BY WILBUR WOOD
FOR THE SAN FRANCISCO BAY GUARDIAN

A memorial for William Anderson will be held June 26, 2 p.m., Bay Guardian Building, 135 Mississippi, S.F.

-1-

There is a part of me that's always twenty-five years old, it's a sunny day in San Francisco, and we're headed for Naked Beach.

I'm driving my white Buick Skylark, convertible top down, and beside me is Elizabeth, and with us is our friend Bill Anderson, who lived off and on in our Haight-Ashbury apartment during that time -- 1967, 1968.

We're going to rendezvous with other friends who now, too, must be riding south down the coastal highway. Most of us are in our 20s, but Bill's a bit older, edging toward 40. He's like an older brother to many of us, but since he has also opened himself to investigating the same things we are -- Owsley acid, music in the park with neighborhood bands like the Grateful Dead, getting comfortable enough to take off all our clothes on certain beaches -- he also seems ageless, and very much of our time.

Of course Bill knows things most of us are barely aware of, and not merely because he's 12 to 18 years older. He knows things also because he's a black man who grew up in a small town in Pennsylvania but has spent time in cities like Pittsburgh, Chicago, New York; who insisted, when serving in the post-World-War-Two army, on being awarded his earned promotions along with the white boys; who worked for a time in the California Department of Employment training minority people to decode the system so they'd have a real shot at getting jobs; who's hitchhiked more than once across the continent and, since he owns no car, hitches around the Bay Area -- disappearing from our presence for days at a time, then suddenly turning up again -- and now from the back seat he's grinning at us and commenting: "You think this is going to go on forever, don't you."

GO, HE SAID

If you can stretch flat
on grass, so thin
that
the grass's
own sunlight skin

won't break,
the earth moves
as if brightly shaken.

It doesn't matter if you're
nun or lover.

And that
is all I have to say to
lovers.

--William Anderson

-2-

When Jack Gilbert, the poet, said he was going to invite his friend Bill Anderson to our writer's group, he told us that, in other writers' workshops, Bill would read a poem and typically the response would be a long silence. Once Bill began coming to our group and reading his poems, it is true, at times we too were baffled into silence.

Young girls anxiously crouching.
All my life I have tried to
deserve love, that is a swollen thing
of symptoms, dreams and errors.
Courage, courage, a thing devised by the
enemy. Like the air in the adirondacks, half-
morgans, horses, which the
conscious tries to swerve...

--William Anderson, opening lines
from "America, 1966"

Although people in our group, young and old alike, at first also found it difficult to say anything useful about lines like these, many of us were drawn by their power and mystery and evident intelligence. In a book of Bill's poems that Elizabeth and I published in April 1967 -- using a mimeograph machine and staples -- Bill wrote "Notes on 'America, 1966'" and explained his strategy:

"Nearly all my poems are attempts to destroy customary relations between things so that new perceptions occur....
"When we look at things in new ways ... we do not create new senses; we only rediscover the ones we have always had. Which are now shrunken....
"I want the senses to be flexed again ... as an exercise to force recognition of cold, hidden relationships ... to reveal the dread engines underneath."

Many people in San Francisco in the Sixties were seriously aspiring to "look at things in new ways." Maybe, some of us thought, we could figure out how to throw a wrench into those "dread engines" and stop them from grinding us all down.
But not all of Bill's poems turned into decoding exercises.

LA RONDINE

Through wet air and dry
air, puccini, puccini, comes the king.
Through wet
and dry air, puccini, such a small
thing makes me blaze again,

O sun, O sun,
you win again. O, O you win again.

I pull him up to rest.
He is not the right man for me
so I begin to sing.

--William Anderson

One could now, of course, engage in a decoding exercise. Why is an Italian opera composer called up? Who is "the king"? What "small thing makes me blaze again"? It might even be profitable to do this. But then comes "O sun, O sun, / you win again..." and I give up the exercise, swept up in the pathos and joy of these words, not caring who "him" is or why "he is not the right man for me," and disappear into the song.

-3-

Another moment. A Sunday evening meeting of our writer's group in our apartment at 1837 Oak. But tonight we're distracted from poems and literary talk. Too much is happening out on the street. Several of us break away to check it out.

Tourists, including families from the suburbs, have discovered the hippies, and suddenly Haight Street on weekends is clogged with station wagons full of gawking parents and children. Local residents, feeling like zoo animals, respond by setting up chairs on the sidewalk and gawking back. Then they beckon the people: come out of your cars. This day one tourist has freaked out and wrenched his vehicle out of line to escape up a side street, but has slammed into someone's dog and killed it. The hippies -- who've been requesting that the City simply close off a few blocks of Haight Street on Sundays, let visitors park their cars and conduct their tours on foot -- spontaneously sit down in the street around the offending car.

