Black Panther Christmas Party

This story is a chapter of a memoir focused on the insights I gained from interactions with certain notable people. All these stories are true. I admit, however, my memory may not be flawless.

Bobby Seale – Black Panther Christmas Party

My first ever trip by commercial airplane was cross-country to San Francisco at Christmas time 1967. I was barely 19 years old, a baby-faced, skinny kid at 120 pounds with a Beatle haircut. I almost always wore boot cut blue jeans, suede desert boots, a blue work shirt over white undershirt, and an army green Eisenhower jacket with a button on each chest pocket flap, a peace sign on the right, a draft resistance movement omega on the left.

I was excited but apprehensive. The purpose of the trip was to visit my girlfriend, Judy. We fell in love during the summer after my senior year in high school. She was a year younger than me. It was my first serious love affair. Our relationship survived and even flourished during my freshman year in college. The next spring Judy was accepted at Stanford University.

During the summer I found myself foolishly trying to convince her not to go to a first rank college on the west coast. I was afraid our relationship would not survive the separation. At first we wrote each other daily. Gradually her letters became less frequent. Hoping against hope, I gave up my college meal plan and used the money for a plane ticket.

I tried to clear my head as I flew west. On reflection, I had to admit that I could no longer see a joint future for us. I had recently gotten deeply involved in the peace movement. I was making new friends. Although the idea of breaking up was impossibly sad for me, it was time to face the truth. I resolved to tell Judy that we should break up. All during the rest of the flight I couldn’t get a popular Jefferson Airplane song out of my head.

When the truth is found

To be lies

And all the joy

Within you dies.

Don't you want somebody to love?

Don't you need somebody to love?

Wouldn't you love somebody to love?

You better find somebody to love.

Judy met me at the airport. Outside her sister waited in a green and white Volkswagen van. She worked for a civil rights organization somewhere in the bay area. Judy often spent weekends in a spare bedroom in her sister’s downtown apartment.

The closet-sized spare room was in the back. There was almost no furniture except for a futon on the floor and a small desk with a hard wooden chair. The only light came from a floor lamp next to the desk. I was so exhausted I fell asleep as soon as I lay down.

I woke the next morning in full daylight. Judy was not in the room. I looked out the single window onto a tiny courtyard where the trashcans were stored. Judy came in with coffee. She pointed out an avocado tree in the courtyard. I’d never seen a real avocado tree before.

As we ate granola and drank more coffee in the small kitchen I talked about all the iconic sites I wanted to visit: Fisherman’s Wharf, City Lights Bookstore, Chinatown, cable cars, and, of course, Haight-Ashbury. We could walk to economize. I think I had about $25 in my pocket.

Out of the blue Judy looked at me sadly, took my hand and said, “I don’t know how to tell you this, dear Ed, but I’ve got to tell you right now. I think we should break up.”

I don’t know if she could see the relief flash across my face. I told her I understood and had reluctantly reached the same conclusion on the flight. We agreed that although we still loved each other, there was really no other course. With that decision thankfully out of the way, we made plans for our final few days together. 

I remember cool fog in Golden Gate Park. Judy and I walked to the narrow stretch of the park called the Panhandle a few mornings in a row to take in the scene. So this was Haight-Ashbury, the reputed epicenter of the counter-culture. As the fog burned off, handfuls of men and women with long hair and colorful clothing began to populate the benches near us.

The previous summer up to 100,000 young people from around the world flocked to the Haight-Ashbury district. The media called it “the Summer of Love.” It was a true blossoming of the hippie culture. Golden Gate Park was its heart with free music, free food, free drugs and free love. I saw it on TV and in Time magazine. Young people like me were going to save the world by living lives free from the culture of capitalism and death. The Mamas and the Papas sang:

If you’re going to San Francisco

Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair

By that fall the positive energy was waning. The hippies who still inhabited the Haight were out of money and mostly homeless, drifting from couch to couch. Drug addiction had also taken a toll. We saw a lot of people who seemed permanently zoned out walking around in bell-bottoms and beads carrying their few belongings in a guitar case.

I felt like I had arrived at a long-anticipated party just as everyone was leaving. On October 6, 1967 resident activists had staged a mock funeral in Golden Gate Park. The message was that the revolution of peace and love needed to transform the culture of death could not be accomplished by traveling to San Francisco. Cultural transformation would only happen when the ideas of peace and love were successfully carried to all of America.

I agreed wholeheartedly.

