DON'T BANK ON AMERIKA

Birth of The Environmental Movement

2012-02-24T10:00:00.001+07:00

A nice video about the birth of the Environmental Movement that began with the Santa Barbara Oil Spill of 1969, which was a backdrop to the Isla Vista Bank Burning:

IV Reunion Photos

2010-08-03T22:47:00.000+07:00

Robert Bernstein shot some great photos of the reunion, July 31, 2010, at Anisq'oyo' Park:

Isla Vista Reunion - 31 July 2010

Bob Potter (1934-2010)

2010-07-23T00:30:00.000+07:00

Bob Potter passed away in July 2010, after having given so much to the communities he was an active participant in, including Isla Vista and especially UCSB. Please follow the links to learn more about Bob:

Photo of Bob Potter courtesy of UCSB Theatre and Dance

SB Independent: Bob Potter, 1934-2010, In Memorium

SB Independent: Bob Potter obit

Bob Potter’s Speech
Dedicating the Monument to the Anti-War Movement, in Isla Vista’s Perfect Park, June 10, 2003

"For years I watched him find the light in dark moments, provide clarity amid complexity, and express courage when threatened with violence. As a man of letters and action, he was truly a man for all seasons and those he touched will miss him forever." -- Carmelo Lodise, July 2010

IV Reunion, 7/31, 12-8pm

2010-07-18T00:23:00.000+07:00

The biggest reunion of Isla Vistans and mostly former Isla Vistans takes place Saturday, July 31, 2010 and goes from noon to 8pm:

You're invited to Isla Vista Reunion - July 31, 2010 on Jul 31, at 12:00PM

The Real ’70s

2010-04-30T05:24:00.000+07:00

Community Builder and longtime Isla Vistan Carmen Lodise recently wrote in to the SB Indy about the true legacy of the Isla Vista Riots:

The Santa Barbara Independent: The Real ’70s, by Carmen Lodise

ISLA VISTA RIOTS Radio Series

2010-04-16T23:27:00.000+07:00

KCSB-FM has been re-airing newly remastered and interview-supplemented episodes of Don’t Bank on America, Malcolm Gault-Williams’ 36-part radio documentary on the history of Isla Vista and its three 1970 riots, well-known as I.V. I, II and III.

Explained Ted Coe: "Rest assured that the KCSB crew is not simply pulling the shows, last aired in the late 1980s, out of the mothballs and throwing them on the air. The episodes are being newly remastered straight from their original reels of quarter-inch audio tape, and augmented with conversations featuring the shows’ creators and subjects. The first chapter features a discussion between series creator Malcolm Gault-Williams, who DJed on the station in the 60s and managed it through the 80s; KCSB development coordinator Ted Coe; and Art of Peace host Philip Levasseur. The three discuss the origins of the series, the challenge of capturing and conveying the times in audio, and what it felt like to be right there in the midst of so much social change.

"'I had begun commercial broadcasting in 1968 as a freshman in Arkansas,' Gault-Williams says in the segment, recalling his beginnings in the medium. 'When I transferred to California, I was a City College student. The station let me in the door even though I wasn’t a UCSB student. I started filling in over Christmas break 69-70. It was my first experience with freeform radio; it made a big impression on me, that style of programming, and I tried to continue with that through my radio career. Unfortunately, the changes in radio and formatting as time went by made the opportunity to do that less and less. But when I was here at KCSB, it was mostly as what we called a "night owl" DJ, holding down the FM shift between midnight and eight in the morning.'"

Colin Marshall, in his column in the Santa Barbara Independent, March 15, 2010, gave some more detail on the series, its re-airing, and the context of the Isla Vista Riots of 1970.

The remastered Don’t Bank on Amerika currently airs every Friday morning from 8-9 a.m. on KCSB-FM, 91.9 (streaming on Internet, also.

40th Anniversary of The Bank Burning

2010-02-28T23:54:00.000+07:00

Forty years ago, a mob of students stormed the Bank of America building.
Isla Vista would never be the same

By Taylor Haggerty / Staff Writer
Published Thursday, February 25, 2010
Issue 86 / Volume 90

Photos courtesy of Greg Desilet

On the night of Feb. 25, 1970, second-year student Greg Desilet grabbed his camera from his apartment on El Nido Lane and joined the crowds swarming the streets of Isla Vista.

After a year of high tension, unrest and anger, rioting students had looted and set fire to the local Bank of America, which stood on the site of today’s Embarcadero Hall.

“It was quite an extraordinary scene that night,” Desilet said. “People were in all kinds of different moods — happy, celebrating, freaked out, others shocked, stunned by what was going on. The police never did come the entire evening, nor did the firemen.”

Earlier that afternoon, William Kunstler, a defense attorney who represented well-known defendants in the Chicago Seven trial following the anti-war protests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, spoke at the stadium on campus.

Authorities anticipated an inflammatory reaction and showed up in full force to control the crowd. As a group of students walked back toward Isla Vista after the speech, police beat 22-year-old student Rich Underwood into submission and arrested him for carrying a bottle of wine they assumed was a Molotov cocktail.

“Imagine being in Harder Stadium and having the lawyer of a high-profile national trial … draw connections between what has been happening nationally with what has been happening on campus,” then-Santa Barbara City College student and KCSB broadcaster Malcolm Gault-Williams said. “And then imagine a large part of those attendees leave the stadium and … watch as police not just arrest a student but beat the shit out of him.”

According to John Riley, a second-year student living on Del Playa Drive at the time, the police’s actions fueled student anger.

“Cops arrested this guy and set everything off,” Riley said. “It was like throwing a match into a gasoline can, everybody just went nuts.”

Later that night, the bank was looted and set on fire on two separate occasions — once between 6:30 and 7:30 p.m. when a dumpster was lit on fire and once around midnight when gasoline was used to rekindle the blaze.

According to Professor Emeritus Richard Flacks, a well-known liberal leader whose appointment to the Sociology Dept. in 1969 caused a stir among conservatives including then-Governor Ronald Reagan, the burning of the bank was not a premeditated event.

“By evening I would guess hundreds of people were in the street and at some point people lit a trash dumpster and pushed it through the bank doors,” Flacks said. “I kind of never believed people thought that would happen.”

Some students saw the bank as a symbol of big business, capitalism and the Vietnam War, citing its ties to the defense industry.

“It was the biggest capitalist thing around,” Becca Wilson, a fourth-year student and then-editor in chief of El Gaucho, the predecessor to the Daily Nexus, said. “It was a symbol of the corporations that benefited from war and were oppressing people all over world, in whose interest government was acting.”

Others maintain that the bank was burned purely out of anger and frustration with overwhelming police presence.

“The day afterwards a lot of it was rationalized as anti-war,” Desilet said. “The bank was seen to be in league with defense corporations providing armaments for Vietnam. That was the rationale given, but in my view it was more. It was locally centered with a lot of local anger toward police that had developed over time.”

“People were just pissed off. They were really pissed off”

The 1969-70 year was tumultuous in the school’s history, with tension on campus growing alongside national unrest and disagreement over the Vietnam War.

The voting age in 1970 was 21, but after the lottery system was instituted for the draft, many younger students received numbers that increased their chances of deployment after graduation.

Wilson said that the draft was what really brought the reality of the war home to students.

“When I started in fall of 1966, there were literally a handful of people demonstrating, just a quiet little vigil in front of the library,” she said. “Three years later it was a widespread movement where probably most students were against the war. By that time, students started to be drafted. It changed the whole atmosphere, became much more personal.”

The charged political climate of the time was evident well beyond the confines of Isla Vista, too.

“It’s hard to imagine now, but the whole country was just boiling then, with the Chicago Seven, the war, people getting drafted … the whole country was pretty well out of control,” Riley said.

According to Desilet, many of the students targeted their rage at the ever-present law enforcement officers patrolling Isla Vista.

“Tensions were high in I.V. toward anything and anyone who represented enforcement of the status quo, and the most immediate and visible representatives of this status quo line of defense turned out to be police and narcotics agents,” Desilet said. “The accumulated rage of the disenfranchised and the waiting and unwilling recruits in line for Vietnam landed squarely on the county sheriff and his agents.”

On top of this, the growing drug culture and hippie lifestyle of the time widened the generation gap between students and police, who patrolled Isla Vista and campus in riot gear, often using tear gas to disperse crowds.

“There was nobody over 25, hardly, and this counter culture, drug culture climate, which meant police were unable to understand, or appreciate Isla Vista so to speak,” Flacks said. “[The police] really thought the students were bad guys and that they were at odds with students. And vice versa. Students knew if they were driving [a] Volkswagen van painted up or generally had long hair hippy attire you were going to be harassed by police, stopped in traffic, pulled over, etc.”

Although many students were not embroiled in conflict with the police and demonstrations against the war, anger was the primary motivation for those who played a role in the burning of the bank.

An Occupied Territory

Once the smoke cleared on Feb. 26 — with the Bank of America building in ruins — Gov. Reagan declared a state of emergency.

“[Isla Vista] was just dramatically changed,” Gault-Williams said. “Everybody was walking on eggshells. Some were happy, some angry … all kinds of moods. Everyone began to unite even more so after the bank burning in respect to police.”

A curfew was instituted in Isla Vista and nearly 300 people were arrested and taken to the county jail.

“Everybody sensed huge confrontation the night after,” Desilet explained. “I went out on street again to photograph in the early evening. When I was on Ocean Road taking pictures of police in the San Rafael parking lot … they arrested me and I was taken to their staging area. We were then bussed out to fire station down on Storke Road and eventually over to the new county jail, which was so new that they didn’t even have it open yet.”

The National Guard and Los Angeles County SWAT teams were called in to help maintain order. Bank of America declared that it would not withdraw from Isla Vista and constructed a trailer as a makeshift bank, which quickly became the target of numerous demonstrations.

On April 18, a rally was scheduled against the temporary bank. Associated Students President Bill James went on the radio to speak against further violence, urging students to protect the bank from vandalism.

Police arrived in armored trucks, dressed in riot gear and armed with tear gas. Amid the confusion, 22-year-old UCSB student Kevin Moran was shot and killed.

Although the police claimed the bullet originated from a sniper in the crowd, a ballistics test determined that it came from a policeman’s rifle. The incident was deemed an accident, and the officer was later exonerated.

On June 3, 17 students were indicted for the bank burning, after supposedly being identified from photographs taken on Feb. 25. The indictments were met with controversy, however, as several of the students had solid alibis.

“What was obvious was that they were all well-known campus activist radical leaders,” Flacks said. “The idea that that particular group of well-known people were all together around that dumpster was outlandish. Especially since some of them were among those arrested the day before and were actually in jail when the bank burned.”

“Social Change, Fair Play and Peace”

The rallies, tear gas and arrests continued throughout the course of the year, and according to former students, fundamentally changed the face of Isla Vista.

“The riots destroyed the town,” Riley said. “Before the riots it was this cute little town, nice cinemas, new bookstores, more like a Santa Cruz or something, and after it was … burned out. It just destroyed the town.”

Yet a new Isla Vista emerged from the smoldering ruins of the Bank of America.

“It suddenly created a lot of attention on Isla Vista itself and how students were living and sparked the creation of many community organizations and grassroots movements that turned into institutions,” Wilson said.

The Bank of America closed its Isla Vista branch in 1981, opting to open an ATM on Embarcadero del Norte instead. Embarcadero Hall stands in place of the bank today. A plaque in front commemorates Kevin Moran.

It reads, “For Social Change, Fair Play and Peace.”

DBOA Audio 13-36

2010-02-19T12:40:00.000+07:00

In commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the Isla Vista Riots, here are the remaining audio chapters of the documentary series I produced in the mid-1980s. Tape quality sometimes is poor, as these recordings were digitized two decades later from my personal cassette copies of the original programs that are still archived in the KCSB Public Affairs archives.

I was never much of a radio announcer/producer. In order to do it right, you have to go with the very best take and if that one's not good enough, you cut it again and get it where it needs to be. I never felt I had that kind of time, so I slapped these 36 individual audio documentary episodes together as best as I could, as fast as I could, without taking more time than I was willing to give. Even so, I believe it is still listenable, certainly educational, and even fun hearing protagonists of the day along with music of the era.

I hope you enjoy it, warts and all...

dboa25 - lost

DBOA Radio Series 12

2009-12-27T09:58:00.000+07:00

Chapter 12 of the "Don't Bank on Amerika" radio series takes place during the first week of February, 1970, when the demonstrations for an open hearing into the Bill Allen case were drawing to a close.

DBOA 12 - 0:59:05 (DBOA #11 lost)

Issues covered:

Geoff Wallace interview
Student leaders meet with UCSB administration
KCSB-FM in-field reporting by Pete Koza, Suzi Burnette, Fred Gebhardt and Cy Godfrey
Second string student leadership (Rick Thorngate, Rich Trussel, et. al)
The Faculty Club Takeover
The Smith Survey
KCSB-FM in-field reporting by Phil Singer and Greg Sprankling
The Serpentine March, February 4
KCSB-SM in-field reporting by Greg Sprankling and Pete Koza
Campus Strike proves ineffective
Mick Kronman letter
Rip-off of the UCSB student leadership
The Trial of the Chicago 8
Willam Kunstler at UCSB's campus stadium

Music featured:

Quicksilver Messenger Service: "Who Do You Love?"
Richie Havens:"Handsome Johnny"
Arlo Guthrie: "Alice's Restaurant" (short version)
Thunderclap Newman: "Something In The Air"
Bob Dylan: "Masters of War"
John Lennon: "Power to the People"
Iron Butterfly: "In The Time of Our Lives"
Beach Boys: "Student Demonstration Time"

I.V. Free Press #4, 1987

2009-12-13T01:00:00.002+07:00

The University of California, Santa Barbara's Davidson Library Special Collections department has archived the special February 25, 1987 edition of Carmen Lodise's "Isla Vista Free Press." It contains a "Reader's Digest" version of my history on the riots, an analysis of the causes of the riots by professor Dick Flacks, and observations on I.V. community building by Carmen. An extra treat are the vignettes from the 1987 period, along with lotsa pictures. To read, go to:

ISLA VISTA FREE PRESS #4, February 25, 1987

To view a larger image of the IV FREE PRESS cover of 1989, click this image:

DBOA Radio Series 10

2009-12-09T06:22:00.000+07:00

Chapter 10 (0:62:22) takes place January 29 and 30th, 1970.

Contents

KCSB-FM in-field reporting by Pete Coza, Maxine Cass, Greg Sprankling
Sleep-out, January 29/30
Rich Underwood recalls the Dean Evans Bullhorn Incident
Dean Evans Bullhorn Incident
Mick Kronman
Acting Chancellor Russell Buchanan approves Sheriff's forces on campus
David Gardner meets with student leaders
Chris Hall Incident
Bill Allen Demonstrations at UCSB
KCSB-FM in-field reporting by Cy Godfrey, Greg Sprankling, Pete Coza, Don French
Bill Allen: "You people really voted today!"
Post-riots interviews: local issues organizing
"Peace Brigade"
Greg Knell interview

Music

Byrds: "8 Miles High" (live)
Youngbloods: "Love One Another"
Steve Miller Band: "Livin' In The USA"

KCSB-FM History

2009-11-25T02:54:00.000+07:00

Colin Marshall has been writing a series of articles on "the history and modern times of KCSB 91.9FM," at the Santa Barbara INDEPENDENT:

The Santa Barbara Independent KCSBeat

DBOA Radio Series 09

2009-11-22T08:41:00.000+07:00

Chapter 9 continues in January 1970, in the heat of the Bill Allen demonstrations on the Santa Barbara campus of the University of California:

In this episode:

January 29, 1970
Bill Allen at the demonstrations in front of the Admin Building: "Woodstock Nation People"
7,776 signatures calling for an open hearing into the Bill Allen case
"Power to the People"
Oil companies
Wharf-in
Dean Evans Bullhorn Incident
KCSB-FM in-field reporting
Greg Knell recaps the student side of the Dean Evans Bullhorn Incident
Santana: "Go out and make it better"
Off-campus police called in
January 30, 1970
KCSB in-field reporting - Maxine Cass and Pete Coza
Dylan: "Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?"
Outro
Iron Butterfly: "Soul Experience"

Additional Music:

Moody Blues: "Om"
Iron Butterfly: "In The Time of Our Lives"
Yardbirds: "Shapes of Things to Come"

DBOA Radio Series 08

2009-11-18T04:03:00.000+07:00

Chapter 8 (0:65:10) takes us back to January 1970. Listen with headphones...

(Bill Allen demonstrations infront of "The Ad Building")

In this episode:

Bill Allen Demonstrations
KCSB-FM in-field reporting ( Greg Sprankling )
Geoff Wallace interview: chronology of beginning 1970
Arrests of Black Activists (Banks and Gardner)
First annual observance of the Santa Barbara Oil Spill of 1969
"Desiderata" goof
National vs. Local issues
Mick Kronman - "Join The Conspiracy"
Polls, surveys
Bill Allen: violence towards people vs. things
Becca Wilson interview

Music featured:

Fleetwood Mac: "Oh, Well" and "Searching For Madge"
Jefferson Airplane: "Volunteers"
Mothers of Invention: "It Can't Happen Here"
Quicksilver Messenger Service: "Gold and Silver"
Electric Flag

Desiderata:

Desiderata

Go placidly amid the noise and haste,
and remember what peace there may be in silence.
As far as possible without surrender
be on good terms with all persons.
Speak your truth quietly and clearly;
and listen to others,
even the dull and the ignorant;
they too have their story.

Avoid loud and aggressive persons,
they are vexations to the spirit.
If you compare yourself with others,
you may become vain and bitter;
for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.
Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans.

Keep interested in your own career, however humble;
it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.
Exercise caution in your business affairs;
for the world is full of trickery.
But let this not blind you to what virtue there is;
many persons strive for high ideals;
and everywhere life is full of heroism.

Be yourself.
Especially, do not feign affection.
Neither be cynical about love;
for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment
it is as perennial as the grass.

Take kindly the counsel of the years,
gracefully surrendering the things of youth.
Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune.
But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings.
Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.
Beyond a wholesome discipline,
be gentle with yourself.

You are a child of the universe,
no less than the trees and the stars;
you have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you,
no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.

Therefore be at peace with God,
whatever you conceive Him to be,
and whatever your labors and aspirations,
in the noisy confusion of life keep peace with your soul.

With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams,
it is still a beautiful world.
Be cheerful.
Strive to be happy.

Max Ehrmann, Desiderata, Copyright 1952.

“William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe”

2009-11-13T04:56:00.000+07:00

KCSB Presents S.B. Film Premiere of “William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe” with Guest Filmmakers Emily Kunstler & Sarah Kunstler, November 19th, 2009, 7:30 p.m., Campbell Hall, UCSB

DBOA Radio Series 07

2009-11-08T07:24:00.000+07:00

Chapter 7 (0:55:56) takes place Winter 1969/1970.

Subjects covered:

Geoff Wallace interview: student activist groups
Greg Knell interview
ASIA
Chicago 8 Trial
Drug arrests, laws
Marijuana
Bill Allen Case
John Maybury: "B of A: A Piggy Bank"
7,776 signatures
Call for open hearing into the Bill Allen Case
"... no more bureaucratic tricks"
KCSB in-field reporting
Beginning of the Bill Allen Demonstations at UCSB

Notable musical excerpts:

Firesign Theatre
Joe Cocker: "With A Little Help From My Friends"
Beatles: "With A Little Help From My Friends"
Love: "Signed D.C.

DBOA Radio Series 06

2009-10-31T22:40:00.000+07:00

Chapter 6 (0:56:25) of the "Don't Bank on Amerika" radio series takes place in Winter 1969/1970.

This episode contains the following:

Becca Wilson interview on the nature of Isla Vista
Greg Knell interview on chronology
The Smith Survey
The Goleta Sloughway
Kunstler speech excerpt from campus stadium, 2/24/1970
Fall 1969 chronology
Greg Knell interview on the Bill Allen issue
"Bank of America: A Second Check"
Opposition to the Bank of America
Tim Owens documentary excerpt

Musical excerpts:

Jefferson Airplane: Eskimo Blue Day
Quicksilver Messenger Service: What About Me?
Beach Boys: Student Demonstration Time
Mothers of Invention: American Way
Jethro Tull: A New Day Yesterday

DBOA Radio Series 05

2009-10-25T23:28:00.001+07:00

Chapter 5 of the "Don't Bank on Amerika" radio series (0:61:42), originally produced in the 1980s, takes place in the Fall of 1969, before the Bill Allen demonstrations and the later riots.

Contents include:

Becca Wilson interview excerpt
The local effect of the Vietnam War
The Smith Survey
Richard Nixon
The Vietnam Moratorium
ROTC on campus
UCSB background history
UCSB student body composition
UCSB student action groups
Vernon Cheadle's financial conflicts of interest
The Goleta Sloughway
Field Nigger vs. House Nigger
Buffalo Springfield music to end

Please feel free to not only listen, but download and share with friends:

"A Citizen's History"

2009-10-23T02:27:00.002+07:00

Carmen wrote in:

"It's almost perfect, except the Free Press was three years, not two, and the book is not available in full at www.islavistahistory.com

AND, whatever does she mean: "the growing rift between students and community members"? We talked nothing of anything like that.

Not bad for the Nexus, I guess.

C.

Local Publicizes New Book
Over 150 Pictures Included in New Isla Vista History

By Alex Llerena

Published Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Issue 21 / Volume 90

Author and former Isla Vista resident Carmen Lodise hosted a book signing in Goleta last Friday to promote his new publication: Isla Vista: A Citizen’s History.

The 200-page book includes over 150 pictures and first-hand accounts of significant events in our vibrant college town. Lodise used a collection of articles written during his time in Isla Vista as a foundation for the book, which was first published last year.

Lodise said he chose to write a book chronicling the history of I.V. because of his appreciation for the infamous local community.

“People remember the burning of the bank, but it’s what happened after that was so important,” Lodise said. “Students and townies came together to make living in I.V. a better place.”

Lodise moved to Isla Vista in 1972 to work as an assistant to a cultural anthropologist, and quickly became involved in the local community. In 1987 he started his own newspaper, called the Isla Vista Free Press, which ran for two years.

“I couldn’t compete with the Nexus,” Lodise said, commenting on the short life-span of the paper.

In 2002, Lodise took several of his articles from the newspaper and published them online. He decided to expand his online work into a book in 2008 after noticing the site had received over 1.6 million hits.

Although Lodise’s book recounts the “dark ages” of Isla Vista — including charges of corruption, greedy landlords and the growing rift between students and community officials — the author said he has high hopes for the future of the community.

Lodise also advocated for Isla Vista to become its own city, noting several potential advantages.

“I.V. is a liberated territory,” Lodise said. “It’s a hell of a great little town. … If I.V. could have control over the community including police, transportation and the quality of housing, through becoming a city, then it would be a great place to live.”

Besides running a local newspaper, Lodise said he also took part in the establishment of the park district, worked to establish funding for the medical clinic, sat on the I.V. community council and helped start the annual joint rolling contest.

The book, priced at $17.50, is available at the UCSB Bookstore, the Isla Vista Bookstore, the Isla Vista Food Co-op and Chaucer’s Books in Santa Barbara. The book, in its original form, is still available online at www.islavistahistory.com.

DBOA Radio Series 04

2009-10-15T01:12:00.002+07:00

Chapter Four of the radio series begins Fall 1969:

DBOA Radio Series - Chapter 4 (0:56:15)

Subjects covered:

-- The United Front
-- Isla Vista, Summer 1969
-- Associated Students radical slate
-- Bill Allen case begins
-- Local drug use and availability
-- The "First" Isla Vista Riot, August 14, 1969
-- El Gaucho, October 2, 1969 covers most all issues of the period
-- Goleta "Sloughway"
-- Dick Flacks "controversy"
-- Angela Davis firing

Lou Reed's "Heroin" closes the chapter.

Dogshit Park

2009-10-13T03:00:00.001+07:00

Kevin Billingjurst sent this link in, to an Isla Vista story written by Todd Brendan Fahey in 2002:

Dogshit Park

DBOA Radio Series 03

2009-10-09T20:09:00.001+07:00

Chapter 3 of the Don't Bank on Amerika radio series aired over KCSB-FM during the last half of the 1980s covers Spring/Summer 1969...

Topics covered include:

-- SDS
-- Malcolm X Hall
-- Faculty Club Bombing
-- Universities as a growth industry
-- Vernon Cheadle's vision for UCSB
-- People's Park, Berkeley
-- Kent State, 1970
-- Bill Allen case begins, June 1969
-- The United Front

My copies suffered lots of tape degradation before I digitized them nearly 20 years later. Best way to listen is on headphones. Listen and/or download:

DBOA Radio Series 02

2009-10-05T08:29:00.000+07:00

I've just begun making my radio series from the late 1980s available for listening and/or downloading.

Topics covered in this 1:03:24 length documentary episode ("Chapter 2"), beginning in Fall 1968, include:

-- Treatment of black athletes
-- Takeover of North Hall
-- UCSB backstory
-- IV/UCSB housing
-- January-May 1969 chronology
-- January 10, 1969 BSU rally
-- The United Front
-- BSU, SDS, UMAS
-- January 28, 1969 Oil Spill
-- Police repression
-- The role of the realty companies
-- Faculty Club bombing, death of Dover Sharp

Kevin Moran Park

2009-10-03T02:08:00.001+07:00

The following from John Maybury via Gary via Becca:

( Composite image courtesy of IslaVista.org )

"Kevin Moran honored as hundreds celebrate official opening of park in Saratoga" By Brian Babcock, Saratoga News, 07/21/2009

It was a day many Saratogans thought might never come. Close to 40 years of contentious discussions, long meetings and hard feelings had finally come to an end. One of Saratoga's darker chapters was closing and those intimately involved with the situation were ready to move on.

So it was only fitting that on a sunny, warm day in July, hundreds of residents would gather at Kevin Moran Park to celebrate its symbolic "grand opening." With new tennis and bocce ball courts, a meditation garden, bathrooms and upgraded landscaping, the park's official makeover was complete — almost four decades after the city bought the property.

But Saratogans didn't just gather at the park to see these additions. They had come to hear about one of their own.

"Increasingly as a society, we look toward movie stars and sports legends for inspiration and personal qualities we would like to emulate, often becoming disappointed," wrote Kevin Moran's brother, Brian Moran, in a memorial in 1995 marking the 25th anniversary of Kevin's death. "Many times we need not look any further than our own families and loved ones to find those that will inspire us."

Kevin Moran died in 1970 while trying to put out an arson fire at a Bank of America in Isla Vista. Kevin was attending UC-Santa Barbara at the time; as at many colleges at the time, protests against the Vietnam War were becoming increasingly [violent]...

In April 1970, such an incident occurred. The college's student body president called on more moderate students to head down to the protest to try and calm some of the more radical students who were rioting and lighting fires.

Kevin and his roommates headed down to the scene. After helping put out a fire in a Taco Bell, Kevin ran to Bank of America, which had also been torched. While the students attempted to put out that fire, police officers moved in and began tossing tear gas into the crowds. During the confusion, police reported at the time, an officer's rifle accidentally went off and fragments of the bullet struck and killed Kevin.

Thirty-nine years after his death, Sheila Moran Couch, Kevin's sister, would stand at a lectern at Kevin Moran Park and tell a crowd of mostly strangers about her brother. As her sisters, Rita Moran, Joan O'Brien, Kathleen Menasce and Margaret Weir listened, Couch would tell the crowd that she had shown up at the park a week earlier because she didn't believe the news that the park was finally finished.

Her comment was met with a round of laughter, perhaps because most of those gathered couldn't believe it either. After close to 40 years of bickering and contentious discussions among residents, the park had finally been completed.

The 10.3-acre property now known as Kevin Moran Park was purchased by the city of Saratoga [California] in 1970 for $236,572. That same year, the city and residents overwhelmingly supported the idea of naming the park after Moran.

