Michael James : Back to Uptown, 1965-1966

Two men, Uptown Chicago, 1966. Photos by Michael James from his forthcoming book, Michael Gaylord James' Pictures from the Long Haul.

Pictures from the Long Haul:
Back to Uptown: Bye-bye California, 
Chicago here I come, 1965-1966

I was glad to be back in Uptown, progressing along my path with another left turn and a big step into America.

By Michael James / The Rag Blog / December 9, 2013

[In this series, Michael James is sharing images from his rich past, accompanied by reflections about -- and inspired by -- those images. This photo will be included in his forthcoming book, Michael Gaylord James' Pictures from the Long Haul.]

The West Oakland organizing project over, I planned to leave Berkeley. But in the late fall of 1965 I was still there. I had classes. I was thinking about conflict, and how you could bring conflicting groups together. I met others who were already doing community organizing, including Mike Miller who is still at it in 2013, and Mike Sharon with whom I’ve lost contact. I was going to be a community organizer, either in Newark or Chicago.

That fall I lived with friends, for a time with John Williams, who taught me a lot about cooking and politics, and then at Julie Miller’s. Julie was a politically active student friend from Los Angeles. I studied and took in doses of politics and culture. In addition to sociology classes with Nathan Glazer and Hebert Blumer (a renowned academic who had played football at the University of Chicago and then professionally with the old Chicago Cardinals), I went to talks, rallies, demonstrations, films, and musical events.

The playwright and poet LeRoi Jones had become Amiri Baraka. He came to campus and his anti-white rap shook me up. My more knowledgeable pals Davy Wellman and Joe Blum helped me to understand Black Nationalism. A few years later Black Panther leader Bobby Seale would distinguish between revolutionary and reactionary nationalism. “You don’t fight fire with fire, you fight fire with water, and you don’t fight racism with more racism, you fight racism with solidarity.”

Simply put: dig yourself and others.

There were large marches into Oakland, against the Vietnam War and against the racist Oakland Tribune and its rightwing Republican owner, former Senator Bill Knowland. I saw the great guitarist John Fahey along with Country Joe and the Fish at the Finnish Hall. On Telegraph Avenue I bought and listened (over and over) to Joe’s EP Section 43. And I began going to concerts at the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco.

Also in San Francisco I took in a movie I’d read about, Jean Genet’s Un Chant d’Amour, a flick about gay men in prison and their fantasies. The article in Studies on the Left reported on the SF Police Department’s harassment of a theater showing the film. This was all new to me; I didn’t have much consciousness about gays at the time.

I liked the film; it featured a black prisoner and a white one, breathing and whispering through a straw between their neighboring cells. I found it pleasant and sensual; it sure bumped up my learning curve on such matters.

I visited what I now considered my second home, the Williams compound in the Carmel Highlands. From there I explored down the coast. I climbed foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains and went to a rodeo in the old mission town San Juan Bautista. The rodeo was different than my early rodeo experience in Madison Square Garden -- this one was small, outdoors, and heavily influenced by Mexican culture.

Charlie Mingus, Monterrey, California, 1965.

And I went to the Monterey Jazz Festival. A jazz fan since my mid-teens, I’d been to shows and concerts in Greenwich Village and NYC’s Town Hall. I was at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1961, and went to many sets in Chicago. The Monterey Jazz Festival was my first jazz event on the West Coast. I took some pictures of Charlie Mingus hanging out in the concession area before his short set.

At Christmas time I went home to Connecticut. My brother and I, in a tradition started accidentally by our Dad years earlier, went to get a tree late on Christmas Eve; as usual the tree seller had long gone. My Dad returned to the lot to pay the next day, but no one was there. In subsequent years Beau and I didn’t even make that much effort, so later in my life when I sold trees at the Heartland Café, I never got too upset if some went missing and unaccounted for. Karma.

I’ll always remember that particular Christmas, especially for the warm vibes I felt while listening to the Beatles’ Rubber Soul, over and over. I suddenly appreciated them, and saw both them and the Remains at the Chicago Amphitheater the following year.

After Christmas I went to Newark, New Jersey, to visit Tom Hayden and others who worked in the Newark Community Union Project, in a black community. Then I went to Chicago and visited the National Office of Students for a Democratic Society, which was located at 63rd and Cottage Grove.

While in Chicago I visited a snow-covered, gray, and very cold Uptown, where I met with two JOIN Community Union organizers, Peter and Stevie Friedman, working in what was then a predominantly Southern white community. Next I headed down to the University of Illinois in Champaign Urbana, where SDS was holding one of its conventions. My only recollection of that meeting is of when I leapt off a table to break up an altercation between a black community person from the Newark Project and Bob Speck, a Navy vet from the Austin SDS chapter.

At the end of winter break I rode with fellow SDS members from Chicago to Los Angeles, and made my way back to Berkeley. Early in the New Year of ‘66 I was at a SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) benefit at the Fillmore, featuring Grateful Dead, Quick Silver Messenger Service, Moby Grape, and comedian Richard Pryor.

In the back of the hall I met and talked with Stokeley Carmichael (Kwame Ture) who was then head of SNCC. I shared with him my intention to leave Cal and go into a community, either Newark or Chicago. He told me in no uncertain terms to “Work with whites, we’ve got plenty going on in the Black community. We need more support from within the white community."

California girls. Carmel, California, 1965.

That was it. Bye-bye California. Chicago here I come.

But it took a while longer.

I had a graduate paper to write on organizing the poor. I was comparing three efforts: the Saul Alinsky model from his Industrial Areas Foundation, the conflicting and self-constricting efforts of the Government’s War on Poverty, and the “be one with the people” and “let the people decide” projects of SDS and ERAP. My research findings of course declared the SDS efforts best, and I spent the winter of 1966 in the Highlands writing about poverty and organizing.

While there I battled a raccoon that raided the bird feeder every night. Laying in wait, I was inside writing with a baseball bat nearby. I attached bells to the feeder and when they jingled I leapt into action. I went for the animal with a mighty swing, missing as the raccoon jumped free ahead of the bat.

Back up in the Bay Area I ran into someone at a Paul Butterfield concert who said, “I thought you left for Chicago.” I replied: “Soon -- I’m finishing a paper.” I was. I was also having a real fine time in my final weeks as a California resident.

But bye-bye California and hello Chicago did come to be. One Sunday in early April, JOIN organizer Burt Steck and I began heading east in my 1957 Ford convertible, to the heart of the nation.

On Monday night we stopped on the Navajo Reservation in northeastern Arizona and slept on the ground beside the Ford ragtop. In the morning we found that we had actually slept very close to the edge of Canyon de Chelly. Driving on a dirt road we stopped to pick up a hitchhiking Navajo kid. His mom came running out from the bushes and they both got into the car.

The small woman had a blanket she was bringing to a trading post. I just happened to have with me a box of broken abalone shells I had literally thought about “trading to the Indians.” They made great buttons. When we reached the trading post I gave them to the mom. She smiled. Inside I arranged for the trader to send me a buckskin, which I later traded to Austin SDS friend Bob Pardun for a very nice cowboy shirt.

Over a thousand miles and 20 hours later, Wednesday morning found us parked and asleep in front of the U.S. Farmers Association (USFA) office in Des Moines, Iowa. Two policemen tapped on the window and woke us up. We engaged in friendly and humorous conversation about Berkeley, the FSM, and heading to Chicago to organize the poor. They did ask about marijuana; I shared that I had tried it, but assured them we didn’t have any.

We were in Des Moines because a new SDS friend from the University of Nebraska, Carl Davidson, had told me about a radical farmer named Fred Stover. Stover had been a Department of Agriculture official in the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, had supported the progressive, Henry Wallace, in the 1948 presidential campaign, and opposed the Korean War. He had been accused of being a member of the Communist Party in his youth and had been forced out of the leadership of the National Farmers Union (NFU). That led to his founding of the USFA, a progressive offshoot of the NFU.

When Fred arrived he took us out to eat, treating us ravenous boys to a big Iowa breakfast. We had a good talk. I really liked Stover. I myself had been a member of the 4H Club (“Head, Heart, Hands, and Health”), and have always liked agriculture and farmers, particularly those on the progressive side of the political equation.

By mid-afternoon Burt and I were in Chicago in Uptown. I immediately became involved in a small demonstration at the Price-Rite TV Repair Shop on Argyle. Mrs. Hinton, an East Indian on welfare and a JOIN member, had tried to return a broken used TV set she had purchased from Price’s. They refused. JOIN organizers and community folks were picketing out front. One of the Price brothers and I got into some macho posturing and arguing. Eventually Mrs. Hinton got her just due. The Price brothers were from Appalachia; eventually they would become JOIN supporters themselves.

It was a good day. I was glad to be back in Uptown, progressing along my path with another left turn and a big step into America.

[Michael James is a former SDS national officer, the founder of Rising Up Angry, co-founder of Chicago's Heartland Café (1976 and still going), and co-host of the Saturday morning (9-10 a.m. CDT) Live from the Heartland radio show, here and on YouTube. He is reachable by one and all at michael@heartlandcafe.com. Find more articles by Michael James on The Rag Blog.]