For a Christmas present, Judy’s sister gave us tickets to a concert at the Fillmore Auditorium. We drove over there in the VW bus. I can’t remember the names of the two psychedelic rock bands we heard that night. What I do vividly remember was the total sensory overload created by the lightshow.

A dozen or so shadowy figures were on stage behind the band fiddling with a variety of light and image sources. I counted five overhead projectors, two movie projectors, and about a dozen slide projectors. Spotlights with rotating color wheels illuminated the band.

The overhead projectors were each fitted with a tray of liquid floating with blobs of color. When the music started the operators sloshed a combination of water, oil, and liquid dye around in time with the music to make fantastic pulsing patterns on the musicians, the walls, the dancing crowd and the ceiling.

The slide projectors were aimed at random spots on the walls. The slides changed rapidly and seemed roughly choreographed to the music. Some slides were scenes of nature, but most were hand-painted with abstract images. Some contained popular slogans like “Peace now!” “Turn on, tune in, drop out,” and “Fuck the draft.” The movie projectors cast blurry rectangles of fast moving images that changed erratically. I soon felt like my brain was melting.

Everyone was dancing. Along the left wall a group of seven women in classic hippie clothes complete with braided leather headbands held hands forming a circle. They moved slowly at first so the crowd had a chance to get out of the way. In less than a minute they were whirling almost out of control. It was beautiful. Legs and long colorful skirts flying, they whooped at the top of their lungs. They seemed to levitate until they bumped into a guy who wasn’t paying attention and all fell in an ecstatic heap.

In a back corner I saw two men sitting on the floor with their arms on each other’s shoulders. One was laughing hysterically and the other crying uncontrollably. I asked a guy by the door if he thought they were all right. “Bad trip, man,” was all he said.

I completely lost track of time. At some point Judy’s sister magically appeared and dragged us out into the fresh air. She said she had run into some activist friends who insisted that she go to a Christmas party across the bay in Oakland. We climbed into the van and set off.

It must have been late by the time we reached Oakland. We drove through mostly deserted streets. A few scattered places were decorated with Christmas lights. The whole neighborhood was pretty beat up. I was glad I was not on foot.

We found the address. We climbed some rickety steps to an apartment above a store. I could hear the Four Tops blasting from the stereo in sweet harmony before we even opened the door.

Now if you feel that you can't go on

Because all of your hope is gone

And your life is filled with much confusion

Until happiness is just an illusion

And your world around is crumblin' down

Darling, reach out, come on girl, reach on out for me…

In the living room a crowd was dancing, eating cold fried chicken, drinking wine and laughing. A small Christmas tree twinkled in the corner next to the front window but the main decorations were the black power posters on the walls. Here was Malcolm X pointing forward with the caption: “We want freedom by any means necessary. We want justice by any means necessary. We want equality by any means necessary.” On the facing wall was a garish red poster featuring the chubby face of Chairman Mao declaring: “Power proceeds from the barrel of a gun.” Next to the entrance to the kitchen someone had crudely painted a large black fist right on the wall.

The living room was too crowded for me. I worked my way to the kitchen. A dozen or so white folks were clustered in the back corner. They looked like college students to me. A guy with long brown hair held in place with a rolled up bandana and wearing a colorful dashiki shirt grabbed me a cup of some cheap red wine. I desperately needed to find a bathroom and a quieter place.

I followed a black woman wearing jeans and a shiny red sequined top up the stairs to the third floor. I found the bathroom. When I came out I turned into a large room that might have been a bedroom. It was a lot quieter there. I couple dozen people stood around, mostly African Americans.

Four young black men sat on folding chairs with their backs to the wall at the far end of the room. They were all dressed alike: black boots, black pants, blue shirts and leather jackets. One of them was wearing a black beret. I noticed four rifles propped against the wall behind them.

After a few minutes a guy with a modest Afro and a little mustache stood up.

“Brothers and sisters, HEY NOW! HEY! Can I have your attention.”

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Judy’s sister over at the side of the room speaking with some black women. I walked over to her and asked if she could explain what was going on. All she said was, “Be quiet, Bobby is going to rap.”

“Brothers and sisters, we are at a turning point. As you know, our good brother, Huey P. Newton, was framed by the pigs a month ago and is now in jail.”

There were murmurs of assent from all corners of the room as people turned their attention to the speaker.

“Me and the brothers,” he gestured to the other three men, “the council of the Party, we have been talking and thinking. We have to find a way to free Huey. We must make our voices heard! We will have justice!”