But that seemed to be the only thing that those involved would agree on for almost four decades. Almost immediately residents began butting heads on how the park would be developed. While Saratogans living near the park wanted to see it kept as a neighborhood park, others within Saratoga wanted to see it developed with play areas and a baseball diamond.

Ultimately, the Saratoga City Council approved a master plan in 1971 but most of the recommendations were never implemented. It wasn't until 1973 that pathways, a turf area, a children's playground and landscaping were developed within the park.

Although the topic of how to fully develop the park was never dormant for long, the discussion always ended up on the back burner since no one could come to a consensus on what to do with the area.

The most recent debate revolved around the idea of putting a soccer field in the park. Supporters said the park was the perfect place to develop a field for Saratoga youth soccer players. Opponents slammed the idea, as they wanted to keep it a peaceful and tranquil neighborhood park.

A Kevin Moran Park task force was formed in 2004 to come up with a "consensus plan." The task force included two city council members, two Saratoga residents who were to represent the city as a whole, two "user group" members and three neighborhood representatives.

One of the neighborhood representatives was Elaine Clabeaux. She said that although there were times where talks became argumentative, overall the task force members worked well together.

"We were different people with different bits of knowledge and it was up to each of us to educate the others on what we knew," Clabeaux said.

In January 2006 the decision was made — the Saratoga City Council voted 4-1 to approve a plan that would allow the development of a full-size soccer field at the park. The task force would later agree with the plan, to the dismay of the park's neighbors.

Multiple meetings were held by the city with each one lasting late into the night. A January 2006 council meeting lasted five-and-a-half hours alone as 80 people spoke on the issue.

But while the infighting among residents continued, it turned out that West Valley College would help resolve the issue as plans to build multiple soccer fields on the college campus were revealed. The council would allocate $250,000 in August 2006 to help care for the fields and make necessary improvements to them.

Although not the end of the story, those decisions would be the turning point in a 36-year debate. The task force, which had been disbanded months earlier, reconvened in September 2006 to come up with a new vision for the park. That plan would include adding bathrooms, a half-size basketball court, tennis courts, a bocce ball court and a meditation garden.

Those plans were kept and a groundbreaking was held at the park in November 2008. And eight months later the issue would be put to rest forever.

Before the grand opening began on July 17, Couch thought back on all that had led up to the event.

"He had such a violent death with being surrounded by protests and rioting and people not getting along in his own community. And to see the Saratoga community fighting over the park really created a lot of unhappiness. It was really sad. And it was ironic," she said.

But in the end, it all turned out.

"The outcome is wonderful," she said as she glanced around at the park. "It's nice to see that people sat down and worked on a compromise and came up with a beautiful solution. This is a really lovely place."

DBOA Radio Series 01

2009-10-02T04:42:00.002+07:00

In preparation for the 40th anniversary of the burning of the Isla Vista branch of the Bank of America, February 1970, I am downloading the entire "Don't Bank on Amerika" radio series that ran on KCSB-FM during the last half of the 1980s.

In this series opener (length: 0:48:35), that takes place in Fall of 1968, subjects touched upon include:

-- The United Front
-- Isla Vista background history
-- Chancellor Cheadle talking about the United Front
-- The Black Students Union
-- SDS
-- Police harrassment
-- Obscenity on campus

Tape quality sometimes is poor, as these recordings were digitized from my personal cassette copies of the original program that -- I think -- is still archived in the KCSB Public Affairs archives (hopefully of better quality).

Also, I was never much of a radio announcer/producer. In order to do it right, you have to go with the very best take and if that one's not good enough, you cut it again and get it where it needs to be. I never felt I had that kind of time, so I slapped this 30-some individual audio documentary episodes together as best as I could, as fast as I could. Even so, I believe it is still listenable, certainly educational, and even fun hearing protagonists of the day along with music of the era.

I hope you enjoy it, warts and all.

"Burning Banks and Roasting Marshmellows"

2009-08-15T22:21:00.002+07:00

Greg Desilet's book on the period of the Isla Vista Riots has been published by XLibris. Please read about the book below. Thank you, Greg, for crediting me with helping with the book's evolution. I was very happy to do so:

Burning Banks and Roasting Marshmallows: The Education of Daniel Marleau

This chronicle of student unrest, set during 1970 in the unlikely palm graced, sun-kissed Santa Barbara campus of the University of California, follows young Dan Marleau and friends through personal and political upheavals that begin on campus with the firing of a popular professor and spread off campus to the infamous burning of the Bank of American in Isla Vista. Those who lived through the Vietnam War era will be swept into a portrayal evoking measures of angst, anger, and bitterness alongside nostalgia, humor, and resilience. Those who are too young to have lived through this period will find areas of identification with characters who face circumstances and challenges that remain relevant in a time of continued military entanglements, corporate excesses, political divisions, and global terrorism. Numerous photographs taken by the author complement the narrative.

Tip of the hat to Malcolm (from the book acknowledgement section):

This project percolated for many years before I finally found time to write a draft during the late 1990s. Reading an early version of Malcolm Gault-Williams’ Don’t Bank on America (initially titled Sunshine Revolutionaries) inspired me to get down to writing. It prodded my memory and became an incomparable resource and time line to follow in reconstructing the pivotal events. Without Malcolm’s work, my task would have been much more difficult. So my debt to Malcolm is deep and I thank him for producing an historical account of high quality and for help and motivation supplied through several email communications over the years I have worked on this project.

Copies of the book can be ordered here:

http://www2.xlibris.com/BOOKSTORE/bookdisplay.aspx?bookid=63124

Greg's website, with more info about the book is: www.gregorydesilet.com

IV 1 Video, parts 1 & 2

2009-05-24T08:08:00.004+07:00

There are some YouTube videos on the riots. Here's the beginning of a series on "IV 1" ...

IV I, part 1:

IV 1, part 2:
DBOA 1, part 2

"A Citizen's History" Review

2009-02-07T05:50:00.001+07:00

D.J. Palladino reviewed Carmen's book in the latest edition of the SB INDEPENDENT:

"Carmen Lodise and Friends Release Isla Vista: A Citizen’s History," SB INDEPENDENT, February 5, 2009, By D.J. Palladino

... Lodise, an activist and newspaper editor during the ’70s and ’80s.. [gives] a political history beginning with Spaniards landing on the Chumash, segueing into the grandees of ranching, early (futile) oil explorations, and a conspiratorial-tinged saga of development, a story that fingers some big dead white men, like editor T.M. Storke, oil mogul Samuel Mosher, and former chancellor Robert Huttenback [no, it was Cheadle]. Though its zoning and financing scandal accusations are surprisingly inconclusive, the story nonetheless feels both juicy and fishy.

Lodise offers essays on various uprisings, the bank’s demise (by Das Williams’s dad Malcolm), and, more scrupulously, limns I.V.’s political climate following the riots, a tale of much woe, in which the university, despite its own sponsored report’s recommendations, balked at fruitful involvement. It does slightly better today, Lodise admits...

In the book, Lodise invokes the hard work that produced, if not an incorporated city, fervent citizen involvement lasting more than two decades, a record of activism that created parks, public health facilities, a food co-op, and big fun, like nude-ins and joint-rolling contests. He also revives the voices of people we needed and still need: like playwright, professor, and activist Bob Potter; politically committed journalist and candidate Carrie Topliffe; artist and shopkeeper Al Plyley; and Lodise himself.

What his book doesn’t manage well, however, is the city’s complicated cultural life, ignoring things as disparate but important as off-beat cultural destinations like Biko House and public traumas such as the actions of David Attias, a disturbed young man who drove into a crowd of Isla Vistans and tragically killed four, but awakened, finally, the conscience of the university. Surfing, rock music, theater, poetry, even businesses born in I.V., like Kinko’s, get little shrift. The worst sleight, however, is Halloween, which, it has been well argued, did as much as firebrand Yippees to create the culture of protest there. With roots back to the late 1950s, Halloween bonfires, suspended during the psychedelic years, are truly the strongest tradition most I.V.ers remember. Lodise gives it one page.

It’s crucial to recall that Isla Vista is an adopted city. It’s a transient pleasure, partly because absent landlords rent 96 percent of the town out to students who spend maybe four years there, then leave. Though the town looks much as it did in the late 1960s, except the I.V. Bookstore, it is completely different. Few businesses last, and fewer citizens remain, including Lodise who lives in Mexico and Arizona today. The world he describes was what he saw; his adopted era.

You can’t blame Lodise for encouraging youth to continue speaking truth to power, to band together before I.V. becomes a theme park. But I can’t help thinking about Fellini’s sailors [in Satyricon (1968)], offered the corpses of their elders to chew. Ironic that it’s now the boomers providing the eat-or-die flesh. This generation needs to know the past, sure, but not just 1970s legacies. A more balanced book may help us all move forward on all the available winds.

For full text, please go to:

The Santa Barbara Independent New History of I.V. Published

Carmen replied:

DJ,

Thank you for the mostly positive review of our book. I acknowledge my "citizen's history" does short the vibrant cultural aspects of Isla Vista. However, I recall a piece you wrote in the Independent a couple of years ago on that topic, which leads me to believe that it may be you, not me, who should write that history.

A couple of other reviews:

“The book is gorgeous and vividly authentic, a grass-roots people's history in the tradition of Howard Zinn."
-- Bob Potter, Prof. Emeritus, UCSB
Co-author, The Campus by the Sea Where the Bank Burned Down

“This is outstanding! The legacy of Isla Vista owes you a tremendous debt of gratitude and on a personal level, so do I.”
-- Cloe Mayes Yocum,
UCSB student, mid-1970s

"The book reminds me a lot about how much I owe Isla Vista. I think someone could never really know me without knowing what our community was/is like."
-- Glen Lazof,
Isla Vista Community Council, 1983-84, I.V. Park District GM, 1985-93

Incidentally, the book is available at Chaucer's Books, the I.V. Food Co-op, both UCSB and Isla Vista book stores and, within the next couple of days, at Amazon.com.

Regards,

Carmen Lodise

Bank Burning Video

2009-01-30T09:48:00.002+07:00

A YouTube video on the burning of the Isla Vista branch of the Bank of America:

"To The Bank!"

2008-12-28T09:21:00.006+07:00

Every once in a while, former Isla Vistans reconnect here, many with stories of their times during the campus demonstration, Isla Vista riots, and the community building years. Here's one recently come in from Davo:

"My friend Steve and I lived in IV during the time of the riots. Steve was on the 'front lines' the night the bank burnedin IV I. He remember the burning dumptsters being rammed through the doors of the bank, and the subsequent fire lighting up the night sky. It was a thing of beauty. Later on,he was one of those who strolled through it. He couldn't find anything more interesting than coffee creamer at this point, so he didn't take anything. Nothing ever came of it, so apparently he wasn't caught on film.

"Once the bank caught fire, and the police cars were pelted with rocks and left, then came the Greyhound busses full of police. There was a very large line of police in full riot gear with shields. It reminded Steve of that movie, '300 Spartans.' (the original). They began to advance, and everyone panicked and ran. Some people were falling and in danger of being trampled. But then they regrouped, and started 'firing' rocks and some bottles at the blue line. The police had advanced so powerfully, seemingly arrogant and ruthless, certainly overpowering and seeming invincible. But as the 'missiles' found their mark, one cop after another would fall. Soon the line broke, and they ran for cover and left. For that one night, of course, there was no 'law and order' in Isla Vista. No civil authorities, police or fire, could enter, and of course they gave up. It could be said, for one night Isla Vista was not a part of the U.S. It seceded from the Union.

"One night in particular, Steve was with a group of about a dozen guys, roaming the streets looking for police cars to pelt with rocks. They wore kerchiefs over their faces, soaked with vinegar, supposedly this helped with the tear gas. Anyway, Steve made a tactical mistake and got separated from the group, and suddenly found himself isolated on the outskirts of town. A couple cop cars spotted him. He turned and ran across a large field for dear life. He could see his shadow stretched out far in front of him a long ways from the search lights shining on him. Shots were being fired at him. Of what he didn't know, and didn't stop to ask! All he could do was keep running. Finally he came to a fence and hopped it. He came to the back door of a house and knocked on it, and told the people there he was running from the cops so they let him in. What a time it was, what a culture, that this was considered appropriate behavior. After a few minutes, he left and crawled to the next house, and then to the next house, house by house, heading towards the beach.

"Then he worked his way down the beach heading towards the dorms, as he was a freshman. A helicopter was searching the beach and shining its spotlight. When the light came near him, he crouched down in the crevice between the cliff and the sand. Somehow, someway, he made it safe back to the dorm.

"On another occasion, he was staying with a friend in IV, in an apartment which formed an 'L', with the front door opening to the inside, not to the street. A fellow protester, as was called a 'brother' back then, not connoting race, asked if he could hide in Steve's pad, which he agreed to. Then the protester had a Molotov cocktail with a half gallon wine bottle. The police would drive through the streets in dump trucks, firing tear gas and perhaps rubber bullets or... The protester lit his Molotov and heaved it at a dump truck going by, and he and Steve quickly ran into the apartment amid shots being fired. Steve hid under a bed. He could see the police walking through the bushes, shining their flashlights into the apartment. He knew if they saw him the police would break down the door and get him. But he hid successfully.

"In the mornings, the air was filled with remnants of smoke and tear gas, and dumpsters were smoldering. Groups dared not gather, and some people went to class. But in the evenings, the battle was on...

"I believe it was in mid-April 1970, there was a concert in the large park on the East outskirts of town (not the park by the bank)(or was it an athletic field, I don't remember). There were 5,000 people there; everybody had a great time. But all good things must end, as did the concert. 5,000 people were just mulling around quietly, not really knowing what to do, not really wanting to leave. Overhead, Sheriff Joel Honey in his helicopter was threatening the people to disperse. This infuriated Steve. He did not want to see this go down as a victory for Joel Honey. So at the top of his(very, very loud) lungs, he yelled, 'TO THE BANK!' Silence. Then, somewhere in the crowd, someone repeated, 'TO THE BANK!' Then another. And another. Pretty soon the whole crowd was chanting, 'TO THE BANK!' and off they went! A surge of 5,000 people off to the bank! Thus began what came to be known as 'IV II' and ultimately the tragic fatality."

Mexico City Massacre 1968

2008-12-03T01:40:00.006+07:00

In the summer of 1968, Mexico was experiencing the birth of a new student movement.

( Photo courtesy of NPR )

But that movement was short-lived. On Oct. 2, 1968, 10 days before the opening of the Summer Olympics in Mexico City, police officers and military troops shot into a crowd of unarmed students. Thousands of demonstrators fled in panic as tanks bulldozed over Tlatelolco Plaza.

Government sources originally reported that four people had been killed and 20 wounded, while eyewitnesses described the bodies of hundreds of young people being trucked away. Thousands of students were beaten and jailed, and many disappeared. Forty years later, the final death toll remains a mystery, but documents recently released by the U.S. and Mexican governments give a better picture of what may have triggered the massacre. Those documents suggest that snipers posted by the military fired on fellow troops, provoking them to open fire on the students...

National Public Radio has a very good audio retrospective, along with images, which also sheds new light on the massacre in Tlatelolco Plaza. Go to:
NPR: Mexico Massacre 1968

North Hall Takeover, 1968

2008-11-20T03:44:00.005+07:00

A great resource on the Black Students Union (BSU) Fall 1968 takeover of UCSB's North Hall (renamed "Malcolm X Hall") can be found at:

1968: A Global Year of Student Driven Change

( Plaque commemoration photo courtesy of: http://www.ia.ucsb.edu/93106/2001/nov19/blackstudies/blackstudies.html )

S.U.N.

2008-11-15T02:21:00.003+07:00

[ From it's press release of 11/13/2008 ]

Today a coalition of Santa Barbara County organizations is announcing the formation of Sustainable University Now (SUN). SUN is the product of a series of meetings convened by the Santa Barbara County Action Network (SB CAN) to discuss community challenges raised by UCSB’s Draft Long Range Development Plan (LRDP). SUN members are committed to encouraging wide community participation in reviewing and responding to the LRDP draft Environmental Impact Report (EIR), which is expected to be re-circulated soon.

SUN members emphasize that they do not seek to oppose the University’s future development, but rather to improve it. Olivia Uribe, Associate Director of SB CAN, sums it up this way: “As a recent UCSB grad, I know firsthand what a great asset UCSB is to Santa Barbara County. Our coalition has been clear that we want to have a collaborative, positive relationship with UCSB.” SUN’s statement of principles echoes this approach, stressing the importance of careful planning: “Decisions made by and about the University will have far reaching and long lasting consequences for residents of the campus, Isla Vista, the Cities of Santa Barbara and Goleta and throughout Santa Barbara County.”

Richard Flacks, UCSB Research Professor of Sociology, is serving as interim chair of the SUN Coalition. In announcing the formation of the group he summarized the objectives of the organization as follows: “We want to make sure that this project is based on principles of sustainability, provides broad social benefits and that the project’s impacts on the area’s housing supply, water resources, traffic and commuting help improve rather than threaten our quality of life.”

SUN is requesting that local governmental bodies review and comment on the recirculated draft EIR.

The current list of Coalition members includes these organizations:

Coalition for Sustainable Transportation (COAST)
Community Environmental Council
League of Women Voters of Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara Audubon Society
Santa Barbara County Action Network (SB CAN)
Sierra Club Los Padres Chapter - Santa Barbara Group
Pueblo Education Fund
Santa Barbara Channelkeeper

The Coalition’s Statement of Principles follows:

SUSTAINABLE UNIVERSITY NOW COALITION PRINCIPLES

UCSB is an integral part of the greater Santa Barbara County community.

The University’s current Long Range Development Plan (LRDP) efforts will set the stage for its expansion over the next twenty years. Decisions made by and about the University will have far reaching and long lasting consequences for residents of the campus, Isla Vista, the Cities of Santa Barbara and Goleta and throughout Santa Barbara County.

The LRDP should fully acknowledge the relationship and impact of the University’s development plans on other constituencies and jurisdictions. UCSB must ensure that the cumulative impacts on the resources it shares with its neighbors – roads and intersections, water supply, watersheds and sensitive habitats, etc. – are understood and specifically addressed.

We believe that the following principles should guide this process:

* The LRDP must be based on principles of sustainability and UCSB should demonstrate leadership in such areas as transportation, protection of natural resources, water, affordable housing, traffic, parking, energy conservation, climate change concerns, recycling, etc. UCSB development should seek to promote and include modern sustainability planning principles.

* Any UCSB growth plans should be warranted by broad social benefits as well as institutional needs. UCSB’s development must be at a level that maintains and enhances the quality of life of its surrounding communities.

* Concerns and impacts raised in the draft Environmental Impact Report should be addressed fully, openly, and inclusively, providing specific mitigations, timetables and detailed planning as part of the final plan.

* The final LRDP will benefit from and should be the result of substantial community involvement and local public hearings and meetings on the proposed EIR. UCSB should seek participation from all South Coast jurisdictions and constituencies, including, but not limited to, the City of Goleta, the City and County of Santa Barbara, agencies such as the Isla Vista Redevelopment Agency, the Isla Vista Recreation and Park District, the Goleta Water District, the Goleta West Sanitary District, the Goleta Sanitary District, neighborhood associations and individuals.

Ocean Road

2008-11-14T01:17:00.004+07:00

How can building on Ocean Road NOT be considered as part of UCSB's Long Range Developement Plan?

[ From: "UCSB’s Ocean Road Project Raises Concerns - University Administration Facing Possible Housing Pressure," By Ben Preston, SB INDEPENDENT, November 13, 2008 ]

In an attempt to get going on a portion of its Long Range Development Plan (LRDP) for 2025, UCSB has been pushing to get a campus housing project proposed for Ocean Road considered separately from the rest of the plan. The university’s argument that this part of the already controversial plan could be initiated as an amendment to the university’s 1990 LRDP was met with skepticism from members of the public at a November 6 hearing.

Objections to what some are calling a piecemeal approach were met by comments from Tye Simpson, UCSB’s director of campus planning and design, [who] claimed at the meeting that the university is doing what any community would do when making an amendment to its General Plan. The project’s detractors argue that since the LRDP for 2025 is currently under review — of which the Ocean Road development is part — has not been passed, dealing with it separately goes against the existing LRDP and the California Environmental Quality Act process.

Adjacent to Isla Vista along the western boundary of UCSB’s main campus, the Ocean Road project would include 532 units containing faculty, staff, and graduate student housing, commercial space, and more than 1,000 parking spaces. The row of eucalyptus trees that now stands along Ocean Road next to Isla Vista’s easternmost houses would be removed, and UCSB’s student health center would be relocated. UCSB’s position has been that the housing and parking are much needed, but community activists say that it is over and above what that area can accommodate. “The project includes so much more parking than is required by the housing they’re building,” said Olivia Uribe, the associate director of the Santa Barbara County Action Network (SBCAN).

“Even though the Ocean Road project is an integral part of the 2008 LRDP for 2025, [UCSB] is representing it as an amendment to the 1990 LRDP,” said Dick Flacks, a professor emeritus of sociology at UCSB and a member of SBCAN’s Board of Directors. Along with individuals and groups he said are “concerned with the future of UCSB as a part of the community,” Flacks recently formed the Sustainable University Now (SUN) Coalition to address the many problems they’ve perceived in the LRDP for 2025. “[The Ocean Road project] changes a lot of things. Height limits, for instance — there are buildings that will be taller than anything allowed in the 1990 LRPD,” he said. The apartments and town homes in the development would be anywhere from two to six stories tall.

Flacks... also said that extracting elements of the plan would go against the very nature of long-range planning...

Linda Krop, the Environmental Defense Center’s chief counsel, said that although the LRDP amendment process has been going on for nearly two years, the Ocean Road project is only a part of it, and is still subject to its own environmental review and scrutiny by the California Coastal Commission before anything can be done...

The next hearing for the Ocean Road project will be December 20, when many students will be gone for the winter holiday...

"A Citizen's History"

2008-11-13T05:17:00.003+07:00

[ From: "Local Activist Writes I.V. History Book," By Angel Rodriguez, Daily Nexus, October 30, 2008 ]

... “Isla Vista: A Citizen’s History,” is the updated and expanded version of the author’s [Carmen Lodise] original work, which is available online. The 200-page book includes over 150 pictures and first hand accounts of significant occurrences in the vibrant half-square mile college town that is Isla Vista...

“No one had written the history of Isla Vista,” Lodise said. “The vision of Isla Vista, what it could be … has dimmed, and I am trying to reignite it.”

According to the author, the book has been in the making for over 30 years and reveals how local politicians, greedy developers and university officials conspired to build a company town that 40 years later remains a community composed of 96 percent renters. Lodise gives accounts of key events in Isla Vista’s history, such as the burning of the Bank of America building during a riot in 1970.

Lodise first moved to Isla Vista from Michigan to work as a research assistant. Lodise said he fell in love with the college town, and soon became involved in campaigns to improve I.V.

He was involved in the community as an activist for 30 years and was the Editor in Chief of Isla Vista’s longest running community newspaper, the Isla Vista Free Press. In the 1970’s Lodise was elected to the Isla Vista Community Council and Park Board and participated in three attempts to incorporate Isla Vista. He also served on the steering committee for the construction of the monument that stands in Isla Vista Perfect Park.

In a statement, UCSB alumnus and former member of the Isla Vista Park Board David Fortson said Lodise was an influential member of the community.

“For a town with so many people simply passing through, Carmen has inspired me and many other activists with care and love for our community,” Fortson said...

The original form of the book is available online at www.Islavistahistory.com, which has received over 1.6 million hits without any advertisement since it was established in 2002. The print edition of the book costs $17.50.

Bill Allen Demonstrations

2008-11-11T07:37:00.004+07:00

The Bill Allen demonstrations, on the UCSB campus, were the biggest demonstrations to ever take place at UC Santa Barbara.

"Isla Vista: A Citizen's History"

2008-11-10T00:02:00.008+07:00

Carmen Lodise's history of Isla Vista is now available in print. I recommend it highly to anyone who, at one time or another, considered themselves an Isla Vistan.

For the thousands of students and non-students that have called Isla Vista home at some point since the 1970s, this book is for us. Carmen fills in the political and cultural history many of us have known on some level, but never fully understood. His clarity of vision of what he fondly refers to as "The Isla Vista Adventure" reveals clearly the heroes and villains behind Isla Vista's successes and defeats and helps point us to what I.V. could be if more self-government were made possible for its residents.

Year of Rebellion Forum promo

2008-10-29T02:36:00.007+07:00

The forum that took place around Joe Melchione's "Year of Rebellion" photography exhibit will be broadcast on Santa Barbara Channels:

Fight the IVMP

2008-10-19T22:37:00.004+07:00

There's a FaceBook group, organized through the Biko House, that's nearly 1500 strong.

The FaceBook Group is in opposition to much of Isla Vista Master Plan. Check them out and be sure to scroll down to the bottom for discussions and postings. If you are of like mind, please join:

FB: Fight The IV Master Plan

Joe Melchione Tour

2008-08-30T01:22:00.011+07:00

Joe Melchione's personal tour of "Year of Rebellion" ...

http://www.sbchannels.net/videos/303/year-of-rebellion-pt-1.html
http://www.sbchannels.net/videos/304/year-of-rebellion-pt-2.html

Thanks to Josh Figatner, Production Coordinator for the Santa Barbara Channels, SB's own local and educational access TV network, for the heads-up.

Recollections

2008-08-20T00:55:00.003+07:00

Joe Melchione's exhibition of photographs from the Isla Vista Riots period has garnered a lot of local attention. In his on-line photo gallery of YEAR OF REBELLION, Joe's got the best photographs of the era, along with text covering a concise history of the time. Highly recommended. Advance each photo by clicking "Next" to get another image and more text.

Joe Melchione self portrait coutesy of Joe Melchione Photography

In conjunction with the opening, there was a forum held where many recollections were shared...

[ Excerpt from: "Rebellious Isla Vista," BY ERIC LINDBERG, DAILY SOUND, August 19, 2008 - full text at: DS: Rebellious Isla Vista ]

... in 1970, a series of intensifying events triggered violent exchanges between students, activists and police that quickly turned Isla Vista into a battleground.
Perhaps the most recognizable incident from those fateful six months is the burning of the Bank of America building in February 1970, torched by protestors upset over police brutality.

But Joe Melchione, then the newly appointed photo editor for UCSB’s El Gaucho newspaper, sees it differently.

“My sense is that what happened in 1970 has kind of devolved into the bank burning,” he said. “…But it wasn’t something that just happened one night when the bank building burned down. It was a repeated message and I think the community finally got together.”

And while the impetus for social unrest can be traced back to several specific incidents, such as the firing of leftist anthropology professor Bill Allen or the beating of student Rich Underwood, the larger context reveals a society already on edge.

Mick Kronman — now Santa Barbara’s harbor operations manager, then a rebellious Gaucho — looked back on the events of 1970 during a panel discussion Sunday evening with an attempt to root out what he described as “hindsight bias” and to understand the entire dialectic.

It had to do with the civil rights battle and the Vietnam War, he said. Radical black students on campus were enlightening others to their struggle. Fear of being drafted hung thick in the air.

Police, ill-equipped or untrained completely in personal interaction skill sets, faced increasingly irate students upset over Allen’s firing, the war and a lack of empowerment. Many officers were veterans with a strong distaste for draft-dodgers and war protestors who called them names and spit on them, said Robert Potter, professor emeritus of literature and theater.

“If you call someone a pig, they may begin to act like one,” Potter said.

Protestors and petition signers on campus demanding a fair hearing for Allen in January began to receive visits from sheriff’s deputies for the first time ever, said Becca Wilson, then the editor-in-chief for El Gaucho. Attacks by police and provocation by activists during those protests further polarized the two sides.

By February, the conflict escalated dramatically. Activist attorney William Kunstler, fresh off his defense of the “Chicago Seven” against charges of conspiring to incite riots during the 1968 Democratic convention, came to speak on campus.

But rather than Kunstler’s fiery speech, UCSB professor emeritus of sociology Dick Flacks described how [Rich] Underwood, who came to the speech toting a bottle of wine, sparked the infamous riot.