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Michael James : Going Off Campus, 1965

Sam and Theophilius at sunset in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Photos by Michael James from his forthcoming book, Michael Gaylord James' Pictures from the Long Haul.

Pictures from the Long Haul:
Going off campus:
Idaho, Wyoming, and Connecticut, 1965

I proceeded to quote Tom Paine: “Let them call me rebel and welcome, I feel no concern from it; but I should suffer the misery of devils were I to make a whore of my soul.”

By Michael James / The Rag Blog / November 11, 2013

[In this series, Michael James is sharing images from his rich past, accompanied by reflections about -- and inspired by -- those images. This photo will be included in his forthcoming book, Michael Gaylord James' Pictures from the Long Haul.]

At UC Berkeley in the winter and spring of 1965 the Free Speech Movement battles continued. The court proceedings for the Sproul Hall arrests continued, as did rallies and negotiations. My sentence gave me a choice: 25 days in jail, a year’s probation, or a $250 fine. Believing that a year’s probation would limit my political activities, I took the fine, and said to the judge; “A lot of people across the land are coming to feel as I do,” and proceeded to quote Tom Paine: “Let them call me rebel and welcome, I feel no concern from it; but I should suffer the misery of devils were I to make a whore of my soul.”

Eventually the University agreed to permit tables and discussion in Sproul Hall Plaza, and reversed their edict on no political activity. And political activity there was. The U.S. war on the people of Vietnam was in the forefront. I got involved with the Vietnam Day Committee initiated by Jerry Rubin, Stew Alpert, and others. In May we held a two-day teach-in, which thousands attended. Senator Ernest Gruening of Alaska was a featured speaker. He and Oregon’s Wayne Morse were the first Senators to stand in opposition to U.S. involvement in the war in Vietnam.

Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters showed up in a wildly painted school bus; Allan Ginsberg, Wavy Gravy, and others were on the scene. Protest singer Phil Ochs came to perform. Before he took to the stage I was fortunate to hang out with him at the home of Neil Blumenthal, a Berkeley psychologist and the Free Speech Movement’s resident shrink.

Man on Harley, Route 53, Connecticut.

For the teach-in I helped compile a pamphlet with articles on Vietnam and the war. While laying it out at the Berkeley Free Press, I leaned on the light table and fell through the glass (no injuries, luckily, and the shop owner took it in stride). When the pamphlet made it to press, I remember the brass bell on the Multilith offset that gave a constant ding-ding at the tempo of the press’s speed. The pressman was David Goines, who became a well-known poster artist.

Students for a Democratic Society was the organization that caught my attention, and then my love and devotion. Back when we surrounded the police car with Jack Weinberg in it -- the event that really set the Free Speech Movement in motion -- I had found a leaflet put out by SDS calling to “build the interracial movement of the poor.” SDS “traveler” (field organizer) Mike Davis, now a noted author, came through town and signed me up into the ranks of SDS. At an SDS party I talked and drank wine with Michael Harrington, who I had heard speak in 1962 at the University of Chicago, along with the old socialist Norman Thomas. Harrington’s ’62 book The Other America exposed the dramatic extent of poverty in the U.S.

The summer of ’65, while the anti-war movement was building at Berkeley and across the land, some of us were making plans to move into West Oakland. We would be among SDS members involved in the Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP), which had begun organizing in 13 cities, trying to build an interracial movement of the poor. Paul Booth, an SDS leader, came to California to help with what would be called the West Oakland Community Project (WOCP). We were idealistic. We said, “Let the people decide.” An SDS button proclaimed Sam Cook’s lyric “A change is gonna come.”

Twelve of us --11 white, one black -- were involved in the WOCP that summer. We had a house at 320 Henry Street near the Southern Pacific Railroad yards. People in the community wondered who we were and what was going on. A ragtag group of men who lived at the Catholic Worker’s Peter Maurin House came by to check us out. [Peter Maurin was a Catholic activist who along with Dorothy Day founded the Catholic Worker Movement]. They’d been drinking wine and their spokesman was challenging, but mellowed out when we shared our hopes and intentions.

Lots of people were working for change in Oakland. There were freedom schools, summer work projects, and labor projects. The issue that got traction in our efforts was beautification. It may not seem radical, but responding to the way the city was tearing down fences and ruining people’s gardens at Peralta Villa Public Housing without notice or community input, was about letting the people decide, a major SDS principle. The Peralta Villa folks were pissed off, and they let the city know about it. The fence removal was halted, a small but significant victory.

A mostly white group of Berkeley students organizing in a poor black community did not bring us far on the road to a revolution. Perhaps the biggest deterrent to sustained work by WOCP was the exploding growth of opposition to the Vietnam War. There was considerable anti-war activity on campus and energies were pulled in that direction.

To top it off, there were the troop trains, and the efforts by hundreds to stop them. During August there was a demonstration at the railroad tracks in Berkeley. My clearest memory of that day is a soldier’s face, probably a conscript, who was on the Union Pacific train from Fort Riley in Kansas, heading to the Oakland Army Terminal to be shipped off to Nam. He was at the window with a shaved head. His face was laughing yet somehow also fearful as he watched me take the picket sign I held and slap it against the window. “U.S. Out of Viet Nam!” I hope he made it back.

Sam and Theophilus in Wyoming or Nebraska.

At the end of the summer I headed back east. My Staples High School pal, football lineman Sam Whiteside, was on the West Coast. He and I, along with two women from the Oakland Project and a young black SNCC activist named Theopholis Smith, headed east in Sam’s Chevy wagon. Theo had been on a break from his work in the South and was heading back to the voter registration battlefield in Alabama.

I was back on the road, heading east from Berkeley by car for the first time. Sam, like me, was up for a circuitous route, and I had a camera with me. We drove through Nevada, then Idaho, and on to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where at sunset I caught a picture of Sam and Theo climbing a over a fence. Later that night we spotted Indians swaying and staggering along the road. We were riding through a Crow reservation as we neared Dubois, Wyoming. In Dubois we ate at a bar while a piano player tickled the keys. We joined him in song before driving off into the night.

By morning we were in my ancestral homeland of Nebraska. Near Valentine we decided to stop and take a jump into the Niabrara River. Sam cut his foot, and got stitches from a doctor in Valentine. I talked to the doc about the war, which he supported. As my family will attest, this was the beginning of a lifetime of bringing up politics with folks anywhere I am -- in an elevator, at a gas station, attending a wedding, on the phone with an operator at a credit card company in wherever. “And what state are you taking this call in? Hope you guys are going to vote out so-and-so!”

In Chicago we went to the Uptown neighborhood, where the JOIN (Jobs or Income Now) Community Union office was located on Argyle. There I met Sandra Cason, aka Casey Hayden, who had just left her work with SNCC in Mississippi after Stokley Carmichael (Kwame Ture) had booted the white members out. Sam and the others left me there.

Cross, cowboy, Conoco, and Wonder Bread truck in Idaho.

Casey and I visited Old Town, a pioneer hip neighborhood and happening place. The night heat was close to unbearable, and the sidewalks were packed with people. A guy on a motorcycle, his squeeze on the back, was jumpy and jittery as he revved his bike, moving through the crowds crossing the street. I suggested to Casey, “Let’s get out of here!” We took the Chicago Northwestern RR to Lake Forest, 30 miles north. It was cooler there, where we stayed at the home of my anthropology Prof Gerry Gerasimo.

The next morning we said goodbye to Gerry and his wife Dottie, who had been a classmate of mine. Casey and I grabbed our stuff and hitchhiked east, stopping for a night at an SDS ERAP project in Cleveland, located in a mostly poor white neighborhood near the Great Lake Erie. The next day, thumbs out, we hitched rides and made it to Connecticut.

We linked up with fellow Berkeley sociology student Nigel Young and his wife Antonia, serious peace activists from England. Nigel told me about writing “U.S. out of Guatemala” on a wall in London in 1956, when he got arrested while trying to figure out how to spell Guatemala. They were quite a couple, he in mod all black: turtleneck, black pants, short black jacket, and pointy-toe black shoes. Antonia wore a big long fur coat. (This was before there was much talk of animal rights.)

All four of us headed west in a gray 1957 Plymouth station wagon “drive-away” that needed to be delivered to California. We stopped at the Custer Battlefield and Museum in Montana, where the park ranger-guide kept referring to “the hostiles” coming over this hill, and doing this or that. With Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull already heroes in my consciousness, I found his rap to be offensive. In Billings we stopped to eat at a place with an adjacent bar that had a dirt floor and a sign “Check guns at door.” That made sense.

We cruised through Yellowstone National Park, took in the geysers, and had our progress momentarily halted while a bull buffalo decided to mosey along the middle of the road. In Idaho we crossed over a mountain and stopped to eat early in the morning. On the jukebox I noticed Johnny Cash covers of Dylan tunes, and thought: “Wow, something is happening here, the times indeed are a-changing.”

A ranch in Idaho.

On a back road we stopped at an abandoned ranch where I found a branding iron. Down the road we had to stop for a herd of sheep. The shepherd was Basque, didn’t speak English, and wore a jean jacket and pants and engineer boots. Later Nigel enlightened us about the struggles of the Basque people in Spain.