The crowd was warming up. I heard voices scattered throughout the room call out, “Yes! Say it, brother! Amen, brother!”

“Our brother Huey was arrested on false charges that he shot and killed a police officer. We all know brother Huey would not do such a thing. That would go against everything he believes in.”

“That’s right.”

“Well the time has come to act and we have a plan.”

“Tell it, brother.”

“We party leaders have been meeting during the last few weeks with our allies on the college campuses and in the national peace movement. They have agreed to join in our cause to Free Huey.”

“Free Huey! Free Huey! All power to the People!”

I stood there in shock. Holy shit! These guys were the Black Panthers. It all made sense. Judy’s sister worked for a civil rights organization. Her friends, all of whom were probably civil rights or peace activists, invited her to this party where an alliance was in the process of being forged between the Panthers and the New Left.

What little I knew about the Black Panthers I heard from Walter Cronkite on the evening news. Throughout the 1960s a number of cities across the country experienced race riots, often immediately after incidents of police brutality. One such riot occurred in late September 1966 in the Hunter’s Point neighborhood of San Francisco following the police shooting of Matthew Johnson, an unarmed young black man.

Huey Newton and Bobbie Seale were first hand witnesses to this riot. They saw the anger of young people in the black community as a force that could be organized for change. They were dissatisfied with the failure of civil rights organizations to directly challenge police brutality. Toward the end of 1966 they began to conduct armed patrols on the streets of Oakland. When confronted by the police, they cited California law that permitted carrying a loaded rifle or shotgun as long as it was publicly displayed and not pointed at any one.

Newton and Seale called their organization the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. They soon became the most visible element of the Black Power movement that was gaining strength in black communities across the nation.

The national media was fascinated by the image of young black men holding rifles in an urban streetscape. White Middle America was terrified. The FBI under J. Edgar Hoover declared the Black Panthers to be "the greatest threat to the internal security of the country." The FBI immediately instituted a program of surveillance, infiltration and police harassment designed to incriminate the Panther leadership and drain the organization of resources. Bobby Seale knew about the FBI’s plan. He had concluded that the arrest of Huey Newton was proof that the FBI would stop at nothing to destroy the Panthers.

As I listened to him talk, I began to feel a strong admiration for what Bobby Seale was trying to do. His passion for justice was so strong. His vision of a brighter future for his community was amazing. His commitment to directly and personally confronting police brutality totally blew me away. It was impossible for me to reconcile my own commitment to non-violence with the Panther’s belief that violent revolution may be necessary to achieve justice for the black community. Even so, it was a revelation for this country boy just to be in the same room with Bobby Seale.

Bobby Seale was right, I think, about the need to forge an alliance with the wider community of left-leaning activists. As it turned out the “Free Huey” campaign did have wide appeal for both peace activists and other black power organizations. The Peace and Freedom Party and its Presidential candidate, Dick Gregory, supported the Free Huey campaign as it promoted antiwar and antiracist politics. The overall result was a growing awareness among those on the left of the structural connection between the causes of the Vietnam War and the roots of racism in America.

Despite everyone’s efforts on his behalf, Huey Newton was convicted of murdering the police officer and was sentenced to prison. He was released three years later when his conviction was reversed on appeal.

The Free Huey campaign resulted in Bobby Seale being invited to join the organizers of the huge anti-war demonstration during the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. All the top organizers, including Seale, were quickly arrested and charged with inciting a riot. Seale was convicted of multiple counts of contempt of court because he would not sit quietly during the obviously sham court proceedings. He was sentenced to four years in prison. He was released years later after his conviction was reversed on appeal.

By the time Bobby Seale and Huey Newton got out of jail the Black Panther Party had lost its momentum. J. Edgar Hoover’s plan had worked. By depriving the Black Panthers of their two strongest leaders and diverting cash and energy to their defense, the FBI caused them to collapse.

Although the Black Panthers did not create a sustained national black power movement, it did succeed in drawing a great deal of public attention to issues of race and justice. As I stood in Oakland that night listening to Bobby Seale, I understood the irrational power of hope for the first time. All idealism is fueled by hope. If Bobby Seale and the Panthers could hope for justice, I could hope for justice.

We left the Christmas party in the early morning hours. It was getting light by the time we sat in Judy’s sister’s kitchen eating breakfast. I managed a few hours of fitful sleep then headed to the airport, said a tearful last goodbye to Judy and to caught the red-eye back to the east coast.

