Stephanie Slade

I was born on a beautiful day in Los Angeles on February 23, 1949. It was unusually warm and everybody went to the beach.  My parents, Ruth and Albee Slade, who had been waiting for me anxiously, were thrilled to have me. They were in their late thirties and were told they couldn’t have kids. But my mom told us dad persistently chased her around the bed.

My parents had met organizing worker unions in New York City. Both first generation Americans , they were their Russian refugee parents hope and dreams and both were college graduates.

Mom and Dad had come West from New York to live the good life. And for a few quick years they did.

They were living with Uncle Abraham Polonsky and his wife Sylvia who had left New York a few years earlier for Hollywood to pursue Uncle Abe’s screen writing career. My uncle Abe was a working screen writer but sadly soon to be blacklisted as was my father and my mother for being accused by the house of Un- American activities committee (HUAC) of being communists.

My dad had a radio show called “The Bread and the People”.  My uncle got a deal with RCA studios to write Golden Earrings and Body and Soul and they lived together on Selma Avenue in a little house. For Jewish people coming out of the depression they were living the American dream. .

So within that two year period from when I was born in 49 to 52 a dark cloud formed with fear from being  blacklisted or worse jailed for not ratting out their friends . Not the kind of bird that you cook in the kitchen,  the kind of bird that squeals stool pigeon.

To escape what my uncle Abe  called Season of  Fear  my parents moved to Chicago where Aunt Bessie and other cousins lived and my premature sister Laurie, who’s been my best friend all these many many years and in and out of  adventures, we’ve been close together, although very different.

Accused of communism, many fled to Mexico, Argentina or Europe.  Uncle Abe fled to France to make Film Noir with with famous French film makers and my mom and dad fled to Chicago.

The times were harsh and the dream of a better world with enough for all was sadly turned to a nightmare. But being from good strong Jewish peasant stock they persisted and they were not going to give up on their dreams.

Baby Laurie was born in the cold  Chicago winter and it was not my mother’s happy place. My clever  dad had  gotten a new job working as a technologist at the Chicago Institute of Technology teaching speed reading and  baseball players how to see the ball faster using a device he called the Takistascope, which was a fancy slide projector machine.

One of my earliest memories is being driven in the snow to my cousin’s house by dad and having a car accident,falling violently to the base of the car floor in the snow.

I was not badly hurt but very scared and then left at my cousin’s because my dad had to go to my mother who was birthing my sister. I cried and cried looking out the window at the falling snow.

Soon after my dad got a better job as a sales manager of the Sealy Mattress company in Oakland California and we moved back to sunny California to Mandana Boulevard off Lakeshore and mom was happy again.

It was a good move and my dad was a really good businessman.   His communist/socialist background was more or less donating to the NAACP and  talking about the possibility of a brand new system that might be better than capitalism. He loved to entertain his friends and mom was a great cook. They labeled intellectual thinkers like him the armchair revolutionaries.

He was making money at his new job and he bought mom a new house in Piedmont for 17,000 dollars.

Mom got a brand new cherry red drop top convertible and dad was Big Pimpin’ in a crop top green Lincoln Continental.  Life was good again.

It was a beautiful house with two floors and a big backyard with cherry blossom trees and a short walk to Wildwood elementary School where I went to school.

I was a good musician. I played the clarinet and C saxophone and  the piano that lived in my living room. My dad had a jazz band and recorder society and let me play sometimes.  I took lots of dance lessons.  I really excelled and I was a great student. I was always a great student.

My parents Jewish but not religious,  were active in the Jewish community in the Bay area and often had bridge parties and lots of fun gatherings. Mom took us  swimming at the Jewish community Center.

We celebrated Passover with our family who lived in Los Angeles. Riding to Los Angeles my parents would sing old Union songs.

We would always get together with Aunt Babe and Uncle Morty and Aunt Sylvia and their families who were mom’s siblings.

It was my favorite Jewish holiday because all of us kids would get to drink four glasses of wine during the long Passover dinner  and we would have a lot of fun when we would get together.. my cousins and I.