Back at school in Berkeley, I was a graduate teaching assistant. Casey was bereft, missing her comrades in Mississippi, and returned to her family’s home in Victoria, Texas. I tried to restart the Oakland Project along with Vivian Rothstein. From 12 of us, we were down to two. We moved into a different house where neighborhood kids ripped us off. Honest talk led to the goods being returned.

Barry and Betty, both of whom had worked in the Newark Community Union Project (NCUP), soon joined Vivien and me in our efforts. We took a trip to a commune near Big Sur. As we approached we heard beating drums, apparently a sunset ritual to help the sun to go down over the Pacific. A number of longhairs came running at us with clubs, but backed off when Barry yelled he was there to see his sister.

It quickly became clear that the Oakland Project had run out of steam. Though my heart was still with the interracial movement of the poor, I needed to figure out the best place for me to help work toward that vision. Knowing now that I wanted to leave Berkeley, to go off campus and organize, I began contemplating my next moves.

[Michael James is a former SDS national officer, the founder of Rising Up Angry, co-founder of Chicago's Heartland Café (1976 and still going), and co-host of the Saturday morning (9-10 a.m. CDT) Live from the Heartland radio show, here and on YouTube. He is reachable by one and all at michael@heartlandcafe.com. Find more articles by Michael James on The Rag Blog.]

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Michael James : Muddy Waters and James Cotton at the Fat Black Pussycat, 1963

Muddy Waters and James Cotton at the Fat Black Pussycat in Chicago, 1963. Photo by Michael James from his forthcoming book, Michael Gaylord James' Pictures from the Long Haul.

Pictures from the Long Haul:
Muddy Waters and James Cotton 
at the Fat Black Pussycat, 1963

Music has always been big in my life... In the 1950’s I was all in when Rock and Roll swept the scene, its fans, its makers, and its content crossing racial boundaries. No more Snooky Lanson and Your Hit Parade for me.

By Michael James / The Rag Blog / September 3, 2013

[In this series, Michael James is sharing images from his rich past, accompanied by reflections about -- and inspired by -- those images. This photo will be included in his forthcoming book, Michael Gaylord James' Pictures from the Long Haul.]

My younger brother Beau was often ahead of me: like having a car with a nice paint job, and knowing what was going on in music. In our early Bedford Junior High years, while I was probably listening to Pat Boone muck up Fats Domino’s "Blueberry Hill," Beau and a little band of hipsters, the Jolly Jazzbos, were down in Norwalk at the Forest Hotel, a black joint where bluesman Jimmy Reed was too drugged-up and drunked-up to perform. They got to see him nod out on stage.

Regarding the paint job: when he graduated from high school, Beau spent the next year working at Kerrigan’s Auto Body, a place worthy of one hell of a sitcom. Beau had a beautiful 1950 Ford convertible. Unfortunately, I backed it out of the shop’s painting bay where it had just received a new paint job, leaving it with a big scratch.

It was only days since I had returned from my motorcycle trip to Mexico City and my eye-mind-heart-opening summer of study and adventure. Then I headed back on the highway with Beau, in his Ford. We headed west to Illinois, to Lake Forest College -- I to be a junior and Beau a freshman. I was glad to be bringing him along. I knew it would be a good year.

While I was now more aware of the world, I was still not old enough to drink legally, and not old enough to vote. I felt more grown up, though: smarter, and certainly cooler. However, I was (and still am) prone to infantile anti-authoritarianism; I refused to sign in for the required all-student-body college convocations. I conspicuously walked on the grass near the administration building that sported “Keep off the Grass” signs. (Hey, grass is for walking on!) I parked Beau’s Ford in the college president’s designated parking space, which seemed sensible since the Prez didn’t use it.

Having experimented with weed in Mexico, I was of course hooked, appreciating how it enhanced my perceptions. And I was looking for more. This quest took me and some friends to a pool hall in Waukegan where we found it, getting a lid from a pool-shooting black kid. Unfortunately, it didn’t have the same effect as the smoke in Mexico City, and I recall I felt burned.

All this said, it wasn’t as if I was going to the dogs: I was a productive young guy. I was getting A’s, going to classes, lectures, and the library. I was involved with student organizations and government, and the college newspaper, The Stentor. I explored religion, and considered becoming a minister. Checking out the religious scene had me going to Quaker meetings, visiting the Bahia Temple, and attending Unitarian services. I was unconsciously developing and nurturing the roots of my own spirituality and future political action.

That process included meeting William Sloan Coffin, the Yale Chaplain. He spoke at Lake Forest and we talked at a reception at President Cole’s home. He was among a growing number of people who influenced and inspired me. A few years later someone reported that he asked, “What happened to that young guy with good ideas?”

Ideas don’t drop from the sky. Humans learn from experience, both their own and others'. Learning: I was being exposed to, participating in, and observing all manner of things. In The Stentor office I heard about the New Left through the College Press Service. It reported on a meeting in Hazard, Kentucky, of unemployed coal miners with members of Students for a Democratic Society, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the Northern Student Movement. That event caught my interest.

And the events kept coming.

On campus there was a foreign film series, and there were many speakers. I heard Alan Watts talk about Zen. I thought Feminine Mystique author Betty Friedan was great -- though the sorority housemothers and some sorority sisters did not and were bent out of shape by her ideas on women in society.

Classmates Dave Feldman and Penelope Bartok (now Rosemont) started the Jacobin Society, a leftist club that brought liberal and radical speakers to campus. There was Fair Play for Cuba, the American Friends Service Committee, Jay Miller of the American Civil Liberties Union, and Carl Shier, a labor organizer with the United Auto Workers. I really liked him. And the Jacobin Society provided my first encounter with Joffre Stewart, a black beat poet, anarchist, and long-time contrarian-type guy in Chicago’s left political scene. He got someone to burn a draft card at our small meeting!

On the music and political front we brought the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s Freedom Singers to campus. I drove the school’s van that brought them back to Hyde Park, to the home of Sylvia Fischer, who called herself a socialist and was a leader in the Chicago Area Friends of SNCC. James Foreman, a SNCC leader and major civil rights movement thinker, was handing out travel money. Willy Peacock said: “I can’t get back to Mississippi on $25” -- to which Foreman gruffly replied: “You have to.”

Music has always been big in my life -- listening, playing, singing, and dancing. In the 1950’s I was all in when Rock and Roll swept the scene, its fans, its makers, and its content crossing racial boundaries. No more Snooky Lanson and Your Hit Parade for me. Beau and I would blast our tunes. Our dad, a Broadway musical kind of guy, would yell up the stairs: “What do you think this is -- a fucking plantation?” Oh, Dad.

I danced my ass off on November 22, 1957, when Bo Diddley came to St Anthony’s Hall in Saugatuck, the Italian section of Westport. The ticket price was $5 a couple. I had a jug of cider brought back from a visit to see Beau at a school named North Hampton, in New Hampshire.

I loosened the cap to let the cider ferment. Apparently Beau had done the same thing, getting kicked out of that school a few weeks later when he got drunk and stole the school’s tractor for a nighttime joy ride into town. I too got drunk, sharing swigs of fermented, hard apple cider with Jerome, Bo Diddley’s maraca player. That was a night to remember!

A friend’s dad drove us to New York for Alan Freed’s rock ‘n roll shows at Lowe’s State and Brooklyn Paramount theatres. I went to shows at the Apollo in Harlem. I listened to Jocko’s Rocket Ship Show on WNJR out of Newark (“Woo-ditty-wop and we’re back with the Jock, back on the scene with the record machine...”). Late at night I listened to tunes on CKLW from Windsor, Ontario, and the Hound Dog Show from Buffalo’s WBLK. I started getting a regular dose of country and western listening to WWVA out of Wheeling, West Virginia.

Doing my time at Lake Forest from 1960 to 1964, the good music kept on coming -- listening to lots of jazz, plus Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Dave "Snaker" Ray, and Spider John Koerner. And Doc Watson, Roscoe Holcomb, The Country Gentleman, Woody Guthrie, Cisco Houston, the Seeger family, as well as chain gang chants and field hollers on Folkways Records.

Active on the Cultural Activities Committee, I met Old Town School of Folk Music pioneers Fleming Brown and George and Gerry Armstrong. We brought Mississippi country bluesmen Sleepy John Estes and Hammie Nixon, a guy named St. Louis Jimmy, and Muddy Waters’ cousin Otis Spann to the College.

I met Mike Bloomfield and Charlie Musselwhite, who were hanging around Joe Segal and Bob Koester’s Jazz Record Mart on Wabash below Roosevelt University. I worked with Bloomfield to put on a little blues show at a high school for the local Junior Chamber of Commerce; attendance at this early production was sparse.

My professor friend Sam Pasiencier, who’d developed the rolls of film from my 1962 Mexico motorcycle trip, took me to a place in Chicago on Broadway north of Diversey called the Fat Black Pussy Cat. There we saw Muddy Waters playing with harmonica player James Cotton and some young white musicians. I got a good shot of Muddy and James.

