Avoiding the Dreaded B-word

1. 
   
   In her campaign for president, Kamala Harris is steering clear of the B-word
   
   
   
   , the scary word that might frighten many voters. I have avoided it too. Until now. It is Berkeley!

 

Like Harris, I lived first in Berkeley, California, just a few miles from the famous University of California at B….. Don’t say it, Mike! Today, some people call it the People’s Republic of Berkeley.

 

When Harris talks about her background, she usually refers to the East Bay or Oakland, where she did not live until she was in her 20s. Well, I can’t blame her. Oakland has a safer, diverse middle-class sound to it.

 

In her first home, she lived for a while in Berkeley, where Harris’ parents were pursuing Ph.D degrees in 1964. After they left and split up, she and her mother and sister moved back to Berkeley.

 

We only lived in Berkeley for about a year after I was born, moving to the next town over, El Cerrito, where I lived until high school. Many of my friends were sons and daughters of university professors.

 

Then I went to the dark side: I enrolled at the University of California at Berkeley! This was 1959, when there was no tuition and all you needed was a B average in college-related subjects to get in. There was no entrance exam to one of the country’s most prestigious public universities. Well, why not go there?

 

This was all before the famous Free Speech Movement, which took place the year after I graduated in 1963. But there were precursors of student radicalism when I was there. There were demonstrations of some kind all the time. Even at our Daily Californian student newspaper, we sang revolutionary songs at our parties.

 

I still think the campus of 28,000 people was too big. I got lonely and joined a fraternity. How different that was: full of engineering and business students who embraced conservative political views. What a contrast!

Upon graduation, I didn’t flee the Berkeley stigma. I got a job as a reporter for the Berkeley Daily Gazette  newspaper. Man, was this foreign to student radicalism! It covered the city’s largest industry by piecing together University of California press releases. It had a conservative editorial policy for the rest of Berkeley, which did not seem to be liberal at all.

 

Despite a few college reunions and football games, I had little connection since then with the now notorious city.

The only time I bring it up now is usually when someone in my rural town in Virginia questions one of my viewpoints in a conversation. My answer: “I can’t help it. I went to UC Berkeley!”