Police monitoring the speech spotted Underwood’s wine bottle and mistook it for a Molotov cocktail, subsequently beating the young student into submission in front of thousands.

The resulting protest grew into torching of police cars, dumpsters, and finally the bank.

“It was a baptism of fire,” said Melchione, who had just picked up a camera a few months prior.

Many of his images, currently on display at the Brooks Institute’s Cota Street Gallery through Sept. 12, had to be shot on the fly — the longhaired photographer using single streetlights as sources of light as he fought through nightstick-wielding police officers.

“I got threatened lots of times,” Melchione said. “I had a press pass. It didn’t help much for flying tear gas.”

In the weeks that followed the torching of the bank building, panelists said police broke into apartments, beat people indiscriminately and enforced a strict evening curfew.

“What shocked me the most is that police were willing to brutalize people to protect property,” Wilson said. “That property was more important than life.”

In an attempt to evenly portray both sides of the equation — and not an attempt to offer any excuse for their actions — Kronman noted that authorities faced militant students and outside agitators bent on driving them from Isla Vista.

“These people were scared,” he said. “They’d never seen anything like this before. They felt like they were under siege and, frankly, they were under siege.”

Jean Voss, a former sheriff’s dispatcher, confirmed the fear she heard in the voices of deputies as they patrolled the streets of the small community.

“It was a situation so intense, you couldn’t believe it,” she said. “Fear. Fear of drug addicts, the out-of-control students, the atmosphere.”

Kronman later agreed that police engaged in widespread injustices during what he deemed an all-out street fight.

“It wasn’t pretty,” he said. “It was indiscriminate. … The closest cousin to fear is anger.”

Several panelists speaking at the Cota Street Gallery described the feeling in the months following the burning of the bank building as a sense of being occupied by an out-of-control police force.

One audience member, 11 years old at the time of the riots, recalled running home with food from a burger joint in an attempt to make the curfew. While other kids around the country might have been out collecting butterflies, he said his friends would go out to see how many empty tear gas containers they could find.

During that time, Potter pulled together a posse of colleagues and friends to form a system of cataloging complaints about police brutality, using his own background in intelligence gathering as a soldier in Vietnam.

“I saw some of my old fogey colleagues were taking no notice of a world that was changing,” he said. “…We were able to get the information while it was still hot.”

Altogether, he catalogued 1,000 reports of police misconduct, eventually publishing them in a book titled “The Campus by the Sea where the Bank Burned Down.”

In June, the conflict came to a head again, when protestors learned that authorities planned to indict 17 people for torching the bank.

Wilson described how those arrested for the arson just happened to be the leading activists and organizers on campus.

“Somehow, all the leaders of these radical movements on campus, according to these indictments, banded together to burn the bank building,” she said.

On June 11, a group of approximately 1,500 students and activists gathered at Perfect Park to peacefully protest police brutality. As the 7:30 p.m. curfew approached, officers told the crowd they must disperse or face arrest.

After peacefully arresting more than 300 people, and as night began to fall, police announced they would begin making arrests by force if the crowd didn’t disperse.
Authorities sent tear gas streaming into the park and officers began swinging nightsticks indiscriminately, ultimately taking 667 protestors into custody.

“It was entirely peaceful and the police went completely out of control,” Melchione said.

All charges against those arrested were dismissed — and the indictments for the bank burning ultimately ended in a hung jury — but the impact of the Isla Vista riots left an indelible mark.

The unrest led to the formation of the Isla Vista Foot Patrol, Potter said, bringing officers out of their squad cars and lessening the gap between students and law enforcement.

A year later, the Isla Vista Youth Projects came into existence, offering a series of diverse educational, recreational and social programs for children and families in the community. Food co-ops and credit unions popped up.

“I believe very strongly that a group of people who are committed to a cause can bring about change,” Melchione said. “Those events that spiraled out of control in 1970 brought about great changes in Santa Barbara.”

...

"Year of Rebellion"

2008-07-09T01:41:00.006+07:00

Joe Melchione's "Year of Rebellion" photography exhibit, now to September 12th (reception on August 7th, 5-8pm):

The Santa Barbara 19

2008-06-22T04:46:00.005+07:00

Appreciations to Jeff Probst, who supplied this classic photo of The Santa Barbara 19 (minus a few), of which he was one. Jeff clarified: "The 19 were arrested after the first large demonstration at UCSB, in January 1970, calling for an open hearing for Bill Allen."

Top row, left to right:
Greg Knell, Mick Kronman, Kim Christiansen, Richard Trussell, Ricky Fisk, Michel Barton, Walt Chesnavich, Patrice Drolet, Bruce Cook, Jim Gregory

Bottom row, left to right:
Jeff Probst, Linda Rudolph, Emily deFalla, Mary Poulsen, Sandy Wardwell

Jeff Probst's "Isla Vista Bank Burning Story"

Tom Hayden via Dick Flacks

2008-06-14T21:51:00.004+07:00

Tom Hayden has just written "Writings for a Democratic Society," published by City Lights.

Dick Flacks reviewed the book and it is posted at TruthDig, with hyperlinks, at:

Richard Flacks on Tom Hayden

Dick's review is posted below, minus the hyperlinks:

If you were on the campus at Ann Arbor at the dawn of the 1960s, you’d have been aware of Tom Hayden’s writings in The Michigan Daily (the substantial and influential University of Michigan student newspaper). He first came to notice for his travels to the South to cover scenes of civil rights struggle and the movement then bursting into history. Then during the summer of 1960, Hayden was reporting from California, on the new breed of student rebel at Berkeley, on farmworker conditions in Delano, and a conversation with Edward Teller, the father of the H-bomb, at the Livermore Nuclear Lab. And then there was Hayden at the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, watching JFK’s nomination and interviewing Martin Luther King Jr. as he led pickets in the streets outside the convention arena. In the fall of 1960, Hayden became editor in chief of the Daily, writing full-page articles declaring the birth of an American student movement. He was 20 that year.

Mickey and I, just married, were in Ann Arbor, where I was working toward a Ph.D. in social psychology. We’d gone there from New York City, both of us red diaper babies, disillusioned with communism’s betrayals, harboring no expectations that we’d ever find a way to restore political hope, enjoying instead our breakaway from the provincialism of the City, and discovering at that moment cultural possibilities unknown to New Yorkers. Ann Arbor was humming with film and electronic music festivals, “happenings,” coffeehouses and bookstores where young writers and artists could find voice and space that would not have been possible in the big city. Tom Hayden’s articles in the Daily became part of that ferment. We read them avidly, seeing them not as mere reportage, but as an effort to construct an exciting political myth—that Cold War apathy and conformism might be replaced by a new, youthful protest and dissent, spawned by the civil-rights movement, seeking possibilities for personal commitment and social renewal. We weren’t yet ready to believe his story line, but we certainly wanted to hear it.

In March 1962, Hayden delivered a well-advertised speech at the university on “student social action.” That speech changed my life: Here was a 21-year-old kid from America’s heartland, putting into words what Mickey and I had been groping and hoping for—that in the United States a new left was needed and possible, that it had to break with many of the fundamental suppositions of all the factions of the traditional left and with Cold War America, that it could come in part from students. He quite insightfully saw how personal struggles for individual self-determination and moral coherence could fuel a collective commitment of youth to social change. I remember coming home right after the speech and telling Mickey: “I think I’ve just seen the American Lenin!” This wasn’t a reference to the substance of Hayden’s talk, which was quite self-consciously antithetical to Marxist-Leninist doctrine, but to his evident gift for making the hope for a movement seem a practical possibility.

Hayden’s speech that day was a trial run for what became, by the summer of 1962, a fuller draft of a manifesto for the emerging Students for a Democratic Society. Sixty folks, including Mickey and me, gathered in Port Huron, Mich., in June to debate and rework the draft and lay the groundwork for what was meant to be, and eventually became, the organizational expression of the 1960s’ new left, and the spearhead of a multi-issue student movement. Tom Hayden wasn’t the originator of this breakthrough (if any single person deserves credit, it’s Al Haber—a fellow Ann Arborite, who actually created SDS out of the remnants of the old Student League for Industrial Democracy and recruited Tom and other student leaders to the project). But Tom’s writing and speaking enabled a genuinely new political voice and outlook to come into being. He was, appropriately enough, elected first president of the new formation at that meeting.

Forty-five years later, City Lights, the independent press founded by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, has published a collection of Hayden’s writings over the last nearly five decades, called “Writings for a Democratic Society: The Tom Hayden Reader.” Its 600 pages [in some editions] make it a monumental book in more ways than one. It’s fat and densely packed, with some 60 pieces of reportage, advocacy, reminiscence and reflection drawn from some of the more than 15 books Hayden has written or edited, and the hundreds of articles and speeches he’s produced over these years. (Full disclosure: Not only have I been a friend of his for the last 47 years, but I discovered, after getting the galleys, that one of the chapters is a speech Tom gave in my honor two years ago. But what I write here is not a “review”; rather, it uses the occasion of this book to reflect a bit about Tom’s work in helping advance radical democracy in our time.)

It isn’t the size of the book that makes it monumental; it’s the life that has gone into the writing and that is reflected by it. The book’s chapters trace that life: from student journalist to SDS leader to community organizer in the Newark ghetto; then on to North Vietnam in the midst of war, to Chicago streets leading anti-war protest, to Chicago courtroom as a defendant in the conspiracy trial. Then his partnering with Jane Fonda in working to end the war and in life. In the mid-1970s, seizing new mainstream political openings, running for the U.S. Senate in California, building a statewide electoral organization, winning a seat in the California Legislature. In the state Legislature, where he serves for 20 years, he pioneers alternative energy development and, along the way, crafts a spiritual perspective on environmentalism, discovers his Irish heart, and tries to rouse the University of California to serve egalitarian purposes. And, after he ends his adventures as politician, we find him in the streets of Seattle and Miami, in Mumbai and Chiapas, in Bolivia and Cuba exploring and reporting newly emerging movements for global justice. Not many Americans have done so much making of history while, at every juncture, taking the time to be a “participant observer” of the scenes and events one is helping to shape. The writings so produced are of course uneven in style and perspicacity. Some are remarkably moving and insightful: a heartfelt reflection on the meanings of the Irish famine for the American Irish soul; some brilliant appreciations of the meaning of the World Social Forum and other grass-roots resistances to corporate globalization; a weird “journal” of epiphany in the Amazon, and a number of valuable documents and reflections on the meanings of the 1960s, both personal and political. These suggest that Tom Hayden could have been one of the great journalists of our time, given his ability to combine a penetrating style, keen eye and an unusually sharp theoretically informed mind.

Tom, however, chose a different path—to change the world rather than merely interpret it. From those early Ann Arbor days, he insisted on living inside the fierce contradictions and dilemmas inherent in political engagement. Engagement demands advocacy, and therefore at least some sacrifice of the intellectual’s claim to being a disinterested truth-seeker. Accordingly, these “Writings” don’t tell stories or express ideas for their own sake; each of them is making a point in an ongoing debate with the powers that be and reflects a persistent effort to challenge the complacent and the passive.

But some of these pieces are deeper and more durable than topical advocacy. Tom has had, from his earliest work, something to teach both activists and intellectuals about the tensions and connections between them. He’s been guided by a fairly coherent philosophical pragmatism, learned from his Michigan professors like Arnold Kaufman and Kenneth Boulding, from immersion in the writings of C. Wright Mills, as well as now neglected heroes of the late ’50s and early ’60s Albert Camus and Paul Goodman. Our passion and our action, this pragmatism says, should be guided by our experience, rather than ideological doctrine, theory or concealed thirst for power. Here, Tom suggests, are some ways to make our experience useful for making change:

* Take institutional claims seriously and see if they are practiced by those in power.
* Challenge elites to live up to their claims, to justify their actions.
* Oppose structures of authority that block ordinary people from, in the language of Port Huron, “participating in the decisions that affect their lives.”
* Try to figure out, by observation of relevant cases, by experimentation, by dialogue, how social empowerment and participatory democracy can be made real.

It is through such ongoing efforts to organize from below, to win voice for the voiceless, to de-legitimize elites, that fundamental change happens. And, he teaches, whether or not transformation is possible, that struggling for democratic voice and empowerment is the essence of practical strategies by which ordinary people can advance their interests.

In 1976, at age 36, Tom made a turn to electoral politics after 15 years as a movement leader. He decided to run in the California Democratic Party primary for U.S. Senate, opposing the incumbent John Tunney. Not only was this a break with his longstanding political identity, but it was an affront to the interests and sensibilities of party professionals. Running for the Senate was presumptuous for a political upstart, it threatened a perfectly respectable liberal incumbent, and it was bizarre to imagine that a former revolutionary ex-Chicago conspiracy defendant, spouse of Jane Fonda, might have a chance in the political mainstream. The move was also questioned by many on the left—as an opportunistic betrayal of principle which would legitimize one of the two corporate-dominated political parties and undermine the effort to build a mass movement.

Tom’s pragmatism, however, allowed him to see that the mid-1970s might be a moment when the electoral process could be open for a genuinely democratic possibility. The generation of the 1960s was now grown up and ready to be an electoral force ("The radicalism of the sixties is the common sense of the seventies,” he declared). The economy was in stagflation (and the Keynesian strategies to revive it seemed no longer viable). Rising global competition in manufacturing was leading to declining real wages for American workers for the first time since World War II. A new awareness of environmental peril was rising; newly asserted demands for economic justice were being expressed by women and minorities. In Europe and the United States speculation was growing that corporate capitalism was in crisis, no longer able to manage its manifold contradictions. New paradigms were in the air: “Eurosocialism” and “Eurocommunism,” Ralph Nader’s crusade against corporate domination, and a variety of ideas about how to empower communities, workers and consumers. Tom’s campaign decided to issue a new Port Huron Statement-style manifesto, and gathered a number of academics and activists, myself among them, to write a campaign platform which we called “Make the Future Ours.” Some passages from this lengthy effort are reprinted in the “Writings.” The key idea was captured by the phrase “economic democracy,” coined by Derek Shearer, a term that paralleled and focused the “participatory democracy” of SDS at Port Huron.

In reality, however, the Hayden for Senate campaign did not operate as a vehicle for new vision. Instead the logic of big-time campaigning—and the availability of Jane Fonda as effective fundraiser—led to a series of negative TV ads aimed at Tunney’s vulnerabilities, featuring Henry Fonda and other Hollywood figures. These ads boosted Hayden’s poll numbers into the 40 percent approval range. In addition, there was a sizable grass-roots organization, and Tom undertook a 1,000-mile walk down the California coast. To win the race was always a long shot, but garnering 1.3 million votes led the media to take Hayden seriously as leader of something new on the political scene.

An internal premise of key organizers was that the campaign, when it was over, would be the foundation for a permanent progressive electoral organization in California, and within a few weeks after the June primary race, the “Campaign for Economic Democracy” came into being. The CED became a significant electoral force in several cities and counties over about five years. It came to an end as Tom focused on his own political career, getting elected from Santa Monica to the California state Assembly, while many other CED activists found niches in government, party politics and mass media.

This chapter in Tom’s life story is not well represented in the book, nor does he devote much space to the 20 years he spent in the California Legislature. This absence reflects the fact that he hasn’t written much about these matters. The CED’s work and his efforts in the Legislature certainly bore fruit of which he’s proud (and these are mentioned in the text of the book). But to write in detail about these efforts, and the times themselves, might also be painful. The hope that many new leftists had, in the 1970s, of creating a new movement for economic democracy was considerably dashed by the rise of Reagan and the triumph of conservatism on the national stage. The fact that such a hope existed has been largely obliterated in prevailing memory, and there has not been much documentation of the fact that as national politics moved right in the last 30 years, many localities across the country were moving left. Politics rooted in environmentalism, feminism and the growing numbers of Latino and Asian-American voters have changed local structures of power and implemented some pieces of the “economic democracy” agenda. (The Web site http://www.community-wealth.org/ provides a comprehensive inventory of local efforts at establishing economic democracy.) Below the radar, new forms of citizen action have taken local power away from old local elites. In Santa Barbara, where we’ve lived for 40 years, local government, once securely controlled by bankers and real estate agents, now is led by environmentalists, feminists and liberal Democrats. It’s a shift that’s happened in many other California communities, too. These developments need to be documented, in part because they constitute some of the experience that a new national reform agenda can draw on.

Tom is now 68, and some of us of the SDS generation are in our 70s. It would be a good thing if, individually and collectively, members of that generation were to spend some part of their remaining years in efforts to closely interrogate our political experience. I don’t mean producing further rehashings of “The 1960s.” It’s the 40 years since then that have been inadequately examined. Tom Hayden and his compatriots helped shape the history of these decades, and not always in ways we intended. Still, it’s the right that claims and is generally perceived to have dominated during most of this time. Yet all ideological perspectives from left to right have failed to comprehend the world as we now experience it. An effort to comprehend the state of that world would benefit from a systematic examination of the gap between the expectations and hopes of activists on all sides and the reality that ensued.

But ’60s oldsters now are stirring themselves to new action rather than reflection. Tom Hayden himself has been tirelessly speaking, writing and organizing in hope of mobilizing grass-roots opposition to the war in Iraq. Some of the pieces in “Writings” express his excitement on encountering the street-level global justice movement. He and other ’60s veterans are even more excited by the Barack Obama youth surge. It inspires hope for social regeneration in some of the ways the youth revolt of the 1960s offered.

Hillary Clinton wasn’t, as far as I know, an SDS member back in the day, but we do know that she was moved by the student movement and the new left. Yet it is Obama, (even though, as he has reminded us, he was only 7 years old in 1968), whose campaign provides validation for some of the hopes of the new left. He, like Tom Hayden, roots his leadership experience in his work as a community organizer. His campaign, as explained by Michelle Obama, bears a striking resemblance to the way Hayden’s 1976 Senate campaign was conceived. She declared: “Barack is not a politician first and foremost. He’s a community activist exploring the viability of politics to make change.” Obama’s frequent assertion that it’s not the president who makes change, it’s the movement from the bottom up that makes change, very much expresses the spirit of the “organizing tradition” that includes SNCC, SDS, King, Saul Alinsky and the “local heroes” who led the movements of the 1960s. Maybe participation in and critical observation of the Obama experiment will provide the best opportunity we’ve had to learn about the chances for that democratic society Tom and his co-conspirators started to write and organize for in the very year that Obama was born.

-----------------------------

Richard Flacks is professor of sociology emeritus at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he has taught since 1969. He is the author of “Making History: The American Left and the American Mind,” published by Columbia University Press.

Joseph Lodge (1932-2008)

2008-06-07T04:30:00.002+07:00

Recently, the Santa Barbara community lost its judicial giant, Joseph Lodge. Many very good words have been subsequently printed about Judge Lodge, but none as good as that from his wife, Sheila.

In response to what Sheila Lodge wrote, Carmen Lodise sent me the following:

--------------------------

Allow me to express my gratitude to Mayor Sheila Lodge for her moving eulogy to her husband, Superior Court Judge Joe Lodge.

In it she mentions the time he ordered the release of some 350 people who had been arrested in a peaceful sit-in in Isla Vista’s Perfect Park on June 10, 1970. Those of us active in Isla Vista politics and community affairs during the Vietnam War era will forever honor Joe for his brave and principled rulings in that case.
As Sheila notes, he could well have lost the job that he loved when he said, in effect, that the offense of torching the Bank of America three months earlier could not be used to restrict the entire community’s right to free speech and assembly. The demonstrators who made that point in Perfect Park were amazed to come before a judge willing to stand firm in the face of overwhelming pressure from the sheriff, the DA and a large swath of public opinion.

By the time he was an institution on the bench, Joe was even more forthright in publicly discussing that case when he appeared as the featured speaker at a reception launching the website www.islavista.org on Feb. 25, 2000, the 30th anniversary of the night the bank burned. That he actually showed up to address about fifty people gathered at the Isla Vista Medical Clinic was a surprise; what he had to say was downright astonishing.

“I looked out at those young people who had been arrested in Perfect Park, and in letting them go I felt I was taking sides in a revolution,” he said to gasps from the audience.

In 2002, hundreds of people attended the anti-retirement party Mayor Lodge threw for Joe at the Montecito Country Club. I thought it remarkable that four of the six speakers mentioned that his releasing the demonstrators back in 1970 was the ruling that most impressed them about the judge in his nearly 50 years on the bench.

I think of Joe’s words and example each time I visit the monument to the international anti-war movement in Perfect Park.

Carmen Lodise
Barra de Navidad, Mexico

PS Thanks to Kevin for some help polishing this note.

IV Bank Burning Story

2008-05-10T21:35:00.006+07:00

Back in the day, Jeff Probst was a UCSB student and EL GAUCHO (re-named "Daily Nexus") reporter. A number of years back, he wrote a story about his life during those times and prefaces his work by writing:

"This is a personal story about the late sixties and the events leading up
to the bank burning, and its aftermath. The names of people, unless well
known, and those of publications, have been changed..."

To read, please go to:

The-Isla-Vista-Bank-burning-Story.pdf

1969 Oil Spill to 1970 Earth Day

2008-04-18T05:06:00.003+07:00

The 1969 Oil Spill resulted in environmental degradation, but also to a local and national sense of increased environmentalism, leading to the first Earth Day, 1970. Read about it at:

Daily Nexus: Locals Remember 1st Earth Day

U2 photo courtesy of Jeffrey Hemphill

Harvey Levin 1970

2008-04-04T06:08:00.002+07:00

"Back in the early 1970s... the gossip kingpin was a politically-active student at the University Of California Santa Barbara. This recently resurfaced newsclip (exact origin date: unknown) shows the future TMZ boss speaking to a local television crew on the campus of UCSB in the wake of the Isla Vista riots. As evidenced in the clip, Levin demonstrated not only an early penchant for dealing with the media, but also, dare we say, a slight case of Napoleon complex..."

Watch the video:

Harvey Levin in front of the Ucen, 1970

"Disturbing The Universe"

2008-02-29T11:32:00.003+07:00

Thanks to Greg Knell and Sarah Kunstler for the heads up on the new film about William Kunstler. Here's the message from Sarah:

"... my sister and I are making a documentary about our father, and would certainly appreciate if you could post something to your list about our film. The website for the project, where you can watch a short trailer, is www.disturbingtheuniverse.com

"We are definitely interested in any archival photographs or any other materials related to Bill's speech and the bank burning that we might be able to incorporate in the film. We may also be doing some additional interviews, although have limited funds to travel at this point..."

Trial of The Chicago 10

2008-02-28T23:06:00.003+07:00

Appreciations to Bob Fass for giving me the heads-up on the new film about the trial of the Chicago 10. Much of the sound in the film came from Bob Fass's "Radio Unnameable." Here's a clip combining real audio from Bob combined with animation (the film also contains good archival footage):

Listen to:
NPR Audio interview with the producer

John R. Seeley (1913-2007)

2008-02-03T01:20:00.000+07:00

John R. Seeley has passed away. Please read about him at:

The Santa Barbara Independent: John R. Seeley 1913-2007

Malcolm's Recommendations

2008-02-03T00:59:00.000+07:00

I've added a link to Amazon.com, with some recommendations. These will always be located in the sidebar to the blog and will change over time. Please let me know if you have some recommendations, too. I know there's a ton of stuff I'm missing. Please go to:

DBOA @ Amazon.com

BILL ALLEN After The Riots

2008-01-18T05:13:00.000+07:00

In December 2007, I received the following email from Will (Bill) Allen:

(Image courtesy of IslaVistaHistory.com)

I am sending this note to apprise you of my current whereabouts and
interests and give you a thumbnail sketch of my life since IV. As you may
know, after I got out of jail in 1971 I went underground, changed my name,
and stayed active against the war. I became part of the back to the land
movement. My reading of Marx (especially the last chapters of Capital) and
other Marxist-Leninists convinced me that rural activism was every bit as
important as industrial sweat shop organizing. I lived in Oregon for a year
and a half until 1973, interning on farms and working as a farm laborer on
bulb and tree farms.

In 1973 I returned to Santa Barbara for about nine months, but the police
harassed me constantly so I moved to Santa Maria and rented a farm there. In
1974 I moved to Creston, in San Luis Obispo County and rented a 15 acre farm
there. In 1975 I moved to Forbestown in the Sierra foothills and bought a
small piece of hilly, rocky farmland. We lived in tee pees, built a house,
terraced the land, an d built the soil.

In 1980 we moved to Crows Landing because the schools were bad in the
foothills and my two eldest sons had muscular dystrophy, which made it
difficult to care for them in such basic surroundings with no running water
and bad hospital services. I went to work as a farm laborer on my
father-in-law's 2300 acre bean, alfalfa, cotton, tomato, cattle, and walnut
farm. I rented 25 acres of land from him and became one of the first organic
farmers in the San Joaquin Valley. My youngest son died in April of 1981.

We farmed in Crows landing and also worked for my in-laws on their farm for
the next nine years. During that time I stayed politically active and helped
jump start the organic movement in California. I helped write the first rule
book for certification of organic growers when I served on the board of
California Certified Organic Farmers. I helped start the Ecological Farming
Conference, and served on their board from 1982 until 1995.

In 1989 we moved back to Goleta and worked for a year and a half for
Fairview Farms. I was farm Manager and educational director. In 1990 we had
the 20th anniversary celebration of the burning of the Bank of Amerika.

In late 1990 we moved back to the San Joaquin Valley and I rented a farm in
Patterson. That year I was offered a job as rural toxics director for the
California Institute for Rural Studies. In that capacity I worked with
cotton farmers and farmworkers, since cotton was the most toxic crop in
California with more that one million acres. In 1991 I founded the
Sustainable Cotton Project which was designed to get growers to grow cotton
organically and to get garment industry companies to use organic cotton. Our
efforts helped launch the organic cotton industry. We were able to get
15,000 acres converted to organic by 1995, before NAFTA and GATT were
passed. We also got dozens of garment companies to buy organic cotton,
including Patagonia, Esprit, Nike, Norm Thompson, Levis, etc.

After GATT and NAFTA the demand for domestic organic cotton tanked (because
Patagonia, Nike and all the rest of the fucking garmentos could get it for a
few cents cheaper from Turkey, Pakistan, India, or Peru. Our growers
switched to other crops. By 2003 I was sick of the full time farmer
consulting role and anxious to get back to farming full time, instead of
part time.

In 2000 we (with two partners) bought a piece of land on the Connecticut
River in Vermont. We currently farm 55 acres of rich bottom land, have a
farmstand, a coffee shop, 13 greenhouses, and a small bakery. We also have
an educational program to help young people learn how to farm, and to get
safe organic food into local schools and into the inner cities (we have an
inner city program with mostly black and Puerto Rican kids in Worcester,
Mass.)

I just finished a book, The War On Bugs, that is being published by Chelsea
Green and is due out at the end of January, 2008. It is a historical survey
of chemical promotions since the 1840s and is richly illustrated with
advertisements and promotions.

I currently serve on the policy advisory board of the Organic Consumers
Association, and I am a national co-Chair of Farms not Arms. I am also on
the board of Rural Vermont. I am very active against the war and have been
arrested four times in 2007. I am very active with Farm Aid and with the
Armenian Tree Project. My wife and I have done consulting work in India,
Mexico and Armenia.

Bill Allen wasn't a very popular name in the San Joaquin Valley, so I
changed my name to Will Allen. I have used that name since we started to
grow organically in Crows Landing. My dad wouldn't be happy with the change
but it kept me safe and gave me the ability to slide under the radar of
local officials.

I will be promoting my book in California in January, March, and April.
Perhaps we could meet. Thanks for writing about that very exciting time in
all of our lives. Perhaps you could send me a copy. Venceremos, Bon Apetit!

Will (Bill) Allen

IV Circa 1983-1987

2007-11-24T01:09:00.000+07:00

Charles Hobbs recently wrote about his memories of Isla Vista circa 1983-1987, at the Isla Vista Community Yahoo Group ( http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Isla_Vista_Community/ ):

Welcome to IV, where the real education begins....