Early in the summer of 1963 I was heading to the Twin Cities on my motorcycle. Outside of Portage, Wisconsin, the engine blew. I chained the Triumph to a fence, hiked through fields and knocked on a farmhouse door. A big farmer in overalls let me use the phone in his kitchen. That night I took a bus out of Mauston, riding north to meet up with Beau and his squeeze Ellie, daughter of Werner Pese who had been my freshman World History professor -- a smart man and heavy smoker, with a heavy German accent.

A few days later, the three of us returned to the bike, with a trailer hooked to the back of the Ford. Back in Illinois, I sold the Triumph to a motorcycle shop in East Chicago, Indiana.

That summer I participated in an open-air art exhibit in the Lake Forest town square, displaying my welded sculptures, a torso carved from stone, and figures made of clay. Then, still needing language credit, I headed back to Connecticut for another dose of español.

I attended Trinity College in Hartford. Terry Montgomery and Tim Lyons were the two guys I hung with at Trinity. Tim lived in Kent, where we visited his family’s dairy farm. He urged me to climb on the back of a young Guernsey cow. I expected her to buck, rodeo-like, and could only laugh when the frightened beast stood in place, shitting and swinging her tail, decorating my backside.

The civil rights movement and upcoming March on Washington were in the news. The New York Times reported the leaders of the March were forcing SNCC’s John Lewis (now Congressman John Lewis) to cool it on radical demands, weakening his call for jobs and freedom to accommodate the Kennedy Administration. Tim, Terry, and I headed to Washington, D.C. in a green VW bug and spent the eve of the March at the home of a lady friend of Terry’s. He said she was a nymphomaniac; I had to ask what that was.

On the morning of August 23, 1963, we were moving: first in the little green critter of a car surrounded by busloads of people on the freedom road; then we walked -- marching, surrounded by a mass of humanity. And then thousands upon thousands of us stood together as one at the Lincoln Memorial and the Reflecting Pool. We felt a real sense of hope and togetherness, a belief in the future.

To this day I welcome the tears that come every time I hear Dr. King as he declares, “I have a dream... we shall over come, someday... black and white together.”

That day is good forever.

[Michael James is a former SDS national officer, the founder of Rising Up Angry, co-founder of Chicago's Heartland Café (1976 and still going), and co-host of the Saturday morning (9-10 a.m. CDT) Live from the Heartland radio show, here and on YouTube. He is reachable by one and all at michael@heartlandcafe.com. Find more articles by Michael James on The Rag Blog.]

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Michael James : Fading Away: JFK in Mexico City, July 1962

JFK with Mexican President Lopez Mateos in Mexico City, July 29, 1962. Photo by Michael James from his forthcoming book, Michael Gaylord James' Pictures from the Long Haul.

Pictures from the Long Haul:
Fading away: 
JFK in Mexico City, July 1962

At the time I was a Kennedy fan... I was also, however, becoming aware that many in the world didn’t see the USA as the land of the free and the home of the brave.

By Michael James / The Rag Blog / August 14, 2013

[In this series, Michael James is sharing images from his rich past, accompanied by reflections about -- and inspired by -- those images. This photo will be included in his forthcoming book, Michael Gaylord James' Pictures from the Long Haul.]

The run from Victoria, Texas, to Ciudad Victoria, the Tamaulipas state capitol, on my Triumph Thunderbird motorcycle, was about 450 miles, 700 kilometros. That’s where I ended up, and where I checked into an old hotel. My room off the second floor balcony had a big bed and a big overhead fan, a good hot shower, and plenty of bugs on the ceiling in the night.

Out on the streets I watched a crowd gather around a gray-haired woman, a man in a straw cowboy hat, and a policeman. I didn’t know what it was about. After I shot a few pictures I was approached by an older fellow; he spoke English and we talked for a time. He had lived and worked in Chicago years earlier... said he once had a 1947 Harley.

I walked and looked around. People were friendly. I was offered the affectionate services of women for $2 -- offers I graciously declined, declaring I was too tired.

My first meal in Mexico was chosen by indicating to the waiter, el mesero, that I would have the same fare that someone at another table was eating. It turned out to be cabrito, baby goat. It was delicious. I washed it down with a Carta Blanca that cost 16 cents.

Awakening in the night, I went to the window and used my best español to ask someone in the gas station below what time it was. I heard doce -- midnight -- but I took it for dos, two. Figuring to get a jump on my ride to Mexico City, “dos” seemed good. I loaded up, gased up, and was ready to roll before I realized the correct time. With an extra two-hour jump, my ride now spanned the end of a night and the dawning of a new day.

A misty dawn and I was in a mountain town, smelling unique jungle scents, and the diesel fumes of buses and trucks. There I heard for the first time the early morning pat-pat-pat of women making tortillas. I shot a picture of my trusty steed parked in the middle of the road, in the middle of the town, with no one around. It was still. It was quiet. I soaked it in.

During the night out on the highway I had barely missed the rump of a caballo that was on the road seeking warmth. I had seen some campesinos muy borrachos staggering on the roadside, and, after following a bus for better lighting, had ended up in a dirt wash while navigating a turn near Ciudad Valles.

I had also pulled up to a rural cantina and dancehall, gotten off the bike, stretched out, and walked into the club. My entrance had eyes looking at me -- blond, 210, 6’ 2” -- wearing a gray leather welding jacket, black jeans, and jet boots. I ordered a refresco from the bar, drank it slowly, and nodded at numerous folks before saddling up and rumbling off into the night.

The Sunday ride south was “far out,” amazing and magical for this 20-year-old gringo del Norte. I rode above, below, and in the clouds. Along the side of the road there was an ongoing parade of Indians carrying sticks, pigs, turkeys, bundled-this and bundled-that, goods I did not yet know about.

I passed a scraggly group of peasants standing at attention, led in drill by a man in a scruffy uniform who waved as I rode by. And when I stopped, camera in hand, on the mountain’s edge, I decided not to “capture the spirit” of two Indians sitting on a wall with their machetes when they turned away from me.

Closer to Mexico City there were more mountains, more horses, burros and carts, more cars, buses and trucks, small towns, and all manner of roadside activity. And there were hundreds and hundreds of fellows riding European bikes. Bicycles. They were all wearing colorful tight-fitting riding outfits, grouped in packs, creating a rainbow effect. This bike scene was way new to me. I was the product of the fat-wheeled American bicycle era, a la J.C. Higgins and Schwinn, in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s.

By mid-afternoon I reached kilometro 16 up on the Carretera Mexico Toluca highway, 7,000 feet above sea level, 76 hours after leaving Lucia and central Illinois. I was there, at Mexico City College, planning to study, to see, to learn new things; and I intend to have a good time.

I took notice of the beatnik types, the early hippies, as well as straighter preppie types. Huaraches and woolen Indian sweaters were popular with all. I fell in with an interesting collection of gringo types living at the Mex-Ci-Co Apartments, and with people I met at school. All of them were older than me. I was, in fact, the young kid, being introduced to new and different things. That was my good fortune.

In my new world, Mexico summer 1962, these adventures included trips to the Museo Nacional de Arte, the central market, getting too drunk at a bar called Tipico Mexico in Garibaldi Square, climbing the pyramid at San Juan Teotihuacán, hitting the Toluca Thursday market, more climbing at las ruinas outside Toluca, and other trips out of town.

It also included discovering mangos, visiting eating establishments, hitting the Saturday night into Sunday morning after-hours dance halls, and going to the bullfights. And it also included drinking in the grand lobby of a palatial whorehouse, where I chatted with a very big and very black Cuban pro wrestler. Oh, and there was the discovery of la marijuana, the sacred weed. Hallelujah!

Twelve days after I showed up in Mexico City, so did President John F. Kennedy. He was attempting to bolster the U.S.’s role in Latin America via the Alliance for Progress. At the time I was a Kennedy fan, especially of his inspirational exhortation to “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” I was also, however, becoming aware that many in the world didn’t see the USA as the land of the free and the home of the brave.

I saw walls covered with anti-USA and anti-Kennedy graffiti. I photographed a man on a corner, and was able to discern the scrubbed-out words “Kennedy Largate” -- “Kennedy get out” -- on the wall behind him. My political awakening was continuing.

On July 29, 1962, an excited crowd lined the Paseo de la Reforma to catch a view of Kennedy in a confetti parade. I was there and shot two photos of Kennedy riding in an open air Mercedes with Mexican President Lopez Mateos. In the first one, which I call “Commotion in the Motorcade,” the secret service guys, riding behind Kennedy in a Cadillac convertible, are turned right and looking back. The motorcycle in front of the Mercedes had just hit someone who came too far out into the road.

That happened perhaps 20 yards to my right. I cocked my camera, immediately shooting again, catching a slightly blurred JFK who was directly in front of me. The vehicles had been moving fast, and after hours of buildup, the moment had come and gone. I took it easy, moving through the crowd, back to the Triumph and up the mountain to my Mex-Ci-Co abode, to eat, read Sons of the Shaking Earth, and reflect on some fading ways of looking at the world.

[Michael James is a former SDS national officer, the founder of Rising Up Angry, co-founder of Chicago's Heartland Café (1976 and still going), and co-host of the Saturday morning (9-10 a.m. CDT) Live from the Heartland radio show, here and on YouTube. He is reachable by one and all at michael@heartlandcafe.com. Find more articles by Michael James on The Rag Blog.]