Almost as soon as the plane was airborne I fell asleep. I was floating free. I felt so confident. I dreamed of a revolution of peace and justice that would transform America. I vowed to somehow find a way to live that dream.

Power to the people! Right on!

References:

On the Black Panther Party:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Panther_Party

http://www.theweeklings.com/jjuanita/2013/04/14/five-comrades-in-the-black-panther-party-1967-1970/

On Bobby Seale:

http://www.biography.com/people/bobby-seale-9477529#the-black-panthers

http://www.ourcampaigns.com/CandidateDetail.html?CandidateID=45396

On Malcolm X, by any means necessary:

http://www.blackpast.org/1964-malcolm-x-s-speech-founding-rally-organization-afro-american-unity#sthash.AcWHRVeW.dpuf

On the Summer of Love:

http://www.the60sofficialsite.com/Summer_of_Love.html

On the Fillmore Auditorium:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fillmore

Volunteers video – Jefferson Airplane 1967

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SboRijhWFDU

A voice from the Other Side

This story is a chapter of a memoir focused on the insights I gained from interactions with certain notable people. All these stories are true. I admit, however, my memory may not be flawless. I did not take notes at the time.

 

Arthur Ford: A Voice from the Other Side

"This is Fletcher speaking. I have a message for someone in the room."

A standing room crowd of forty to fifty Bucknell students crowded the downstairs lounge of the New Dorm (now called Vedder Hall) to listen to a lecture on Spiritualism by Rev. Arthur Ford. He was about half an hour into his lecture when suddenly his eyes glazed over, his body stiffened and his head fell back. The voice we heard was much deeper than Ford’s with a slight French-Canadian accent. Ford's mouth was open but the words were unearthly, disembodied somehow. His lips barely moved as he continued.

"A recently departed soul wants you all to know that he has successfully made the transition to the other side. He wants his friends and especially his roommate to know that he is sorry he did not say goodbye. What he did, he did because he felt there was no other way."

Ford now appeared to fall asleep. The room was utterly still. I was completely stumped. What should I do? Should I try to wake Ford? Would that possibly harm him?

I was sitting at a table in front of the audience right next to Rev. Ford. I had volunteered to introduce the speaker and assist during the question and answer period. That task seemed simple when I volunteered. I had never heard of Arthur Ford but I was given a couple of sheets that outlined his background and accomplishments. Obviously, I was not adequately prepared.

After about a minute, Ford awoke. He said he was extremely tired and could take only a few questions. He steadfastly maintained he had absolutely no knowledge of what transpired during the visitation by Fletcher. He also maintained that when he agreed to lecture he had no intention of demonstrating his psychic abilities, but that he was not always able to control when Fletcher would make an appearance.

It was the fall of 1967. Rev. Ford was on campus as part of a series of informal talks on current events. The idea was that holding lectures in the dormitories would foster open discussion. I got involved because I was then organizing a group of my friends into a homegrown education reform movement we called “Outer Ripple.” This lecture, sponsored by the Bucknell Christian Association, was a prototype of the sort of living/learning event Outer Ripple advocated.

Arthur Ford was a bit of a strange choice. He had been internationally famous as a trance medium back in the 1920s but his star had faded. He achieved new notoriety only a few months before the Bucknell event when he conducting a televised séance involving Episcopal Bishop James A. Pike. During this televised event Ford’s spirit guide, Fletcher, was summoned and spoke at length. Fletcher passed on accurate information from many of Bishop Pike’s deceased associates. He also revealed details of the life of Bishop Pike’s son who had committed suicide a year and a half earlier. After the broadcast Bishop Pike proclaimed that Ford was completely credible. This created a considerable stir in the media.

Although Ford was variously referred to as a psychic, a clairvoyant, or a medium, I think the term “mentalist” is more accurate. He was born in 1896 and grew up in a time when there was widespread belief in spirit phenomena. Beginning with the Fox sisters in 1848 and continuing through the rest of the nineteenth century especially in America and Great Britain scores of trance mediums claimed to have the ability to communicate with the dead. Ford was a direct descendant of this tradition.

Always the performer, Arthur Ford also had a serious interest in magic. In the late 1800s continuing into the late 1940s spiritualism and magic merged to created so-called “mentalists,” men and women who toured the U.S. and Europe providing an occult show for the paying public. This phenomenon was so prevalent that the great magician and escape artist Harry Houdini began a crusade aimed at unmasking mentalists as frauds.

