Mario Savio

Driving around Berkeley with Tasha and Spencer I tried to explain the early 60's to them when the name Mario Savio came into my brain.

Well, I said, it was all about personal freedom and being able to say what you wanted to say, that the beatniks led to the hippies and Mario Savio was somewhere in-between that era. Mario Savio was important enough for me to remember him being discussed by my parents when I was a kid. My dad was for him and my mom was kind of for him, being the liberals they were in the conservative community they lived in at the time.

I turned the corner from Telegraph onto Bancroft Way.

There's Sproul Hall, I said, Mario Savio made speeches on the steps of Sproul Hall. The police would come and haul him away and then the next day he'd be back on the steps of Sproul Hall making the same speech.

As I told them about Mario Savio I knew I wasn't doing a very good job of explaining the time or Mario Savio's place in the time. Later, much later, when Tasha and Spencer were in the airplane flying home to Utah, I thought of Julian Assange and that if I'd used the name Julian Assange in connection with Mario Savio maybe my explanation about Mario Savio would have been clearer.

I wanted to show them People's Park, remembering that People's Park more or less came into being because of Mario Savio.

I'd forgotten that People's Park is right across the street from the great Christian Science church designed by Bernard Maybeck.

I stopped the car on Dwight Way and pulled to the curb in front of the Maybeck masterpiece of a church. Several of the windows were boarded up and weird wires stretched between wooden beams. We walked into the portico. There was a sign posted on the door that there would be a service held there that night, but otherwise the building looked abandoned.

Across the street in People's Park, a dark-haired man was preparing to fix. His dark brown satchel lay on the grass. It looked like his male companion was ready to fix as well. Three other men stood on a corner, leaning against each other, swaying back and forth in unison.