This stops traffic entirely, which in the U.S.A. is a major sin, so the Tactical Squad is called in to practice crowd-control techniques on the hippies, in preparation for using them later on war protesters, campus protesters. Bill and I stand in a crowd of people fifty feet from a phalanx of cops trying to push us off the street when with no warning (altho' later the police claim they did warn us) we hear pop! pop! pop!

Striding up Market Street or down Telegraph Avenue in early anti-Vietnam War marches has not prepared me for my first full-scale police riot. Bill jerks my arm, and we're running and I notice him pulling out a handkerchief to cover his nose and mouth. A whiff of the gas jolts me into coughing and tears, but quickly we're out of range of the spreading smoke, and then we hang back studying the police methodically dividing the crowd into smaller and smaller segments, pushing our segment down Cole Street. Angry hippies are picking up hot smoking canisters and flinging them back at the line of blue uniforms, helmets and gas masks, until we are all either driven across the Panhandle into next neighborhood north or we disappear into buildings.

Once again traffic can flow on Haight Street, but the only traffic is passing patrol cars that become the target of glass bottles flung out of upper story windows and splashing onto the street.

September, 1968, Oakland. I know perfectly well what the past really contains, but it's not like the events I remember, like the Supreme Court decision of 1954 against school segregation. That decision is a fact, but it's not anybody's personal history. The history is my memory of the civics teacher who slipped one day and called me a nigger....

Nor can I afford to remember how many times I've been in a strange, white neighborhood bar and suddenly heard a glass smash to the floor behind me. 'Nigger,' murmur the pittsburgh Irishmen, 'get out of here before we skin your black ass!"

I broke my beer bottle on the table, held the jagged end before me like a dagger, backed toward the door and got out!

--William Anderson, from "The Huey Newton Trial"

-4-

The pull of the street was pulling our poetry -- Bill's and that of others in our circle -- toward more pertinence, more accessibility.

No matter how early you leave for the hospital
it is sunday afternoon when you
get there. I'm still not quite complete, not quite happy,
but tomorrow I'll start on news again...

--William Anderson, from "Lazarus"

The poetry also was moving out of our salon into the wider world. Bill was running the poetry readings at the I / Thou Coffeehouse on Haight Street. Kenneth Rexroth, always interested in what younger writers were doing, showed up regularly. So did George Hitchcock, on the prowl for material for his surrealist magazine Kayak. From a Greek island, where he had gone with Linda Gregg, another poet from our group, Jack Gilbert wrote that he'd heard that Bill had become "the Doctor Johnson of the Haight-Ashbury".

I was already writing pieces for The Bay Guardian, and Bill was intrigued with the possibilities of public prose. Soon he was writing for the Guardian as well, infusing journalism with the tactics, the rigor and leaps, of poetry. Both of us covered the murder trial of Oakland Black Panther leader Huey Newton (Bill for the Bay Guardian, I for The Nation). It was summer 1968. The Tet Offensive in January had shown that the Viet Cong could pop up anywhere in the country. Martin Luther King, Jr. had been killed in April. France had gone on strike the entire month of May. In early June Bobby Kennedy had won the Democratic primary in California, clearly on his way to becoming our next President and stopping the war in Vietnam; then he too was killed.

Bill remarked one day: "When somebody asks me what I think about Vietnam, the only answer is to scream for one hundred years ."

The world was shifting perceptibly, day by day. We called this "going thru the changes." In August on the streets Chicago, protesters struggled against police in scenes foreshadowed in the Haight-Ashbury many months earlier, while Democrats managed to convene indoors and nominate a man who had gone along with Lyndon Johnson's war and was not promising to end it. Students were out on strike all over the planet, sometimes joined by workers, as in Mexico City. There, just before the Olympics, after months of massive protests against government corruption, the military surrounded thousands of people gathered peacefully in the square in Tlatalolco and opened up with machine guns. Bill and I were traveling to Mexico City by bus and arrived just after that horror. The Olympic games flickered on a black and white TV screen in our hosts' apartment, while we moved around the city talking with traumatized survivors. Trucks hauled away hundreds of bodies, one young man told us. We met on a suburban basketball court. Cautiously he brought forth Wretched of the Earth by Franz Fanon. "We must study!" he said. "We must keep resisting." Fourteen year old girls would see us gringos through the windows of buses, mouth "Che!" and lift two fingers in the peace sign.

...a whole generation
of young people who were
once in our middles

are now everywhere. In mississippi.
In hanoi. In trances.
Deep underneath, they say,
are the same old shoes,
the bureaucrats and their buttons,

grim and cool ...