Ford reported that he became aware of his spiritual powers and acquired his spirit guide, Fletcher, in 1924. Fletcher was killed during the First World War. Ford knew Fletcher as a boy so had a personal connection to him and was able to visualize his face.

Beginning in 1924 Ford toured New England appearing between the acts of the S. S. Henry magic show. The Sphinx, a magic periodical at the time reported, “he [Ford] gave one of the finest talks on magic ever heard.” Gradually Ford expanded his repertory. He claimed his contacts in the spirit world gave him access to names, information and whereabouts of items otherwise only known to close family members. He said this allowed him to read minds and sealed messages handed up by members of the audience.

Ford’s decision to tour with magic shows certainly raises questions about the validity of his claim to possess genuine psychic powers. To be fair, during that time magic shows and touring carnivals where about the only places psychics could practice their profession. If Arthur Ford ever hoped to be paid as a psychic, joining a mentalist show was one of his few options.

In 1929, Ford publically announced he had received a message he believed to have originated from the spirit of Harry Houdini, the very man who had sworn to unmask spiritualism as a fraud. Prior to his death Houdini devised a plan to prove or disprove spiritualism once and for all. Houdini announced that he was going to leave a coded message with his wife. If a spiritualist medium was able to contact Houdini after his death and obtain the code that would provide proof for spiritualism’s claim of that the spirit survived death.

Ford was one of several mentalists who claimed to have accomplished the feat. All the others failed the test. Initially, Mrs. Houdini appeared to validate Ford’s claim, then she recanted. A storm of fierce arguments pro and con erupted in the media. Some feature writers championed the authenticity of Ford's claim, while others quoted Houdini’s widow as saying that the message was not correct. Ford’s reputation as a mentalist was thus secured.

In the early 1930s, however, Ford was involved in a serious automobile accident and subsequently descended into severe alcoholism and morphine abuse. He stopped appearing publically. He eventually found his way to Alcoholics Anonymous and learned to control his addictions. In the early 1950s Ford began once again to provide mentalist demonstrations now focusing on contacting the spirits of the deceased.

By the time Ford resumed his mentalist performances, more than one hundred years had passed since spiritualism first caught the attention of Christians struggling to reconcile the claims of their religion and science. Increasingly, as science advanced, the idea that it was possible to communicate with the dead through a séance was losing credibility. The claim that Spiritualism was itself somehow a science was no longer taken seriously. As early as 1941 spiritualism and séances had become the basis for popular comedy as witnessed by the wild success of Noel Coward’s play Blithe Spirit.

The rise of new age spirituality in the 1960s briefly revived general interest in Spiritualism.  Ford made concerted efforts to participate in this revival, the most famous of which was a séance he conduced in 1965 for Dr. Sun Myung Moon, founder of the Unification Church, whose members believed Moon was a sort of deity. Somewhere along the way Ford must have realized that the best hope for reviving the popularity of Spiritualism was through the medium of television. The result was the televised séance with Bishop Pike in 1967. Television, it seems, did not provide the resuscitation Spiritualism needed. Arthur Ford spent the final years of his life in Miami, Florida, where he died of cardiac arrest on January 4, 1971.

After the presentation Ford gave at Bucknell the campus buzzed for a few weeks with rumors that Ford had given a genuine psychic reading that contained a message from a classmate who had recently died. I spoke at length with the sophomore class president, who confided that the message Fletcher delivered was probably intended for him. He was the roommate of a young man who had committed suicide a few weeks before Ford’s lecture. The family had kept the cause of death secret. My friend concluded that the message delivered by Fletcher with its veiled reference to suicide had to be genuine. I remained skeptical. The message appeared deliberately vague. It seemed possible to me that Ford had somehow obtained information about a suicide of a Bucknell student from public records, or just made it up and hoped it would hit the mark.

Shortly after Ford’s death in 1971 a number of researchers obtained access to Ford’s private papers. They found masses of evidence that prior to performing his séances Ford conducted detailed research into the private lives of his subjects. Included in this discovery was information on the life of Bishop Pike and his son. One Ford biographer, Allen Spragget, made a very careful study of Ford’s papers and concluded, "The evidence is disquietingly strong that Ford cheated—deliberately as well as unconsciously."

