By now I've written (or rewritten) most of the "People's Park" article.  I was there from the beginning because Jon Read, my former employer, was the landscape architect responsible for the park's initial design.  He also provided the tools to build it and donated many of the materials. 

That first weekend was terrific!  I drove my truck (the one pictured in the "Hippie: Travel" section) up to the site and parked it in the middle of the park as it developed around me.  My good friend David Garthwaite convinced his sister, Terry, that they should play music, so "The Joy of Cooking" jammed all day. I cooked food for the crowd in my truck and worked laying sod.  Returned home at the end of the weekend, tired and happy.

When they fenced off the park, my truck was still parked in "The Boneyard"a place at 5th and Delaware in Berkeley where a number of people were building boats, vans and so on.  My neighbor, Alan Blanchard, had said goodbye to his wife, Sheila, and gone up to Telegraph Ave. to work at the Berkeley Reperatory Theater doing carpentry.  He heard some noise on the street, went up to the roof to see what was happening and was immediately hit by a volley of buckshot fired by an Alameda County Sheriff's deputy.  He never saw another thing, as he was permanently blinded.  James Rector, who was standing next to him, had seen the deputy point his shotgun at them; he turned and was running away when the blast hit him in the lower abdomen.  He died four days later.

I was in Sproul Plaza for Rector's memorial service just after he died.  The National Guard troops surrounded the plaza and pointed their bayonets inward, while helicoptors dropped CS gas directly on the thousands of people who had assembled.  Walking home after this gathering, we were assaulted by National Guard troops.  That night I defied the curfew and drove my truck all around Berkeleyno one was permitted on the streets after dark, and it was obviously a "hippie truck"yet they never stopped me, even at the roadblocks, which I ignored.

Yes, a whole other 60's saga.  Still makes me sad about Alanhis wife left him, and whenever I saw him after that he commented that he realized he would always remember me as he saw me on the last day he was sighted.