--William Anderson, from "What Is Doctor Spock Up To?"

-5-

Grim and paranoid, Richard Nixon co-opts the peace sign of the young and, arms raised, flashes it as his personal "V for victory" sign after he narrowly outpolls Hubert Humphrey to become President. Nixon claims he has a "secret" plan to end the war, but it continues for seven more years. By now the realization is spreading that the war is much bigger than Vietnam, it is a war against Nature, against our future, against our dreams. "Can the youth revolt, now that it is finding out what is most important of all to revolt against, make a significant difference?" asks Kenneth Rexroth in the August 18, 1969, Bay Guardian. The best Rexroth can imagine is for some people to form "a community of health within the great Sickness."
In that same Bay Guardian issue Bill Anderson is writing:

"It was Friday afternoon and I was all set to attend the Black Panther conference for a United Front against Fascism in America ... but suddenly the thought of listening to one more political speech disgusted me, and I found myself instead listening that evening to a tape of Richard Alpert's recent lecture in the Bay Area about another aspect of the revolution -- the individual struggle for self-realization....

"Is this a cop-out? I don't think so; instead, it seems to show a desire to take care of the real business of the revolution, to bring about a change in behavior in our own lives, to communicate better, to love better...."

Bill discusses the meditation techniques that Alpert (who changed his name to Baba Ram Dass) was helping to popularize, and also the pioneering alpha-wave brain research by his friend Joe Kamiya at the University of California medical center, and other ways to exert conscious control of our emotional lives. Bill ends the piece like this:

"Maybe we are at last pressing into the future, the shift on the part of so many people we know seems to indicate that ... an ability to put the revolution into practice on a day-to-day level is no longer a Utopian dream but an absolute necessity.

"For living in such a cut-off way as we do is becoming as offensive to us as poverty, or war or racial prejudice."

The Beatles were singing, "Get back to where you once belonged" -- and what that said to many people interested in no longer living in a cut-off way, in putting the revolution into daily practice, was this: reconnect with Nature, get back to the land. Among the main writers in our group, Elizabeth, a fourth-generation Californian, and I were the first to leave the CIty, moving to my home country, Central Montana, in 1971. By the mid-1970s Geron Bruce had returned to Alaska to be a salmon fisherman; Printer Bowler had returned to Montana to engage in organic farming, writing and publishingDavid Rollison was teaching in California colleges; Herb Roth was a potter in Mendocino County; San Francisco native George Stanley migrated to British Columbia and spent many years in rural Terrace, B.C.; Laura Ulewicz was living in the Sacramento Delta.

Not everyone left, of course; Jean McLean maintained his residence in San Francisco (in between trips to the Dakotas to work with Lakota Indians). Stuart and Ellen Quay remained in the City, and Jack Gilbert alternated between San Francisco, Japan and other places when he wasn't living on a Greek island. Marin County native Linda Gregg moves around a lot, but has ended up residing chiefly in Massachusetts and New York City. Maxine Pfeiffer went to London. Bill Mayer and Larry Felson moved to the East Bay and have continued the writing group to this day.

Bill Anderson left San Francisco in 1974, returning to Bedford, Pennsylvania, to care for his aging mother. Soon he was joined there by his partner Peggy Reimann, and they home-schooled their daughter Sarah, developed educational materials for one-on-one teaching, worked effectively on a variety of local and statewide environmental causes, and helped migrant laborers learn language and survival skills. Bill also studied with Oscar Ichazo at Arica, a metaphysical school in New York City.

What he did not do was continue writing poetry -- at least, not poetry that he shared with his old compatriots. We kept in touch mostly by telephone, and saw each other several times in the Bay Area, twice in Montana, and in March 2001 Elizabeth and I rode Amtrak to Pennsylvania and stayed a week with Bill and Peggy.

There are friends you may not see for years, but then they are standing in front of you again and there is no awkwardness, and you simply pick up the conversation. Now that Bill has gone from this Earth -- he died in his home April 24th -- the conversation has not really stopped, tho' I know I won't pick up the phone some night and hear Bill's voice requesting a friend's address, or wanting some information about strip-mining, or asking me to dig up an earlier version of a Jack Gilbert poem that Jack later revised and published but Bill thinks the early version might be better. His voice and his laugh are still in my ear, and his remarkable poems and vivid prose lie in wait, ready to blaze again.

- 6 -

THERE'S NOT A FRIEND LIKE THE LOWLY JESUS

Suddenly, against the mountainous
wall of the fireplace
soot begins to glow.

At the ocean
at that very moment
the waves spread their lips.

In the folds of the sierra
nevada, a crowd
of skiers ride down the snow.
They hold torches, they
wave and shout, so you can hear
them in the
hotel.