First day of school at UCSB, Fall 1983. Once I settled
in a bit, I grabbed my bike and started riding on the
bike path through the center of campus, passing Storke
Tower, etc.
At the edge of campus, I noticed an overpass.
Intrigued, I sped up and passed through it....and
found myself in a whole new world.

I found myself riding, not on a bike path anymore, but
in the middle of a real street. There were a few cars,
but mostly bicycles, bicycles, and more bicycles being
ridden all over the street.
Just like those old pictures of Beijing, China. Cars
crossing Pardall were stopped, waiting as if for a
train to pass, while the stream of bicycles zoomed by.

On the left, there was the Delta Tau Delta frat house.
I didn't really deal with frats much, but I mention
this one because
a. I and about 4 other guys did an "air guitar" gig
there in Spring 1984
b. A roommate of mine actually joined them (but kept
on living with us....maybe the house was full or
something). Anyway....

On the right, there was a planter full of cactuses.
(The county removed it within a few months, citing
liability if someone fell into it and got pricked...)
and a dead Taco Bell.
(In late Spring of 1984, the TB was torn down and
replaced with a Subway sandwich shop, a
(pre-Starbucks) coffee shop, an ice-cream store, and a
Chinese restaurant that
served dishes such as "Beef Isla Vista" and "Shrimp
UCSB".)

Pizza
College students lived on two things, pizza and beer.
There were four places to get pizza:

* Domino's. Mostly for freshmen who didn't know any
better.

* Pizza Bob's. Jock/frat boy hangout that served
(allegedly) watered-down beer. Delivery hours were
somewhat limited (about an hour earlier than the
other places on this list). Now the place is (I think)
a coffee shop, last time I was in IV

* Perry's. Surfer-type hangout on Pardall. They served
pan pizza cut into square slices. (This was part of a
small chain, with
stores in Inglewood and Redondo Beach(?). I also
remember them trying to get into the post office
business, by opening a contract
postal station after the official IV Post office
closed....cost them goodwill as people got mad that
they couldn't buy stamps during all
open hours. (There's a funny cartoon in the Daily
Nexus about Perry's foray into the postal business).
They closed down sometime
after that.

* Woodstocks. IMHO the best pizza in IV. Still going
strong.

Restaurants
* The Habit. Served decent, if a bit greasy, burgers
and fried pies. There was another one in Downtown
Goleta, and now there is a whole chain of them as far
south
as Encino. In early 86, the IV branch shut down and
became a McBurleys, selling overpriced food ($3 for a
simple burger?) and beer. McBurleys was rumored to be
run by one of the more well-heeled frats, perhaps with
a good helping of parental funds...In a few years,
became a coffeeshop or some other type of restaurant.

* Borsodi's. Your quintessential hippy coffee shop.
They probably did poetry readings there too. Not my
scene so I never went inside. (This was also the IV
stop for the
Green Tortoise bus on its LA-SF run)

* Baba's Falafel: Before I got to UCSB, I didn't even
know what a falafel was. The dining commons served
what they called falafels, but were really just balls
of bland tofu. Yuck.
Baba's turned me on to a whole new world of Middle
Eastern cuisine....sort of. The little stand was
replaced by a strip mall in 1987. Baba's was there for
a while, then moved
(on campus?). Freebird's moved in, looked good, but I
never got to try it.

* Pappagallos. Italian? Never ate there, but I do
remember their pink neon sign beaming into my room all
night, during their summer of 1985....

* There was also a Mexican place near the tip of the
Embarcadero loop, never did get a chance to try it
out.

* The Egghead. Served omelets and breakfast. Never
went there
* New York Hero House. Sub sandwiches. Never went
there either
* There was another really tiny breakfast-only place
as well. It had some sort of "flower" name (White
Lily?). Apparently it was quite good, because there
were
often lines out the door...
* Andrea's/Sam's to Go/Gerties: a few other names that
come to mind. I remember trying to go to Gerties one
evening and found that they closed early...never went
back....

Entertainment and clubs
At least the first year, there was a lot of griping
about the lack of nightlife, as opposed to LA or some
bigger place. Of course, there were clubs in
Downtown Santa Barbara, but those were mostly 21 and
up (and carded).You'd also need a car, a friend with a
car, or $20 for a cab ride back to
campus (in these pre-Bill's Bus days). But in time, a
few things opened up in IV

* The Library. Somewhere on Pardall. I think this was
a 21+ place, so I never dealt with it (it was gone by
the time I turned 21)

* The Graduate. Opened in the old Bank of America
building in Spring(?) 1985. Did both 21+ and 18+
events, something for everybody. Fun to go out with
friends
once in a while. Eventually became a UCSB lecture hall
after stints as a brewpub, a dance studio/gym, and who
knows what else...

* Magic Lantern Theaters: Fall 1983 was the last of
their existance as a movie theater. I remember seeing
a couple of flix with friends (Strange Brew and
National Lampoon's Vacation, I think)...tickets were
very cheap and the theater was still empty. They went
out of business shortly after that and were taken over
by
UCSB for use as lecture halls. (Campus groups could
also show movies there, or in a number of the other
on-campus lecture halls, as fundraisers)

Arcades
* Video Madness/Side Pocket. In the James Ventura
building on Pardall.Had good crowds even after the
video game craze died down. Side Pocket was the
adjoining pool hall. Now a small liquor store and a
bar (the "Study Hall", at least last time I was up
there....late 2004?)

* Bank Arcade. In the old B of A building. Games
mostly in poor condition, went out of business in Fall
1983.

* Video Hideway. One or two "geeks" who worked in the
UCSB Computer Lab set up a little arcade near the Six
Pack Shop in Spring 1986. Free games for about a week,
then
ridiculously low prices (10 games for a buck or
something). Over the summer, the geeks took it home to
Santa Clara, and went into business there.

Music
There were two record stores (anyone still remember
when record stores sold....well, *records*???)

* Morninglory. Best for used records. (I was too
poor/cheap to buy new ones). Also sold concert
tickets. For a while you could rent CD's, but the
copyright people put a stop to that.

* Leopolds. Just across the street. Mostly new
records, small selection of used stuff. After a
couple of years, turned into a surfwear shop.

Books
* IV Bookstore. Handy alternative to the UCSB
bookstore (sometimes IV would have books that UCSB
didn't have, and vice versa). Usually cheaper on
textbooks
by $1-2.

* Merlins. Near the IV Foot Patrol. Used bookstore
smelling of pipe smoke. Little of academic interest,
but ok to grab a cheap novel or two for that long bus
ride home...

Groceries/Beer
* IV Market
* Pruitt's / Dave's Market
Two small supermarkets. I lived in the dorms so didn't
really do too much grocery shopping per se, but often
bought snacks, fruit, coke, etc. for those late night
study sessions.

* IV Food Co-op. Hippied-out place, sold exotic stuff
such as ginseng root beer. Prices high unless you
joined. Also the only place for miles where you could
buy
single floppy disks (a whole box cost up to $50 in a
lot of places back then!)

* International Market
I had a lot of Asian friends, so I got to know this
place well. Cheap ramen noodles and beer (when they
didn't lose their license for serving underage). I
think this place
changed hands at least once; when it did, my roommate
(Vietnamese) quit going there. "The people act ugly
and rip you off" he said....

* Six Pack Shop/Lloyd's Liquors
Another place for the kids beer runs!

Services
* Dougs Bougs.VW repair shop. Moved to Milpas in late
83 or early 84. Some environmental dust-up regarding a
leaking underground fuel tank, if I recall correctly.
Another car repair joint took its place...

* Kinko's. The original (really, this is where that
whole chain got started). Sometimes, course "readers"
(books made up of copies of articles) needed for
classes had to be
purchased here. (This got them in trouble with our
friends the copyright police!)

* The Alternative. Another copy shop, right next door
to Kinkos

* IV Bike Rental. Moved from Embarcadero (Del Norte?)
to Pardall at some point....

* Bank of America ATM's. Of course the real bank
(rebuilt from the 70's riots) had closed some time
ago. They did have a couple of ATM's open in IV
though.

* IV Bike Repair. Fixed bikes, also had tools chained
to a rack outside for do-it-yourselfers. (Most
students took advantage of the on-campus bike shop,
with cheaper prices.
You needed a student id to use that shop, though).

* St Athanasius Church: Greek Orthodox. During the
long hot summer of 1985, I toyed with the idea of
going to one of their services. Never made it though.
That fall, though, I did
end up joining a Baptist church off Milpas, though....

IV Wiki

2007-11-17T03:19:00.000+07:00

A growing resource on the history and current state of Isla Vista is Wikipedia.

Go to: IV Wiki and add to the collection.

"Frat Boys..."

2007-10-26T01:20:00.000+07:00

A funny story from IV1, from musings.angryhippy.net:

"Frat Boys, Ronny Ray-Gun, And Other Tales Of Krakatoa"

Let me set the scene. It was 1970. I was living in Isla Vista and we had just burnt down the Bank of America a few days earlier. It came to be known as The Isla Vista Riots No.1. I was living on the corner of Sabado Tarde and Camino Pescadero, about a block away from where Aldous Huxley had written Doors of Perception. The cops (Santa Barbara and Los Angeles County Sheriffs, and California Highway Patrol) were in a very pissy mood seeing as how we had kicked their ass so bad, they had to call in the National Guard. William Kunstler the Attorney for The Chicago 7 had come ashore in a row boat with a big sign saying "The Peoples Navy" and was giving a talk at the UCSB campus. After the talk everyone was walking back home when the cops showed up, declared us an unlawful assembly and proceded to arrest the first black man they saw who had a bottle of wine in his hand. Well people were already pissed off over the firing of a popular professor, but this highly unnecessary act got everyone pissed off even more. We kind of looked around, saw the police car, flipped it over, and torched the fucker. The car unfortunately was in front of the Isla Vista Branch of The Bank of America, a very potent symbol of the establishment and corporate funding for the war, so we burned that fucker down too.

The following 4 days and nights were open warfare and running battles, between the students and the police. On the second day the Santa Barbara County Sheriff asked the L.A. County Sheriff for back up. The third day they asked for reinforcements from the Highway Patrol, and on the fourth day Governor Ronny Ray-Gun called in The National Guard. We were throwing rocks, tipping over dumpsters and setting them ablaze in the middle of intersections, and flying black kites at night. Black kites at night? WTF? Ya the kite flying thing was cool. Since Isla Vista was built on a point there was always an ocean breeze. The black kites couldn't be seen cause we had shot out all the street lights, with sling shots and ball bearings, so the man had to ground all their helicopters. Another point of confusion was the position of the point. It faced due south, so when you were sitting on the cliff looking out over the sea, you were actually looking south, not west. And seeing as how the street signs had all been spraypainted black, the out of town cops had to answer calls like "the 3rd east west running street. They, naturally were looking for the 3rd north south running street.

We were standing on a balcony watching this Roman Phalanx of Cops marching down the street resplendent in their Plexiglas Riot Shields as they goose-stepped with military precision around the corner and out of sight. We decided the show was so good, another dube was in order, and as we stepped back inside to twist one up and refill the wine glass this thunderous cacophonous roar of voices could be heard. We ran back to the balcony just in time to see these 50 or so cops no longer information, running helter skelter every man for himself mode, for their lives, being chased by at least three hundred rock throwing, Banshee screaming tie dyed,
sandal wearing, patchoolie smelling, long haired, peace loving, college students. It was a glorious sight to behold indeed. And it was only day two.

One of my roommates Steve (RIP lost at sea) had these asbestos gloves, and one of those David (as in David and Goliath) slings, and a gas mask from the surplus store in Santa Barbara. The cops would fire a tear gas canister into the crowd and Steve would run over and pick it up and sling it back into the phalanx of cops marching down the street who had fired it. Needless to say that REALLY pissed them off. They finally figured out where he lived and retaliated in kind, but that part comes later.

Times were so different then. Let me give you an example. In my bedroom, in the bottom drawer of my dresser was where I made my living. I had a large jar there with a thousand hits of acid. Nothing fancy like Owsley or anything, just some very mellow generic pink tabs. They were $3 a hit. Everyone in town knew where they were, and we never locked our doors. People would come in, when no one was home, walk back to my room, get however many they wanted, and leave the cash in the drawer. No one ever stole the acid or the money. I was usually somewhere above the San Marcos pass hiking in the mountains and tripping, or sitting around naked in the hot springs. I had sat on the cliff over looking the ocean peaking on a few hits, and read The Hobbit in one night in it's entirety. My pad and Isla Vista were a very cool warm friendly place to live. Until…

Until the cops figured out where Steve lived, opened up the front door and lobbed in a canister of CS Pepper gas. The CS was banned for use in warfare by the Geneva Convention, but apparently was OK to use on scum, long haired college students. Now tear gas. If you get it into your eyes, can be washed out with water, but not this CS shit. Water intensifies the effects. The net result is that all our clothes and furniture had to be tossed, and we were unable to go into it for about 6 days, and only for a few moments at a time for several more weeks. So I've set the scene and the circumstances that resulted in me finding myself in this mansion.

Let me explain where I was. Hope Ranch is an uber rich snob community in Santa Barbara, a few miles south of Isla Vista. Uber rich, nouveau riche, assholes, with a "property owners association" run by bored uber rich snob bored housewives with nothing to do. Remember now this is 1970 and these houses are already in the million dollar plus range. I'm in this monstrous house being occupied by the opposing army. Uber rich snob frat boys who want to rebel against mommy dearest, anyway they can. The party is hardy, the wine (a dainty little Bordeaux Blanc stolen from some rich daddies cellar no doubt), Napoleon Brandy and good Columbian and Oaxacan bud. And of course the obligatory uber rich and uber trashy sorority girls.

You know now that I think back, partying with rich kids wasn't so bad. The kitchen in this pad was huge with one of those butcher block islands floating in a sea of Carrera marble floor tiles. The bathroom was so beautiful I felt shame defiling it's porcelain God by peeing in it. Everything was white. The tile floor the tile walls the tiled shower with a white frosted door. I mean even the toilet paper was white. With this place you would expect to have your butt wiped by the servants in Tuxedos and white gloves, using hand made French Lace doilies. White of course. The White theme was carried into the masters bedroom as well. Not to mention, I swear this is true, a goose down mattress. I was already scheming on how to lure one of those frat girls up there to try it out, but alas that was not to be.

So here I am, a homeless waif and war orphan in this Animal House, meets Cheech and Chong, meets Gone With The Wind pad filled with drunk and stoned frat boys who already have gotten too many notices from Scarlet O'hara, the head of the owners association about breaking rule #668 no loud noise after 10PM or some such shit, and Scarlet's 10 illegitimate drunk stoned Sorority Sisters.

I had gone back upstairs to take a dump in The Hall of Ivory toilet room. I just couldn't resist. It made me feel so special. I was getting ready to head down stairs again to peruse those frat girls. The front door was set in a 20 foot high wall with windows running across the top of the wall above the door. That's when I saw the police car pull up. Then the second one. Then the third one. Rolling up in full stealth mode with lights off. CRAP!

I ran to the bedroom and looked out the window. More of the bastards coming through the gate by the pool house. The oak tree was too far away to make the jump from the window sill. I WAS TRAPPED LIKE A RAT SINKING IN THE SPLENDER OF THE TITANIC! What to do, what to do? My first thought of course was drugs. No pot on me. Thank god, I hate eating pot, it tastes like shit. Three hits of acid. I could flush those before the cops turned the water off, but hey, why waste good drugs? So I threw them down my throat with some of that Chateau Lafitte Rothswhatever it's called wine. They
say desperate times call for desperate measures, and desperate men do desperate things, so not wanting to disappoint those people who make up all those "They say" sayings, I ran into the bedroom, and grabbed the white bed sheet off the bed, kicked my shoes under the bed, but left my white socks on, and headed for the bathroom. I climbed into the shower and waited and listened.

Now you're probably thinking WTF? He's in a shower in his stockings with a white bed sheet, waiting for the cops! This guy really is a nut case. Well ya,…this guy is a nut case, but I'm crazy like a fox too. I heard them bust down the front and back doors simultaneously. It wasn't long before I heard the steps on the staircase, and I put my plan into action. I flattened myself against the wall like the Q key for Sam Fischer in Splinter Cell, raise the white sheet above my head, and held it in front of me. I heard someone say "check that bathroom". So, I swear to God this Deputy Dawg comes in and looks around. He can see through the frosted
glass door without having to open it, cause he can see all the way back to the white tile, or in this case the bed sheet hiding his quarry. After about 15 minutes my arms are really getting heavy.

After about a half hour or so, I'm just fucking ripped on this acid, the bud and the wine, and this shower is looking like the cargo hold on that ship in "Krakatoa East Of Java". It's this one scene where this guy is strung out on Laudinum and they are trying to detox him by locking him in the hold. And he's hallucinating like crazy. Now Krakatoa East of Java was a really bad movie, even if it was in Cinerama. I mean Krakatoa is West of Java for Christ sakes. But it's one redeeming quality was the aforementioned scene. The Special Effects guy was definitely a head. Aside from the Cinemascope projection of the octopus on the wall, the rest of the hallucinations were the closest to the real thing I've yet to see from any film. Of course I did see it on Acid so maybe a re-screening might change my mind.

Anyway back to the shower. There was nothing left in this bathroom that was white. Colors and trails and colored trails, and trails off the trails. If you've never taken acid and are wondering what the hell trails are, go to the control panel click on mouse then go to the pointer options tab and set it for long pointer trails. Then sweep your cursor across the screen. That's what everything does when you're on acid, except with colors added. Now you know what the album title "Happy Trails" by Quicksilver Messenger Service was talking about. Not Roy Roger's theme song that's for sure.

In Carl Sagan's book "The Dragons Of Eden, he speculates on the idea that Marijuana might be responsible for Human civilization. He points out that the Pygmies are ambush hunters and can stay motionless for hours after smoking their dope that they do before the hunt. He says this ability to stay motionless is enhanced by the drug, and that maybe Pot was the first drug ever cultivated, giving rise to agriculture and civilization itself. Wouldn't that be a trip if it was real. We could all tell Harry Anslinger to kiss our ass.

Anyway it's been , it seems, like two hours I've been doing the Rain Forest Pygmy imitation, when all is quiet in the house, and to my great relief I can finally lower my arms. The dirty deed is done and the perps have gone, taking everyone with them. The house is mine alone. I go and flop out on that down mattress, albeit alone, and crash hard.

I'm jolted to consciousness by the slam of the front door, and yelling. Mommy and Daddy have bailed out Junior and are surveying the wreckage that once was their home, and giving junior hell. Probably telling the poor bastard that he's cut out of the will. DAMN! And I'm still stuck upstairs. Oh well, may as well make good while the time is there to be making it. I got undressed, jumped into the shower that was once my temporary prison, wet myself down, get out, rap a towel around my waist, walk out to the edge of the staircase, and make my presence known.

"Hey! Is there any coffee brewing?" I say in my best just woke up groggy voice, acting as if I had somehow been missed by the police and slept through the entire tawdry affair. "Whoa bro. What happened to the pad?" Dad was up the staircase faster than a mama rhino who's baby had just been threatened telling me to get my clothes on and get the fuck out of his house. Not being one to argue, I got dressed and with a last "Are you sure there's no fresh coffee? I could sure use a cup!" this boy was out the door.

I hopped into my '57 Vee Dub bus affectionately named The Blue Meanie, with a wooden back bumper painted with stars and stripes that said America Change it with Love, and bidding a fond adieu to that bastion of Reagonomics that still is Hope Ranch, I headed out to Hermosa Beach where a special sweet young lady had told me a few days earlier, I could crash there for a few days. But first I had to pick up a gas mask and make one last dash into the pad for... well of course. The jar in my bottom drawer, and any monies accumulated in my absence.

--------------------------

Disclaimer: As there is still outstanding John Doe warrants for the perpetrators of the bank burning, let me just say that that event never happened and my participation is strictly ficticious. And, if I'm not mistaken the bottle of wine was a gallon of Gallo Hearty Burgundy, and was not chilled.

Perfect Park Peace Monument

2007-10-24T02:59:00.000+07:00

Dedication of the Perfect Park Peace Monument

By Bob Potter , June 10, 2003

A third of a century ago, our forefathers - and foremothers - and fore-motherfuckers - hippies and yippies; speed freaks and Jesus freaks; Students radicalized by their professors; Professors radicalized by their students; Anarchists, Pacifists and Registered Republicans; Flower Children, Franciscan Friars and pissed-off Football Players; Marxist-Leninists and Proto-Feminists; Surfers, Sorority Sisters and Sexual Revolutionaries; Space Cadets and Vietnam Vets; the Hare Krishna and the Woodstock Nation; Visionaries in all colors and Mindblown lead guitarists of non-existent bands; not to mention winos, transients, alcoholics Anonymous and Otherwise, the Chairman of the Sociology Department and ordinary college students caught up in the pure adrenalin of the moment - All of these people, and indescribable hundreds more, made history with their asses, by sitting down on them here in Perfect Park, in violation of a Police Curfew Order, linking arms to defend their community.

What could have brought so many unlikely people - including more than a few still alive here in this audience - to that outlandish act of defiance? Tonight, exactly 33 years later, it is worth looking back briefly, and as unsentimentally as possible under the circumstances, to remember what a hell of a mess things had gotten into.

To begin with, there was the Vietnam Crisis. By early 1968, with the February Tet Offensive, the American public had begun to wise up to the fact it had been lied to (does that sound familiar?) and that the Vietnam War had become unwinable, though young Americans continued to be drafted and killed in action by the thousands. This quickly brought on a Political Crisis, as President Lyndon B. Johnson was driven from the race in that Presidential Election Year by antiwar activists led by Eugene McCarthy and later Bobby Kennedy - whose assassination after the California primary in June brought chaos and deceit in its wake, a tumultuously rigged Democratic Convention and a bloody police riot in the streets of Chicago. And this coincided with a perilous turning point in the Racial Crisis in America. The non-violent insurgence of the Civil Rights movement to overturn segregation ended in calamity, with the murder of Martin Luther King on April 4,1968, touching off catastrophic urban riots across the country, and calls for Armed Struggle. The backlash from all of this brought the election in November of Richard Nixon as President of the United States.

It was in the long shadow of these events that activism - violent and non-violent - came to the sunny shores of Santa Barbara. Thanks to the EOP program, an early example of Affirmative Action, the previously lily-white UCSB campus was integrated - though the Black students who arrived were unhappy enough with their treatment by campus bureaucracy and local law enforcement that one day they took over North Hall - the campus Computer Center! That every bit of the campus' computing went on in one small building tells you how long ago that was. The peaceful settlement worked out by the UCSB administration, brought the promise of more minority faculty and students, and new Black Studies and Chicano Studies Departments - but triggered a vicious denunciation from Governor Ronald Reagan, who had won his job in the first place by attacking student demonstrators at Berkeley, an ongoing Educational Crisis.

Concurrently an Environmental Crisis had erupted, with the Santa Barbara Oil Spill of January 1968, the single worst ecological disaster of our times, and the opening gun in a war of attrition between developers and environmentalists that continues along this coast to this very day. The oil-soaked dead birds on the beach turned surfers and ordinary beach goers overnight into radical activists.

Meanwhile, thanks to the baby boom, UCSB had doubled its enrollment between 1954 and 58, doubled it again by 1963, and again by 1967. Too busy building classrooms to bother with dormitories, the University solved its problems by steering this avalanche of students into substandard overcrowded apartment houses thrown up overnight by private land speculators and slum landlords, creating a demographic dystopia called Isla Vista, and precipitating a Housing Crisis (well, thereÕs always a Housing Crisis in Isla Vista).

And all of this, let's remember, was unfolding generationally in the throbbing context of the Countercultural Crisis of the 1960's, that sexually-pioneering, musically-energized, chemically-induced metaphysical vision quest and psychedelic light show. Oh, you should have been here!

But if you were, you'll remember the pain and disillusion of it too. Woodstock led on to Altamont. Repression and violence were as American as Apple Pie, as Black militant H. Rap Brown pointed out. There were signs of trouble locally as early as 1969, with the arrest of 7 Black student leaders by the Santa Barbara Sheriffs on the pretext of an eviction notice, bringing student demonstrators out by the thousands. And April of that year brought the first death, when a bomb set off in the Faculty Club killed an innocent custodian, named Dover Sharp - a senseless violent crime still unsolved.

In the fall came news of the firing of a popular (and decidedly countercultural) Anthropology professor. The Bill Allen Crisis, which culminated in massive demonstrations and a petition signed by 7,776 students demanding an open hearing on his personnel case, was at once a carnivalesque assault on academic pomposity and a serious protest against the ivory tower obliviousness of much of the faculty, at a time when the world seemed literally to be coming apart. Bill Allen had the temerity to speak to students about what was on (and in) their minds, and it seemed he had been fired precisely for doing so.

And speaking of injustice, there were nightly TV news clips of the bizarre show trial of the Chicago Seven, with Judge Julius Hoffman railroading criminal Conspiracy charges against antiwar activists who barely knew one another, with Black leader Bobby Seale gagged and bound in the courtroom. At the year's end, as Tom Hayden, one of the defendants, came to speak on campus, a Crisis of Justice was palpable across America. Could we trust our traditional institutions, or were they in the process of failing us, precipitating anarchy and revolution - or maybe fascism?

It was in such incendiary times that Isla Vista burst into flames 33 years ago, putting this most improbable trouble spot on the world map forever after. In the first few months of 1970 there were to be three major civil disorders.

In January came huge campus protests against the firing of Bill Allen, and the calling of Santa Barbara Sheriffs to clear the Administration Building of protestors, with Captain Joel Honey, the loose cannon of the Sheriffs Tactical Squad, leading the charge. As Allen's appeal for an open hearing was turned down, with the arrest of 19 student leaders, matters careened off campus and out of control. On February 26, after a rousing speech by William Kunstler, the lawyer for the Chicago Seven, and the beating of student leader Rich Underwood by police, crowds gathered in the Isla Vista streets and attacked Realty Offices and the Bank of America, seen as the prime local symbol of the Establishment. Later that night, having chased off the police presence, the crowd set a fire in the lobby of the bank and then watched in amazement as the place burned to the ground.

The ashes of the bank were still smoldering the next day as Governor Ronald Reagan arrived in town to vilify the bank burners as "cowardly little bums" and call in the National Guard. The Bank of America took out nationwide full-page advertisements offering a $25,000 reward for the arrest of the arsonists, vowing to rebuild the bank. Reagan's call for a campus crackdown seemed to be heeded shortly afterwards, when Chancellor Vernon Cheadle banned Chicago Seven defendant Jerry Rubin from speaking on campus, saying it would "seriously threaten the welfare of the University." Unappeased, Reagan made a speech to a Growers Convention on April 7, in which he made the following infamous statement about campus disorders: "If it's to be a bloodbath, let it be now."

It seemed he didn't have long to wait. On April 16, after a campus speech by Berkeley radical Stu Albert calling on students to "rip off the pigs," there was an angry rally in Perfect Park, then a vacant lot at the end of the Embarcadero loop that had become an informal community gathering place. As night fell the new temporary bank was attacked, as were realty offices; other students - protesting the violenceÑ defended the bank and extinguished fires. The police waded into the middle of this melee, firing tear gas and birdshot into the crowd indiscriminately, from dump trucks specially outfitted for the occasion - an action that was dubbed "Operation Wagontrain". The next night the violence (and the resistance against it) resumed - with tragic consequences. As police arrived in riot gear, amid reports of sniper fire, anti violence students were attempting to defend the temporary bank from assault. One of them, Kevin Moran, was shot and killed.

KCSB the campus radio station was covering these events live, with reporters in the field, as they had previous demonstrations. Fearing that the reports were giving away police tactics and deployments, Sheriff James Webster demanded that the University authorities close down the station - an order with which Vice Chancellor Steven Goodspeed complied. So it was that the only recorded silencing of a radio station by government order in American history took place, right over there on the UCSB campus. The death of Moran was attributed to snipers, and a dawn-to-dusk curfew was imposed, with heavy police patrols and reports of beatings and apartments broken into. On April 20, as Governor Reagan made a speech blaming Moran's killing on those who "take the law into their own hands," it was revealed that a Santa Barbara policeman had admitted that his rifle had "accidentally" discharged at the time of Moran's shooting. In a subsequent Coroner's inquest, held with little public scrutiny, the shooting of Kevin Moran would be ruled to be accidental, and the policeman, Officer David Gosselin, exonerated and returned to duty.