Some years when  we would go to Los Angeles we would get those e-ticket rides at Disneyland with my cousins Wilma and Zachary. almost exactly the same age as me and Laurie. One day we were riding to Disneyland and we were sitting in the backseat of a station wagon looking backwards the way they had the seats back then and we made up a song    I remember it  went the “Mars people are our people the only ones that we’d like ..they’ve got six heads and three tails and they ride on a triple bike”.

I learned to ride horses at Mountain Home Junior Ranch where my parents sent us for summer camp in Calistoga California.  I was a campfire girl and I still have my honor beads that I earned during those early days. We went to campfire girls  camp in the summertime up in Nevada City called Camp Augusta. We sang “On a lake called Vera there’s a place you should know.  it’s camp Augusta and we love it so.  We rock and we roll and we’re really alive, we’re the Camp Augusta campers and we really thrive so boom boom diddy daddy we love you so ..

Whenever we would get home from camp my mom would always cook a big standing rib roast and my sister and I would have two bones one for each of us to enjoy our homecoming. We were growing up in the lap of luxury and the lap of love.

When I was at Piedmont Junior high I realized that the Civil Rights movement was starting up in Alabama and Mississippi. I watched as Chaney Goodwin Swerner,  three Jewish guys   got hung up on trees working for the civil rights movement in the south.

I wanted to do something too. I started going to the Quakers meetings in Berkeley and there I met my friend Renee. I think we must have been 10 or 12 years old.  Around the same time I  smoked my first marijuana in the bathroom in a resort in Hawaii that my parents took us to and when we were discovered ..oh they were so angry.

I experienced my first kiss in the back alley near my home on Boulevard Way called Sylvan Way. I was playing the clarinet in the school orchestra and I remember the woody flavor sucking on the clarinet reeds. Smells of my dad’s cherry tobacco he smoked in his pipe and moms cigarettes that she said she never inhaled only puffed still bring me back to that time of Innocence and optimism with a little bit of socialism or communism or discussions about socialism and communism mixed in. My dad told me that without struggle there would be no change and that was called dialectics.

Through the Quakers American Friends Service Committee Renee and I found out that there was going to be a seminar at Asilomar about the Civil Rights movement. Us kids were going to take a bus to Asilomar  and see if we could go south to help with the civil rights.  It was organized by John Rockefeller and and on the bus was my first experience with black people who are also on the bus on the way to the Asilomar camp. I realized then how cool it was to be together and that black skin white skin we were all really the same we enjoyed sharing stories and songs and I made some friends who are from Richmond and black community that was the home for many black people who came out during the Great migration when the shipyards needed workers it was the Rosie the riveters time and my new friends were the children of the roses.

At the workshop seminar we were told racism is everywhere so go back to your own community and do something in your own community. Well I was thinking Piedmont? Was Piedmont racist because there are no races there there’s only one race there so that made me feel kind of weird but okay that was my directive.  Renee and I on the way back on the bus started talking about what we might be able to do. Her family was from  Berkeley but had moved to Walnut Creek. We would continue to talk about what we could do going to activities at the Quakers.

It was early every morning  that I started working on my artwork. In my house there was a den upstairs.  I had my room my sister had her room my parents had their room and there was another room we called the guest room with a big closet with a window and in the mornings when I woke up early because  I was an early riser I would go into the guest room closet that I made my art studio.   I loved my little art sanctuary  working on my art while my sister and parents slept in.  I was five years old and continued to find my sanctuary in my art studios throughout my life.

One early morning while I was in my art closet I was thinking about what I learned after the Asilomar,  conference and what I could do in my own community.

I thought maybe I could do a student exchange program and offer students from Oakland high and Castlemont high and McClymonds high,  all very diverse and mostly black students , a chance to come to Piedmont for a week. Like a local student exchange program.   Also students from Piedmont could go to those schools for a week to live and so together they may learn more about each other and like each other and make friends and that would be one way to conquer racism. Why not?

When I was in 10th grade Renee and I began to really seriously propose this option and this idea and we were not well received .

The Piedmont council of adults called me in front of them and told me that I was ridiculous for the reason why they lived in Piedmont was because they didn’t have to socialize with black people or any other people of other colors. They very clear and they said don’t do it Steph.