If you're in any way
a prophet, you
better figure why you think
you're different from a woman, or any

of the above lights. Because when I
think of all the things
I do to keep from
dying. --William Anderson

There is always a part of me that's twenty-five years old, driving my Skylark convertible out of the City, south toward Naked Beach. Elizabeth perches in the passenger seat and Bill Anderson lounges in back. On the radio it's the Beatles or maybe The Band. Bill leans forward, grinning. In his mock accusatory voice, brimming with bemusement, he exclaims: "You think this is going to go on forever, don't you!"

There is always a part of us turning then and meeting Bill's grin and saying, "Yes!" as we drink in the salt-tinged air, breeze ruffling our hair, and keep driving south.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Note: The quotations from William Anderson's poems and prose come from the collection of Wilbur Wood. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

===========================================
STASH

The head learns, the head learns what is
in the bottom of the river
valley and in women, but the heart never learns

anything...

--William Anderson, from "Sonoma, 1966"

----------
{{{STASH Grim and cool, claiming that he has a "secret plan" for peace in Vietnam, Richard Nixon steals the peace sign of the young and converts it to his private "V for victory" sign when he barely outpolls Hubert Humphrey -- for whom many of my generation could not bring ourselves to vote -- to become President. The sense is growing that the war is much bigger than Vietnam -- which continues as a shooting war for five more years -- it is a war against Nature and against our dreams. Kenneth Rexroth, writing in the August 18, 1969, Bay Guardian, asks, "Can the youth revolt, now that it is finding out what is most important of all to revolt against, make a significant difference?" The most Rexroth can hope for is for some of the people to form "a community of health within the great Sickness, {{{{{{ " and "struggle to live a balanced life of mutual aid, of symbiosis with all the other creatures on earth ... in the face of the Apocalypse."}}}}
In that same Bay Guardian Bill Anderson is writing:

"It was Friday afternoon and I was all set to attend the Black Panther conference for a United Front against Fascism in America. I'm a black man and of course concerned with what goes on in the movement for black liberation and also what goes on in a wider political-cultural context ... but suddenly the thought of listening to one more political speech disgusted me, and I found myself instead listening that evening to a tape of Richard Alpert's recent lecture in the Bay Area about another aspect of the revolution -- the individual struggle for self-realization....

"Is this a cop-out? I don't think so; instead, it seems to show a desire to take care of the real business of the revolution, to bring about a change in behavior in our own lives, to communicate better, to love better, and to show the uncommitted middle that there is a better way to life....
"Maybe we are at last pressing into the future, ...an ability to put the revolution into practice on a day-to-day level is not longer a Utopian dream but an absolute necessity.

"For living in such a cut-off way as we do is becoming as offensive to us as poverty, or war or racial prejudice." }}}
=======

The Beatles were singing, "Get back to where you once belonged" -- and what that said to many people interested in no longer living in a cut-off way, in putting the revolution into daily practice, was this: reconnect with Nature, get back to the land. By 1971 I was gone from the City, back in my home country, Central Montana, with Elizabeth, a fourth-generation Californian, consenting to accompany me in this adventure. By 1974 Bill Anderson was back home to Bedford, Pennsylvania, soon joined there by Peggy Reimann and her daughter Sarah. Both of us -- and other friends of ours who left the City -- ended up doing similar things: working on environmental causes in our regions, involving ourselves in bread and butter local issues. Bill and I both cared for aging mothers until their deaths, helped raise daughters, got involved in hands-on forms of education. We kept in touch mostly by telephone, and saw each other several times in the Bay Area, twice in Montana, and in March 2001 Elizabeth and I rode Amtrak to Pennsylvania and stayed a week with Bill and Peggy.

=========

Bill Anderson left San Francisco in 1974, returning to Bedford, Pennsylvania, soon joined there by Peggy Reimann, where they raised their daughter Sarah and Bill cared for his aging mother. Both of us -- and other friends of ours who left the City -- ended up doing similar things: working on environmental causes in our regions, involving ourselves in bread and butter local issues. Bill and I both cared for aging mothers until their deaths, helped raise daughters, got involved in hands-on forms of education. We kept in touch mostly by telephone, and saw each other several times in the Bay Area, twice in Montana, and in March 2001 Elizabeth and I rode Amtrak to Pennsylvania and stayed a week with Bill and Peggy.

=====
{{{THERE are / WE have / FRIENDS WHOm we do NOT SEE FOR YEARS at a time, but when we see them there is probably not even one brief flicker of awkwardness, and if there is it dissolves in a smile and a hug and we simply pick up the conversation where we left off. Or pick up the conversation we never left off.}}}
=========