Less than two weeks later President Nixon astonished the world, escalating the Vietnam War by invading Cambodia. The resulting firestorm of protest spread from coast to coast. At Kent State, Ohio National Guard troops fired into a crowd of protesting students, killing 4 of them. UCSB students occupied and closed the Santa Barbara airport, and surged onto the 101 Freeway, blocking it for many hours. As Universities across the country began to close down, the UCSB faculty was energized at last, moving quickly and effectively to keep our community together, by offering special "national crisis" courses focusing on the circumstances of the times.

It seemed that the school year might end quietly, but events intervened once again. On June 3 news leaked out that 17 people - student leaders and activists, the "usual" suspects Ñ had secretly been indicted, accused of burning down the Bank of America. One of those indicted had in fact been in jail the night of the bank burning. The resulting outrage led to further street and campus demonstrations, including attempts to torch the temporary bank. With disorder in Isla Vista once again, State officials, apparently acting on instructions from Governor Reagan's office, ordered the Los Angeles County Sheriffs to dispatch their Special Enforcement Branch to restore order. Instead, this notoriously violent paramilitary outfit, which had cracked heads in many urban riots, brought a reign of terror into Isla Vista. On June 8 and 9, enforcing a dusk-to-dawn curfew, the LA Sheriffs, accompanied by local law enforcement units, kicked down doors, dragged Isla Vistans from their houses, beat them bloody with their nightsticks, sexually harassed and intimidated, destroyed vehicles and personal property, sprayed mace and threw tear gas canisters into private yards and dwellings, threatening to shoot to kill.

At this very dark moment came Isla Vista's finest hour. With their streets under siege the next day, June 10, a group of faculty, student and community leaders met in the Methodist to seek a collective strategy. They decided to organize a sit-in in Perfect Park that night, to protest the police repression. By the time of the 7:30 curfew a quiet and determined crowd of some 700 had gathered, including UCSB faculty and staff and students of all social and political persuasions. When the police began arresting them for curfew violations, they reacted with calm, non-violent acceptance in the tradition of Gandhi and Martin Luther King. At 9:20, with nearly 300 arrested, police ordered the remaining crowd to disperse. When no one moved, the police sprayed pepper gas from a machine directly into the crowd. Then, as the Santa Barbara News-Press described it the next day, "gas-masked deputies swarmed into the crowd, flailing their nightsticks in all directions." Those arrested were hauled away to the still-unfinished New County Jail where many were subjected to further beatings, denied bail, abused, stripped naked, sprayed with mace and thrown into solitary confinement.

But a crucial moral point had been made. Judge Joseph Lodge ordered charges dismissed against all those arrested and, faced with an ultimatum from University officials, Governor Reagan agreed to end the curfew and withdraw the L.A. Sheriffs. Peace returned to the streets of Isla Vista. The promised bloodbath had been averted, and the task of creating new institutions for the Isla Vista community had begun.

In the aftermath of the 1970 riots, a whole array of community institutions came into being in Isla Vista. The IV Recreation and Park District would go on to become a dynamic force in the establishment of parks and other public venues for the first time, along with the dream of cityhood (with or without Goleta). The University began to provide funds, and pay belated if sporadic attention to its unruly stepchild; one tangible result was the IV Foot Patrol, putting officers into direct daily contact with the community. Also established were the IV Credit Union, the IV Medical Clinic (bringing the inimitable Dr. Dave Bearman to town), the Isla Vista Youth Projects, and the IV Food Co-op which remain vital and highly-value institutions to this day. In short a true community was born, out of the courage and solidarity of the Perfect Park sit-in.

It was in an effort to commemorate that event, and in a larger sense the spirit of peaceful protest that is the most important legacy of the Vietnam era, that some visionaries set out in the early 1990's to create a Monument in Perfect Park. They had to begin by saving the Park itself!

Perfect Park had been purchased in the 1970's by a Santa Monica doctor who wanted to build a Safeway Supermarket. Only the long Goleta Water moratorium prevented him from doing so. In 1992 - eleven years ago! - Isla Vista voters approved a referendum saving Perfect Park from the developers, and two years later the Park District bought the property. Carmen Lodise, the historian and unofficial Alcalde of Isla Vista, was probably the first to propose building a monument to the anti-war movement on the site. That Carmen was proposing it guaranteed that certain other people would oppose it - and so indeed they did. Critics denounced the whole idea as an attempt to glorify bank-burners and bomb-throwers, waste taxpayers' money and enrich unspecified cronies.

In 1995 - eight years ago! -the IV Park District decided to appoint a committee to study the issue, including both proponents and opponents. Against my better judgment (I had, after all, co-authored a book on the IV Riots) I applied to join it. Despite our disagreements we held some useful public forums and learned that the IV community generally liked the idea. Most thought it should be a positive symbol for Peace, to unite rather than divide the community.

When the committee was reconstituted in 1996 we adopted a mission statement that made clear our commitment to honoring peaceful protest. We further decided that the monument should be built with private donations rather than public funds - a noble idea, though easier said than done. And as for what the thing should look like, there were dozens of conflicting strong opinions. A consultation with the County Art Commission yielded the bright idea of a national design competition, which of course we couldnÕt afford to finance. Here the amazing people at the Fund For Santa Barbara came to our rescue in 1997, funding a $3,800 grant, which enabled us to reach artists all over the country.

To vet the entries we appointed a Selection Committee of arts professionals and community representatives (including John Muir, a combat veteran of the Vietnam war, who is here today). In June 1998 - five years ago! - the committee picked 6 finalists, who were given $500 grants to build models of their proposed monument designs. The following year, as fund raising began with a goal of $20,000, we held three public exhibitions of the models, on campus and in IV, gathering input and reactions to the designs; Santa Barbara artist Colin Gray's design for a cluster of arches proved to be the public favorite. In May 1999 - four years ago! - our committee voted to recommend Colin's design be built, and the IV Park District Board accepted the recommendation, authorizing the monument to be built on Park District land here in Perfect Park. Now all we had to do was raise $20,000.

Thanks to a flock of small donations, and a few large ones (thank you, Michael Douglas, and Richard and Tekla Sanford, for your $1,000 checks!) plus two generous grants of $2,500 from the IV Community Relations Council of the UCSB Associated Students, we had by June of 2001 - two years ago! - raised some $13,000.

They say that everything changed after September 11, 2001. That was indeed the case with our project. Suddenly, with the war in Afghanistan, a Peace Monument began to seem like a timely idea, rather than an exercise in nostalgia. People who had written us off as a bunch of aging hippies began to understand what we were up to, and pay attention. In January Congresswoman Lois Capps lent her name and support to our effort, speaking at a campus gathering where ColinÕs model was displayed, with television coverage from KEYT. In May 2002 -just a year ago! - filmmaker and film critic Peter Biskind came to town to show his infamous documentary Don't Bank on Amerika and help us raise over $2,000, and someone found a stash of old Burning Bank Check Posters and donated them to the cause.

As the Bush administration began its push toward war with Iraq, our small Peace project rode the wave of public outrage and protest as the Peace movement came alive all across the globe. Daniel Ellsberg came to town and joined our honorary board of advisors, which by then included Dick Flacks, David Krieger, Tom Hayden, Marc McGinnis, David Smith and Terence Hallinan In February of this year, as the war clouds gathered, the L.A. Times ran a prominent feature story on our project.

That same week, - less than four months ago! - still $9,000 shy of our new goal of $25.000, I picked up the telephone to find that I was speaking with someone who wanted the Perfect Park Peace Monument to be built - and had the courage and the money to make it happen. Thanks to that visionary donor - who has insisted on remaining anonymous! - we received an astonishing pledge of $9,000 and broke ground in April.

So thanks to all the hundreds of people who made this possible - Diane Conn, Dave Bearman and Carmen Lodise still on the committee, and all the others who served time on it, including Mitch Stockton, Karl Brunner, Brent Foster, Dave Fortson, Leila Salazar, Ariana Katovich and untold others. And let's not forget someone whose reckless and disastrous actions put our initiative back on page one, and turned the Peace movement from a distant memory to an international necessity - President George W. Bush!

But finally our thanks must go to the people who, 33 years ago tonight, made a commitment to non-violence and kept it so memorably, who took a beating unflinchingly, looked repression in the face, and pepper gas in the eye - the people who made this ground historic when they put their asses on the line.

Joe Melchione Photography

2007-10-23T01:02:00.000+07:00

Joe Melchione is still doing photography and has a fine set of classic riots-era photographs online and, I think, available for purchase.

Che - 40 Years Later

2007-10-14T01:45:00.000+07:00

Che Guevara was a hero to many of us at UCSB and in Isla Vista in the late 1960s and early 1970s. For me, he remains one to this day.

"The Martyring of Che Guevara,
By Robert Scheer, October 9, 2007 at TruthDig

The 40th anniversary of the death of Che Guevara elicited considerable media
attention, mostly about his iconic image captured on T-shirts throughout the
world. There were the standard snarky asides that many young people wearing
those T-shirts have scant notion of who Che was, but the journalists
reporting the story seemed equally ignorant. Little was reported about Che’s
life and what led him to shun the comforts of a physician’s lifestyle in
Argentina to fight as a revolutionary in the rugged terrains of Cuba, the
Congo and, finally, Bolivia—or why someone who claimed to be obsessed with
helping the world’s poor was executed, gangland style, on the order of a CIA
agent.

One exception was the BBC, which bothered to send a reporter to Florida to
interview Felix Rodriguez, the Cuban-born CIA agent who was part of a team
of CIA operatives and Bolivian soldiers who captured Che. “Mr. Rodriguez
ordered the soldier who pulled the trigger to aim carefully, to remain
consistent with the Bolivian government’s story that Che had been killed in
action in a clash with the Bolivian army,” said the BBC report. Che’s hands
were then cut off and put in formaldehyde to preserve his fingerprints.

In his interview with the BBC, Rodriguez claimed that the order to kill Che
came from the Bolivian government, and that he went along: “I could have
tried to falsify the command to the troops, and got Che to Panama as the
U.S. government said they wanted,” he recalled, but he didn’t. Clearly, the
U.S. government was not unhappy with Rodriguez’s role in the bloody affair,
for he went on, as he boasts, to train the Nicaraguan Contras and advise the
repressive Argentine military government in the 1980s. He showed the BBC
reporter his CIA medal for exceptional service along with a picture of him
with the first President Bush in the White House. George H.W. Bush, it
should be remembered, had been the head of the CIA during some of the years
that Rodriguez worked there and was not put off by the man’s past deeds,
including his part in Che’s assassination.

So, what’s the big deal? Che was a Cuban Communist, and it’s a good thing
that folks like Bush and Rodriguez were able to defeat him before he spread
his evil message further—right? False, on every count.

First off, he was either an Argentine Trotskyite or an anarchist, but Che
was not a Communist in what we think of as the heavily entrenched,
bureaucratized Cuban mold. Che was restless in post-revolutionary Cuba
because his anarchist temperament caused him to bristle at the emerging
bureaucracy. He was, like Trotsky in his dispute with Stalin, skeptical that
the kind of socialism that truly served the poor could survive in just one
country; hence, he died attempting to internationalize the struggle.

It also turned out that killing Che was a big mistake, as his message was
spread more effectively by his execution than by his guerrilla activities,
which were, after he left Cuba, quite pathetic. This is the case in Latin
America, where political leaders he helped inspire are faring better than
those coddled by the CIA. Daniel Ortega, whom the CIA worked so doggedly to
overthrow, is the elected president of Nicaragua. Almost all of Latin
America’s leaders are leftists, some more moderate than Che (as in Brazil),
and others as fiery as the guerrilla (in Venezuela), but all determinedly
independent of yanqui control. Fortunately, they differ from Che in
preferring the ballot to the gun. But all recognize that poverty remains the
region’s No. 1 problem and that the free-market model imposed by the United
States hardly contains all the answers. Recall that the U.S. break with the
Cuban revolution came before Castro’s turn toward the Soviets, and that it
was over his nationalization of American-owned business assets in Cuba
ranging from Mafia-run casinos to the electric power grid.

These days, few politicians in the United States even seem to care about the
subversive Cuban influences in our own backyard that once haunted them. The
embargo on Cuba remains to mollify Florida’s aging Cuban community, but
what’s important to Washington today is Mideast oil, not protecting the
peasants of Bolivia from the likes of Che Guevara.

On Monday, Che’s death was marked, in the Bolivian village where he was
killed, by Bolivian President Evo Morales, who proclaimed his movement “100
percent Guevarist and socialist,” which hardly registers as a propaganda
success story for those favoring CIA assassinations. They turned a
failed—and flawed—guerrilla fighter into an enduring symbol of resistance to
oppression.

----------------------------------

A good site for links to stuff about Che:
Che: Selected Writings

Chant 1447

2007-09-15T01:54:00.000+07:00

Surprise, surprise...

[ Excerpt of "I.V. May Add 1,447 Housing Units - Density, Dude," SB INDEPENDENT, September 6, 2007, By Chris Meagher ]

With the passage of the Isla Vista Master Plan last week, Santa Barbara County officials believe they have met the state’s housing mandate and have sent a letter to the state’s Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) asking for final certification. As a result of rezoning included in the plan, 1,447 additional housing units can be built in the already densely populated Isla Vista area. Of those units, 1,415 can be “built at densities ranging from 25-45 dwelling units per acre” — a density rate consistent with state guidelines for lower-income housing in the county. The 1,415 units will sit on 259 acres of recently rezoned land in Isla Vista.

County planners knew the completion of the plan would help make up for the county’s overall shortfall of available affordable units, but wouldn’t speculate on how big the effect would be until the Board of Supervisors okayed the Master Plan. Up until that point, the county had a reported shortfall of 1,235 units out of a designated 6,064 units it had to zone for by December.

The state housing mandate doesn’t call on counties to build homes, but rather requires them to prepare for housing through policy decisions and incentive packages for builders. HCD crafts a Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA) for agencies such as the Santa Barbara County Association of Governments (SBCAG), which then divvies up that number as requirements for each city and county. David Matson, the county deputy director of long-range planning, said the primary consideration in placing housing units is providing a balance between housing and available jobs. The South Coast received 38 percent of the RHNA-zoned units in the county. Another 30 percent went to the Santa Maria area — primarily Orcutt — while Santa Ynez received 13 percent, Lompoc 14 percent, and Cuyama five percent. Because the greatest job generation in the county comes from the South Coast, Isla Vista was an appropriate place for the units, Matson said.

Meanwhile, some groups have stepped up against the choice to make I.V. housing even denser. Chris Henson, director of the Coastal Housing Coalition, called the move by the county “shortsighted,” opining that the housing units should be geared to an entire county community and not just I.V.’s student population. Henson pointed to a section of the county’s Housing Element which states that the “county shall ensure adequate sites zoned at densities that accommodate the county’s ‘fair share’ housing needs for the current planning period at all income levels and in all Housing Market Areas.”

When asked if the county was just putting the units in Isla Vista to get through this round of housing mandates, Supervisor Brooks Firestone — whose 3rd District includes Isla Vista — said that various options had been studied and that the option adopted was ideal. “The county ultimately must do what the state requires us to do,” he said. First District Supervisor Salud Carbajal said that while the housing crisis is by no means solved with this move, rezoning Isla Vista allows the county to move on and address the next cycle of mandates from the state. The county didn’t go about the last cycle in the most productive way, Carbajal said, but is working to improve this time around.

SBCAG is already working on the next cycle of mandates... As it sits now, the county will be forced to accommodate 13,312 new housing units between 2008 and 2014 as part of the RHNA program. SBCAG officials are attempting to negotiate with the state, saying a cookie-cutter mandate doesn’t work in Santa Barbara. “Housing Elements are a sham throughout the state of California,” Carbajal said. “The state is not providing the tools —

the creativity and the flexibility — to meet our mandates. It’s a bogus process that polarizes our community.”

Bob Goodwin, R.I.P.

2007-08-17T23:57:00.000+07:00

Following the burning of the Bank of America in 1970 and the beginning of the community building period of Isla Vista's history, the area battles shifted to controlled growth in the wider Goleta Valley via a "water moratorium" enforced by the Goleta Water District. A major fighter in those battles was Robert Goodwin.

The following is excerpted from "Bob Goodwin’s Good Fight," by Barney Brantingham, SB INDEPENDENT, Augutst 16, 2007]

Water Warrior: Attorney Bob Goodwin received countless threats while defending the Goleta Water District hookup moratorium back in the 1970s and ’80s. Goodwin, who died last week at 64 in Livermore, was one of the main targets of the infuriated development interests who’d been busy trying to pave every inch of Goleta.

Under the good old boys previously running the board, the district was approving every project that came along, sucking up more precious water than could be replenished by nature. Over-drafting the ground water basin meant that, like it or not, at some point Goletans would have no choice but be forced to hook up to expensive state water, which in turn would produce even further growth.

According to Ed Maschke, former water board member, not only was Goodwin threatened, but he himself received threats from anonymous callers while at home with his children. “We will come and get you,” voices at the other end of the line said.

Donna Hone, also a former board member, recalled anonymous phone threats and being severely frightened at a forum when a developer fulminated, stirring up a crowd of burly construction workers with ugly accusations. “It was a scary business,” she recalled. “Passions ran high” in those turbulent days. “We were idealistic and the other side was looking out for its pocketbooks,” including the banking interests, Hone said.

... Until [1971]... few attended board meetings and directors were reappointed without challenge at the polls...

Through the 25 years the moratorium lasted, “Bob was a hero,” Bill Wallace, former Water District board member and county supervisor told me.

In the early 1970s, residents began rebelling against runaway development in Goleta, then known as the fastest growing unincorporated community in California. Young homeowners who had moved in as tract houses replaced lemon orchards were appalled by the unrestrained growth and lack of planning. The pro-growth Board of Supervisors just shrugged.

“People just woke up,” Wallace told me. “People said (the rate of development) was just too much.” So a group of young professionals — Llana Sherman, a teacher at La Patera School, and Raul Martinez and John McCord, engineers at one of the new research plants springing up — formed a slate that unseated the old Water Board majority.

All that Goodwin and the homeowners swept into district office in 1971 wanted was to enact a moratorium on new hookups until voters approved new sources. It was democracy in action.

“Bob Goodwin was a real superstar,” one former district official recalled. “I remember your comment about Bob being the Billy Martin of water law.” As the board majority shifted, Goodwin was bounced at least twice from his post as attorney for the district. (Billy Martin served as manager of the Yankees five different times.)

The hookup battle led to into a fight over who had the rights to underground water: owners of the land above or the public agency serving the community at large. “It was a classic struggle between private greed and public need,” Maschke said.

“He was a brilliant water attorney,” Hone said. “He tried to change California water law.” Goodwin argued that the public had the right to subsurface water, and he lost only when the case reached the state Supreme Court, Hone said. But the district still gained invaluable water rights.

“He was a genius,” Wallace added. “He really never would give an inch” in his battles with batteries of attorneys. “He would face eight or nine attorneys,” Maschke said. “Without him, we never would have kept the moratorium. It slowed the madness that transformed Goleta into another concrete bedroom community. He was the best and the brightest.”

Goleta also shook up the California water establishment with the then-revolutionary belief that “if you don’t have the water, you can’t build,” Maschke said. Now state regulations require that proposed developments must show that they have a proven water source. But back then, Goleta became a pariah among many in the state water industry, which traditionally served by and large as a pawn for developers, extending service out to new developments, then handing taxpayers the bill.

Early on, Goodwin and the new board also faced hostility from top district staff, who resented their philosophy and just wanted to keep over-drafting. They didn’t like me, either.

Rest well, Bob Goodwin, valiant warrior and good friend...

-------------------------------

[Barney wrote some more in Bob's official obit]:

Robert Goodwin, a key figure in the Goleta water wars and a leader in the homeowner activist movement of the 1970s, is dead.

Goodwin, who died this week in Livermore, served as attorney for the Goleta Water District after a slate of young Goletans unseated board members they accused of bringing the fast-growing community to the brink of a water crisis. The newly elected board then imposed a moratorium of new hookups on grounds that supplies were insufficient to serve added demands unless voters approved new sources.

The water board election, paired with Goleta homeowner attorney Jim Slater being elected to the then-pro-growth county Board of Supervisors, sparked an electrifying ferment among young families that had swelled the Goleta population. A group of well-educated Goletans rose up against what they felt was out-of-control growth, lack of proper planning, and a water district policy of officially promising to serve new developments despite a looming water deficit.

But tumultuous political tides led to fierce disputes as the homeowners won and lost their water board majorities and pro-growth factions regained power. Goodwin, a water law specialist, was ousted as board attorney.

He moved to Livermore around 20 years ago and continued in private practice...

Goodwin graduated from the University of San Francisco in 1964 and its school of law in 1967. He has served as president of the Livermore Chamber of Commerce, president of the ValleyCare Hospital Foundation, director of the Livermore Rotary Club, director of the Eastern Alameda County Bar Association, and Tri-Valley Estate Planning Council.

"Family Jewels" Declassified

2007-06-22T22:54:00.000+07:00

Washington D.C., June 21, 2007 - The Central Intelligence Agency violated its charter for 25 years until revelations of illegal wiretapping, domestic surveillance, assassination plots, and human experimentation led to official investigations and reforms in the 1970s, according to declassified documents posted today on the Web by the National Security Archive at George Washington University.

CIA director Gen. Michael Hayden announced today that the Agency is declassifying the full 693-page file amassed on CIA's illegal activities by order of then-CIA director James Schlesinger in 1973--the so-called "family jewels." Only a few dozen heavily-censored pages of this file have previously been declassified, although multiple Freedom of Information Act requests have been filed over the years for the documents. Gen. Hayden called the file "a glimpse of a very different time and a very different Agency." The papers are scheduled for public release on Monday, June 25...

For more info, visit:
National Security Archives

NPR: Family Jewels

IVMP Approved by SBCPC

2007-05-26T05:12:00.000+07:00

[ Excerpt from: "SB Officials Approve I.V. Master Plan," by Matthew Weisner, DAILY NEXUS, May 24, 2007 ]

The Santa Barbara County Planning Commission authorized the Isla Vista Master Plan yesterday morning, leaving it only months away from the desk of the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors... the Planning Commission voted to recommend the Board of Supervisors approve the IVMP...

The Isla Vista Project Area Committee, a group of 13 individuals that includes local residents, students and business owners, took six years to devise the plan. The finalized IVMP attempts to reach a compromise between residents who wish to see a more upscale I.V. and those who are concerned about overdevelopment impacts such as environmental damage and increased traffic...

[Deputy Director of the Santa Barbara County Redevelopment Agency Jamie] Goldstein said the planning commission was confident in the plan and he projected that it will go to the Board of Supervisors as early as this August. Goldstein also said in a recent interview that the El Embarcadero and Pardall Road revamping projects would likely begin by summer 2008.

--------------------

For full text of this article, please go to:

DN: IVMP Approved by SBCPC

--------------------

Additional coverage at:

SBI: IVMP Go-Ahead

(Jamie Goldstein image courtesy of Paul Wellman and SBI)

Sympathy for The Plan

2007-05-26T04:56:00.000+07:00

[ Excerpt from: "A Not-so-Simple Plan," y Matthew Weisner, DAILY NEXUS, May 23, 2007
]

... Isla Vista is nearing a period of unparalleled growth and development that promises to change the face of this beachside community for years to come... the creation and implementation of the 736-page-long Isla Vista Master Plan will encourage an entirely new change. It changes zoning codes, gives I.V. a downtown facelift and updates parks and roadways throughout I.V. to streamline transportation.

... if it is approved, the project... could result in new two- to three-story buildings in I.V. as well as a refurbished soccer field and a new skate park.

One of the most prominent ideas in the IVMP is a publicly funded facelift for the “downtown” I.V. area. This plan would connect Pardall Road to Anisq’ Oyo’ Park with a passageway known as a “paseo,” which acts as a walkway for pedestrians. This facelift would establish Anisq’ Oyo’ as both a central point and corridor between apartments and marketplaces in I.V. The plan provides Pardall with widened sidewalks and bike lanes to encourage pedestrian access and safe bicycling.

The IVMP also aims to revamp the faade of the properties on Pardall Road, transforming its current stores into multiple story “mixed use” buildings, with retail stores on the first floors and housing above. In addition, the IVMP outlines the creation of similar “mixed use” buildings along the Embarcadero loop.

The creation of these structures will require changes to current zoning laws, and despite resistance from some residents who are wary of allowing such sizable construction in I.V., planners believe the zoning changes are an integral part of the IVMP.

Deputy Director of the Santa Barbara County Redevelopment Agency Jamie Goldstein, who has presided over several Master Plan meetings, said the changes would make downtown more accessible and help make Anisq’ Oyo’ Park a social center of Isla Vista.

“Narrowing Pardall to cars and making it more bicycle and pedestrian friendly will make that area a cool spot to come shop and hang out,” Goldstein said. “It will give businesses more sides, and make going downtown easier for everyone.”

Lou Ventura, a seat holder on the Isla Vista Project Area Committee - the committee charged with creating the IVMP - and owner of property management company Ventura Enterprises, said the challenge would be convincing property owners to pull the trigger on remodels and redevelopments...

Imagining the journey from the 6700 block of Sabado Tarde Road to Freebirds without having to walk in the middle of the street is difficult to comprehend for most Isla Vistans. However, the IVPAC claims the IVMP will improve pedestrian safety throughout I.V. with the construction of new sidewalks in areas such as Camino Pescadero, Sueno and Sabado Tarde Roads.

Meanwhile, in an attempt to resolve the overcrowded intersections of Pardall Road and the two halves of the Embarcadero Loop, the Plan seeks to add large roundabouts. The planners hope the roundabouts will ease traffic conflicts between bicycles and cars.

Currently, the preferred plan for improving traffic flow on El Colegio Road involves roundabouts at all major intersections, and improved sidewalks and bus stops all along the road. Goldstein said one of the possible solutions involves a consolidation of bus routes that would allow for more frequent public transit through I.V.

New zoning laws would allow more than a thousand additional units to the I.V. community - including low- and moderate-income housing in accordance with California State law and the Santa Barbara County’s Inclusionary Housing Program.

According to the law, new I.V. developments of five or more units must allocate at least 25 percent of the total units to affordable housing. Technically speaking, a unit that allows the tenant to spend less than 30 percent of their total income on housing is considered affordable, Goldstein said.

“The plan makes it easier for the private sector to come build and develop,” Goldstein said. “It should result in more affordable housing and increased property tax revenue that can be used only in I.V.”

However, Associated Students External Vice President of Local Affairs Joel Rodriguez-Flores, who currently holds a seat on the IVPAC, said the effects are uncertain.

“I think it will have a mixed impact,” he said. “It will make it possible for more development of affordable housing and also increased revenues for Isla Vista, but it could also increase property values because of the renovations.”

According to the IVMP outline, the Master Plan seeks to “incorporate an appropriate amount of affordable housing within the community. Housing opportunities would be provided for families, students, university faculty and staff and area workers within Isla Vista.”

In addition, the County Redevelopment Agency will see increased revenues - currently about $2 million per year - with which they will fund the public projects outlined in the plan.

The changes introduced by the plan could lead to between 800 and 1400 new units throughout I.V., according to Kris Miller-Fisher, executive staff assistant to 3rd District Supervisor Brooks Firestone.

“There hasn’t been the financial impetus for developers to build this much in the past,” Fisher said. “That could change with the passage of the Master Plan.”

Although the IVPAC had their plan for a parking permit program shot down earlier this year, the IVMP seeks to alleviate the severe lack of parking through a multifaceted approach.

