Forty years ago today I left New York City for good, flying to San Francisco to take a job at UC Berkeley.
It was also the day RFK was shot.
I woke that morning, in my empty apartment in the Village, surrounded by the luggage I packed the night before. I switched on a pocket radio, the only working appliance in my one room studio, and heard just confusion. I couldn’t tell what was going on.
Eventually it became clear. RFK had been shot in LA. And I was flying to SFO in a few hours. There is no record of what I thought at that moment. Today, my mind is a blank about much of the whole affair. The shooting. The flight.
I do remember that my parents drove in from Long Island to take me to the airport. Their second child was leaving. (My brother left years ago for Johns Hopkins, or was it MIT. Or Tel Aviv U. I forget which.)
I don’t remember any conversation. It must have been a difficult scene. RFK and goodbyes. My dad was an Eisenhower Republican anyway. And my mom was probably a Democrat, if she voted at all. Her parents were Eastern European immigrants and Socialists. She was quite happy just being a suburban housewife. I guess. I never really knew for sure.
Anyway, RFK and my leaving NYC for Berkeley are forever tied together.
Somehow I got on the plane with all my stuff. 51 boxes of books and more stuff, shipped earlier in the week, would be waiting for me. Somewhere. I have no memory of how I managed this move. It happened, somehow. I wasn’t even sure where I was going to live once I arrived. The University would pay relocation fees, including a hotel for a few days. But then what?
On the plane I was nervous. I do remember that.
Was I doing the right thing? Moving from New York. Four years earlier, when I graduated Brookly Poly, my friends were all being sucked up by the tech companies in the West who were supporting the military technology of the Vietnam war. Engineers were going off to Arizona and southern California to work for the now lucrative war effort. But leave New York? It was 1964, I was 20 and living in the Village. No way! You must be crazy to leave.
By ‘68 all that changed. Assassinations, riots, crime, grit and soot, bad drugs in the street. The hippies of ‘66-67 had morphed into homeless beggars and toothless street bums by ‘68.
Sometime in March, and this I do remember clearly, I left my apartment to go to work across the street at NYU. Blocking my way on the sidewalk was what looked like a pile of old clothes. Some busted boots, coats, hats, many pairs of pants. Unfortunately there was a man in them. Lying on the ground staring up at the ugly sky. I knew this man was dead just by looking at his skin. A few months before I had gone to a funeral home in Brooklyn for a view of my Uncle Benny. I’d never seen a dead man before. He was quite dead. So was the guy on the sidewalk . That same color.
And people were just walking around him, not even looking. Like it was just a pile of garbage left there last night for pickup.
This disturbed me. I do remember that.
So I went over to work, to my office, sat down and typed out my resume. I gotta get out of here.
I wrote and sent two letters that day, with my resume. One was to people I knew at the computer center at the UC Berkeley Lawrence Lab in California. The other to people I knew at the University of London Computer Center. I went to the mailroom and bought stamps, and mailed them. That was sometime in March, 1968. I knew it was a wild and impulsive thing to do. But it had been building up. I always wanted to go to Berkeley. And to London. We’d see who’d win the toss. Then I went about my business, wondering what would happen next.
A few weeks later, in early April, MLK was killed. We expected riots.
And then a letter arrived from Berkeley. An interview. I never did hear from London, until years later.
By late May I had a job offer. And On June 5, I had turned my life’s arrow around and was on the plane heading West.
It was on the plane that the pilot announced RFK’s death. There was a moment of silence. I didn’t know what to think. I had the feeling that everything I ever knew was about to change forever.
That’s what it took. A letter. An envelope. And a stamp.
Had London ever replied, I probably would have quit this country. Had I not followed the impulse to get out of the City and write those resumes and post those letters, I would still be in NYC, maybe. Had that old guy not died in front of my apartment, who knows.
I tell this story to my two Berkeley-born daughters occasionally. They wouldn’t be alive had it not been for the events that stemmed from a death in the street, a letter, an envelope, and a stamp. When you’re 24, the most mundane things can form the matrix out of which the next forty or more will grow. But you don’t know that then.
It’s all very very strange .. to wonder about it all.
And the rest of the story, the London part, is important.
I loved London when I visited it in 1966, and kept up a number of connections there by mail. Disappointed from not hearing from them, I still would occasionally meet people from the U of London at conferences. Around 1972 I arranged to take a year’s leave from Berkeley and take a job at the London computer center. I spent all of 1973 in London, enjoying most of it until the big oil crisis, the first oil crisis, in the winter. But sometime around September the director of the computer center moved his office from the second to the third floor. By this time I had forgotten about the 1968 letter. But into my office comes the director, a very very messy guy, excitedly holding in his hand guess what, that letter.
Unopened.
It had fallen behind his desk and sat there for 5 years until this moment.
I told him there was no need to open it, I knew what it was.
So he opened it, read it while laughing. (I wasn’t, but I was contemplating all the events that led up to this moment and what would have happened if he had been a bit neater.)
And standing there he offered me a full-time job. But it was too late. I wanted to go home.
A letter, an envelope, and a stamp.
And forty years later….
And right now, one daughter, at 24 the same age that I was when I left in ‘68, is now a tourist in New York City, visiting friends and hopefully tracing my footsteps in the Village. And the other, almost 30, is in Gaza City, looking out on the Sea and reporting back from Palestine.
It’s enough to take your breath away.
This year marks the 100th anniversary of Olivier Messiaen’s birth, December 1908. So maybe it’s more like the anniversary of his conception as well.
Gerhard Samuel, conductor of the Oakland Symphony from 1959 to 1971, passed away in Seattle on March 25. He was 83.