Soon after that  crosses were burned on my front yard and a leaflet called Toxin was passed out to our neighbors calling my family Communists on a bright pink paper. The climate turned cold  and fear of worse was a bitter warning .

However I had found a number of students who wanted to do it also.  Ted and Tom Lane and a few others were enthusiastic so we kept on pushing for the student exchange program and eventually we did get a donkey basketball game one night at the Piedmont Community Church with students from Oakland high School.  It was an amazing achievement as simple as it was.

That happened in my senior year.  I was hanging out in Berkeley on the weekends at the Mediterranean Cafe. I always loved Berkeley since the days bringing food to the Free speech movement with Mario Savio.  Tuna and Bologna  sandwiches were my mother’s favorite food to bring eating and singing We shall Overcome and Don’t let nobody turn me around. These were the songs of The Civil Rights movement really started to take a hold.

I started writing poetry after JFk was assassination. I was in the library. It was a turbulent time when the now legendary Rosa Parks,  Martin Luther King and Malcolm X were becoming household words and black people were being told to be proud  Say It Loud sang James Brown I’m black and I’m proud!

It was an  amazing time to be alive  and the Mediterranean Cafe and telegraph avenue was very groovy and far out to hang out .

Many weekends I would go to my girlfriend Romney’s house and we were really interested in Bob Dylan every time a new album came out or a new song we were playing it in heavy rotation especially songs like The times They are changing and blowing in the wind.

At Piedmont high I was in the marching bandI played the clarinet in the marching band and at the football games every Friday night.  I was a star journalist,  junior statesman and in a club.  I was really excelling in all that Piedmont high School offered me as I was working behind the scenes as a enthusiastic revolutionary girl alongside my best friend Renee.

In 1966 I graduated Piedmont high School and I went straight to San Francisco State for the beginning of the flower Power revolution yes I was a flower child and a hippie and as I lived in the dormitories and started taking classes. I I soon met my boyfriend Craig who was a junior and a football player and a handsome young man who I fell in love with. Craig was living in an apartment off campus and soon I was going back and forth between my dormitory room and my camp and his room and we were happy to be together as much as possible. It was far out and that’s when I started taking a lot of psychedelics probably about 300 trips with Craig LSD and a lot of marijuana.

One night we dropped acid at his apartment. We had gotten a copy of Timothy Leary’s The Tibetan Book of the Dead. As we read the pages came alive and the letters danced. I looked up at the ceiling and it seemed the whole ceiling opened up to the universe to the sky it was my experience with the Astro plane looking down at myself and Craig and feeling a sense of being completely out of the world and yet not afraid just in awe of the great Majesty and mystery of the universe amongst the Stars and the planets looking down at myself this little girl with big dreams.

 

 

Every weekend we would buy a $10 lid of marijuana on Oak Street and then head to the panhandle. The panhandle was called the panhandle because it was about five or six blocks before you could enter Golden gate Park.

Bands including big brother and the holding company the grateful Dead and Quicksilver Messenger service  would pull up in flatbed trucks and  I  danced  with wild abandon. Flowers in my hair. I  wore my brocade blouse with puffy sleeves and very short skirt,  black seed  beads,  and black tights. Sometimes barefoot. Then Craig and I would make our way through the portals of the past  down the Golden gate Park Road to the beach where there would be Conga players drumming.   Sometimes we were so high we watched the sky open up in the fog above us and see the stars. We held hands and kissed in the moonlight listening to the mix of the Congo players and the waves.

Our bubble burst when Craig got drafted.  The Vietnam war was in full force and he really didn’t want to go.  He started taking lots and lots of LSD. He dropped  so much LSD that it really affected his brain and he was so out of it that it was  hard for me to be with him.

When when he went to get his physical at the army recruiting station he hoped that he would get out of going to the war by being mentally deranged.  it turned out he had something wrong with his inner ear and they weren’t going to take him anyway.

He decided he was going to go to Canada and he left me. I was relieved.  and said goodbye with Canada. He was gone a long  with his friend Henry.