First, the plan would install metered parking and minimize the number of red curbs along Pardall Road. Additional spaces could be obtained by negotiating for shared use of surplus spaces, particularly from private lots that planners believe are under-utilized. The combination of these efforts would add anywhere from 200 to 300 spaces to the greater downtown area.

Goldstein said the county hopes to eventually construct a parking structure to serve the downtown I.V. area. An underground parking lot is also being considered, depending on what space is available.

“The parking agency is in negotiation with land owners about a possible purchase for underground parking in I.V.” Goldstein said. “But it’s just too early to know where or how large scale it would be.”

In addition to the extra parking spaces, the IVMP could create a new community center, tentatively located at Estero Park, so long as the plan’s Environmental Impact Report - a document that details the possible environmental hazards associated with construction - is approved

This community center would include a nearby skate park, new basketball courts and a soccer field. The Isla Vista Recreation and Park District, a five-member board which assists in developmental oversight, will fund construction of the new playing field in part with a $1 million grant it received from the State of California for new athletic fields.

IVRPD General Manager Dale Sumersille said soccer fields would be constructed first and the basketball courts and skate park would follow. In the meantime, IVRPD and active community members would attempt to accommodate the athletic facilities, the community gardens and the community center all within the confines of Estero Park.

Although Goldstein predicts sending the IVMP to the County Board of Supervisors for approval as early as this summer, the plan must also be approved by the California Coastal Commission, which will determine whether the environmental impact of the plan is acceptable - a process that could take up to 18 months.

IVRPD Vice-Chairman and PAC seat holder Ken Warfield said he was confident that the plan was environmentally conscious, but unsure of CCC’s future decision.

“You never know with the Coastal Commission because they think we have a single constituency,” Warfield said, referring to the greater UCSB community. “It depends on what UCSB’s development plan is.”

IVRPD member Diane Conn said the environmental impacts of the IVMP projects would increase the challenges I.V. currently faces.

“The plan proposes to increase the density of I.V. 20 percent, so you have all the same problems we do now up 20 percent,” Conn said. “There will be impacts to noise, parking, social and police services.”

While some individuals disagree with the Isla Vista Master Plan, all can agree that a monumental amount of time has been spent on it. Goldstein and board members have held more than 50 meetings about the plan and have spent countless hours planning and debating the future of I.V.

The process of creating the IVMP began in 2000...

--------------------

For full text of this article, along with images of what is envisioned, please go to:

DN: Not So Simple Plan

IVMP Hearing 5/23/2007

2007-05-22T05:06:00.000+07:00

The hearing before the Planning Commission, on the Isla Vista Master Plan, is this Wednesday:

wed. may 23, 2007, 9:00 A.M.
PLANNING COMMISSION
105 E. ANAPAMU ST.
SANTA BARBARA, CA.
(anapamu and anacapa) near state street

Here's some email from Jeffrey Beltway about it:

------------------

Date: Sun, 20 May 2007 17:02:17 -0700 (PDT)
From: jeffrey beltway
Subject: isla vista,and ucsb the battle for the california coast
To: firewallsfortheenvironment@yahoo.com

the isla vista and ucsb master plans.

the destruction of hundreds of trees,including the EUCALYPTUS CURTAIN,which was planted in the 1800's, which now have numbered metal discs hammered into them and white paint on some of them, yes these mighty living beings that stretch from harder stadium to the sea, sycamore, redwoods, so many other types of trees could be totally destroyed!

23 parks some that could be turned into parking lots. one proposed parking lot on the site of a former gas station, still leaking. BIRDS AND DUCKS etc. including, the gnatcatcher, blue herring,mallards,coonts,blue jays,blackbirds etc. etc. and fish and turtles,wildlife of all kinds, native habitat etc. The release of asbestos,and lead through the contruction of 3,400,000 square feet of condos and townehouses creating more CEDARWOODS (the eviction of 52 families with no cause) the most posted sign in isla vista is roomates wanted!

Air, water,traffic,congestion, density etc. An increase of 5,000 students (to a new total of 25,000).emission city. They want to turn isla vista into westwood (ucla) los angeles.

We believe if the EUCALYPTUS CURTAIN falls then the border of isla vista and ucsb will be lost, and that there will be no difference, it will all be ucsb. for the curtain has always been the border, because these beautiful eucalyptus trees were planted before isla vista and ucsb ever existed!!!! They are a great wind break and reduce utility bills, and retard the deadliest animal in the world----the mosquito.

Help us save them please!! Therefore if isla vista falls to the redevelopment agencys and ucsb's plan then isla vista is the domino that will fall and after that goleta,the goleta valley, naples, gaviota coast, jalama etc. until the
california coast becomes san angeles or santa francisco. Let us join the united nations 100% vote in declaring global warming a fact,and that is destroying the world. let us stop global warming here in isla vista and santa barbara county and tell the developers NO to
their cancerous overdevelopment.

wed. may 23, 2007, 9:00 A.M.
PLANNING COMMISSION
105 E. ANAPAMU ST.
SANTA BARBARA, CA.
(anapamu and anacapa) near state street

time is running out!!!!!!

Joyce Elaine Roop

2007-04-15T10:44:00.000+07:00

Friends of Joyce ~ Wikipedia has an entry for Joyce Roop:

Joyce Elaine Roop

1969 Faculty Club Bombing

2007-04-12T00:04:00.000+07:00

The 1969 UCSB Faculty Club bombing that resulted in the death of caretaker Dover Sharp is once again officially being being looked into. Full story at the DAILY NEXUS:

( Image courtesy of the DAILY NEXUS )

[ Following is excerpted from "Police To Resume Investigation of ‘69 Campus Bombing
Letter from Former UCSB Grad Student Spurs Police to Revisit Unsolved Homicide"
By Jessica Mullen / Staff Writer, DAILY NEXUS, April 11, 2007, Issue 100, Volume 87 ]

Before the riots, before the massive protests, before the burning of the Bank of America, an explosion rocked the campus community and took the life of one of its members.

Today marks the 38th anniversary of the UCSB Faculty Club bombing that claimed the life of resident custodian Dover O. Sharp and caused over $1,000 in damage. Since 1969, the case has lain dormant; however, a letter received by the Daily Nexus last Thursday offers new developments and potential leads. UCPD is currently looking into the content of the letter and is attempting to contact the author...

Former UCSB philosophy graduate student Steve Ander is the supposed author of the letter that was postmarked from a town in Switzerland and originally written on Feb. 23. He claims to have witnessed the bombing, and described two or three nameless and sturdily built Caucasians as having been responsible for the homicide.

“I saw the men who I think did it. There were two or three of them, tall, solidly built. That’s all I recall of them. Caucasian,” Ander said in the letter.

In the note, which was scribbled on pink graph paper, Ander expressed remorse for not having come forward earlier. The letter’s focus often strays from the topic of the bombing; at one point, Ander reminisces about his rented hillside trailer and his landlord.

However, later in the document, Ander asserts that the three individuals responsible for the bombing visited him at his trailer and posed questions regarding the condition of the custodian.

“I was at my trailer and saw the two or three men I spoke of walking down the road,” Ander wrote. “They asked me of the caretaker - I do not recall if they asked of him by name - [and] went down the road. I followed them. Naively, I took them as bill collectors.”

Three UCPD officers were on hand to receive the document from a Daily Nexus reporter Monday, but would not handle the document without the use of gloves. Among them was UCPD Public Information Officer Matt Bowman. He said that regardless of the credibility of the document, all evidence must be initially presumed to be legitimate in order to ensure safety.

“We must take all matters seriously until determined otherwise,” Bowman said. “We treat all things as equally serious.”

When the bombing occurred, authorities were unable to arrest any suspect or group, and the case has since remained an open homicide...

The explosive used in the bombing was described by law enforcement in El Gaucho [ predecessor to the Daily Nexus] as a sophisticated device consisting of a timer connected to a wine jug filled with a volatile liquid, and a 6-inch piece of pipe packed with an explosive compound. The blast threw Sharp about 20 feet. He died at the Goleta Valley Cottage Hospital three days later.

Sharp, 55, had two children but was separated from his wife and lived at the Faculty Club, serving as the caretaker. The victim’s coworkers described him favorably, characterizing him as dependable but reserved...

According to Bowman, the recently received letter gives law enforcement an opportunity to revisit the unsolved case and determine if any new progress can be made in bringing the perpetrators to justice.

“I am happy to say that this letter provided was new information to us, and now we can go back to where the investigation was concluded and see if this evidence sheds new light on a new lead,” Bowman said.

Bowman said the crime committed 38 years ago would still be tried in court if law enforcement officials are able to locate the person or persons involved.

“Even though this case is from 1969, it is an open homicide and we would still seek prosecution through the legal system,” Bowman said.

1971 Indictments

2007-04-03T02:52:00.000+07:00

[ March 29, 2007 Excerpt from the SB INDEPENDENT of "Firing a Federal Prosecutor - The Isla Vista Connection" by Bob Potter, coauthor of "The Campus by the Sea Where the Bank Burned Down," an official account of the 1970 riots in Isla Vista. ]

When Attorney General Alberto Gonzales admitted “mistakes were made” in the firing of eight federal prosecutors, his choice of phrase had an oddly Nixonian ring to it. And with good reason. White House meddling in Justice Department affairs for political reasons was an all-too-familiar story during the Nixon years. One particularly flagrant case comes to mind... And interestingly enough, the triggering events occurred in Isla Vista.

Robert L. Meyer was appointed U.S. Attorney for Los Angeles by President Nixon in May 1970. An active Republican, former campaign manager for U.S. Senator George Murphy, and nominee for the state Assembly, he was immediately faced with several explosive and politically controversial cases involving civil rights violations and alleged police misconduct. These included the “mistake killing” of two Mexican nationals by Los Angeles police officers, the killing of L.A. Times newsman Ruben Salazar during a riot in conjunction with the Chicano Moratorium protests, and finally, widespread charges of gross misbehavior by L.A. County Sheriff’s officers during the June 1970 disorders in Isla Vista.

Despite strong pressure from L.A.’s elected officials, including Mayor Sam Yorty, Sheriff Peter J. Pitchess, and Police Chief Edward M. Davis, Meyer’s office pursued these allegations aggressively, convening federal grand juries to investigate the charges. In March 1971, five Los Angeles police officers were indicted by the grand jury, including three on charges stemming from the “mistake killing,” one for abetting a burglary, and one for forcing a female suspect to disrobe. These indictments ignited a huge political furor. In Salazar’s case, a coroner’s inquest ruled the death a homicide, but the police officer escaped prosecution, and no indictments were issued.

It was the Isla Vista cases, however, that brought about Meyer’s downfall. More than 400 reports of police misconduct — including beatings, break-ins, false arrests, and sexual molestation — had been collected from Isla Vista residents. In May 1971, indictments were returned by a federal grand jury in Los Angeles against an unnamed number of law enforcement officers, members of the L.A. County Sheriff’s Special Enforcement Branch, and the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office. With the indictments still under seal, Pitchess, Yorty, and Chief Davis all spoke out, with the latter warning that “an ill wind is blowing from Isla Vista.” Sheriff Pitchess flew to Washington, D.C. and met on June 3 with Attorney General John Mitchell. Subsequently the indictments were quashed and never issued.

In November 1971, Meyer was asked to resign by Assistant Attorney General L. Patrick Gray, acting on instructions from Attorney General Mitchell. “He told me they wanted my resignation, effective January 1,” Meyer recalled, “and that I could have it the easy way, or the hard way.” Meyer resigned his position and died of a heart attack a year later, at the age of 49. After leaving office, Meyer said he had been criticized as a “moderate” or “liberal,” rather than a “true conservative.” Many of his policies did not jibe with what his superiors wanted, but the big issue was “a philosophical area epitomized by the civil rights cases” (L.A. Times, Nov. 15, 1972).

Despite all the evidence, the accused L.A. and Santa Barbara sheriffs’ officers were never prosecuted. Mitchell and Gray, for their part, would go on to become notorious figures in the Watergate scandal. Gray, briefly appointed J. Edgar Hoover’s successor at the FBI, was revealed to have destroyed evidence from Howard Hunt’s safe and was indicted for illegal break-ins, though he escaped conviction. Mitchell became the first U.S. Attorney General to be convicted of illegal activities and sent to prison.

Their role in firing a fearless and nonpartisan U.S. attorney in Los Angeles is barely remembered today. But as we contemplate the current politicization of the attorney general’s office, it is worth remembering that quashing legitimate investigations is only a step away from instigating systematic injustice. That is the road the Bush administration, in its tottering final years, may find too tempting to resist.

History suggests the time to investigate thoroughly and clean house at the Justice Department is now.

-----

Full Text available at the SB INDEPENDENT:

Firing a Federal Prosecutor

I.V.M.P. Criticised

2007-03-17T01:51:00.000+07:00

< Animated GIF courtesy of www.mkthink.com )

[ Excerpt from "Growing Pains" By Drew Mackie, SB INDEPENDENT, March 15, 2007 ]

Embattled I.V. Master Plan Nears Completion

... Adequate parking, uncongested roadways, and housing for people of varying income levels were among the concerns that drew together such entities as the I.V. Project Area Committee/General Plan Advisory Committee (PAC/GPAC), UCSB, the I.V. Recreation and Parks District (IVRPD), and several neighborhood organizations in 2000. The PAC/GPAC presented the groups’ proposals for community improvement to the Redevelopment Agency, which was established by the county Board of Supervisors in 1990. Seven years’ worth of meetings after PAC/GPAC’s original presentation, the Redevelopment Agency is close to finalizing an I.V. Master Plan which, according to its proponents, compiles these findings to represent the community’s best chance of reinventing itself and improving its residents’ lives.

The first of three hearings on the Master Plan was held on March 7, allowing the public to give feedback to the Redevelopment Agency before the plan is taken to the Board of Supervisors for approval. Jamie Goldstein, Redevelopment Agency deputy director, said he was proud of the efforts made so far. “This is the most progressive plan the county has ever put together … . There’s not ever been as serious a look into such a relatively small area before,” he said of the document, which includes plans to turn I.V.’s central Pardall Road area into a “downtown” district with more commercial space.

According to Goldstein, outside input during the development of the plan yielded both positive and negative changes...

Many criticisms lobbed against the plan at the March 7 meeting revolved around the prospect of creating housing units for an additional 4,300 I.V. residents. “The biggest issues have to do with land use,” Goldstein said. “People are concerned with changes in population density.” Indeed, the meeting gave rise to concerns that are older than talk of a Master Plan. “You can’t add more population than the services can accommodate,” said Florence Klein, an I.V. resident since 1998. “They need to acknowledge our biggest problems are safety regarding fire and police, then traffic and the lack of parking, and the density of the population that is already here.” Klein, who attended the meeting bearing fragments of her dynamite-exploded mailbox, said she felt police and rescue services were already overtaxed moderating drunken student revelry. Goldstein explained new residences were a necessary trade-off the Master Plan included to meet county mandates for affordable housing.

Other meeting attendees — mostly business owners and longtime non-student I.V. residents — worried that redevelopment could hurt business and that restructuring I.V.’s central Anisq’Oyo Park could ruin a sense of historic preservation. Goldstein said some opposition was expected but maintained that the plan represents I.V.’s best hope for improvement. He also pointed out that only three of the speakers at the meeting spoke in favor of halting the plan altogether.

Ken Warfield, an IVRPD boardmember, defended the process that led to the Master Plan, saying, “Everybody who has had something to say about this has had ample opportunity to say it. … I.V. is going to change. It’s going to be built out and a number of additional people will live in I.V. How that growth and change is going to happen really needs a Master Plan so that it doesn’t become hodgepodge higgledy-piggledy nonsense that other communities have experienced.”

Klein remained unconvinced, noting that she and others will express their dismay at the next meeting on March 19, in the county’s Planning Commission Hearing Room. “We don’t know anybody here who’s really for this,” she said. “It’s madness in the name of greed.”

To read the full article please go to:

SB Independent :: Growing Pains

I.V. Plan Faces Opposition

2007-03-09T00:52:00.000+07:00

More about the I.V. Master Plan and the first of three meetings to discuss it with the Santa Barbara Planning Commission.

Meetings 2 & 3 take place on March 19 and April 4:

Long-Term I.V. Plan Faces Opposition at Community Meeting

I.V. Master Plan @ SBPC

2007-03-08T02:41:00.000+07:00

The Santa Barbara County Planning Commission will consider the adoption of the Isla Vista Master Plan at a public hearing today to discuss the future of affordable housing, transportation and land use in I.V.

The meeting, which will be held in Santa Barbara, will be the first hearing focused on adopting the master plan...

Board Hearing To Examine I.V. Master Plan

Isla Vista Rampage

2007-02-27T03:54:00.000+07:00

UCSB's DAILY NEXUS has reprinted the original EL GAUCHO "Chronology of Events" from the night the bank burned down, 37 years ago. The chrono was prepared by reporters: Jeff Probst, Cindy Heaton, Larry Boggs, Mark Aulman, Becca Wilson and Denise Kessler:

Isla Vista Rampage; Bank Destroyed by Fire

Coal Oil Point

2007-02-23T06:33:00.000+07:00

Beach Shelters Wildlife, Inspires Art

By Katie Miserany / Daily Nexus Staff Writer
February 21, 2007, Issue 79 / Volume 87

The crumbling wall known as “the jail” stands watch over Sands Beach at low tide. The heavily decorated wall features graffiti art from many local artists, lending some color to the brown sand that covers the shoreline. Local legend has it that The Doors’ frontman Jim Morrison spent an acid-addled evening on Sands Beach staring at the lights of nearby oil platform Holly, which inspired the song “Crystal Ship.”

The same view prompted former UCSB student and musician Jack Johnson to write the environmentally conscious tune “The Horizon Has Been Defeated.”

Indeed, Sands’ beauty has a history of inspiring both environmental activism on behalf of the animals that call it home, and art celebrating its sublime vistas. The surrounding area is also a productive petroleum field, home to a former opulent estate that was later transformed into a scandal-plagued mental institution and the vulnerable yet adorable Western Snowy Plovers.

( Image of "The Jail" courtesy of Rickey Mizuno / Daily Nexus )

History

Sands Beach was originally part of a Mexican land grant awarded to cattle rancher Nicholas Augustus Henry Den in 1842. Following his death in 1863, his heirs divided and sold most of the land, which included the area adjacent to Sands Beach. The land, including Sands, remained one of the only areas in Den family possession after Col. William Welles Hollister, for whom Hollister Road is named, purchased the land from the family.

Remnants of the beach’s past still exist, including a memorial gravestone to Colin Powys Campbell, a retired British army officer who built a major estate on the land when he purchased it in 1919. Many of the original buildings from the Campbell estate are still present at Sands today, including the access road, barn and the family’s mansion, currently the main building of the Devereux School for children and adults with developmental problems.

Part of the Campbell family’s former beach house, located at the base of the cliff, currently serves as the site of a display of brightly colored aerosol murals. Commonly referred to as “the jail,” the walls of the crumbling beach house are coated with layers of spray paint that have been documented by UCSB art studio professor Michael Arntz in a series of photographs on display in Davidson Library.

According to the description accompanying the display, Arntz said he wanted to capture the ever-changing artwork because it incorporates a wide community of artists into a continual process of cultural production.

He said each individual layer is not as important to him as the entire evolution of the murals through the different reevaluations and revisions of each separate artist’s additions.

The area has also historically been involved in oil production. Venoco Inc.’s offshore oil drilling operation near Sands’ coast may seem to mar the beach’s beauty, as Johnson suggests in his song, but according to Venoco’s website, the natural oil seeps present in the Santa Barbara Channel would make the beach virtually unusable if the oil rigs were not present. More than 1,200 natural petroleum seeps have flooded the channel with tar for centuries, which provided local Native Americans with a highly valued resource for caulking boats, waterproofing and other domestic and maritime tasks.

Beach Bums

In order to preserve the Sands ecosystem, the adjacent Coal Oil Point Reserve was formed with a mission to inform the public about the various species inhabiting the beach, restore coastal habitats and conduct research on human environmental impact in the area.

With their khaki safari vests and ample sunscreen, the Snowy Plover Docents have been a permanent fixture on the beach since 2000, when the reserve launched the program to monitor a fenced enclosure - the birds’ nesting area - that stretches along the reserve’s 150 acres.

Third-year environmental studies major and Snowy Plover Docent Coryl Dolfin said the Western Snowy Plover is a species similar to the Sandpiper, and is naturally attracted to the coastal environment at Sands.

The program, which has affectionately nicknamed the Plovers “Beach Bums,” aims to lure the birds back to the beach environment they abandoned in the 1970s due to increased human presence.

The Endangered Species Act currently protects the Snowy Plover, mandating that Coal Oil Point Reserve and the university encourage the species’ growth. Volunteers work a minimum of eight hours each month in two- to three-hour shifts to educate beachgoers about the Snowy Plover and to encourage bird nesting on the beach.

The docents say the program has seen great success - the plover population has grown from just one nest and one chick during the initial 2001 mating season to 57 chicks last year.

If beachgoers get too close to the enclosure or violate any of the other reserve regulations, docents are instructed to politely inform them of the reasons behind the rules and to ask their compliance. Dolfin said the Docents’ main goal is to further assist the plovers in repopulating, not to bother surfers.

“You can come look at the plovers, walk along the beach and stop periodically,” Dolfin said. “We just don’t want to do anything that would prohibit the plovers from feeding on the bugs in the seaweed on the shore, like leaving a bag or sunbathing near the enclosure.”

Dolfin said the program welcomes visitors to have a positive experience while they spend time at the beach.

“We want people to continue using the beach,” Dolfin said. “People think we aren’t connected to nature, but we are.”

Save the Whales

“So far today we’ve seen a lot of surfers and dolphins, but no whales,” environmentalist Michael Smith said during one windswept afternoon at Sands as he scanned the horizon for a glimmer of a gigantic gray whale migrating through the Santa Barbara Channel.

As Gray Whales Count Project Coordinator, Smith and his team of volunteers will be a common sight at Sands as they hope to collect data about population growth in the threatened species by counting the number of whales that migrate through the channel.

This year’s count began in late January, and will run for 15 weeks.

The project is an outgrowth of a joint effort by Coal Oil Point Reserve, the American Cetacean Society and the Cascadia Research Collective to conduct research and educate anyone interested in the once-endangered species. Though whale sightings are scarce at the moment, Smith said they will soon increase.

“In the spring they will pass by a lot closer with their calves.”

Catching Waves

Visitors to Sands are rewarded with great surf and a positive atmosphere. Frequent Sands surfer Taylor Ernst said the beach is one of his favorite places in Santa Barbara for the sights, waves and human interaction it affords.

“I can walk to it and I consistently have people I know there,” said Ernst, a fourth-year history of public policy major. “And, now and then, you can find yourself sitting next to a professor who taught you religious studies last quarter, and you can talk about the afterlife in between catching waves.”

Beach Shelters Wildlife, Inspires Art - Daily Nexus

Master Plan Failure

2006-12-09T00:32:00.000+07:00

[ Opinion piece published in the SB INDEPENDENT, December 7, 2006 ]

How the Isla Vista Master Plan Fails the Community

by Carmen Lodise, a community activist in Isla Vista for nearly 30 years. During the ’70s, he served on the Isla Vista Community Council and the Isla Vista Park Board. His Isla Vista: A Citizen’s History is available at islavistahistory.com.

Isla Vista got hosed again two weeks ago, after getting hosed pretty good last June. Both of these are follow-ups to the Big Hosing of about 40 years ago.

Ever wonder why I.V. apartments are packed together, with little off-street parking, and some structures are built so close to the bluff they’re falling into the ocean piece by piece? Back in the ’60s, a couple of UC Regents owned large properties in or near Isla Vista. Decisions were made to leave I.V. for private development and to maintain UCSB’s enrollment at 25,000. This set off a building boom in Isla Vista, which was mostly financed by a Goleta-based savings and loan with a board of directors that included agents of these landowning regents and the UCSB chancellor. The county did its part when the supervisors created zoning allowing shorter setbacks and fewer parking spaces per bedroom than anywhere else in the state.

The university and county fought like cats and dogs to keep Isla Vista under each of their iron fists, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to fend off three widely supported campaigns throughout the ’70s and ’80s to form a City of Isla Vista. An elected city government, you see, would likely force absentee landlords to keep up their properties, police officers to treat all residents humanely, and an auto-centered transportation system to be mostly replaced by a bike-centered one — all things offensive to the local ruling classes. For example, one supervisor at the time was a Ford dealer. All three campaigns to hold an election on establishing a City of Isla Vista were defeated 4-1 by a county panel that was 4‑1 Republican during an era when more than 75 percent of Isla Vistans voted Democratic.

It was never clear why the university fought Isla Vista self-government so fiercely. But what does it say about an institution that doesn’t trust the brightest young people in the state to govern themselves in a small town of 20,000 people? Especially since the university/county cabal was doing such a lousy job. After all, the UC Regents’ own study of the causes of the traumatic civil disturbances of 1968-70 blamed the university itself for “failing to create a viable university community.”

But by the 1990s, the jig was up. With encouragement from UCSB, the county declared Isla Vista so “blighted” that it established the Redevelopment Agency (RDA) in I.V. with a long-term budget of nearly $80 million. Many student and community leaders saw this as an opportunity to greatly improve the quality of life for generations to come. But what actually happened? The draft Environmental Impact Report (EIR) for the I.V. Master Plan came out last spring, with public hearings set during Dead Week (the week prior to finals). How insulting to a community that’s roughly half students! Adding insult to injury, the proposed final EIR came out just before Thanksgiving, with hearings set to continue through Dead Week and finals. We can safely assume that the Planning Department of a City of Isla Vista would better accommodate student schedules.

Even more appalling is that the draft EIR studied only car-friendly options and dedicated 60 percent of the redevelopment money available during the first few years to adding parking structures — this in a town that has long supported auto-reduction as a major community goal. Because of this, several former elected officials in I.V., including myself, officially requested the final EIR include an auto-reduction alternative. Some of our suggestions — which eliminated at least 10 of the two dozen negative environmental impacts of the plan — included closing off the downtown district to auto traffic, keeping open the east-west streets to serve it, and opening up the eastern streets to Ocean Road on the UCSB Main Campus. We also suggested banning undergraduates from having cars, as many universities already do, and a wider use of speed bumps in the 6600 blocks.

In this era of global warming, Isla Vista is the perfect place to teach people how to get along without the automobile. After all, the town is only one-half square mile in size; has a mostly college-student population, 70 percent of which is between the ages of 18 and 24; and is a place where traffic on bicycles greatly exceeds that via cars and where about 95 percent of private property is absentee-owned. All of this has been true for more than 35 years and will most likely remain true for the next 35.
Our requests have been ignored in the proposed final EIR. A chance for the county to finally get it right in Isla Vista has been squandered for the benefit of propertied interests rather than the wider community. That’s why the county doesn’t want the vast majority of Isla Vista residents to see what it’s doing. These hosings will continue until Isla Vista becomes a city.

( Photo courtesy of UCSB )

Article as it appears electronically at the SB INDEPENDENT (including comments from readers) can be found by going to:

The Santa Barbara Independent :: opinions :: I.V. Autonomy

SBI: Eye on Isla Vista

2006-11-04T00:56:00.000+07:00

The SANTA BARBARA INDEPENDENT now has an Internet-accessible-only section to the newspaper stictly dedicated to Isla Vista. It's at:

The Santa Barbara Independent :: online onlys :: Eye on Isla Vista

Two I.V. Yahoo Groups

2006-10-24T01:23:00.000+07:00

Many of you already know about the two Isla Vista Yahoo Groups. For those of you who do not, here's some basic info:

Isla_Vista_Community Yahoo Group

"This as a place where current and former Isla Vistans can meet up with old friends and talk about what IV meant to us.

"We’re interested in IV in the years 1970-1988 (from the Burning of the Bank of Amerika to when the Isla Vista Community Council disbanded). These were the community-building years, a period of social and political activism, experimentation and idealism.

