not work but lived in groups or communes or in tent settlements in the mountains. In Cambridge and Boston, they lived in old townhouses but nobody lived outdoors.

The morning of April 10 seemed like any other morning to me. I awoke at 4am for my hospital job, then made my way up Kirkland Street past the Fog Museum, following my usual route which meant veering to the left so I could walk through the Yard.

 

As I approached the Yard on this morning, however, I heard some sort of commotion. Flashing lights flickered between the trees and police sirens wailed and then shut off. The gated entrance to the Yard, open as usual, provided me with an explanation. Police cars and wagons—big white wagons large enough to hold multiple prisoners—were lined up in front of University Hall. I saw police in helmets with clubs and riot gear. Many of them were rushing towards the building. More police were coming into the Yard in wagons. I noticed the smell of tear gas.

I had never smelled tear gas before but I had read about it in The Boston Globe and The Old Mole, Boston’s underground newspaper. I debated turning around and exiting the Yard to take the long way to the MBTA to go into Boston but in the end opted to walk along the margins of the Yard where a few protesters were catching their breath.

 

 

Tension at Harvard had been building for weeks with various teach-in talks near University Hall. Days prior to the riot I’d often stop to listen to the speakers in the Yard. One afternoon I listened to George Wald as SDS student activists distributed leaflets. I stood on the sidelines, not being a Harvard Student. The following day there was another teach-in and then another one the day after that.

 

 

 

On April 8, a large contingent of Harvard SDS marched to the university president’s house and nailed a list of demands on his door. The Martin Luther-like proclamation caused a stir in the press.

In Harvard Yard on the morning of April 10 I watched as even more police officers clad in riot gear kept pulling up in white vans. I saw students being dragged out of the building and being put into the vans while the protesters around me shouted "Pigs!” at the police.

Revisiting Harvard Square some years ago, I naturally wanted to revisit some of my old haunts. I looked in vein for the Pewter Pot Muffin House, where a friend of mine pocketed the check and then left the restaurant without paying. While certainly guilty of my fair share of "crimes” in life, it had never occurred to me to walk out of a restaurant without paying. The Hayes Bickford Cafeteria, where I once ate a solitary Thanksgiving dinner and where I often stopped on my way to work for the daily English Muffin poached egg special, was now a Chinese restaurant. The German Restaurant, Wursthaus, with its stunning pewter plates, sauerbraten, schnitzel and imported beers from throughout the world (a favorite eating place of John F. Kennedy, Harvard Class of 1940), was also gone. Walking through Harvard Yard, I re-imagined the SDS riots and approximated where I stood watching it all go down in the wee hours of April 10^th.

The statue of John Harvard was of course still there. Students traditionally rub the statue’s toe for good luck in their exams, but for me the statue marks the spot where I met Jimmy, a blond AWOL soldier running from the FBI and who needed a secret place to crash for two or three days. I took Jimmy back to Kirkland Manor and then later, with the help of an older friend from the hospital, we were able to get him on a bus to Vermont where he would meet people who would then take him into Canada.

 

I walked around Memorial Hall, a foreboding building that always left me feeling depressed, especially in winter. I walked along the same footpath where I had walked nearly a half century before, then past the Fog Museum and finally to where Kirkland Manor used to stand. The two old houses that comprised the rooming house had been demolished some years before although the cast of characters that lived there were still very much on my mind.

1. Lyn S., from California, an avid member of the Socialist Workers Party. I took Lyn to a gay bar in Boston where she told me that all the men there appeared to be "very sad.”

 

2. Muriel, the French Lit grad student who knew everything about Proust and Gide but who cried copious tears when I told her I was gay.

 

3. Beth, a student at Brandeis University, who loved jewelry, skinny boys and wire frame eyeglasses.

4. Beto, the defrocked gay Anglican priest from San Francisco, who wanted to shower with everybody in the rooming house.

At the end of my visit, I went around to Julia Child’s house, mumbled a silent bon appetit, then headed back to the Square and to the Brattle Theater, still very much intact but no longer showing Casablancaor Goddard’s Weekend.

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