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Michael James : 'El Triumph' in Tamaulipas, Mexico, 1962

Check Point, Tamaulipas, Mexico, June 16, 1962. Photo by Michael James from his forthcoming book, Michael Gaylord James' Pictures from the Long Haul.

Pictures from the Long Haul:
El Triumph in Mexico,
Check Point, Tamaulipas, 1962

I’m working hard to keep the Triumph on the road through the flat, arid, brown, dry and desolate terrain. Its new, different, and I’m digging it, taking it all in.

By Michael James / The Rag Blog / August 6, 2013

[In this series, Michael James is sharing images from his rich past, accompanied by reflections about -- and inspired by -- those images. This photo will be included in his forthcoming book, Michael Gaylord James' Pictures from the Long Haul.]

Heading off to college I thought I might be a social worker, even a minister. I was attracted to the offbeat and rebellious, and felt an affinity for black people and other non-whites in general. I felt compassion for the handicapped and those I perceived to be underdogs.

My team was the “bums,” the Brooklyn Dodgers, and my hero was Jackie Robinson. At the Saugatuck Congregational Church during the offering, I put money in the foreign mission side of the donation envelope, not the domestic. And along the way I rapidly learned of class and racial divisions in the US of A.

Sociology Prof Don Roos clued me in to the notion that social, economic, and political forces shaped individuals and society, and I went for sociology and anthropology over the more popular major, psychology, that focused on the individual. Favoring the group over the individual, and the social forces dominant in shaping the individual, was my simplistic bent.

Like many of my generation I was attracted to the writings of C. Wright Mills, particularly The Power Elite (1956). And I was keen on the notion of participant observer or participant observation and things I heard the “Chicago school of sociologists” espoused.

Life was full in the winter and spring of 1962, lots going on both on campus and the outer world. I was inspired by the new Peace Corps, and became involved with cultural activities and the International Relations Club. I attended the required convocations, but wouldn’t sign in, telling Dean Hoogesteger that I showed up because I wanted to, not because I was required to do so.

I remember seeing the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and the anthropologist Loren Eiseley, who wrote the wonderful book, The Immense Journey.

The Garrick Players put on a rendition of Jean Anouilh’s The Lark and recruited me, a football player, to play the executioner. I stood on stage bare-chested, holding a weapon, my head covered by the executioner’s masque. My little acting stint in that play meant that I couldn’t attend the February 16, 1962, anti-nuclear march in Washington put on by the Committee for a SANE nuclear policy and the young Students for a Democratic Society.

I drove friends to Hyde Park where they gathered around a fountain at the U of C preparing to board buses to DC. There I met one stoned Elvin Bishop, later of the Butterfield Blues Band, among the people gathered for the sendoff.

A friend early on at Lake Forest College was Carole Travis. Her dad was a renowned Communist, “Fightin'” Bob Travis, who led the UAW’s Flint sit-down strikes. Through Carole, Gloria Peterson, and others, I was introduced to people and events at the University of Chicago where my Dad had gone to school. Included were Skip Richheimer, Danny Lyon, and Norland Hagen, all motorcycle riding students with the nickname the "Blessed Virgin Mother Motorcycle Club.” They rode Triumphs and a Norton, the favored British bikes, not Harleys.

At the U of C folk festival I sat on the steps to the stage, tears and emotions welling to the surface as the young Mavis Staples of the Staples Singers belted out gospel tunes. There too from the back of Mandel Hall I saw the great American Socialist Norman Thomas and the writer Michael Harrington.

Harrington’s book, The Other America, opened my eyes, uncovering the extent of poverty in the U.S. That book, that hit stores in March of 1962, rocked the minds of not only students who were becoming activists, but had a big effect on the Kennedys, Lyndon Johnson, and the government.

Later, in 1964, as a graduate student at Berkeley involved in the Free Speech Movement and then Students for a Democratic Society, I had a memorable discussion with Harrington at a party while drinking freely from a gallon jug of cheap red Pirate wine.

The biggest deal for me that spring was bringing a big yellow 650 cc Triumph Thunderbird motorcycle into my life. I found The Triumph at Sunset Cycle Sales in the old religious and still nuclear town of Zion, Illinois, on the great Lake Michigan at the border of Illinois and Wisconsin.

Not long after getting the Triumph I was riding with my college sweetheart Lucia Crossman from town toward the college’s South Campus. It was pouring rain and the Triumph went out from under us, the three of us sliding as if on ice, the machine in the lead, followed by Lucia then me, we two humans looking clearly into each others’ eyes in a state of amazement, all in slow motion.

My performance in Old Pinky Williams’ Spanish class was dismal. I needed more “foreign language” credit for graduation. I was reading Robert Redfield and his theories on the growth of cities and the creation of the peasantry based on "field work" from Mexico. The plan developed: I would ride my machine to Mexico City College and take Spanish language and anthropology courses. It would be a far-out summer.

On Wednesday, June 13, I took my last exam, packed, and attached my stuff to the bike: saddlebags plus two aluminum boxes and a black attaché case fastened to the luggage rack. Lucia’s parents picked her up and I followed them three hours south to Morton outside Peoria. After dinner Lucia and I had a nighttime ride in the country and made out in a cornfield before I entered a restless anticipatory sleep.

In the morning I moved on. Outside of East St. Louis I met a guy on a new Honda motorcycle and asked “are these fast?” He said, “Let’s go!” The Honda wiped the Triumph. So much for the perceived inferiority in those days of the “Jap bikes.”

“Man from Lincoln land” was what the black man said, waving at me as I pulled away very early in the morning from a dingy motel on the side of a busy road on the edge of Little Rock, Arkansas. Sleep was restless, fleeting, and passing, trucks rumbling through the night beside the room where I slept. The long day’s ride took me through Texarkana, and the hills and piney woods of East Texas. I hit big-time traffic and alternating combinations of showers and sun riding through Houston on a new highway.

They say that if you had a Triumph you needed four hands, two to ride and two to pick up the parts. My Triumph was leaking oil. I made it to Victoria, Texas, by sunset and headed to a motorcycle shop. Nobody home. They were out at the airport testing their dragster.

I got a motel room across from a diner on the main drag, linked up with the cycle shop guys who fixed me up with missing screws for the crank case, and engaged in devouring a giant sizzling steak served on a big hot metal platter. C & W spun from the jukebox. I finished my pie, gulped down my milk, cleared the tab, crossed the wide Texas highway 77, and slept oh-so-soundly.

At daybreak I rode through the King Ranch, checking the speedometer, doing fundamental math, figuring time and miles. I felt lonesome -- and very alone. A bus emerged in the distance; as it neared I read its marquee: “BB King.” Wow! The blues man! My mood lifted. I felt so good, my excitement on the rise, heading to the border, looking forward to what was to come.

Here comes Brownsville; there went Brownsville. I’m on the other side of the little trickle of the Rio Grande aka Rio Bravo and am immediately dealing with Mexican border guards. I’ve got to be 21 to cross this line. I’m 20, and I’m giving him a rap, telling him I’m going to school in Mexico City.

I knew the age requirement. I thought I was ready and had typed a letter from my dad with my deft portrayal of his signature. This little work of forgery that I pulled from my trusty attaché case didn’t carry much weight with this particular border dude.

I also knew about la mordida, the bite, the little bribe. For a few bucks I was free to move on, after a little frenzy of handing out small change to a cluster of beggars, handicapped kids, and Chiclets gum vendors.

Quickly -- but only momentarily -- I was lost in Matamoros on skinny dirt streets lined with adobe buildings, looking for the Pan American Highway, a road I figured someday I might ride all the way to Tierra del Fuego. Then I’m riding through Tamaulipas heading south with a strong wind blowing off the Gulf.

I’m working hard to keep the Triumph on the road through the flat, arid, brown, dry and desolate terrain. Its new, different, and I’m digging it, taking it all in. A Brahma cow, a horse, a burro, an old guy in sombrero and serape, and people on the side of the road. I’m waving as I fly by. People wave back. I like that.

I see people getting on an old bus, a team of oxen, roadrunners and other birds. There are tiny settlements with fewer then 10 little huts made of sticks, and larger settlements of adobe huts. A guy is riding a burro, bouncing along, trot-trot-trot, his legs nearly touching the ground. There are old cars and trucks, beautiful to me, a product of the '50s hot rod and custom culture.

We’re in el mundo de kilometros; I’m doing division, translating miles into kilometers and kilometers into miles, long before I knew that a 5k run equaled 3.1 miles. I am eating up those kilometros.

Uh-oh, a roadblock and Federales coming out of a stick shed to check my papers. No problema aqui. I hang out, do my best to communicate and take some shots: a man in uniform, two kids, a young woman hanging on the back of a pickup truck beside a 1954 Chevy wagon under a sunshade made of sticks and straw, next to a refreshment stand with a Coca Cola logo on the side.

It is hot. I shoot the picture of El Triumph, south of the border in Mexico, enjoying the rippling, fizzing, and refreshing iced soda. Then, I get on the bike, wave goodbye, and hit the road.