"What was it like being part of or close to those events? We know there are some great stories out there that aren’t widely known and we’d like to begin sharing them. In the process, we’re hoping to create a new archive of institutional histories, photos and documents.

"We also see this Group as a means to reconnect with old friends and catch up on what we’re all doing now. You can share PHOTOS (both past and present), get information on what’s happening with those you’ve lost track of and much more.

"We’ve established a few GUIDELINES for making the Group a rewarding and safe place. Please read these before you begin posting messages; they’re in the FILES Section. We have also prepared “Help with Using the Group,” which may be useful for members and can also be found in the FILES Section.

"We also recommend you visit our DATABASES Section, which has:
• FAQs, with answers to most questions
• PERSONAL, where you can insert stuff about yourself
• WHERE ARE THEY NOW, with info about other former Isla Vistans you've kept in contact with
• RIP, containing obits and tributes to friends who have passed away
• SEARCHING FOR information describing people with whom you'd like to reconnect.

"We hope you’ll enjoy and contribute to this Group. If you have suggestions about other features we should have, or problems with the Group or a fellow member, please contact us at
Isla_Vista_Community-owner@yahoogroups.com."

Fred Stang, IVCC 1974-75
David Pye, IVCC 1974-77
Carmen Lodise, IVCC 1972-73
Ed Isenberg, Co-Owner, The Town Crier

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Isla_Vista_Community/

-----------------------------------------

IslaVista Yahoo Group

"This is an open discussion of Isla Vista Past-Present-Future and just a place to get to know folks. I'm a 27 year resident of IV who truly loves the place and an experienced list owner and moderator (AUM and Autismlist at yahoogroups). The core group here are bank burners and IV community builders and founders. I'm originally from upstate NY but lived in my college town of Oneonta, NY until I was 31 when I moved here to IV. So I'm also an experienced hand at college towns. Please click on DATABASE / FAQ to read common questions and answers about our group. Please add your contact information (only as much as you want to share) by clicking on DATABASE / CONTACT LIST. You can also ask for information on non-members, and check what we already know, by perusing the other DATABASEs."

Tom Smith (QIM)

"PICTURE ON RIGHT is of the Isla Vista Oak tree which once was on the edge of the cliff in Dog Sh-t Park, officially called Isla Vista County Park. That Oak Tree is the symbol of Isla Vista but fell into the ocean during the El Nino storms in 1983. The picture is courtesy of Carmen Lodises' Isla Vista History Page at: www.islavistahistory.com"

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/IslaVista/

IVRPD, Summer 2006

2006-10-03T03:08:00.000+07:00

[ Excerpt from DAILY NEXUS, September 24, 2006, article by Lauren Crecelius: ]

Despite three resignations and what one former member said was a $30,000 setback, this summer the Isla Vista Recreation and Park District focused on creating a community center as well as ways to reduce gang violence.

Plans for the community center in Estero Park continue, and IVRPD hopes to break ground in fall 2007. As for gang violence, the board is considering placing a curfew on Children’s Park, which according to the I.V. Foot Patrol has had a recent upswing in gang-related crime.

Concerning the resignations, Bryan Brown and recent UCSB graduates Logan Green and Eric Cummings left IVRPD for differing reasons.

While Brown resigned because he is moving out of the area, former board member Cummings said he and Green resigned in frustration over actions taken by IVRPD concerning plans for the community center.

The board originally hired consultants from Culver City for about $30,000 to design the community center as well as various other facilities in Estero Park. The designers suggested moving the 32 plots of community gardens in the park across the street in order to fit a soccer field in the plans. However, several community members rejected relocating the gardens...

Cummings said he and Green both felt frustrated with IVRPD’s actions, which they voted against, and he said he did not want to work with the board anymore. He said the board recently appointed a new member, long-term I.V. resident Kellie Ann Prichard, who he said will not work for changes.

“I just saw the same battles coming up and I didn’t want to be a part of it,” Cummings said. “[Under the new board] the money for Estero Park will probably be wasted again.”

In addition to Prichard, another long-term I.V. resident - Arthur Kennedy - will soon join the board, said IVRPD General Manager Dale Sumersille.

IVRPD Board Director Kelly Burns said the board is also looking for a new director to serve up to a four-year term. Applications will be available Oct. 3.

Meanwhile, IVFP Lt. Sol Linver said over the summer officers saw an increase in gang activity in I.V. Linver said teenage gang members have been loitering in Children’s Park, on the 6600 block of Picasso Road. In May, several unidentified attackers stabbed a juvenile in the park.

“Over the past six months and over the summer, we’ve been having issues with Children’s Park,” Linver said. “There are two gangs that claim it and for the last six months there has been graffiti damage, drug issues and stabbing in the park.”

...

“We don’ t have an hours ordinance in that park [currently] so we saw that as a possible tool to get them to move out of the park,” Linver said. “The design is to take the parks back.”

... In other news, Sumersille said two programs IVRPD will be heavily encouraging this new school year are the Adopt-A-Block program and the Adopt-A-Box program. The Adopt-A-Box program will assign artists to paint murals on utility boxes and cable boxes to prevent graffiti tagging, and Adopt-A-Block will focus on cleaning up trash in I.V.

“We want to beautify the city,” Sumersille said.

Gang Activity Drives I.V. Park Improvement Plans - Daily Nexus Online

Free Speech Movement

2006-08-22T05:06:00.000+07:00

The State of California has unveiled it's "Calisphere," a portal to eucational digitial content. Worth checking out. I took a look at it's doorway to the FSM:

To see more, go to:

Calisphere - A World of Digital Resources

Protest New "Master Plan"

2006-08-02T06:45:00.000+07:00

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

July 14, 2006 (Bastille Day)

SIX FORMER ISLA VISTA ELECTED OFFICIALS PROTEST
A NEW "MASTER PLAN" THAT EXCLUDES AUTO-REDUCTION

Six former elected officials in Isla Vista have lodged a protest against
plans by the County of Santa Barbara to add more people and traffic to the
seaside university town. The preferred option among six alternative
scenarios under study would build out all remaining vacant lots, adding
nearly 4,500 new residents to the already overcrowded town. The plan also
calls for the construction of a multi-storied parking garage in Isla Vista's
intimate downtown, which would absorb over half of the total funds available
in the next few years to "redevelop" the entire town.

The six requested that the County include for consideration a scenario of
dramatically reduced cars in Isla Vista, an approach that has long been
supported by Isla Vista residents in polls and advisory elections.

"Whenever elections or polls were held in Isla Vista, the majority of
residents voted to support, maintain and perpetuate certain common ideas of
what Isla Vista should be," said Fred Stang, an elected representative to
the Isla Vista Community Council (IVCC) in the mid-70s. "They include as a
central idea that alternative transportation should be encouraged rather
than the use of automobiles, especially to get around within I.V., which is
small enough that walking and bicycling are more appropriate and practical
means of transportation than driving."

...

"Isla Vista has always been on the cutting edge of environmental issues,"
says Carmen Lodise, a former elected representative to the IVCC and Isla
Vista Park Board. "Consider its strong support for controlled-growth
candidates through the years and pesticide-free parks since 1973 -- a
practice only recently adopted by the City of Santa Barbara. To further
commit the town to dependency on the automobile in this age of global
warming is profoundly inappropriate, especially considering how much such
policies cost."

Isla Vista is a one-half square mile town in the center of the University of
California, Santa Barbara campus, which is located on the mesa immediately
oceanside from the Santa Barbara Airport. The 2000 Census indicated that
roughly 20,000 people live in this small area, although most observers agree
that this is a significant undercount.

The town was left to private development when the UCSB campus moved to the
Isla Vista Mesa from the Santa Barbara foothills in the 1950s.
Developer-friendly building regulations created by the County and unopposed
by the university during the rapid development era in Isla Vista (primarily
1960-70) permitted higher densities, fewer parking spaces, and construction
closer to the ocean bluff than allowed anywhere else in the state. These
regulations led to a maximizing of profits for landowners and developers
with little regard for how these over-crowded conditions would impact
residents. This "misdevelopment" was soundly criticized by two independent
commissions examining the 1970 civil disturbances in Isla Vista (see the
attached Trow Report Summary).

"The County is considering alternative futures for Isla Vista based on two
fundamental misconceptions: that Isla Vista needs more parking and that it
needs additional housing," says Malcolm Gault-Williams, a former elected
representative to both the IVCC and Isla Vista Park Board.

Together, the former elected officials have requested that the County
consider the financial and environmental impacts of excluding all cars from
the downtown area of Isla Vista, with service provided to businesses and
housing units by existing east-west streets off two major north-south
thoroughfares -- Camino Pescadero Rd. in Isla Vista and Ocean Rd. on the
UCSB Main Campus. They also requested that UCSB limit automobile usage by
undergraduates -- as many major U.S. and U.K. universities already do -- and
that the County cul de sac the entire tier of 6600 blocks in the seaside
town.

"This is Isla Vista's one chance to get it right, but a so-called Master
Plan that doesn't even consider substantially reducing cars in town totally
misses the mark," says Lodise.

These officials were responding to the Draft Environmental Impact Report on
the Isla Vista Master Plan, which had a Public Comment period ending July
14, 2006.

The DEIR can be found on the Internet at
http://www.countyofsb.org/rda/deir.asp; the Draft Master Plan (2003) is at
http://www.countyofsb.org/rda/ivmasterplan.asp

FOR MORE INFORMATION, CALL (805) 464-0747.

The following Comments on the DEIR were submitted to the County by Carmen
Lodise and endorsed by former Isla Vista Community
Council members Marcus Borgman , Gina Fregosi
, Malcolm Gault-Williams , and
Fred Stang < fred@aprilinternational.com>. These Comments were also
endorsed by Jeffrey Walsh , Isla Vista Park Board,
1980-84. Lodise's Isla Vista: A Citizen's History (1990), can be found at
www.islavistahistory.com

DEIR on DIVMP

2006-07-22T00:58:00.000+07:00

The following are my comments sent to the county concerning the draft Environmental Impact Report on the draft Isla Vista Master Plan 2003:

--------------------------------------

TO: Jamie Goldstein, Deputy Director, jgoldst@co.santa-barbara.ca.us
105 E. Anapamu St., Room 303 • Santa Barbara, CA 93101 • (805) 884-8050 • FAX (805) 568-2016

FR: Malcolm Gault-Williams • malcolm@legendarysurfers.com • (805) 966-3376

DT: 13 July 2006

RE: Comments on the Draft EIR of the Draft Isla Vista Master Plan (2003)

By way of introduction, I am Malcolm Gault-Williams, a former resident of Isla Vista on-and-off between the years 1969-1993 and an Isla Vista historian. In the mid-1980's, I was elected to two governmental bodies: the last Isla Vista Community Council (IVCC) and the Isla Vista Recreation and Park District (IVRPD). Additionally, I was appointed to the last Isla Vista Municipal Advisory Committee (IVMAC) by the Santa Barbara Board of Supervisors. While my book "DON'T BANK ON AMERIKA: The History of the Isla Vista Riots of 1970" remains the definitive study of the student movement in Isla Vista and at UCSB, 1968-1971, this study also covers the subject of how Isla Vista was developed during the first half of the 20th Century. I bring these credentials to your attention so that you understand that the following comments and observations I have on the Draft Environmental Impact Report (DEIR) on the Draft Isla Vista Master Plan 2003 ("The Plan") come from a person who not only has a long history of involvement in Isla Vista, but is a former elected official from that community, has served the community and its residents for a number of years, and one who has studied the historical causes for the situation Isla Vista finds itself in, today.

That Isla Vista has long needed a redevelopment plan backed up with suitable financial resources has been recognized since at least 1970 (UC Trow Commission Report, 1970). That the County of Santa Barbara is committed to implement a master plan redevelopment for Isla Vista is certainly a positive and long-overdue development for the community as a whole. A reading of The Plan shows that much staff time has been devoted to this end. In short, an Isla Vista Master Plan meeting the needs and desires of its residents is a great opportunity for Isla Vista.

This opportunity being recognized, however, I am compelled to draw your attention to the fact that both The Plan and its DEIR are based on two fundamentally flawed assumptions. These are: 1) That Isla Vista needs more housing; and 2) That increased vehicular parking would
benefit the community.

1) HOUSING

Isla Vista comprises Santa Barbara County's most densely populated community. It is probably the most densely populated community north of Los Angeles and south of San Francisco. How would an increase in its population benefit this area that is already impacted by overcrowding? How is it to be justified?

Any substantive increase in the level of additional housing in Isla Vista must certainly be recognized as a renewed effort on the part of the University of California to house more of its student population in I.V. It was precisely this intent that caused Isla Vista's overcrowding in the first place, in the 1960's. Additional housing in Isla Vista would be a boon for UCSB, enabling it to increase enrollments. So, the question must be asked: who is to benefit from increased housing in Isla Vista? It's residents or the University of California?
It is not additional housing that is needed in Isla Vista, it is improved housing. Toward that end, a studied Project Alternative similar to the DEIR's Alternative 6 should be considered, where incentives are given existing property owners to upgrade their buildings, but without
the sizeable increase in population densities outlined in the DEIR and its other proposed alternatives (excepting Alternative 1 "No Plan").

2) PARKING

To my knowledge, there has never been a majority expression on the part of Isla Vistans for more parking in Isla Vista. In fact, the opposite has been true. Community leaders representing their constituencies have consistently moved ahead to find more open space, enhance that open space, and encourage the use of bicycles over motorized vehicles. Much of the recent problems with parking have been caused by students and staff at the University who choose to park for free in Isla Vista rather than pay for parking at UCSB. Instead of listening to these voices addressing a basically University parking problem, the county needs to consider the historical positions the community has taken toward vehicular use in Isla Vista over the course of the past 36 years.

To this end, a project Alternative built around AUTO-REDUCTION should be included in the DEIR on the 2003 Isla Vista Master Plan.

IN SUMMARY/FORMAL REQUESTS:

1) I formally request that a Project Alternative based on HOUSING & BUILDING INCENTIVES WITHOUT INCREASES TO LOCAL POPULATION be included in the DEIR of the 2003 Draft Isla Vista Master Plan.

Also:

2) I formally request that a project Alternative built around AUTO-REDUCTION be included in the DEIR on the 2003 Draft Isla Vista Master Plan.

Sincerely,

Malcolm Gault-Williams

IV & Elwood Mesa Videos

2006-07-07T00:17:00.000+07:00

Tom, at IslaVista@yahoogroups.com, shot some video on July 4 and 5th. Especially for those of you who haven't been up on the Ellwood Mesa in a while, they are a fun view. Two of his I really like:

1. Ellwood Mesa July 4th '06 - 03:08 minutes - "Pictures of Ellwood Mesa and Beach covering the 4th and the next morning with a short film clip of the fireworks at Girsh Park in Goleta
as seen from Ellwood Mesa."

4. Isla Vista and Ellwood - 02:37 minutes - "A tour of the area and it's characters, of which I'm now proudly one."

( Ellwood Mesa aerial view, circa 1971, courtesy of UCSB Geology Department. )

Draft EIR: Master Plan

2006-06-21T03:32:00.000+07:00

This message just in from Carmen Lodise:

-----------------------------------------

Friends,

The comment period on the Draft EIR of the Isla Vista Master Plan has been
extended to July 14. Just like the County, I believe the two public
hearings in Isla Vista on the Draft EIR were held during final exams.

It would be helpful if all you folks who know anything about the vision for
Isla Vista held by its residents and their elected leaders through the years
would take a look at it and comment.

Read the 5-year Plan first. It's a lot shorter.

You can find both at:

http://www.countyofsb.org/rda/

It would be helpful and reach a lot more people if you would post your
comments on the new Isla Vista Discussion Group:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Isla_Vista_Community/

This is the one chance Isla Vista has to be made right.

Regards,

Carmen

P.S. My quick read of the Draft EIR says it will add 4,350 people but only
440 new parking spaces.

More I.V. Master Plan

2006-06-02T01:48:00.000+07:00

Criticisms of the I.V. Master Plan have been pretty lame thus far. Even the Associated Students are basically going along:

Residents Share Thoughts on I.V. Master Plan Options - Daily Nexus Online

EIR on IV Master Plan

2006-05-31T03:09:00.000+07:00

The following is an excerpt from email sent out to the new Isla_Vista_Community Yahoo Group today from Carmen Lodise about his initial impressions of the currently proposed Isla Vista Master Plan.

-------------------------------------------------------------

"... I would suggest that it might be more helpful if every effort in the
next 30 days was spent reviewing and commenting on the EIR on the
Redevelopment Agency's Master Plan for Isla Vista -- the comment
period ends June 30.

http://www.countyofsb.org/rda/

"The proposal does, among other things, permit two-story buildings to
become three-story and adds roughly 1,500 new Dwelling Units.
Commenting on the EIR isn't "revolutionary" but it's the kind of
nuts-and-bolts action that once made many of us feel that Isla Vista
might become the model community its residents envisioned in
the '70s & '80s.

"I was only alerted to this EIR deadline by an emailed Nexus article
from Malcolm Gault-Williams. I hope that he will send that again to
everyone on this site and that everyone still interested in Isla
Vista's fate will take a look at it and comment.

"I will send around some notes on my impressions after I read the
document – by June 9.

"I will say, however, that I am not opposed to enhancements in the
business district and increased density – if it's done right and the
old Robber Barons who built the town aren't the main financial
benefactors.

"Of course, at bottom we all know is the University's desire to
increase enrollment and make the community more palatable to the
parents of potential students. These bureaucrats continue to wear
us down.

"Such designs are not exactly in line with what's best for a
community we all know has such incredible potential..."

I.V. Master Plan

2006-05-24T23:13:00.000+07:00

Gee, I've lived and worked in and around Isla Vista since 1969... I never knew that what Isla Vista most needs is additional housing structures and parking lots! Where have I been?

Environment Study Shows Pros, Cons of I.V. Master Plan - Daily Nexus Online

IV @ Answers.com

2006-05-23T04:54:00.000+07:00

Lots of information about Isla Vista and its history is contained at:

Isla Vista, California: Information From Answers.com

Thanks to Susan Swift for the heads-up on this Internet resource.

Dick Flacks Looks Back

2006-05-13T04:01:00.000+07:00

[ Excerpt from the SB Independent article on 5/11/2006 by Nick Welsh ]

UCSB’s Most Dangerous Professor

Dick Flacks is situated comfortably in his living room, the legendary ground zero of Santa Barbara’s progressive politics. Dressed in a loose, beach-bum T-shirt with broad horizontal stripes, blue jeans, and fleece-lined slippers, Flacks leans back into his couch. It’s a ridiculously beautiful Sunday afternoon, and Flacks is preparing for his retirement party, an exaltation of his career as activist and academic — a two-day event billed as Flacks Fest. But at the moment, Flacks seems a little miffed. Somehow, he was not included in the recently published book listing the 101 “most dangerous” college professors in the United States, written by David Horowitz, the one-time left-wing radical turned right-wing firebrand. “I was upset,” Flacks says, an ironic twinkle escaping the prism of his Coke-bottle glasses. “I wasn’t in there. I don’t know why not.”

Flacks is teasing. But he has a point.

When Flacks was appointed to a tenure-track professorship in UCSB’s sociology department in 1969, he’d already achieved notoriety at the University of Chicago as a radical anti-war activist. Ronald Reagan, then the governor of California, quipped that hiring Flacks was like hiring a pyromaniac to work in a firecracker factory. It was a nice line, and for Flacks, perhaps the ultimate backhanded compliment. But other reactions were less charming. Robert Lagomarsino, then Santa Barbara’s Republican state senator, went so far as to call for a House Un-American Activities Committee investigation. To keep any more of Flacks’s ilk from getting tenure, the University of California’s Board of Regents voted to take control of the appointment process. The Santa Barbara News-Press’s editorial pages quivered about the potential violence Flacks might unleash. And all that was before he even moved to town.

Flacks didn’t turn out to be the bomb-thrower his detractors predicted. As his UCSB friend and colleague, Harvey Molotch, once dryly noted, “Dick was never at all athletic.” Instead, Flacks spent the next 37 years on campus advocating a pragmatic brand of radical politics coupled with nonviolent civil disobedience. As a result, Flacks was allowed to operate with a relatively free hand, helping to radicalize generations of students. Both through his classes on social movements and his work with student groups, Flacks inspired young people to go into the world and “make history.”

As a “think global, act local” kind of guy, Flacks directed many of his students’ idealism toward the Santa Barbara community, where he secured them positions in many of the political and counter-cultural organizations he had helped to found. In most of Santa Barbara’s defining political debates — including growth, water, housing, homelessness, the living wage, immigrants’ rights, environment protection, and alternative transportation — activists nurtured by Flacks have played crucial roles. Harley Augustino of PUEBLO, the grassroots organization that helped bring 20,000 marchers to the streets of Santa Barbara in support of immigrants’ rights last week, started his career with the Isla Vista Tenants Union and then with the Living Wage Coalition thanks to a helping hand from Flacks. Geoff Green, the current director of the Fund for Santa Barbara, which finances progressive groups countywide; political organizer Ed Maschke, who kept Goleta developers tied up in knots for more than 20 years; and Rob Rosenthal, whose work with Santa Barbara’s homeless helped them emerge as a political force in the 1980s, all were mentored by Dick Flacks. Though most of his protégés have been men — known as the Flacks Boys — he has mentored a number of influential women including Roseanne DeMoro, the head of California Nurses Association, who last year chased Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger up one side of California and down the other in aggressive, successful opposition to four ballot initiatives he was backing.

The work of these men and women prove something that Dick Flacks believes with all his might: Small groups of individuals can make history.

From Red Diapers to String Quartets

The older of two children, Flacks was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1938. His parents David and Mildred Flacks — both school teachers — were born to Russian Jewish immigrants. Both were active union members and organizers; both belonged to the Communist Party. But when the Cold War began in the 1950s, the Soviet Union ceased being America’s ally and became instead its mortal enemy. Flacks’s parents were targeted by anti-communist investigators and fired from their jobs.

Under Khrushchev’s leadership, information about the horrors of Stalin’s blood-thirsty regime became more generally known. Then, in 1956, the Soviets invaded Hungary. Flacks — a scholarly young teenager — began to find the blindly pro-U.S.S.R. position of the U.S. Communist Party, and his own father, repellent. At the same time, the rest of the American left had become virulently anti-communist. Radical red-diaper babies like Dick Flacks were having a hard time finding a place to call home. Then, in 1957, Flacks met Mickey Hartman, the daughter of Yiddish-speaking, Russian-born immigrants. One year later, the two married, beginning a 48-year partnership that produced both a family and a political juggernaut.

Together, the two students stumbled onto an aging American revolutionary named A.J. Muste, whose political vision fused Christian social justice, American populism, and nonviolent civil disobedience. For them, it was as if the sky opened up. “Revolutionary nonviolence? No one was putting those two words in the same sentence back then, let alone giving it serious thought,” said Flacks. “Muste became a complete role model for me.” So much so, Flacks gave his second son the middle name “Ajay.” Stifled by the political claustrophobia of Brooklyn, the young couple set out for the University of Michigan, where Flacks attended graduate school. “We didn’t want to be part of New York,” Flacks said. “We wanted to be part of America in the much broader sense.”

In Michigan, Flacks sought out other young activists whose politics emerged more from Midwestern prairie populism than from Marx. One such activist was Tom Hayden, who would become Flacks’s lifelong friend and political partner. Inspired by the death-defying courage of Southern civil rights workers, who also followed a nonviolent approach to social change, the Flackses joined Hayden in reorganizing Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), then an obscure group loosely affiliated with the United Auto Workers Union. In 1962, Flacks, Hayden, and about 60 SDS activists gathered in Port Huron, Michigan, to pen what would become the rhetorical anthem for the New Left. An almost hormonal celebration of the democratic impulse, the statement began, “We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably at the world we inherit.” It blasted both major superpowers — the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. — and supported democratic principles that they believed could coexist within socialistic and communistic structures. Acknowledging the raw audacity of their vision, the authors wrote, “If we appear to seek the unattainable … let it be known we do so to avoid the unimaginable.”

While in Michigan, Dick and Mickey Flacks began developing a lifestyle that not only kept them sane, it kept them human. They discovered college football, attending all of Michigan’s home games. Mickey remembered once having to yank Dick from an interminable SDS meeting to get to the stadium on time. No one could believe where they were going. Football before global liberation? “They thought we’d lost our freaking minds,” Mickey said. “But we’ve always made it a priority to take time for ourselves. We like going to the movies, eating out in restaurants. We have balance in our lives. That’s our secret.”

As a fledgling academic, Flacks was very much the hot young thing. In 1964, he secured a tenure-track position with the University of Chicago, then among the world’s most prestigious institutes of higher learning, not its current incarnation as a hotbed of neo-con political thought. Flacks resigned from SDS when he took the appointment, but he didn’t stop his political activities. That did not sit well with the school’s administration. Nor did his support of the 121 students who were expelled for sitting-in against the Vietnam War.

At that time Flacks was researching what would become his first published work, Liberated Generation. In tracking the family history of young college activists, he determined their protests were not examples of adolescent rebellion — as noted scholars such as Bruno Bettelheim were insisting — but extensions of the values they learned at home. The book — and its notion that young people could operate as an independent force in American society — put Flacks on the map. Soon publications like Newsweek and the Chicago Tribune sought his opinions on the political activism of the exploding youth culture. At the University of Chicago, however, most faculty couples led social lives that were decidedly old world. Their dinner parties with string quartets and black servants were too bizarre for the Flackses. As Mickey described it, “It was the last bastion of 19th-century male-dominated, super-intellectual elitist nonsense. It wasn’t our scene.”

But by then, UCSB’s sociology department — which was beginning to enjoy a distinctive, quirky reputation — had been courting Flacks. When the University of Chicago did not grant him early tenure, he started looking westward. The last straw came when Flacks was brutally attacked in his campus office by a man posing as a newspaper reporter. The attack — which police believe was administered with something like a crow bar — left his skull cratered in two spots and his right hand nearly severed at the wrist. Flacks’s assailant was never found.

Flacks hoped a sunny campus by the Pacific would offer the quiet he needed. How wrong could one man be? He arrived with his family just months after the historic Santa Barbara oil spill and just months before the burning of the Bank of America in Isla Vista.

Campus Guru Meets the Thursday Club

Flacks’s 1969 appointment stirred significant concern that his assailant might strike again. Even relatively conservative faculty members like Otis Graham volunteered to guard the Flackses’ new home. On the other hand, a new neighbor volunteered to spy on the family for the sheriff and the FBI. “But mostly, people were really, really nice,” said Mickey. For Flacks himself, the times were exciting, bizarre, and nerve-wracking. “Between 1969 and 1979, there was not a single normal moment on campus where you could go about your routine,” he said. “Most of the classes were held in I.V., not in the classrooms; there were bomb threats constantly; fire alarms going off; huge dogs named Trotsky walking down the hallways; and every shade of hippie-dom you could imagine.”

Flacks was too old — and too straight-laced — for the hedonistic celebration of flesh and pharmaceuticals then accompanying the anti-war movement on college campuses. He managed to establish himself as a bona fide campus guru nonetheless. “The deal was if you took politics seriously and you took social change seriously and you did not ask Dick to smoke dope with you, then he would take you seriously,” explained sociologist Harvey Molotch. “That was a deal many people were willing to make.” Those who did found that Flacks could be both seriously intimidating and a friendly adviser. They also found he was passionately curious about what students think and ferociously dedicated to their right to express themselves.

Contrary to urban folklore, Flacks was not involved in the burning of the I.V. Bank of America. In fact, his friends made a point of shooing him away from any protest that looked potentially unruly because handcuffs could seriously damage his still injured wrist. For his part, Flacks does not consider the bank burning a positive political act; it happened, he said, in the spasm of the moment and in response to escalating police violence. “I don’t think anybody planned to burn the bank down,” he said.