There can be no doubt that it is very human to hope the individual soul will somehow survive death. The desire for immortality of the individual spirit is so strong that it can overcome almost all evidence to the contrary. The longevity of Spiritualism is a testament to the strength of this desire. Eventually the evidence against Spiritualism was just too overwhelming. Houdini was right. Mentalists like Ford were frauds preying on those who love their family and friends so deeply that they cannot bear to let them go. It is unbearably cruel to deceive people who grieve for those they have lost.

Yet, somehow, it is hard for me to blame Arthur Ford for wanting to make a career out of mentalism. Magicians are masters of fooling people and we love them for it. Ford was genial and entertaining. He appears to have meant no harm. I have no doubt that Ford genuinely believed that the spirit survived death and he wanted to convince others to share his belief. Nonetheless, his act required a fundamental dishonesty. I cannot forgive him that.

As for being able to communicate with spirits, in my opinion John Mortimer’s character, the crusty old lawyer Rumpole, says it best in "Rumpole and the Dear Departed" (1981):

"What I can't accept about spiritualism is the idea of millions of dead people (there must be standing room only on the Other Side) kept hanging about just waiting to be sent for by some old girl with a Ouija board in a Brighton boarding house, or a couple of table-tappers in Tring, for the sake of some inane conversation about the Blueness of the Infinite. I mean at least when you're dead you'll surely be spared such tedious social occasions."

 References:

Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Ford_(psychic)

Allen Spragget. Arthur Ford: The Man Who Talked with the Dead (1974)

On Victorian spiritualism http://www.victorianweb.org/victorian/religion/spirit.html

On the Houdini code: http://www.csicop.org/si/show/the_day_houdini_almost_came_back_from_the_dead

On Ford, Moon and Houdini: http://www.oocities.org/craigmaxim/s-1a.html

Wild hickory nuts

This story is a chapter of a memoir focused on the insights I gained from interactions with certain notable people. All these stories are true. I admit, however, my memory may not be flawless. 

Euell Gibbons - Wild Hickory Nuts

From the front porch of Aunt Phoebe’s Perch we could just make out the silver threads of the Gasconade River a hundred feet or so below. The late afternoon sunlight was tinted tan by the canopy of remaining oak leaves. It was warm for November. We tilted our chairs back to prop our feet on the railing of the old Ozark log cabin. Joli, our black and white border collie, paced back and forth eager for a walk down to the river.

The year was 2008. My sixtieth birthday fell on a weekend. Merry and I decided to celebrate by taking our first exploratory trip into the Ozarks of Missouri. We headed out of St. Louis down I-44 (that’s pronounced “farty far” in Missouri) headed for Rolla (“Rah-la”) about a hundred miles to the southwest. As soon as we escaped the endless suburbs we began to climb gradually onto the Salem Plateau of the central Missouri Ozarks.

The plateau is a limestone uplift cut through by many shallow rivers and streams. The topography is known as “karst,” meaning that the limestone has severely eroded over the millennia resulting in numerous caves, remarkable fresh water springs and streams of clear water. Along some streams a layer of harder rock such as flint forms an impermeable cap over the water-soluble limestone resulting in spectacular high bluffs.

At Rolla we turned north and wound for about thirty miles more over and around some very steep hills. On the secondary roads small stream crossings were sometimes accomplished by means of low water bridges: nothing much more than paving in the creek bed. Our destination was Rock Eddy Bluff Farm near Dixon, Missouri. Eventually the blacktop ended. We turned up a long dirt driveway and passed a small horse pasture. An older ATV was parked at the end of the drive with a bumper sticker that read, “Another Redneck for Obama.” This must be the place.

Our hosts, Tom and Kathy Cory, gave us directions to the log cabin where we were to stay. We chose this place because it seemed as close as possible to an authentic Ozark country experience. The log cabin was ancient but had been renovated to include a sleeping loft, luxury outhouse, gravity feed sink, gas stove and solar powered LED lights

After catching our breath on the porch, we put the leash on Joli and headed down the path to the river. The air was clean with the lightest scent of leaf mold. The path was so deeply covered in oak and hickory leaves that often we couldn’t see our feet. A little way along I discovered a spot where there were a lot of freshly fallen wild hickory nuts. Merry gathered some to take home. This put me in mind of how I came to first meet Euell Gibbons many years earlier.

Back in the fall of 1967 I was a sophomore history major at Bucknell University. A fellow from Philadelphia named Eric was my roommate for that semester. Eric was a very serious biology student who was proud of his Quaker heritage. He had an easy smile, shaggy hair and wore handmade sandals with socks, all the time, everywhere, in all weather. He liked to regale me with stories about the wonders of the Philadelphia Folk Festival.