[Michael James is a former SDS national officer, the founder of Rising Up Angry, co-founder of Chicago's Heartland Café (1976 and still going), and co-host of the Saturday morning (9-10 a.m. CDT) Live from the Heartland radio show, here and on YouTube. He is reachable by one and all at michael@heartlandcafe.com. Find more articles by Michael James on The Rag Blog.]

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TRAVEL / David P. Hamilton : What We Won't See Driving Across France

Driving in rural France. Image from InterNations.

What Americans won't see
while driving across France

Near Paris, there are extensive wheat fields for kilometers without fences, interspersed with old mixed deciduous forests, pastures of fat cows, and the occasional 12th century abbey.

By David P. Hamilton / The Rag Blog / July 16, 2013

PARIS -- These thoughts arose during a recent drive to a friend's country cottage three hours south of Paris, on every road type from superhighways to one lane, unpaved country lanes. What's missing from the landscape in France that I would see routinely while traveling across Texas?

1. “Manufactured housing," aka trailer houses. This is not a relative matter. It is an absolute. You never see trailer houses in France. I'm told that they are illegal, in violation of national building codes. You do see vacation campers that can actually be towed behind cars. Some people doubtless live in them, but that is illegitimate usage.

There is no such thing as cheap prefabricated housing in France. The carcases of such dwellings do not litter the landscape. Hence, there is no direct French translation of “trailer trash”. As an alternative, they have affordable public housing.

2. Houses constructed on 2x4 wood frames. In the U.S., the typical house is built using a 2x4 wood frame on a concrete slab with siding outside and sheetrock inside. They don't build houses like that in France. Apparently, such houses aren't good enough to satisfy the building codes or the French commitment to quality.

The idea of producing houses that wear out in a generation seems to have never caught on here. Instead, houses in France are typically built of reinforced cinder block and stone covered by stucco inside and out. The older ones are usually stone and mortar with heavy rough-cut wooden beams that are more like 12x12s. This reminds one of the central theme of “The Three Little Pigs." Along comes a wolf (or tornado) and down goes that stick version.

Most U.S. housing has built-in planned obsolescence so that the construction industry gets to sell a new one to every generation and the banks get a new secured loan. Stone houses that, with proper maintenance, can last for centuries are part of the socialist conspiracy to undermine the proper market functioning of the housing industry.

3. Pickup trucks. As a pickup truck owner, I can't really explain this, but there are almost no pickup trucks in France. Instead, there are panel trucks, often completely covered with extravagant graffiti. No French car maker produces a pickup. Neither do the Germans or Italians. There are a few Nissans and Toyotas here, but not the pickup models. I was told that pickups are “stupid” because they don't provide security. If nothing else, this aversion to pickups means less highway litter.

I suspect that many pickup trucks parked in suburban U.S. driveways primarily satisfy the symbolic function of identifying the owner with his lost rural past and manly physical work; a reactionary cultural tendril reaching back toward the mythic old West in an attempt to replicate the supposed values of yore in the absence of horses, cows, and sweat.

4. American-made cars. There are a few Fords and Chevys that are made in Europe, but it doesn't look like American made cars are imported in quantity. There may be Mercedes dealers all over the U.S., but there are no Cadillac dealers in Germany.

Almost the only American-made cars I've seen in Paris were collector items -- the late 60's Mustang convertible being transported on a flatbed truck or the Hummer parked off-street in upscale western Paris, probably seldom used since it is impossible to park on the street (too wide, automatic ticket) and exorbitant to operate.

About 70% of the cars in France are French-made, either Renault, Citroen, or Peugeot. They all make very fine cars these days, mostly clean-burning diesel-powered sedans that get about 70 kilometers per gallon. All are exported widely, but not to the U.S. The high percentage of diesel powered cars here is also due to diesel being significantly cheaper than gasoline, logical since diesel is much easier to refine. The lower price here for diesel points up the fact that diesel owners in the U.S. are getting screwed.

Gasoline in France currently costs about 1.60 euros per liter or about $8 per gallon. Most of that is taxes, which are used to develop and promote public transportation. The super-mini smart cars are a big hit in Paris. But the metro (1.5 billion rides a year), hundreds of buses, the bateaubus river boats, public electric cars, and thousands of public bicycles are much bigger hits.

5. Bumper stickers. I can't recall ever seeing a political bumper sticker on a car in France -- or a joke bumper sticker either -- or any kind of sign or bumper sticker other than very occasionally “Bebe Aborde." An American friend who has lived in Paris 35 years says that is because bumper stickers are “tacky”.

Regardless, it is clear that while the French are willing to demonstrate in massive numbers at the drop of a political hat, they are not ostentatious about those beliefs while driving. Nor do they brag about their child's accomplishments in kindergarten or flaunt their twisted sense of humor or advertise their favorite band.

I've never seen a French car with a French flag sticker either, let alone flying French flags on little plastic poles attached to the windows -- not even on Bastille Day. I guess they don't feel that their patriotism is in question, so it doesn't require perpetual demonstration. Or maybe patriotism isn't so cool here anymore after they lost a few million citizens during several centuries of “patriotic” wars.

6. College affiliation stickers. The French equivalent of my University of Texas Alumni Association sticker seems not to exist. There is nothing like the ubiquitous orange Longhorn decal one sees continually in Austin. No “Sciences Po” on the back window.

I suspect this has to do with French schools somehow managing to educate young people without fostering spectator sports addiction among them. It could also be partly explained by all French public schools having the same curriculum and teacher pool.

Publicly flaunting your supposed educational accomplishments in the U.S. is primarily a means to express your particular tribal allegiance. Such tribalism is encouraged in the U.S. as a diversion from the danger of people becoming unified around shared interests rather than divided over Longhorns vs. Aggies, Cowboys vs. Redskins, etc, ad nauseum. The French instead teach something called “solidarity."

7. Junked cars. There are no roadside car burial grounds, aka, junk yards. In fact, I didn't see any junk cars at all. I don't really know what is done with them, but I suspect some communal solution that takes place in the dead of night in some remote industrial area. Cars parked in one spot too long on a Paris street, evidenced by deep layers of bird poop and parking tickets, seem to disappear on specially constructed flatbed trucks equipped with car-sized forklifts that scour the streets in the early morning.

Of course, there were old cars parked beside houses in the countryside that were not in motion. But none of them were up on bricks, had flat tires, were rusted out, had tall weeds growing around them, or were otherwise obviously debilitated. My friend's car on this trip was a 25-year-old Volvo.

So maybe they just keep them going, oblivious of the fact that such a lack of consumer “confidence” jeopardizes capitalism's need for perpetual renewal and expansion.

8. Billboards. There are evidently strict laws regulating “outdoor advertising” in France. There are only a few commercial signs decorating the roadsides, perhaps 1% of what you see in the U.S. The roadside signs you normally see are small ones clustered on the edge of towns and around commercial centers. These are typically one meter by two meters or less and refer to local establishments.

If you drive through large industrial and commercial areas outside major towns, there are more and they are bigger. But there are no commercial signs at all on superhighways and there are no U.S. billboard-size commercial signs anywhere. The public authorities apparently recognize that such signs are a distraction to drivers and have opted for safety over sales, another significant socialist infringement on your God-given right to consume without restraint.

9. Fences, especially barbed wire fences. There are fences along superhighways that attempt to impede animals from crossing them, but once on secondary roads, fences become scarce, generally only surrounding pastured animals and almost never with barbed wire. It seems that the French commitment to property rights doesn't go so far as barbs. In the U.S., real property is almost always fenced. In France it usually is not.

On the back roads, kilometers roll by among fields, forests, and little villages without a fence in sight. I'm told that France long ago required rural property owners who “enclosed the commons” to provide the public with a means to cross that land. That tradition remains. We walked hours along paths over rolling hills beside fields and through forests without encountering a fence or a “Keep Out” sign. There was strangely no question as to whether we had a right to be there.

10. “No Trespassing” or “Posted: Keep Out” signs. I did see a couple of “Chemin privee” signs, which mean “private road." But as we took our walks through the countryside, I never saw a sign saying “No Trespassing” or anything of the kind. I am told such signs do exist, but since property owners must provide a means to cross their land, they are uncommon.

Clearly, property rights are not well-respected in this country. This lack of separation between mine and yours also reflects that French “fraternity," which contrasts markedly with the state religion of individualism practiced by much of the population in the U.S.

11. Any reference to interscholastic or intercollegiate athletics. No sign pops up on the edge of a quaint village saying “Go Hippos!” No billboard screams “Gig Um Aggies!” -- whatever that might mean. This is due largely to the utterly inconceivable sacrilege committed by French educational institutions by not sponsoring competitive athletic teams. Here, if you want to play football on a team (aka soccer in the U.S.), you must actually join a football club that has no formal connection to a school.

You also will find no reference to “American football” whatsoever, anywhere in France. I know it is hard to imagine how the male population here endures life without it, but football, as only Americans conceive it, literally does not exist in France -- or really anywhere else other than the U.S. Can you possibly imagine the pathetic state to which my own suburban high school would descend without its $50 million dollar football stadium, its $200,000-a-year football coach, the pep rallies, the cheer leaders – the “traditions”?