Meanwhile I was wanting to get into my art and there weren’t any art classes available at San Francisco State. By then I was a regular at the fillmore auditorium, the Avalon Ballroom,   The winter land and sometimes a place called the Family Dog. I especially loved  ladies night and I would go and listen to  bands like Jimi Hendrix,  Jethro Tull,   Chambers Brothers,  Butterfield blues band and Janice Joplin.

One night I was at the Fillmore I was so high I was just laying down and a man came and lay down next to me and his name was Johnny Gappa. He was a cute wirey  young guy from Pennsylvania out to the summer of love and to experience San Francisco. He was part of a commune that night he took me home.  They were a beautiful group of people maybe about 10 mostly couples living in a big  house in San Francisco. We were enjoying living in this beautiful house and having lavish dinners and smoking and drinking and eating and smoking and drinking and dropping acid and a little bit of cocaine came into the mix too.  Cocaine’s not a good thing and it made me really paranoid.  One day I heard some sirens outside and nobody was home and I got the cocaine and I flushed it all down the toilet which didn’t make me very popular at that house anymore.  My parents came and rescued me and got me back into art school at California college of Arts and Crafts.

This was right before the student strike against the war monger  Hayakawa.

I absolutely loved Berkeley.  it  was such a magical time in my life to be it the college of arts and crafts  taking watercolor and taking metal craft and  history of films   We art students had so much freedom.  I got a class that was called  a pilot program where we got an auditorium on the campus of California college of arts and we were told we could do anything we wanted in the auditorium.

We built  a womb like structure that you had to climb through like a soft tunnel.  Once inside we had the music of John Cage and the poetry James Joyce’s  Ulysses as actors performed dresses in black spraying silly string that went all over the whole audience by the end of the performance.

it was fantastic and  crazy and it was so much fun.

One spring day I was sketching sitting under my favorite tree  eating  my sandwich for lunch and a call handsome man came up to me. Looking  down at me he said ” what are you doing under my tree?” and I said “Your tree?”

That was Rex White. He became one of my lifelong friends. He asked me that day to come visit him at his Victorian house on Oakland Avenue where he had his Art studio set up.  I fell in love with him and he with me. We spent many days together painting,  drawing and discussing how we like dropping out from all the politics of the day.   Rex liked to play his guitar while I painted.  His favorite song was ” The banks of the Ohio”.

It was the summer of ’68 and Rex decided he was going to go to a summer workshop in Mexico and I decided I was going to go to Colorado and on to Chicago for the Democratic convention.

When I reached Denver I called Mom to check in she told me  Craig had called and  told my mom  that he wanted to meet me in Taos New Mexico.

I hadn’t seen him for a while and was very excited to see him again. He greeted me at the place that he told my mom he would meet me by the train station and swept me off my feet, spun me around and gave me the best kiss ever.

That summer I didn’t get to the Democratic  convention in Chicago  that turned violent with protesters. Bobby Seal and 6  other protesters were arrested and stood trial as The famous Chicago Seven.

Instead I was in the beautiful spiritual  New Mexico mountains. The sounds of music mixed  with the gentle flutter of the leaves from the Aspen trees and whiffs of marijuana smoke welcomed us to The Gathering of the Tribes.

Many brightly painted buses came with hippie from all over the country to be together for a number of days of music sex LSD  and lots of marijuana. The Merry Pranksters and The Hog Farm folks were there.  One hot windy night I made love with handsome sweet Craig on a mattress on top of an Adobe building,  the hot winds swirling into our orgasms. My first true love was  fantastic,  being surrounded in love ón  that Santa Fe summer night.

It was so romantic that we were together again although the Viet Nam war was raging .

Craig asked me to marry him.  I thought about it. And then I called my mom and asked her to send me  a plane ticket for home.

Craig planned to meet me back in Piedmont and then  get married up in Canyon where his brother Michael lived with his wife Annie.  But when he came back to Piedmont I had doubts.

I stood out in my backyard and looked up at the full moon. I  was only 20 and I thought I didn’t  really want to get married.  I have so much of the world still to see.   I cried and Craig cried as we broke up. He wrote me this poem.

Girl Artist of the Dead

(Insert Poem)