Eric’s Quaker faith was the foundation of his sincere pacifism. My own nascent anti-war beliefs did not have religious underpinnings but grew out of my political opposition to the Vietnam War. We often talked about our differing perspectives on pacifism. He invited me to accompany him to the local Friends Meeting where he assured me I would meet others who would be happy to talk to me about their pacifist beliefs. At the time I was so uncertain of my own beliefs that this prospect did not appeal to me, so I politely declined. My interest level reversed, however, when Eric casually mentioned that about once a month after the Quaker Meeting Euell Gibbons led a hike to gather wild foods followed by a “wild dinner.”

I knew about Euell Gibbons from my Boy Scout days. I had read and re-read his wonderful Stalking the Wild Asparagus. I was intrigued by his claim that it was possible to live solely on food gathered from the wild. I loved his extensive knowledge of plants, his folksy style and his deep affection for the outdoors. I did not know he lived in Central Pennsylvania. I had always wanted to try eating some of the wild plants he recommended but had never dared. This was my chance.

A few weeks later I accompanied Eric to my first Quaker meeting. It was not exactly what I expected. After a few minutes of sitting quietly one person after the other stood to talk about their favorite Bible verse or their interpretation of their faith as it applied to events either in their personal life or the life of the nation. I had a naive idea that Quakers mostly meditated during meetings and only occasionally spoke when the spirit moved them. These Quakers were downright talky.

When I didn’t think anyone was watching I scanned the room but didn't see anyone that remotely resembled a weathered outdoorsman. After the service a very tall, gaunt man with unruly gray hair stood and invited anyone who wanted to go along for a walk to meet him outside.

It was a cool sunny late fall day. We walked for quite a distance along a railroad track outside of town. Euell seemed to know the name of every plant. Every few feet he would stop, pick up a plant, explain what it was and how it could be eaten. At his direction we gathered the edible plants he intended to use to prepare dinner and put them in buckets. At the end of the walk we drove out to Euell's farm where we all pitched in to make a big salad, a savory soup and some roasted root vegetables.

On the walk we collected a large clump of yellow and orange fungus that was growing on a tree stump. Euell called it “chicken of the woods.” We cut it in strips. Some went in the soup and some in the salad. I asked Euell how it was possible to identify which mushrooms were edible and which poisonous. He laughed and said that it was not possible to know which of the many thousands of mushrooms were poisonous. The trick, he explained, was to know how to positively identify just a few edible mushrooms and only ever eat those. Experimentation with mushroom edibility was not something he wanted to risk.

I went on several of these walks during that year. I got to know Euell and his wife, Freda, fairly well. Euell loved to tell stories as we walked. Frieda filled us in on various details of their life while we were chopping, cooking and eating. I learned quickly that Euell was a heavy cigarette smoker and that pizza was actually his favorite food. Euell was not a vegetarian or wild food purist. When he prepared wild food he typically used plenty of butter or even bacon fat. He also employed of a wide variety of spices to improve a sometimes questionable taste.

Until his “Stalking” books became a success Euell led an eclectic and pretty hard life. He was born in Texas in 1911. His mother, Laura Bowers Gibbons, was quite knowledgeable about wild edible plants and passed her knowledge on to the young Euell. He dedicated Asparagus to her. In 1922 his family moved to rural New Mexico. Times were hard. Foraging for plants and berries became a real necessity. Euell left home at the age of fifteen and drifted from job to job for a few years. By the early 1930s he was homeless. His knowledge of foraging helped keep him alive.

He joined the Army in 1934 and served two years. Once out of the Army he joined the Communist Party and wrote propaganda pamphlets for them. He told me that during the depression he truly believed Communist ideology provided the best practical hope for the poor and the working classes. After Russia invaded Poland in 1939, however, he renounced Communism and spent most of World War II in Hawaii working at a Navy shipyard.

In the immediate postwar years Euell lived for a time on Maui. He expanded his knowledge of foraging to include items that could be found by beach combing. He went back to school, earned his high school diploma then attended the University of Hawaii from 1947 – 50 majoring in anthropology. He earned some spending money by composing crossword puzzles in Hawaiian.

In 1948, he married Freda Fryer, a teacher, and both decided to join the Quaker Meeting. They taught school on Maui until they relocated to the mainland in 1953. Euell always wanted to be a writer. In 1955, while employed at Pendle Hill Quaker Study Center near Philadelphia, he started to write a novel about a man who lived primarily by foraging wild foods. He worked on it for years.