12. Highway Patrol cars. It's not that France doesn't have highway cops and enforce its highway traffic laws. They just don't do it with high-powered vehicles driven by power-drunk young men lurking beside the road. In the course of several thousand miles of driving across France, I've seen perhaps two incidents where motorcycle cops stopped vehicles on highways.

One rarely sees marked highway police vehicles at all. France does have unmarked traffic cop cars that will photograph your license plate while you are committing an offense and send you a fine in the mail. They also have radar in fixed sites that do the same thing. But very rarely does anyone actually pull you over. This no-stopping policy cuts down on problematic cop-citizen interactions on the roadside leading to more serious issues, such as the common U.S. criminal offense of young black male driving a Mercedes.

13. Tractor/trailer trucks outside the right lane on superhighways. A tractor-trailer strays out of the right hand lane on a high-speed highway only when one slow truck is passing an even slower one. It is rare, momentary, and often results in flashing lights and blaring horns from passing cars. This is due to the simple fact that trucks are restricted to a maximum speed of 90 kph (56 mph) on superhighways while cars can go 130 kph (81 mph).

The left lane is used exclusively by cars due to the simple fact that they are allowed to go so much faster than trucks. This segregation of cars and trucks makes superhighways in France much safer. Due to very tight restrictions on money in politics, ( i.e., bribes), the trucking industry lobby in France obviously lacks the political clout of its American counterpart.

14. Fly-overs. You never encounter a high speed curving road 100 feet in the air in France. You know how fun those are with a couple of those tractor trailers doing 80 on your butt. Tunnels are the preferred alternative. My acrophobic wife much prefers the French highways for their ground hugging approach to traffic management.

15. Long stretches of superhighway with no facilities. The roadside facilities include fuel, edible food, decent coffee, clean toilets that don't require getting a key from a surly teenager, playgrounds, picnic tables, ample parking, green space, and various other amenities. They are regular built-in features of major highways, occurring about every 25 kilometers.

These “aires” are publicly owned and leased out to private companies to operate. Superhighways are almost all toll roads and you don't exit them in order to visit an “aire.” This means that these highways usually don't have “frontage roads," which means that they are not lined with commercial enterprises. And that means that such enterprises stay in the towns nearby so those towns are less likely to dry up and blow away like so many small towns in the U.S. that had the misfortune to be located a mile or so from the interstate highway.

16. Fields of GMO corn or GMO anything else. In the U.S., over 90% of the corn, cotton, and sorghum raised is genetically modified. In France, food products that contain greater than 0.1 percent GMO components must be labeled to indicate the use of GMOs. If so labeled, people won't buy them in sufficient quantities to make their sale profitable. Hence, they hardly exist.

Many packaged food products here do have labels that prominently declare that they have no GMO components, apparently a major selling point. The average French person spends a much higher percentage of their disposable income on food than does the average American, despite having similar incomes and food prices.

Here, being a “foodie” has deep cultural roots. There are hundreds of registered types of French cheese. Despite the proliferation of supermarkets, it remains very common for consumers to patronize specialty food stores and street markets almost exclusively, even though they are more expensive. People here who are serious about their food, don't buy perishable food products in supermarkets and are willing to spend more for better quality products.

17. Empty fields and unused farmland. If you drive from Austin to Dallas or Houston, you will likely see only two or three different crops being raised commercially. Corn and hay mainly. Maybe some cotton or sorghum. You will see great expanses of land that could be farmed, not being farmed. Or grazing land with nothing grazing.

Here, the land is used much more intensively. Even if the purpose is to keep an area natural, that purpose is pursued with intent. Forests are distinct, usually surrounded by equally distinct planted fields. Near Paris, there are extensive wheat fields for kilometers without fences, interspersed with old mixed deciduous forests, pastures of fat cows, and the occasional 12th century abbey. The whole countryside looks purposeful. In Burgundy, the vines of the world's best wines stretch across rolling hills mixed with yellow blooming rape seed (canola oil) and green wheat fields, a checkerboard of color that would make a Baylor fan ecstatic.

18. Dying small towns. France had about 20 million inhabitants in 1300. 300 years of plague and war diminished that number by about half. Hence, many villages in France today are very old and have a medieval core. There are so many quaint and charming thousand-year-old villages dotting the French countryside, they become a cliché. There are volumes entitled “the 100 most picturesque villages in (fill in the region of your choice)” and the competition to get listed is stiff.

Most small towns in rural France are not drying up and blowing away. They instead are experiencing a resurgence as the trends of second homes and urban dwellers retiring to the country grow and large numbers of foreigners continue to invest in French real estate, 250,000 British alone. We have rented apartments in France that were owned by expat-Americans, British, Irish, and Italians as well as French.

In addition, the French have the world's highest rate of second home ownership, mostly in rural settings. Towns of a few hundred people have excellent restaurants and charming boutique hotels set in 200-year-old farmhouses. Village street markets present a cornucopia of locally produced food items to eager crowds of generally older folk.

We lined up at the weekly street market in the public square of the small town of Levroux, hardly a common destination, to buy the local white asparagus and goat cheeses with the other seniors. This market offered a considerable array of gourmet food products in a town of roughly 3,000 inhabitants. Most of our fellow shoppers had walked to the market pulling their little two-wheeled grocery carts, a device about as common in the U.S. as walking to the grocery store.

The “supermarket” across the street from this market is the size of a U.S. convenience store and was quiet on market day.

19. Exception (something you see more of in France): Road rage. You will see a lot more road rage while driving in France. People yell, honk, and shoot the finger with relative abandon compared to the U.S. French drivers are aggressive and vocal. I attribute this to Latin temperament and the extreme rarity of handguns. And it's all bluster.

There are occasional moments when the French landscape is unattractive. Industrial areas and large commercial centers are growing on the outskirts of the larger of those lovely villages. The French retailer Carrefour is second only to Walmart. Some parts of the “banlieu” outside Paris are notorious for their grimness.

The “outdoor advertising” industry is small, but growing. McDonalds, Subway, and Starbucks are plentiful in cities. The Americanization of France is a continuous force. But the American driving through rural France should be warned in advance that things are different there in ways that don't necessarily reflect well on what they assume is “the best of all possible worlds."

[David P. Hamilton, a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin in history and government was an activist in 1960s-'70s Austin and was a contributor to the original Rag. David and wife Sally spend part of every year in France. Read more articles by David P. Hamilton on The Rag Blog.]

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TRAVEL / David P. Hamilton : Aubervilliers Is Paris 'Red Belt' Suburb That Defies Expectations

Some public housing units were interspersed with gardens and balconies, connected by curving pedestrian walkways. Photos by Sally Hamilton / The Rag Blog.

Paris suburb defies expectations:
Visiting Aubervilliers in the 'Red Belt'

Although Aubervilliers at night might be a scary proposition for an American senior with less than perfect French, it is safer than hundreds of places in the U.S. because the population doesn't have guns.

By David P. Hamilton / The Rag Blog / June 20, 2013

PARIS -- Recently my wife, Sally, and I accompanied our in-laws on an unusual Paris tour they had arranged. This tour took us to Aubervilliers, adjacent to Paris to the north, a site not one American tourist in a thousand chooses to visit.

Aubervilliers is in the center of the “Red Belt” north of Paris, a chain of working class towns adjacent to Paris in the “banlieu” (suburbs) that have been governed by the French Communist Party for decades.

Aubervilliers had Communist Party mayors continuously from WWII until 2008. It has a public housing project named after Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Americans alleged to be Soviet spies who were executed by the U.S. government. Another large housing unit is named after Maurice Thorez, leader of the French Communist Party during its postwar prime. And it has a secondary school named after Rosa Luxemburg, martyred founder of the German Communist Party.

Located on the St. Denis Canal, Aubervilliers has been an industrial center since the early 19th century. It has been a melting pot for immigrants coming to the metropolis since then, at first from provincial France, now from almost everywhere, especially from Africa.

Roughly 40% of its population was born outside metropolitan France, and many of those born in France are second generation sons and daughters of immigrants. Our guide, Ingrid, told us that there are nearly 100 nationalities represented among its 80,000 inhabitants. Like her, many of the second generation are of mixed ethnic heritage. This town embodies diversity on steroids, besides being decidedly proletarian.

Aubervilliers is, however, more famous outside France as the scene of some of the worst poverty and rioting in recent French history. Communities of shacks called “bidonvilles” were photographed there in the 1950s as representative of the darkest side of the City of Light. By 1972, these slums were gone, replaced by public housing. In 2005, Aubervilliers was a major center of the rioting by young people protesting police brutality and job discrimination. Hundreds of cars were torched there, but no one was killed.

Most Americans with any awareness of the area have an image of vast, ugly, dirty, alienating public housing blocks with few amenities and poor transportation, filled with unemployed and disaffected people dealing drugs and inflicting violence on the more affluent who might wander into their midst. This image springs readily to the minds of Americans who are accustomed to the abysmally decrepit state and violent reputation of most urban public housing in the U.S.

Although we were only in Aubervilliers a few hours on a sunny spring day and we were being guided by a local, our impressions were quite different.

Olivier and Guillaume, our camera crew,
interview our tour guide, Ingrid.

