LETTER TO CHELLIS GLENDINNING, 2014
I had never been to a real health-food store before. Of course, what with being in Berkeley, I had already been introduced to Adele Davis’ food theories, and encouraged to use whole-wheat flour, make my own yogurt, and drink herbal tea. And I’d heard of the Food Mill. At the time—before Wholly Foods opened its doors at Shattuck and Ashby and while the industry remained but a twinkle in the eyes of a few health-food-freak entrepreneurs-to-be—the Food Mill was the Bay Area’s only outlet selling organic grains, seeds, and flour.
But I didn’t know where it was.
Marty said he would take me. Imagine my awe when he pulled up to the Vine Street commune in a 1963 Chevy II … convertible. To my mind, the car presented a sharp quip of a lampoon of the American Dream our generation was rejecting and, at the same time, was utterly camp in its own right. Off we went—Marty in his trademark shorts and combat boots, with his flaming red corkscrew locks flying in the wind like Gorgonian snakes; me in U.S. Navy bellbottoms, purple Hindu shirt, and long brown braids—cruising along the Eastshore Freeway, past the driftwood/cast-off machinery sculptures constructed anonymously in the mudflats and on to Oakland’s MacArthur Boulevard.
In those days it was a good bet you would find all five feet and four inches of Marty as a very tall presence around the political advocacy tables in Sproul Plaza. He was a bit older than most in the anti-war movement and, before the 1974 stock-market collapse, he made his living by buying and selling stocks; it was a feature that I found incomprehensible but also far-out—and that definitely made him the All-American Hippie Weirdo Drop-Out. That he filled his studio apartment with God’s Eyes he crafted himself only enhanced my view. Marty kept his Gorgon hairdo for near a lifetime, although it did change color as the years ambled onward; he wore the shorts and boots until the late ‘70s, when they finally disintegrated and he switched over to athletic get-up. I was standing in front of the Café Mediterraneum on Telegraph Avenue when the tornado of red hair and gym shorts arrived, bubbling over with endorphins and the discovery that if he ran just three miles every day, he could eat all he wanted!
Marty grew up in Brooklyn in the apartment behind Berdie’s Corset Shoppe. His parents, Berdie and Morris Schiffenbauer, raised him Orthodox Jewish, sending him to yeshivas and keeping the Sabbath every week. “My parents were not very political,” he reports, “but they loved FDR and always voted Democrat. They were, of course, pro-Israel. Mostly their politics were of the Whatever-Is-Good-for-the-Jews variety.”
Marty in his Berkeley commune, 1972. Courtesy of Marty Schiffenbauer.
He first came to Berkeley in 1964, tooling up University Avenue in his Chevy II almost by happenstance. He liked the summer-blue sky, he liked the vibes, he liked the slender blondes—and in his own pre-anti–Vietnam War way he was escaping the draft. In 1962 Marty had opted to join the New York National Guard as the least demanding way to serve his military obligation. By his own admission, he survived six months of active duty but found the subsequent weekly meetings a drag on his time and on taxpayers’ money. Presaging the political expression that was to fill the rest of his life, he wrote a scathing letter to the New York Times. The captain of his reserve unit happened to read it, freaked out, and proposed that Private Marty move to another state immediately—and one preferably far away. Marty then stumbled upon a summer course in German at UC Berkeley that would satisfy the language requirement for his Ph.D. in experimental psychology at NYU, and voilà! off he went.
By 1967, having completed the bulk of his coursework for the Ph.D., he made the definitive move across country. He launched his political involvement in October Berkeley-confrontation style by joining thousands of others in front of the Oakland Induction Center during Stop the Draft Week. His personal approach, though, did not resemble the serious, organized assemblage of the marchers who had faced down the no-nonsense Oakland Police’s Flying Wedge with improvised shields made of garbage- can lids, tire-fed bonfires, and parked cars as barricades. Marty called for a far wackier, Yippie-style Naked Noisy Vigil for Peace. In truth, no one came nude, but a local character named Jefferson “Fuck” Poland showed up strutting nothing more than a jock strap.
Marty was obviously attracted, then, to the Gray-Life Tour of the Suburbs. I was too. This ingenious mirror image of Grayline’s tour for suburban people to come to Berkeley to observe the hippies was the invention of the Berkeley Barb’s military correspondent, Lee Felsenstein. As if in a zoo, you would be leaning against the steps to Sproul Hall discussing the Camus-Sartre breakup or the nutritional value of alfalfa sprouts or LBJ’s role in the escalation of the Vietnam War, when one of these suburban tourists would bold-facedly situate him/herself smack-dab in front of you and rob your soul with a Kodak Brownie. Ergo, one Saturday morning in 1969, two busloads of us (packing Kodak Brownies) veered off the map to Walnut Creek and environs. When we downloaded ourselves to check out the sights on one quaint little Main Street, the terrified storekeepers and restaurant owners bolted their glass doors and pulled down their corrugated metal security gates so fast they looked like dominoes crashing down across Southeast Asia. Next stop was a park. Here I got dizzy watching children riding around a pony-giraffe-turtle-festooned carousel, while Marty was approached by some steak-fed teenagers who saw in his wild tresses their possibly best-ever customer; they tried valiantly but unsuccessfully to sell him the acid and marijuana they normally peddled to their high school peers.
In psychedelic style, the poster for the Naked Noisy Vigil for Peace, 1968. Designers: N. Pettitt and Marty Schiffenbauer. Courtesy of Marty Schiffenbauer.
The tour was capped off with a visit to the straight people’s retirement community, Leisure World. Needless to say, our buses were refused entry to its clipped green lawns and croquet courts, so we hurled our bodies upon the forty-foot erector-set sculpture of planet Earth outside the gate and, freaks hanging from Somoza’s Nicaragua and Franco’s Spain, flew around and around as the giant globe spun.
Sign of the times: I was at Marty’s on Haste Street when the Symbionese Liberation Army crashed and burned in the biggest police shootout in U.S. history. The SLA had first hit the news in 1973; they took down Oakland’s popular African American school superintendent Marcus Foster with cyanide-packed bullets for what they misunderstood to be his “support” of compulsory ID cards. (He was, in fact, against them.) They rose up into the public eye again in 1974 when they kidnapped publishing heiress Patty Hearst and her betrothed, Steven Weed, in Berkeley. Now, via the new compact cameras and mobile units, all three TV stations were live-casting the defense of their L.A. “safe house.”
The SLA appeared to be part of our movement—anti-war, anti-racist, calling the nation’s jails “concentration camps” for Blacks. Yet they were different from us for their tactics. This ill-prepared army fancied itself as a self-styled, left-wing revolutionary band and the vanguard of urban guerrilla warfare à la Regis Debray and the Uruguayan Tupamaros. But, as Marty put it, they were nothing but “a violent cult with an egomaniacal leader.”
Now, on May 17, 1974—better known to us as the day after Marty’s thirty-sixth birthday—the Los Angeles police and fire departments, FBI, and California Highway Patrol were closing in on them. And now, instead of merrily toasting the birthday boy and chowing down on organic carrot cake, we were fixed like the stelae of Stonehenge around the tube. I was too dumbfounded to speak. The men’s voices rose and fell in gasps of revulsion as each round was shot and returned, as some inside attempted to break away from the house and were met with law-enforcement gunfire, as the place burst into devouring flames.
For Marty the symbolic protest of street theater gave way to direct action in 1971 when he founded the Berkeley chapter of War Tax Resistance and, applying his expertise in financial matters
