by Victoria Lucas

March on Washington

They're saying there were 100,000 of us. There were a lot of people, but 100,000?!? It just seems like an exaggeration to make the whole thing look more dangerous to the government than it really was.

We were not armed. We were not aggressive–well, at least not until later at the Pentagon.

Flower power

Those were flowers that girl put in the barrels of the rifles with fixed bayonets and that were offered to the soldiers, not some black-powder concoction. And it was a sit-in! People at the Pentagon sat down in front of the fixed bayonets.

But we didn’t get as far as the Pentagon. OK, let me start at the beginning–our beginning, for Mel and me and our new house guest.

If you have seen my articles these past few months you know Mel and I were living in New York City and planning to travel to Europe. Yes, our plans were a bit vague, and we were enjoying our stay in New York, with Mel working full time at a boiler insurance company and me part time for Aspen Magazine (Phyllis Johnson Glick). In our spare time we walked in parks, visited friends, joined demonstrations against The War, and went to concerts. We also occasionally went on automobile trips on the weekends, retrieving our VW van from a rented garage in New Jersey.

One such weekend not long ago, we went to pick up a family member of Mel’s who had been suspended from high school, and he came to live with us until we could decide what to do. I’m not going to mention his name or other circumstances, because I don’t have his permission to write about him. I will only say that he was living in the US at this time only on the condition that he stay in school, and because that was the bottom line we had to figure out how to get him back in school. We came to the reluctant conclusion that, given the drug-related nature of his suspension, the only likely high school we could get him into was in Berkeley.

So when we drove to Washington, DC for the protest, there were 3 of us, we were loaded down with all the belongings we could bring, and we did not return to New York. We parked as close as we could get to the Lincoln Memorial and spent our time at the Reflecting Pool with the crowds there, trying to keep track of one another. We never crossed the bridge to the Pentagon to attempt the “levitation” people have been talking about.

Yes, levitation. A silly idea, I suppose, but then–like our plans for Europe–expectations were pretty vague. From what I’ve read since, only about half the people who, like us, gathered at the Lincoln Memorial followed Abbie Hoffman to the Pentagon, where it is said 3,000 federal troops were waiting for them. Norman Mailer was there and managed to get himself busted. At the Lincoln Reflecting Pool, the rally was comparatively quiet, given what I’ve heard and read about the Pentagon crush.

They say a lot of famous people were there besides Hoffman and Mailer–such as Robert Lowell, Noam Chomsky, Paul Goodman, and Allen Ginsberg (who chanted in Tibetan?) as well as rally speakers Dr. Benjamin Spock and Rev. William Sloane Coffin. Unfortunately, ill-conceived attacks at and foray into the Pentagon by some resulted in bloody confrontations, and the protest did not end as peacefully as it began–or so I hear and have read.

Wagons West

Since we wanted to get to a campground to stay the night, we left early. You see, Mel had to quit his job to leave New York, and so did I. We had only our savings to go on, and we were going to be roughing it for the trip back to the West Coast. We plotted our journey by where we could find campgrounds for each night, and we cooked our food from the sort of large drawer on top of the van that Mel had built on weekends and days off in that New Jersey garage. It was closed in a watertight case on top, but once pulled down at the side of the van there were shelves holding a camp stove, a lantern, canned foods, a couple of pots and pans, etc.–a kitchen and pantry all in one. A table folded out from being a cover to the drawer and held the camp stove and provided a spot to prepare food. Quarters were tight, but campgrounds gave us room to spread out, although it got pretty chilly.

We haven’t accomplished much in Berkeley yet, but we have found an apartment and are sending our family member–-let’s call him Mervyn–-to Berkeley High. (He doesn’t have long before he finishes school.) I found a full-time, daytime nanny job with a Mrs. Kurzweil, who has a sweet little guy, not walking yet, so not a year old. And we are connecting with old friends from the pre-New York days, spending some time in San Francisco.

We are still connected with the protest movement, and I’ve found new concert venues.  Next time–adventures in Berkeley! (I love Tilden Park.)

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