Californian Summer-of-Lover's Autobiographical Confessions
as submitted to Classmates.com/MarianCatholicHighSchool,
Class of'67.

I married Clyde two weeks after graduation in June '67, had two kids in Coronado, moved to Pennsylvania in '72, and joined the feminist movement. While I was a board member at the local YWCA, I also held offices in the local N.O.W. chapter,and the Pa.NOW State Board, and was Chair of the SW Pa. Council of NOW Chapters until '79. During this decade I educated myself by auditing courses at the University of Pittsburgh, and various State Campuses, as a non-matriculated Poly Sci/Comparative Religion major, and helped develop their early Women's Studies programs, under the tutelage of Eleanor Smeal, of the Feminist Majority Foundation, in Wash.D.C.
By the early '80's, I had left the kids safely tucked in their secure hometown with their father, the better parent, to do what I could to change the World, and get the E.R.A. ratified. I landed in Syracuse, N.Y., and promptly joined up with the Human Rights Community to work on getting the University to divest its stock portfolios of its South African interests in apartheid.
I made a living as a nursing assistant in old folk's homes, and provided harbour for the starving artists and musicians and poets who were my friends, and cohorts in guerrilla theater. We were street people before street people were called homeless.
I moved to Ithaca for a while, and haunted the Cornel Campus, and was fortunate enough to actually attend lectures given by Carl Sagan, hang out with cosmic composers, and hob-nob at the soup kitchen with poor intellectuals, because my minimum wage job at the nursing home did NOT cover the food budget in a college town with high rents.
I moved back to the 'Cuze just in time to see Apartheid, as well as the Berlin Wall fall, to take my last job at a big city nursing home...from which I was FIRED for union organizing, and blacklisted...couldn't get another job, so I left N.Y. to join the Rainbow Family of Hipis and Deadheads at the ripe old age of 40.
My first gathering was at Trumansburg, just south of Ithaka, and from there we went to Woodstock for the 21st Anniversary "coming-of-age-party", then to the West Virginia Mountains, and then to Colorado's Grand Lake Gathering, which everybody left early because it was sooo cold! Since I was so close to my parents who had retired to Yuma, I hitched a ride down to see them for the first time in 20 years. Needless to say, they were horrified that I had "gone native" and they pretty much finalized our relationship.
I limped back to Seer/accuse, went to truck-driving school and actually graduated!! and hit the road again looking for a REAL JOB. I rode and drove shotgun all the way back to the West Coast, dropped in on my bomber-mechanic son at Castle Air Force base, and then went to the Puget Sound to see my old Grandmother, who bought me a V-dub transporter and a dog, because she didn't want to see me driving big rigs. The only job I ever found driving was with a carnival, and that didn't last two months. Gramma only lasted one month before she died of stomach cancer no one knew she had, but at least I got to spend some quality time with her.
The Volkswagon pretty much trapped me into living the life of an asthetic, and I drove that thing up and down the coast for 8 years, looking for a job, a home, a level campsite. I spent a couple of years in Quartzsite, Arizona, a couple of years in Southern Oregon, three years in Legendary Humboldt County until I broke an ankle working as a hand on a goat farm, and came down with Lyme's disease from tick bite, which severely aggravated three kinds of arthritis in my 50 year old joints.
Thank goodness that Uncle Sam finally came thru with a nut check so that I could retire to this dry desert town that comes equipt with hot springs. Now I'm sitting pretty, happy that I'm no longer on the front lines of the Californicated Class Wars, but indulging my paranoid tendancies by hiding in broad daylight from a government which does not represent me. I wonder if "they" are reading this BIO