Our guide, Ingrid, is a young women of Thai-French ancestry who is a native of Aubervilliers. She is a “greeter," who volunteers to show tourists around her hometown. The way the “greeter” program works is that you make a nominal contribution to their organization and then they tell you what unconventional site you're going to visit. This tour service to someplace you may have never heard of is otherwise free. We just lucked out getting Aubervilliers. Our expectations were to be challenged.

This private tour by four Americans was apparently so unique that it was filmed by a two-man crew under contract with a major French television channel that saw Americans in Aubervilliers as a rare and newsworthy event. So Olivier and Guillaume came along with their camera and microphone every foot of the way, shooting film and asking questions. Our tour became something of a moving spectacle as this miniature television crew followed us through town.

Although Aubervilliers has been around since at least 1069, this tour had nothing to do with medieval churches or civic monuments. Ingrid did point out an ancient wall that had been left standing as part of a public garden and an abandoned old paint factory, now a French “superfund” site. But these were just among the random sights as we walked through town on our way to meet her friends.

First we visited Julian at the “Association Freres Poussiere," a small community arts facility. Julian showed us their art gallery-hangout space and theater and told us that the principal object of the center was to bring together Aubervilliers' diverse groups in creative enterprises. Their facilities were humble, but their enthusiasm was strong and their explicit goal was multicultural harmony.

Next, our little group went up into the very bowels of one of those massive and supposedly dehumanizing public housing buildings to visit Fado, a 63-year-old woman from Senegal, bedecked for the occasion and probably all occasions in vibrantly colorful traditional Senegalese dress. She has been in France since the late 1970's and has three children who were born here. Fado lived on the 18th floor.

Arriving at her building we found that one of the two elevators serving her sector of the building was broken and repairmen were busy repairing it. We were told that elevator breakdowns were not uncommon and that there had been times when both were broken simultaneously. Fado referred to other building maintenance complaints, but from our random visit, it appeared that the building was clean and reasonably well-maintained and the exterior nicely landscaped.

Fado's apartment had two bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen with adjoining dining area, a bathroom, and storage space. The rooms were small by American standards, but not by Parisian standards. The apartment had roughly 7-800 square feet. It also had a great view, including Sacre Coeur and the Eiffel Tower.

Ingrid told us that Fabo paid rent, but it was on a sliding scale and quite reasonable. “Five hundred euros ($650) a month?," we asked. “Less," Ingrid responded.

Getting an apartment there requires proper qualifications (resident status plus low income or disability, etc) and some time on a waiting list. Fabo had lived in hers since the late 1980s. Her apartment was nice, clean and orderly, with a big flat-screen TV and comfortable leather couches in good condition in the living room. She served fruit juices and cookies. She had done domestic work for many years, but had been on disability due to a back injury for the past four. Her children were grown and lived elsewhere in the Paris area.

Brothers on the street.

Other people we saw in the halls, on the elevator, and around the building were of every racial and ethnic type: white French ladies with their kids, black African and Arab ladies with their kids, old white mostly native French guys playing boules in the adjacent park, older Muslim men wearing skull caps, and a few orthodox Jews in their distinctive black suits and broad-brimmed hats strolling by, and mixed groups of idle young men of every complexion lounging around the grounds.

These people were generally well-dressed and friendly. No one looked especially poor and ragged or noticeably miserable or threatening. Unlike upscale central Paris, there were no homeless people living on the sidewalks and no beggars.

The groups of young men were of particular interest and concern. Under-30 unemployment is reputedly very high in Aubervilliers, maybe 50%. These are clearly the type of guys who have on occasion set a couple hundred cars on fire in protests. These are the guys who would reputedly have no livelihood were it not for the continuation of marijuana prohibition in France.

We were told that job seekers from this area lie about their zip codes when applying in Paris. These groups of young guys were thoroughly integrated, ranging from variations on white to very black, with a lot of North African Arab ancestry in the mix along with a few each of several varieties of Asians, plus growing numbers of “others," such as our guide.

These guys were attracted by the filming, being done by two white native Frenchmen in their thirties, both over six-feet tall and fit. Our camera team interacted with these Aubervilliers street kids in a friendly and animated manner, but later told us that the situation was always delicate. You had to know how to act. Be outgoing and show no fear. Show them you're on the same side. Otherwise, it could become dicey. And your security would be a much more risky proposition after dark when the area turns into the modern version of the Cour des Miracles.

Next we popped into a tea room in a shopping mall at the foot of one of the public housing complexes. There we were treated to tea and pastries by the two ladies from Tunisia who owned and operated the establishment. One of them had once spent two months living with a family in Wisconsin and spoke English. Their pouring of the tea into small, highly decorated glasses was quite formal. They could not have been more charming. Their pastries were delicious. We were served more than we could eat without having ordered anything. If there was a bill, I didn't see it.

Tunisian ladies in the Tea Room.

Finally, on the way back to the metro, we walked trough more public housing, these buildings only three to five stories with irregular orientations, interspersed with gardens and balconies, connected by curving pedestrian walkways named after famous artists like Matisse and Modigliani.

Though constructed primarily of interlocking concrete slabs, they were attractively landscaped, looked more spacious and individualized, and had a less overwhelming scale. We were told that almost half the residents of Aubervillers live in some form of publicly-owned housing.

What can we conclude from our brief visit to Aubervilliers? There are doubtless serious social issues there that are at a level worthy to inspire serious concern, but this wasn't some hopeless, grimy, crumbling slum like those I've seen all my life in the U.S.

Housing is the most obvious contrast. Instead of aging, dilapidated wood frame houses and poorly maintained, privately owned apartment buildings so typical of virtually every U.S. city, Aubervilliers has an enormous stock of decent public housing. It may not be ideal, but it is considerably better for poor and working class people than what is typically offered them in the U.S.

The public housing highrise we entered was not trashed out. There was no smell of urine in the stairwells. There was no garbage piling up in the halls. It was quiet. Windows weren't broken. The broken elevator was being fixed.

The buildings were surrounded by green spaces that were regularly tended. There were attractive parks nearby. Many apartments had balconies with views over Paris. There were publicly-owned commercial centers adjacent to the housing units, filled with privately-operated shops, many run by locals. Rents are controlled and manageable, even for the long-term unemployed.

This community was built by communist-led local governments in cooperation with socialist-led federal governments with the guiding principle being to provide decent low-cost housing for people of modest means.

In the U.S, most low income housing is provided by private entrepreneurs whose priority is maximizing their profits. The principal concern of private owners is that their properties cost them as little as possible while yielding as much revenue as possible. The capitalist's profit motive and the interests of the residents for quality maintenance and improved amenities naturally conflict. That is not the case with public housing in Aubervilliers.

While walking through the central part of Aubervilliers, we passed a large building project nearing completion that Ingrid said was a new recreation center that would include an olympic-sized swimming pool. She also said that there were plans to open a branch campus of the University of Paris there soon and a new metro line.

Some of this government effort is doubtless motivated by the desire not to see the recurrence of the past riots. In addition, the central government continues to invest significantly in places like Aubervilliers as a part of a larger strategy to break down the historic barriers between Paris and the surrounding banlieu.

Besides housing, the boys hanging out on the corner in Aubervilliers have a few other things going for them that boys in a similar situation in the U.S. do not have. They have access to a universal health care system that has been judged the best in the world. They grew up with access to a publicly-funded educational system beginning virtually at birth in which one continues to advance based almost entirely on merit.

No one graduates from a French university owing $30,000 in student loans. They have access to more job training programs and, if they get a job, better-protected worker rights and long-lasting unemployment insurance. And if one of these young men becomes a parent, the government will provide all prenatal and postnatal services, besides paying the parent(s) a monthly stipend until the child is 18, more if the child has a disability.

Although Aubervilliers at night might be a scary proposition for an American senior with less than perfect French, it is fundamentally safer than hundreds of places in the U.S. because the population doesn't have guns. You might get robbed, even beaten up, or be forced to dance for hours to Algerian rap music while toking spliffs, but you won't get shot.

The high-rise public housing was surrounded by green space with public parks nearby.

As a consequence of having a citizenry without firearms, the police are also less likely to shoot people. The old police justification -- “I thought he had a gun” -- doesn't compute. You can actually fight the cops in France without worrying about being blown away. The French riot police may look scary in their protective body armor and may use water cannons, tear gas, and truncheons, but they won't shot you with a 9mm if you throw a rock at them.

Aubervilliers is a marvelous example of the integration process of highly divergent groups of people. It has succeeded at achieving this goal on many levels and on a large scale for a long time. It has played this integrative role for almost 200 years now, originally with provincial Frenchmen. Even the disaffected youth of today are an example of its success.

We were told that there are no ethnically-based youth gangs in Aubervilliers. There may be gang-related crime, but it's well-integrated gang-related crime. Given its extreme diversity, racism within Aubervilliers has plenty of potential, but it seemed minimal in our brief observation.

So if some day fate confronts you with the bizarre choice of either Detroit or Aubervilliers, don't hesitate to start working on your French. And rest assured that speaking it with a strange accent won't bother your new neighbors.

[David P. Hamilton, a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin in history and government was an activist in 1960s-'70s Austin and was a contributor to the original Rag. David and wife Sally spend part of every year in France. Read more articles by David P. Hamilton on The Rag Blog.]

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