Through friends he eventually managed to show the manuscript of the novel to a respected New York City publisher. The publisher was impressed but didn’t think Euell’s novel would sell. Instead, the publisher recommended he use all the material he had collected about wild foods to write a non-fiction book. The resulting book, Stalking the Wild Asparagus, was published in 1962. It found an immediate audience and sold well enough that Euell and Freda could retire to a little farm in Central PA. He wrote seven more books on foraging. Most sold well but none was as successful as Asparagus.

One of the most appealing aspects of Asparagus is its easy conversational style. Each chapter has a catchy title and very complete information on finding, identifying and preparing that particular food. The narrative is cleverly designed to fire the reader’s imagination and taste buds. Euell tended to exaggerate how tasty and good for you certain plants are, but that is part of the charm. I still have my copy.

Euell was never apologetic about having once been a card-carrying Communist. Growing up during the height of the cold war, I was taught that all Communists were evil beings who just wanted to exterminate America with the atom bomb. Euell came from a time of economic desperation where a substantial number of Americans deeply believed that our country needed to adopt some form of democratic socialism to help the poor and working class. He told me he believed our democracy was weakened every time the rich got away with exploiting the poor. He believed in fighting back on the side of the oppressed. I admired his conviction. He was a genuine dust bowl lefty in the Woody Guthrie vein.

He and his wife were both steadfast supporters of the peace movement and occasionally attended local vigils and marches opposing the Vietnam War. I especially remember Euell holding forth one Sunday about how the Students for a Democratic Society [SDS] had a real opportunity to remake outmoded and ineffective liberal politics into a truly progressive force that would transform our corrupt political system.

Hearing his “old left” perspective was very important to me. At the time I was only marginally involved in the anti-war movement. I knew nothing about the history of left-wing politics in America. I was suspicious of the SDS because of the views expressed by the mainstream media. After hearing Euell talk, I decided to go to a SDS meeting and see for myself what they were about. Euell provided me with a bridge between the anti-war movement of the 60s and the progressive politics of America’s past. He was a living refutation of the propaganda I had been fed all my young life. I didn’t just think he was on the right track, I knew it. His endorsement of the agenda of the so-called “new left” was a key part of my decision to seriously devote myself to social justice causes.

A few years after I graduated I was pleasantly surprised to see that Euell had been invited to write a couple of articles for the National Geographic and that he appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson and on Sonny and Cher. I was a bit surprised to find him pitching Grape Nuts cereal in a TV commercial in 1974 during which he uttered the phrase I never forgot. When describing the taste of Grape Nuts he said in his Will Rogers voice, “reminds me of wild hickory nuts.”

My friends and I laughed. Some moaned that Euell had “sold out.”  Personally I knew he had lived a hard and principled life. I was happy he had achieved some small measure of fame and economic success. A few years later John McPhee wrote an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times to remind everyone that Euell was more than a Grape Nuts pitchman, “He was a man who knew the wild in a way that no one else in this time has even marginally approached.”

More than fifty years after Stalking the Wild Asparagus was published many of the wild plants he loved, virtually unknown as food at the time, have made their way to the mainstream. Some of Euell’s favorites included lamb’s quarters, rose hips, dandelion shoots, pokeweed, stinging nettle, purslane and cattails. Most of these “wild” foods are now commonly available, even sought after by the best chefs. At a recent meal in a fine restaurant in New York City, for example, I was served the special of the day featuring fresh, locally sourced, stinging nettles. I am certain that Euell’s effort to popularize wild foods contributed greatly to this major shift in the food culture.

Although most people do not now remember Euell’s lifelong dedication to social justice, sitting with him in his kitchen was an education that I never forgot.

Euell died in 1975 from an aneurysm secondary to his Marfan’s syndrome.  Although it's been a long time since I participated in my first wild dinner, I hear his voice and feel his influence every time I take a walk in the woods. I can’t hear the phrase “reminds me of wild hickory nuts” without smiling.

References:

To my mind John McPhee wrote the definitive article about Euell Gibbons recounting a four-day trip he took with Euell in early 1968 on the Susquehanna River, “A Forager,” The New Yorker, April 6, 1968.

Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euell_Gibbons                                   

Grape Nuts commercial filmed in the Ozarks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTcLOqTsNds

Rock Eddy Bluff Farm can be found at: http://www.rockeddy.com