This audio blog is taken — literally — from an article that I was commissioned to do by the California Monthly, the UC Berkeley Alumni Magazine, for the June-July issue, 1980, 10 years after I graduated from that college and left also my positions on the Daily Californian student newspaper.

I hope this is just the first of many such recordings of other articles that I wrote, of journal entries, of poetry, of profiles, of critical reviews, all chronicling my experience, my general experience, my specific experience of being a young woman and a young reporter in Berkeley, California during what is sometimes called the day, sometimes called the movement between 1966 and 1971. I hope these are legacy contributions to some sense of history more than 50 years later.

When We Were Young and Gassed

It was May 15th, 1969, the first day of the city-wide explosion over People’s Park. A noontime rally led to a march by 6,000 people to the side of the park on the south side of campus. A freewheeling street battle began between police and demonstrators, which led to buckshot casualties and an atmosphere by nightfall eerily like a movie set for a World War II battle film. Tear gas wafted up through Sproul Plaza into the cracks and vents of Eshelman Hall.

In the editor’s office of the Daily Californian, students were locked in a tense, angry, expletive-ridden confrontation. Outside, the war raged. Inside, the senior editorial board of the Daily Cal was engaged in a hysterical skirmish over space.

Would the regular Friday departments be sacrificed to the cause of expanded coverage? Could the baseball scores and the weekend film reviews possibly be as significant as the news reporting of the bloody events of the day?

As Arts editor, I was caught in the middle of the fracas. I held my ground. “No, I would not relinquish my pages, my film and rock coverage, my entertainment calendar, my integrity.” But if my reviewers wanted to use some of their columns to comment on the living theater outside, I would not stop them, and at least one person took advantage of this offer.

“Note, in view of the current situation on campus,” they wrote, “The following proposal is offered, that future riots be scheduled ahead of time and that they be held in the Greek theater, where no windows will be broken. There’s plenty of fresh air to disperse the gas and seats for those who wish to watch.” Anonymous reviewer, May 16, 1969.

I, on the other hand, was defending my article, my interview with filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard. “Jean-Luc Godard,” I screened, “will be important long after this riot.” As it turned out, Godard faded into artistic obscurity long before People’s Park was forgotten.

But if I made a misjudgment in instant historical perspective, blame it on an almost unbroken parade of dramatic clashes that had occurred since I landed on campus as a not quite 18 years old. And since I started as a cub reporter for the paper in 1966, there had been a December 1966 student strike, following the Students for a Democratic Society or STS attempt to move the Navy ROTC out of the student union. There were anti-draft rallies, Stop the Draft week, Dow Chemical and CIA Placement Center confrontations, a Moses Hall sit-in, a Sproul Hall mill-in, and a Third-World Liberation Front strike.

A couple of times in the past 10 years, the veterans of the domestic war years on campus, that stormy period between the free speech movement (FSM) and the invasion of Cambodia in 1970, have gathered at Giovanni’s restaurant in Berkeley on Telegraph Avenue to recall, to reevaluate, and even rewrite the high points of our careers on the Daily Cal.

What we collectively remember about working on the paper is that there were days when the Eshelman editorial offices were so dirty, so charged, so filled with tear gas and fatigue that a normal life — that is one without the responsibility of getting a newspaper to bed, so to speak — seemed just a happy dream.

But remarkable numbers of us stayed in journalism. A roll call of senior editorial board members and staff writers from that period includes city editors and reporters from the Detroit Free Press, the Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post, and smaller papers across the country; authors of books on adult development and parents (me); Motown musicians; and in investigative reporting, a television news producer, and the head of an established public relations firm.

The Daily Cal experience was more than a collegiate exercise for most of us, far more than an extracurricular activity to fill the time between language lab and the dinner bell. In fact, and notoriously, Daily Cal staffers often forgot to go to their sections and sometimes even o their midterms. We took our roles on a large college daily newspaper very seriously. So did the university administration, the regents, and the faculty.

The kind of reporting and writing that went on in those years hastened the decision to move the paper off campus as an independent publication. We can either be thanked for or blamed for that 1971 push out the doors of the student office building down Telegraph to quarters on Channing Way.

What we collectively remember about our journalism is that the paper moved, sometimes erratically with the time, from button-down objectivity to sedate five o’clock story conferences and cool reportage to literally naked subjectivity.

Editor Constantine Berlant once ran a nude photograph of himself as an editorial, and free-for-all fights over space happened all the time for our pet stories.

But in retrospect, even in a pitched crisis like the week of People’s Park, we did not completely prostitute the tenants of responsible reporting, some of which we learned about as actual journalism majors. If our revulsion and indignation oozed out through the banner headlines and in the lead stories, the coverage and other stories on other pages was fairly balanced.

The day after the first riot, the paper ran a straight account of the peaceful follow-up march, a statement from Chancelor Hines, reactions from the regents and the ASUC Senate.

The editorials, while passionate and increasingly hard on the chancellor’s office, never advocated armed confrontation or bloodshed. A decade later, the tone seemed less inflammatory than it might have been.

Nonetheless, the Daily Cal was a different paper than it had been before, even during FSM issues, leapfrogged issues, tempers flared, four letter words crept into the pages.

Berkeley’s Public Information Officer Richard Hafner, class of 1950, admits, “The truth is that if the Daily Cal had not gone off campus in 1971, I don’t know what the administration could have done. By that time, the courts had broadly constrained a university’s power to deal with the troublesome campus newspaper. By that time, we had four years of the new journalism,” he recalled.

It developed very rapidly beginning around 1966, ‘67. The previous tradition was to get the facts and let the reader draw his own conclusions. This was replaced by the reporter getting the facts and making conclusions for the reader.

Hafner feels that by the time of the student strike, the balance began to tilt, driven by revulsion against the war in Vietnam. There was a very, very strong administrative feeling that the paper was giving a pretty biased view.

It wasn’t just the politics of the paper that was causing the university to blanch and fume. Hafner says that the most troublesome aspects of the new journalism was the obscenity and the sex stories. These superficially caused even more problems than the political, cerebral court reportage. It clashed heavily with the responsibilities of the staff, the regents, and others in the community.

Carol Mattskin-Osborne, class of 1970, was hauled up before the paper’s publishing board — the governing group comprised of faculty, administrators, and students — for a story, she wrote as a sophomore, an exposé of sex in the dormitories.

“It all started when topless dancer Carol Doda appeared as a promotion for Cal-Cam in the Student Activity Center,” Osborne says. “Another fundraiser my dormitory, Unit 2, held was an auction, a sex auction. The prize was a discreet half-hour of privacy in a dorm room, and my roommate won.”

When she reported this, some members of the pub board were appalled, and she was commanded to appear at one of their meetings. They were threatening the worst.

“I was just a kid, she said. “I didn’t know what they could do to me. I was afraid I’d go to jail.”

One of the senior editors defended her, and she was released with a reprimand.

During the summer, she returned to her home in Chicago to work on the Daily News.

“I just rehashed all the stuff I did for the Daily Cal,” she remembers. “I’d write about macrobiotic diets, and my pieces would end up on the front page, no problem. Nobody back there had heard of any of that.”

So ends the story.