of attracting a few bankers and financial advisors, Marc tore down the burlap wall coverings that hinted at hippiedom and painted the place crisp white. Then he and the staff set up an all-you-can-eat vegetarian restaurant, an eco art gallery, and lunchtime discussions on the city and its quality of life. Sure enough, people from the Financial District poured in. Secretaries. Brokers. Newspaper vendors. Radio commentator Wes “Scoop” Nisker (of “If You Don’t Like the News, Go Out and Make Some of Your Own” repute) popped by for coffee. Ponderosa Pine, who for years had trod the sidewalks of San Francisco without shoes, lent his rants on the glories to be had if only the nation could be broken down into self-sustaining bioregions. Stephanie Mills was a regular; she had gained clout when in 1969 she delivered her Mills College valedictorian lecture on the decision not to bear children due to overpopulation. Sierra Club president David Brower made the occasional appearance. And lo and behold for the power of painted white walls, former New York advertising executive Jerry Mander came to discuss his infamous Save the Whales ad campaign.
Architect Zack Stewart’s Canessa Gallery sat across the street on Montgomery. Ever the bearded eccentric, Zack enlisted the curious and courageous to join him on a boat trip up the Sacramento River so that the budding environmentalists could get to know what the Bay Area landscape looks like, where the city’s water comes from, who is polluting the river, etc.: in essence, to develop a Sense of Place. His River Terminus Expeditions shaped up to be a marine version of the Merry Pranksters’ hippie bus. It boasted three houseboats sleeping ten people each for three days. Each boat had a captain and a navigator, but Marc … well … he was dubbed Admiral of the whole shebang.
Accompanied by Ecology Center herbal teas and fresh-baked, whole-grain muffins, the All-Species Parade through the streets of the city was launched in 1977. The Rain Dance at the Legion of Honor was spawned to wake up the deities and counter the unforgiving 1976 drought; the ceremony was held on a Friday night, and by Saturday morning (of all rarities in San Francisco), it snowed. A block up Columbus, the International Hotel was throwing otherwise homeless, elderly residents into the streets; protest erupted, and the Ecology Center provided childcare for picketers. Then, like some kind of preordained synchronicity, San Francisco’s first environmental campaign focused on that concrete behemoth of a building across Columbus with its energy-sucking air conditioners, and its windows that couldn’t be opened to let in the Bay’s fresh, cool air.
Marc Kasky above Fort Mason Center, 1982. Photo credit: now-defunct San Francisco Food Coop. Courtesy of Marc Kasky.
And since the “straight” drop-ins and non–ecologically minded were confused as to how to live lightly on the land, Marc came up with his how-to-solve-daily-problems-as-if-the-planet-mattered radio show on KPFA-FM called “M.I.N.T.” Money Is Not Thrilling. One caller would confess the eco-disastrous temptation to buy a new car, and by the seat of his pants, Marc would advise him to paint the old one, get some new upholstery, add a hood ornament. Another would moan about her gripping desire to own a Kirby vacuum cleaner like the one her neighbor had; Marc would propose sharing machines.
Imagine how life was for me: I lived for seven and a half years with this fount of ingenuity. When I met Marc in 1979, he was director for Fort Mason Center, a World War II army base perched on the edge of the San Francisco Bay, and for 24 years he guided its development from an army base into a people’s cultural center. There were non-profit headquarters for the likes of Media Alliance, Magic Theater, and Blue Bear Music School. There were classrooms and museums and performance venues. The Zen Center’s Greens restaurant whipped up meals of organic vegetables grown on their Green Gulch ranch in Marin County and, needless to say, served their own baked Tassajara bread. Marc oversaw the building of the 450-seat Cowell Theater; the relocation/restoration of the in-decline eco mural “Positively 4th Street” depicting the reclamation of a defunct freeway off-ramp by plants and animals; and the renovation of the last World War II Liberty Ship, the Jeremiah O’Brian.
When work was finished, the ideas didn’t stop. Steeped in the psychological wing of the anti-nuclear movement of the 1980s, I was running an organization called Waking Up in the Nuclear Age. The motivation of WUINA’s cadre of mental health professionals was to present lectures on the psychological ramifications of living with the arms race and workshops to help citizens break through the denial and, as psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton called it, psychic numbing behind the paralysis of the population since the atomic era had begun. We were faced with a U.S. president taunting the opposition with inflammatory phrases like “Evil Empire” and bragging of bold, new weapons systems like Star Wars and Cruise Missiles; the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock had been readjusted from its former seven minutes before midnight in 1980 to a hair-trigger three by 1984. Our task was to catalyze a new generation of activists who would plunge into the movement against nuclear proliferation.
After the workshop goers’ fear and grief had been excavated and expressed, we would meditate to envision ways to contribute to making a safer world. As far back as 1977, Marc had come up with the Vivatron Bomb, an antidote to the neutron bomb touted by the U.S. government as a military techno-strategy that, upon detonation, would kill all living beings but leave buildings, roads, bridges, vehicles, and airports intact. Marc’s notion was to create a bomb that would destroy the buildings, roads, bridges, vehicles, and airports that ecologists were identifying as sources of a lifestyle that was devastating the planet—and leave the people, animals, and plants to thrive anew.
The ways he and I together contributed to making a safer world were to organize protests, march against nearby weapons-researching Livermore Laboratory, canvas door-to-door for the Nuclear Freeze, write articles, and do radio interviews. To lend some humor to the effort, we also decided to host a contest toward a citizens’ invention of the Vivatron Bomb. Parade, California Living, Albuquerque Journal, and San Francisco Bay Guardian ran notices for the competition, and letters poured in from all over the United States—five shopping bags of entries stuffed to the brim, to be exact. On the drive to Bolinas where, in a borrowed cottage, we were to read the ideas and determine the winner, I was suddenly struck with the fact that we did not actually have the $50,000 prize money we had so frivolously promised. But Marc, of course, had thought all that through: the contest rules stated that the entries had to be not only great ideas for inventions, but also had to have been demonstrated in a major U.S. city. Needless to say, no Vivatron Bomb had yet toppled the Sears Building or set ablaze the New York Thruway—and so we published an article in California Living presenting the best of the lot.
This wellspring of ideas was third-generation Russian immigrant: the family surname before hitting Ellis Island had been Kasajovic, which translated to “fur pelt”; his great-grandfather had been a hat maker. The authorities immediately changed it to Kaskowitz; then when, as a Jew, Marc’s father set out to play professional baseball, to avoid discrimination he changed it to Kasky. One of Marc’s foremost beloveds was the woman who had braved the journey across the Atlantic from Eastern Europe and raised four children alone: Grandmother Rae. From her he learned independence of mind.
His parents were Alice and Dick Kasky. They set about making their home in Stamford, Connecticut, where, upon reaching only the minor leagues, Dick opened a tire store. Marc launched a brief career as what in those days was called a JD (juvenile delinquent)—robbing cars, breaking/entering. Then, suddenly, he made a 180-degree turn-around and became the first in the family to go to college: Connecticut Wesleyan, and later, to Yale for a master’s in urban planning. But the times lent themselves more to “drop out/tune in” work than to joining a firm in Hartford. Marc got a job as a community organizer in Jersey City.
His apartment was a third floor walk-up. The Hippie Revolution was in full bloom, although admittedly not that evident in working-class Jersey City, and on his paltry organizer’s salary, he had zero cash to spend on fixing up the place. So he gathered a bunch of wooden fruit crates and some enormous slabs of foam rubber, painted them neon orange, and set them in a sort of amphitheater arrangement in the otherwise