It was after the bank burning, however, that Flacks really made his mark on Santa Barbara. He and Mickey started something called the Thursday Club, an evolving collection of high-octane activists who met every Thursday at their home. “We knew we couldn’t continue with this violence,” Flacks said. “We had to build positive organizations and we had to have a voice.” The Flackses’ living room served as a Petri dish where ideas mixed with the seed-money of wealthy left-leaning patrons such as Stanley Sheinbaum, Kit Tremaine, Herman Warsh, Maryanne Mott, and Katy Peake. The Thursday Club produced an alternative community school, medical clinics, food co-ops, and a host of other community groups that gave expression to a new value system struggling to define itself. Though many of the original organizations have disappeared, they have been replaced by newer versions, with similar progressive values. The Santa Barbara Independent, for example, is a direct descendant of the News&Review, the worker cooperative weekly newspaper for which Flacks served as trustee and adviser. (One of The Independent’s four owners — Richard Parker — was an original founder of the News&Review.)

On the idea that all politics is local, Flacks turned his attention to elected offices. At the time, Flacks said, the Santa Barbara City Council was dominated by “Republican board-of-realtor types and development interests.” Despite the hard work of earlier, more traditional reformers such as Pearl Chase, the city was in danger of becoming another overgrown Orange County. Dick and Mickey Flacks helped start the slow-growth Citizens Coalition, which succeeded in electing a more environmentally minded council majority. Flacks jokes how conservative those candidates would be judged by today’s standards. Of the four, one is now a Republican city councilmember in New Mexico, one was a nuclear engineer, one was a Westmont administrator, and one the wife of a prominent conservative Republican.

When development interests wrested back control in the late ’70s, Flacks and his wife joined with others to start Network and the Gray Panthers — in which Flacks’s parents, who had moved to town, were extremely active — to give the progressive community a consistent political voice at City Hall. After about 15 years these groups also faded out. But Dick and Mickey did not. In 2000 they got together with other concerned citizens — some of them ex-students — to form SBCAN. Its charge is to fuse the goals of the environmental and the social-justice movements — not an easy task when two visions of a perfect Santa Barbara are colliding: affordable housing versus small-town neighborhoods. How is it possible to have either in a market of million-dollar cottages? Simple problems don’t seem to interest the Flackses.

His Work, Their Lives, Our Town

Dick Flacks’s academic work reflects the same electrified lightning that has illuminated his own life. His research and writings all try to capture that flash, to document it, to analyze the source of its glow. Even as a student activist, Flacks was studying student activism. What made the activists tick? Did they stay active later in life, and if so in what ways? Why? How did activist students differ from students who weren’t active? Could you identify which students were most likely to become active? All of this research — conducted over long intervals, through elaborate surveys, and in detailed personal histories — focused on measuring the extent to which ordinary individuals can jumpstart historical change.

Flacks is now looking forward to a “retirement” that he acknowledges few people have been able to enjoy. He’ll still teach a couple of classes a year, keep his campus office, and program his weekly folk-music radio show, The Culture of Protest, which is the longest running program in KCSB history. And he and Mickey will travel. But of course there always will be politics.

Flacks’s political beliefs have shifted a bit since first moving to Santa Barbara. He once believed that a ruling elite had usurped democratic control from a complacent population. Now he is not so sure. As Molotch explained it, in the present reality of Bush incompetence, “A ruling elite would be good news.” Where Flacks once regarded the university as a hatchery for intellectual worker-bees to maintain the corporate power structure, today, he’s a passionate defender of the university. In times of budget crisis, Flacks fights to keep funding whole. He is also working to rewire the UC’s admissions system so that the children of immigrants, working parents, and minorities will be able to get a foot in the door and a seat in the classroom. At his core, Dick Flacks remains very much the same man he was when he first arrived in Santa Barbara. Then as now, he believed great social movements were created by historical forces. Then as now, he believes that even the smallest group of individuals can make history.

Flacks does acknowledge that times have changed. For the better, he noted that democratic participation in daily life has expanded hugely in the past 35 years. But for the worse, he said, the powers-that-be have become increasingly resistant to change. With the rise of global economics, national governments are less able to make economic concessions in the face of democratic demands. Still, people have to try. “If you took this town in 1969 and looked at what it was like then, you’d see that it’s changed enormously. There are Farmers Markets, environmental organizations, community health clinics — these are all mainstream. The assumed values in our political debate have changed, too. I’m enough of an anarchist to think we can’t change the government at large. But can people do things to make small-scale changes that have meaning? We did. It’s a point of great pride to Mickey and me, that we have been involved with this,” he said. “In whatever time you are living, there will always be spaces for initiative.”

Flacks ought to know. He made the most of his. And that’s what makes him such a dangerous man.

By Nick Welsh | May 11, 2006

The Santa Barbara Independent :: cover story :: UCSB’s Most Dangerous Professor

IV CC - Phase 1

2006-05-09T03:29:00.000+07:00

ISLA VISTA COMMUNITY CENTER
Background on Phase I – Development of Outdoor Recreational Facilities

In 2005, the Isla Vista Recreation and Park District (IVRPD) submitted a proposal to the California Department of Parks and Recreation that resulted in a $1 million award to construct a regulation size soccer field in Isla Vista’s Estero Park. This million dollars—the largest award granted in the state—gives project partners (which include IVRPD, UCSB, and the Channel Islands YMCA) significant leverage to pursue construction not only of the soccer field, but also of the skate board park, basketball courts, parking lot, and public restroom that will provide Isla Vista with a brand new, state-of-the-art outdoor recreational complex. We are extremely excited about this project, as it has the power to transform Isla Vista in a number of respects.

· The regulation-size soccer field will enable youth from Isla Vista’s large low-income and Spanish-speaking community to play league soccer (which they currently cannot do, because they lack transportation to fields outside of IV). The field also would bring league teams from Goleta and Santa Barbara into IV where they not only would play in soccer matches, but also would add to the IV economy by patronizing local restaurants and other businesses after the games.

· The skate park, which would reflect IV’s long association with and conduciveness to board sports, would serve teens from IV and surrounding areas while attracting large numbers of UCSB students. Having the skate park and soccer field in the same Estero Park complex would bring two diverse segments of the IV community (Latino youth and UCSB students) together to recreate.

· The lighted, outdoor basketball courts would be available for after school, evening, weekend, and even late night use, thereby providing safe and healthy activities for teens and young adults. The availability of recreational facilities could help combat some of the ills from which IV suffers, including gang activity among disenfranchised youth and alcohol abuse among college students.

By bundling the soccer field, skate park, and basketball courts together, we can pursue only one planning and permitting process (rather than three) along with one fundraising campaign. The significant seed money from the state, combined with additional funding from IVRPD, the county, local foundations, and other local sources, gives us a great start toward realizing this important project. For further information about project funding, please contact Laurie Hoyle at Laurie.Hoyle@sa.ucsb.edu.

Dick Flacks Retires

2006-05-06T00:50:00.000+07:00

[ Excerpt from SBN-P article by SHELLY LEACHMAN, 5/5/2006 ]

His walk is slow but sort of bouncy, his speech both thoughtful and quick. He takes his coffee black, which seems perfectly appropriate for a legend of social activism and radical politics. It wouldn't seem right for him to order a half-caf, nonfat soy cappuccino, and he doesn't.

In between sips of his dark roast, Dick Flacks slowly spins the paper cup with his left hand while reflecting on his career. Some 37 years after landing at UCSB, the iconic sociology professor is now retiring.

"There's only so much time we've got left on the planet -- how much of it do you want to spend in meetings?" he joked through a sly, conspiratorial grin. "Part of the reason to retire is so you don't have to go to meetings."

He's been to many a meeting. From his early days as a founder of the radical grass-roots group Students for a Democratic Society in 1962, to his years teaching at the University of Chicago, through his long tenure at UCSB, Mr. Flacks has always been beyond involved. And whether as an ultra-engaged teacher, a voracious researcher or a front-line democratic activist, he's forever a proud radical.

"When I came to this town, most people knew of SDS how the press depicted it, as a violent revolutionary movement, and if I was one of the founders, I must be one of those," he said. "Then they'd meet me and say, 'You're not radical at all. You're so calm and thoughtful.' I say, 'Yeah, but I am radical.' I believe that the roots of society can be changed. That's radical."

His humor is wry and distinct, but even the subtlest details about Mr. Flacks stand out -- physical manifestations of a unique personality. The sweater tucked into his jeans. The silver wedding band etched with a vinelike pattern. The watch turned under his left wrist. The thick specs that magnify his eyes. The way the top of his right ear turns down slightly. Those whispers of wiry gray hair. And then there's that deep depression near the crown of his head.

On May 5, 1969, Mr. Flacks was attacked in his office at the University of Chicago. Beaten by someone posing as a newspaper reporter, he nearly died after suffering two skull fractures, an almost-severed right hand and other injuries. His assailant was never caught.

"At some point you decide your life is more important and move on," he said this week. "It helped that I have no memory of (the attack). It was harder for my wife, who'd had to deal with not knowing whether I would survive. I was unconscious."

Barely one month after the assault, Mr. Flacks accepted a lifetime tenured position at UCSB. His appointment was met with loud objections by the California Republican Assembly and, for a time, the News-Press editorial pages, fearing his affiliation with sometimes-violent SDS would cast an unwanted radical pall over serene Santa Barbara.

In a June 1969 Los Angeles Times story, Gov. Ronald Reagan likened Mr. Flacks' hiring by UCSB to "a manager of a firecracker factory hiring a known pyromaniac because he makes good fuses."

But Mr. Flacks, then and now, said he chose UCSB because it seemed so calm -- and calm was what he wanted for himself, wife Mickey and young sons Chuck and Mark.

"It was a very sleepy campus," he said. "I came here partly because I had just been through a tumultuous time (in Chicago) and I was looking forward to a sleepy opportunity."

That opportunity was denied.

Mr. Flacks started at the seaside campus in the fall of 1969. Six months later, in February 1970, the Bank of America in Isla Vista was burned down, and ensuing riots turned deadly as the anti-Vietnam War movement heated up. Many people at the time accused him of being involved in the protests, said Mr. Flacks, who has written extensively about the era.

He wasn't involved in the local riots, but he remains sympathetic to and passionate about social protests and student activism.

"People are very worried about the state of affairs, but it makes sense in a strange way not to pay attention," said Mr. Flacks, citing his recent research that revealed only 7 percent of college students read a daily newspaper and 25 percent ignore the news altogether.

"If you think you're powerless, what good does it do to know more about it? Where are our empowerment possibilities?" he asked. "My whole research and teaching career can be summed up as trying to answer that question."

In the early 1980s and again in the early 1990s, Bill Shay tried to find that answer as a teaching and research assistant to Mr. Flacks, under whose tutelage he eventually earned a doctorate in sociology. Now an administrative director at UCLA, Mr. Shay picked UCSB for graduate school specifically to work with Mr. Flacks, whom he'd known of and admired since high school.

Describing his former teacher and now friend -- "I can't not keep in touch with Dick" -- as an intellectual troubadour, Mr. Shay likened Mr. Flacks to a folk singer who uses storytelling techniques to relate his experiences.

"He was masterful at that," said Mr. Shay. "He was singing the song of sociology in the classroom. And that was the heart of his impact -- he was a model of the way in which to take the experiences of common person and translate them into broader sociological terms."

Mr. Shay is among the many former and current students of Mr. Flacks who will lead discussions during a weekend conference honoring his career on the eve of his retirement. Being held today and Saturday at locations in Isla Vista and on campus, "45 Years of Democratic Activism: Legacies and Learning" will include lectures, workshops and an all-out bash of a banquet. The latter features a speech by Mr. Flacks' longtime friend and SDS co-founder, former state Sen. Tom Hayden.

After retirement, Mr. Flacks has one cruise planned -- an EcoCruise, naturally -- but otherwise, he will apparently be busy as ever.

Mr. Flacks said he intends to continue his research, write books, teach the occasional class and do his weekly KCSB radio show, "Culture of Protest."

He will remain active in local politics and social causes, doing all he can to encourage others to rise up and get radical.

"A frustration that a lot of people feel, that I feel, is that there is no alternative set of voices at the national level," he said. "Radicals are people who are really willing to make a fundamental, critical examination of institutions, of society, to entertain alternative visions. They're people who don't think that the way things are are the way things have to be, that another world is possible. That's a radical statement."

e-mail: sleachman@newspress.com

IV Community Center

2006-04-25T06:41:00.000+07:00

(Isla Vista Community Center project plan layout)

The Isla Vista Community Center is taking shape. There is seed money, but the project still needs further financial support from community, businesses and I.V. Alumni. If you can, please spread the word and contact Laurie Hoyle at the Office of Student Affairs, at UCSB. Her email is:

Laurie.Hoyle@sa.ucsb.edu

AS Presidents

2006-04-05T05:04:00.000+07:00

The UCSB Associated Students present... "a forum featuring a reunion of Associated Students Presidents. This free public forum will be presented on Friday, April 7, 2006 at 1:30 pm in the UCSB MultiCultural Center.

"The UCSB Associated Students Presidents Forum will feature more than 25 former Associated Students Presidents reflecting on their experiences. Included in those expected to attend are Robert Scalapino (1939-40), founder of the Institute of East Asian Studies and Professor of Government Emeritus at UC Berkeley, Bill James (1969-70), the first student of color to serve as AS President who has gone on to work with the US State Department US Aid program and at the United Nations, and Claude Ruibal (1976-1978), CEO of the World Championship Sports Network.

"Also scheduled to attend are several former AS Presidents who served during the turbulent ‘60’s and 70’s when Isla Vista became a hotbed of activity which culminated in three separate riots and the historic burning of the Bank of America.

"Former Associated Students Presidents have been asked to share the highlights of their time in office and reflect on what impact the experience has had on their life. The Presidents will also be available to answer questions from the audience."

The full list:

Robert Scalapino 39/40
Howard Eckles 41/42
George Graves 47/48
David Hodgin 53/54
Robert Andrews 63/64
Jay Jeffcoat 66/67
Greg Stamos 67/68
Bill James 69/70
John Grant 72/73
Abby Arnold 73/74
Howard Robinson 75/76
Neil Moran 75/76
Claude Ruibal 76-78
Rich Leib 78/79
Marty Cusack 79/80
Tibby Rothman 80/81
Curtis Robinson 87/88
Michael Chester 90/91
Aaron Jones 92/93
Geoff Green 93/94
Brittany Oates 94/95
Wayne Byrd II 97/98
Jason Nazar 99/00
Mahader Tesfai 00/01
Chrystine Lawson 02/03
Miguel Lopez 03/04
Cervin Morris 04/05
Chaz Whatley 05/06

For more info, contact Andrew Doerr, Publications Coordinator

UCSB Associated Students
UCen Room 2537
University of California
Santa Barbara, CA 93106
(805) 893-3374 Fax: (805) 893-7734
andrewd@as.ucsb.edu

Goleta Slough

2006-03-23T06:36:00.000+07:00

The Goleta Slough Management Committee's got a neat website with lots of high quality images of Isla Vista's neighbor. Go to:

Goleta Slough Management Committee

... Click on an area of interest on the map, then click on the picture that comes up in the header for a slideshow of that particular map section.

1782 Spanish Map of the Slough Area, Mescaltitlan -- the area of highest Chumash centralized population.

Isla Vista Today

2006-03-11T00:25:00.000+07:00

At the website listed below, there's a detailed map of current businesses, complete with a legend and description of all businesses. Shows fairly well how much has changed since the goode olde daze...

Shop Isla Vista - Community Information and Resources

(Thanks to the Isla Vista Yahoo Group for the heads-up)

Libertarians vs. IVRPD

2006-01-12T04:05:00.000+07:00

Libertarian Party Files Lawsuit Against IVRPD
Charged With Brown Act Violation, IVRPD Accuses Santa Barbara Libertarian Party of 'Gouging District'

by Mollie Vandor - Staff Writer, DAILY NEXUS
Wednesday, January 11, 2006

With the filing of a recent lawsuit, the Isla Vista Recreation and Park District (IVRPD) has found itself facing its second major legal battle with the Santa Barbara Libertarian Party in less than a year.

On Dec. 15, the Santa Barbara chapter of the Libertarian Party filed suit against the IVRPD with the chapter's vice chairman, Michael Lamboley, named as plaintiff. In the suit, Lamboley's lawyer, William Hansult, alleges that the board violated the Brown Act - a California law requiring meetings of legislative bodies to be open to the public - during three closed session meetings in August and September. IVRPD General Manager Derek Johnson said the board used the meetings to interview law firms looking to serve as the IVRPD's legal counsel. Since meetings dealing with district employment issues are exempt from the Brown Act, Johnson said the IVRPD did not violate the law.

"The district fully believes in the Brown Act," Johnson said. "We are confident in the district's position that the district lawfully met in closed session to interview legal counsel."

According to the text of the lawsuit, the Libertarian Party is asking Judge James W. Brown, who is presiding over the case, to issue an injunction against the IVPRD. The injunction would officially condemn the district's actions and prohibit the board from violating the Brown Act in the future. The party also calls for the board to pay the Libertarian Party's legal fees, as well as any other financial penalties the court deems necessary.

Lamboley said the IVRPD could potentially avoid a legal battle over the alleged violation if it admits that the lawsuit's accusations are correct and changes its procedures accordingly.

"The district can either say to the judge that [the Libertarian Party is] right and this is how they're going to fix it, or they can fight it and it could cost them money," Lamboley said.

According to papers Hansult filed at the Santa Barbara Superior Court in support of the suit, the Libertarian Party believes that legal action is the only way to keep the IVRPD from violating the Brown Act again in the future.

"The actions of the defendants ... were designed to purposefully and maliciously deprive the people of their right to know and to remain informed of the actions taken by the public body," Hansult stated in the supporting documents. "Further it is believed and hereby alleged that without this court's intervention and issuance of an injunction, that the board will continue to violate the Brown Act in similar ways."

IVRPD board member Bryan Brown said he thinks the Libertarian Party is using the suit to get money from the district.

"They have consistently made it clear they're out for money," Brown said. "This is an attempt to gouge the district."

However, Lamboley said the lawsuit was motivated by a desire to hold local governing bodies accountable to state laws.

"The State of California has some of the best good government laws in the nation, but there are no provisions in the budget for enforcing those laws," Lamboley said. "They're on the books, but it's up to individuals or organizations to enforce these rules and basically that's what we're doing."

Brown said the suit comes down to how the judge decides to interpret the Brown Act.

"They're claiming that by interviewing attorneys in closed session, we violated the Brown Act because an attorney is not an official employee, they're an independent contractor," Brown said. "The Brown Act says you can meet to discuss official employees, but there's a conflict in how the Brown Act specifies who is an employee."

In early 2005, a judge ordered the IVRPD to pay over $40,000 in fines stemming from a lawsuit filed by the Libertarian Party in November 2001 over another Brown Act violation. Johnson said the suit ultimately cost the district close to $300,000 in fines and legal fees.

"It made things tough," Johnson said. "It made the district's ability to provide its services tough."

Brown said the district has been bracing for the second lawsuit since Craig Geyer, who was the Libertarian Party's chief witness in the 2001 suit, attended one of the meetings in question and informed IVRPD board members that he thought their closed session agenda violated the Brown Act.

Geyer said he is not involved in the lawsuit and declined further comment. The lawsuit itself cites an anonymous citizen who attended an IVRPD meeting and informed the board about the alleged Brown Act violations.

Brown said the IVRPD hopes to have this lawsuit resolved more quickly than the last one, which was in litigation for three years. He said he thinks the two lawsuits show that the Libertarian Party is specifically targeting the IVRPD.

"I think they have a grudge against us for reasons I don't entirely understand," Brown said.

The district plans to discuss the suit in further detail at its Jan. 19 meeting, Johnson said.

Hansult could not be reached for comment.

Libertarian Party Files Lawsuit Against IVRPD - Daily Nexus Online

Isla Vista Yahoo Group

2006-01-11T02:52:00.000+07:00

There's an interesting thread going on currently at the Isla Vista Yahoo Groups site, which also invites new members for those of you who would like to write about Isla Vista on a more frequent basis. The thread excerpt, below, is just a portion of the current discussion:

> In a message dated 1/9/2006 4:43:45 P.M. Mountain Standard Time, qim@yahoo.com writes:
> I remember Borsodi's (sp) Coffee House as the first coffee house I ever went to...poetry readings, guitarist/singers doing actual folk music...interesting place!

Borsodi (I can't remember his name) died a few years back, living in New Orleans. I think it was lung cancer. I think Linda left in the late 1970s? I remember they had this great mural on the inside ceiling that was the view from the center of the Bank of America the morning after it burned down, looking straight up, with the smoldering wood timbers sticking up on every side and the blue sky in the middle.

It occurs to me that if we put together a list of people and their estimated birth dates I could check my Social Security Death Index and find out if any passed on. It wouldn't be definite as in some cases there would be multiple people with the same name and birth year. More help if we had place they were born in but that is probably not known.

I told Dave that Joyce Roop passed away in Boston sometime in the past few years. I taught her massage (she lived below me at the Campus Crusade for Christ on the south side of the 1st block of Pardall (6504?).

Gotta stop. Could go on forever.
Ed

> I am SURE concerts have changed! We held them in People's Park, before and after they built what was easily the world's goofiest amphitheater! I remember we "sold" beer to raise money for the IVCC. Actually, people "donated" for the beer. We kept it cool (as in "proper" not chilled), and the Foot Patrol never gave us any trouble, because the way we ran it, there was never any trouble! By the way, the statute of limitations HAS passed on this, correct???
> Having caught up a bit with Ed, I was saddened to hear of the death of several people I knew, and delighted by good news about others.
> Isla Vista: It was an intense experience, that is for sure!
> I could go on for pages about life there in the '70s, it was indeed a very special place!
>
> Dave Pye
>
> To Post a message, send it to: islavista@eGroups.com
> To Unsubscribe, send a blank message to: islavista-unsubscribe@eGroups.com

Charlie Celebration 3

2005-12-21T04:05:00.000+07:00

A Good Friend Remembered (photo by Susan Swift)

Charlie Celebration 2

2005-12-21T04:04:00.000+07:00

Jeff & Carrie (photo by Susan Swift)

Charlie Celebration 1

2005-12-21T03:56:00.000+07:00

A Celebration of Charlie 1 (photo by Susan Swift - Thanks, Susan!)

Eugene McCarthy, RIP

2005-12-13T03:33:00.000+07:00

Eugene McCarthy has passed on -- once again with very little media coverage; this time for the last time.

A number of key UCSB student leaders were in the McCarthy campaign in 1968, so, in a sense, you could say that the leftist bent to late 1960's and early 1970's politics at the University of California Santa Barbara campus had its foundation in the McCarthy campaign...

REMEMBERING EUGENE MCCARTHY, by Ken Rudin, NPR:

By any measure, 1968 was a horrific year. An endless war in Southeast Asia. The toppling of a sitting president. The assassinations of a civil rights leader and a presidential candidate. A nation torn apart on race and war and culture. It was one of those benchmark years that people who lived through it will remember forever. And when you think of 1968, you also remember Eugene McCarthy, the Democratic senator from Minnesota, whose presidential candidacy was based on opposition to the war in Vietnam and who helped bring down a president.

McCarthy was a reluctant national figure, to say the least. He was not a showboat; he looked more comfortable reading poetry than drawing attention to himself. And he was not one of the earliest opponents of the war. For example, in 1964 he voted for the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that essentially gave the Johnson administration carte blanche authority to wage war in Vietnam (only two senators -- and no House members -- voted against it). But once McCarthy broke with President Lyndon Johnson on the war, in 1966, he never turned back. For months, McCarthy publicly urged that Sen. Robert F. Kennedy (D-NY) challenge Johnson for the nomination; for his part, Kennedy always said he wouldn't run and that he intended to back LBJ for re-election. Finally, with the war dragging on, the casualties mounting, and no one else willing to step forward, McCarthy made it official. And even as he announced his candidacy, on Nov. 30, 1967, he still said that he hoped that Bobby Kennedy would get in the race.

In the winter of 1967-68, all eyes were on the New Hampshire primary. Gov. John King (D), who led the pro-Johnson forces in the state, said McCarthy was the "spokesman for the forces of appeasement," one who advocated "a policy of surrender which would destroy everything we have been fighting for." King opined, "The people most interested in the results of this election are Ho Chi Minh and his Communist friends," and that a sizable vote total for McCarthy would be "greeted with great cheers in Hanoi." (King at one point said he thought McCarthy would get about 12 percent of the vote.)

That Johnson won the New Hampshire primary was not a surprise; he had the party machinery, the money and the endorsements all in his favor. That he won with just 49 percent of the vote -- compared to McCarthy's 42 percent -- was a surprise. In fact, it was a stunning repudiation of a president and his war policy. And it was carried out by the unlikeliest of political figures, leading an unlikely army of college students who decided to "Clean for Gene" -- shave, shower, clean up their acts -- and toil in the snows of New Hampshire to spread their message.

(Where Are They Now Department: McCarthy staffers at the time included press secretary Seymour Hersh, now a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist with The New Yorker; political director Curtis Gans, currently the director of the Center for the Study of the American Electorate at American University; and finance committee co-chair Martin Peretz, who has been editor-in-chief of The New Republic since 1974.)

The satisfaction McCarthy may have gotten for his strong showing lasted less than 24 hours. One day after the primary, Kennedy announced he was "actively reconsidering" his decision not to run. And three days after that -- on March 16, 1968 -- Kennedy made his candidacy official. He said he feared from the beginning that challenging Johnson would have made it look personal; his enmity for the president was no secret. Kennedy said that McCarthy's showing in New Hampshire made it clear that Democrats were losing confidence in the Johnson administration. He insisted he was not out to divide the antiwar wing of the party. "In no state will my efforts be directed against Sen. McCarthy," he said. But for those who joined McCarthy's crusade after having given up on the hope that Kennedy would run, it was an act of betrayal. And it made McCarthy a bitter candidate.

Fifteen days later, Johnson stunned the nation by announcing he would not run for a second term.

McCarthy was never able to capitalize. He spent the next few months campaigning as much against Kennedy as he did against Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who became the choice of the party establishment after Johnson's withdrawal. He beat Kennedy in Oregon in late May. In early June, Kennedy turned the tables on McCarthy by winning in California -- only to be assassinated within minutes of declaring victory.

Although Humphrey got in the race after the filing deadlines for every remaining primary had passed, and thus never won a single primary, he went on to easily win the Democratic nomination. But the cost to the party was enormous. Antiwar demonstrators outside the Chicago convention clashed with and were beaten by the Chicago police. The entire spectacle showed a party in chaos, and it had a big role in assuring the election of Richard Nixon in November. McCarthy refused to endorse Humphrey until very late in the campaign.

Retiring from the Senate after 1970, McCarthy again sought the Democratic nomination in 1972 but was not a factor. As the years went by, he became even more of a Democratic outsider. He ran as an independent presidential candidate in 1976. In 1980, McCarthy endorsed Ronald Reagan over President Jimmy Carter. He even sought the presidency again in 1988.

If you ever got to speak to McCarthy in later years, it always seemed like you were in a time machine. The conflict, the drama, the personal slights of 1968 were never far from the surface. And the conversation rarely was about Vietnam or Lyndon Johnson. It was almost always about Bobby Kennedy.

In 1968 Eugene McCarthy was an imperfect candidate leading an improbable cause. He didn't get the nomination and he didn't end the war. But he stepped forward when antiwar forces needed him the most.

NPR text : Remembering Eugene McCarthy

NPR audio : Audio recap of McCarthy's political life

IVRPD 1972-1998

2005-11-09T02:31:00.000+07:00

For those of you wondering what happened to Isla Vista after the burning of the bank, Christina A. Ziegler-McPherson wrote a history of the Isla Vista Parks and Recreation District (1972-1998) which she gave the IVRPD in 1998.

During the 1970's, IV politics was split between the IVCC/IVMAC and the IVRPD. In the 1980's, the IVRPD became the defacto government in Isla Vista. What happened in the 1990's is also documented in this work. While the author's work is primarily taken from written reports of what occurred and very little primary source information was gathered, I recommend reading it:

Isla Vista Recreation and Park District History