Writers Guild Office Boy 1971 (xxvi)

The second interesting encounter I had in the first two months of 1971 was bumping into Sue on a subway train going uptown in Manhattan in late February 1971. Sue had been a womanfriend of a Citizenship Council bureaucrat and Columbia SDS sophomore caucus member during the 1967-1968 academic year when I last attended Columbia College and she was then a sophomore at Barnard College.

After recognizing Sue across the subway car, I sat down next to her, quickly learned that she was then studying to be a nurse at Columbia’s Medical School near W. 168th Street and exchanged phone numbers with her. Because Sue no longer was living with the Columbia SDS guy she had been living with during the 67-68 academic year, I telephoned her a week or two later. We then agreed to eat dinner out together and then go to hear late 1960s Irish civil rights movement activist Bernadette Devlin speak at an International Women’s Day event at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem on March 8, 1971.

Bumping into Sue brought back memories of the pre-1969 Columbia-Barnard New Left scene that was already beginning to seem like ancient history, now that nearly a year had gone by since Ted’s death in the West Village Townhouse explosion at W. 11th Street. And the feeling generated by some of these memories sparked by bumping into Sue and from working for the Writers Guild within the U.S. television network world inspired me to write the “Saw Sue On A Train” folk song around this time.

I never memorized the “Saw Sue On A Train” folk song and, by the mid-1970s I had thrown out the lyric sheet for the “Saw Sue On A Train” folk song. So I no longer can recall all the words. What I do remember of the “Saw Sue On A Train” folk song, though, is that it did include the following lyrics:

“Saw Sue on a train
Got lost in the rain…
Seize their TV
Then speak freely…”

Ironically—given the “seize their TV, then speak freely” lyrics of the “Saw Sue On A Train” folk song—when, carrying a bouquet of flowers, I arrived in Sue’s apartment near W. 168th St. on International Women’s Day in March 1971, we heard on the radio that a group of radical feminists had chosen that day to non-violently sit-in at the CBS corporate offices for awhile, to demand free speech rights for the Women’s Liberation Movement, prior to being arrested at the request of the white corporate male television network executives at CBS.

A few weeks before this March 8, 1971 protest by the radical feminists inside one of the television network offices, I had mailed a copy of the key to the Writers Guild union office (which I had been given when I was first hired by the Writers Guild) to the radical feminist Movement women who worked at the New York Newsreel office. Just in case they felt like a women’s takeover of the Writers Guild office one evening (using the key I mailed them to gain entry to the Writers Guild union office) might be a good, dramatic way to demand an immediate end to institutional sexism and institutional racism within the U.S. mass media world and at the U.S. television networks.

But when the group of radical feminists protested inside the CBS offices on March 8, 1971, no supportive women’s takeover of the Writers Guild union office, using the copy of the office key I had mailed to the Newsreel women, happened at the same time.

Although I had been excited when Sue agreed to go out on a date with me, by the time we left her apartment to eat a local Dominican-Chinese restaurant, I realized that she wasn’t really open to getting involved romantically with me. A short while after I arrived at her apartment, she had received a long-distance telephone call from her former boyfriend in college, who now was a pre-med student in the Boston area. Then, for the next 20 minutes, Sue stayed on the telephone talking to her old boyfriend, while I patiently waited in the living room. Since she still seemed more interested in talking on the telephone with her pre-med old boyfriend than with the hippie-anarchist-musician-type who had just given her some flowers, my expectations about what kind of time I would have on our date were quickly reduced.

After a pleasant, but not too deep, chat over dinner, Sue and I then walked over to the Audubon ballroom to wait, with a few hundred other female and male supporters of women’s liberation and the early 1970s Movement in the United States, for Bernadette Devlin to arrive there and give a speech. But after a few hours of waiting, word arrived from Downtown Manhattan that a New York City newspaper columnist named Jimmy Breslin had apparently persuaded Bernadette to go see the Muhammad Ali vs. Joe Frazier world heavyweight title fight at Madison Square Garden, which was happening on that same night, instead of going up to the Audubon Ballroom to give a speech at the International Women’s Day event there.

So Sue and I, along with the other audience members who had been waiting in the Audubon Ballroom for Bernadette, left the hall.

The next memory I have is listening to the Ali-Frazier fight on the radio in Sue’s apartment and, after it was announced that Frazier had defeated Ali, saying goodbye to Sue. Heading back to my Bronx slum apartment on the subway, I felt sad that Muhammad Ali had not been able to regain the heavyweight championship title that had been stripped from him because of his morally courageous opposition to the Viet Nam War and his resistance to the U.S. military draft, sad that Sue didn’t seem to want to become involved romantically with me, sad that I hadn’t been able to hear Bernadette Devlin speak in-person that night and sad that Newsreel women hadn’t used the key I had mailed them to take over the Writers Guild union office that night. But the news that at least a few militant radical feminists had attempted to mark International Women’s Day be protesting inside the CBS executive offices did provide me with some encouragement.

I didn’t bother asking Sue for another date. But a few months later, when Sue was looking for some pot, she did telephone me and ask me if I could possibly obtain some grass for her. I told her I’d see if I could get some pot or hashish for her. But when I went down to Staten Island, no one was home at John’s pad, where I usually had been able to buy some bags of grass or hashish in the past.

So I took the bus back to the Staten Island ferry and then, after the ferry arrived in Manhattan, took the subway up to the East Village and tried buying some hashish from a hustler on the street near St. Mark’s Place. But, predictably, the street hustler ended up beating me for $30 by selling me some “hashish” which turned out to be just some sticky gum substance that looked like hashish.

So I had to telephone Sue and let her know I wouldn’t be able to help her out with her pot and hashish supply problem. And I only bumped into Sue one more time during the rest of the 20th century, at a late 1974 demonstration that was protesting white racism in Boston, where we briefly chatted.

Since Sue was then working as a nurse in the Boston area and I was, by then, just living in a cheap apartment in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn, writing protest folk songs, and doing temp typing when I needed to come up with the money for the $100 per month rent, there didn’t seem much of a philosophical basis for attempting to keep in touch with Sue anymore in the future.

Writers Guild Office Boy 1971 (xxv)

Outside of the 9 to 5 work world during the first two months of 1971, I can recall only two interesting encounters during the winter. The first interesting encounter was being visited one Saturday night by Michael (the only other guy in the neighborhood who ever hung out in the Village), a physically beautiful 16-year-old red-haired high school woman runaway from Baltimore and the hippie guy in his late teens with whom she had run away from Baltimore, before bumping into Michael—who told them that he knew of a pad in the Bronx where they could both crash for the night.

Michael still lived in the Bronx neighborhood with his mother, despite his hanging out in the Village. But his mother wasn’t the kind of mother who would allow Michael to invite hippies to crash there. So Michael really didn’t have his own place to serve as a crash pad that night and so he just brought the runaways to the door of my apartment.

Naturally, I agreed to let the teenage runaways from Baltimore stay for the night, since they seemed more hippie-love generation-types than just runaway teenage dopers who might be there to just rip you off. After sharing some joints with us, Michael soon left for his mother’s apartment to sleep there for the night, while I began to strum on my guitar, as the 16-year-old high school woman from Baltimore, her hippie teenage male companion and I began to all feel much more high.

The 16-year-old red-haired beauty seemed to have discovered that it felt good to embrace and kiss long-haired hippie young musicians like myself when she was stoned. So after she noticed I was strumming my guitar, she moved herself from the mattress where she was sitting with her hippie guy companion from Baltimore, sat down next to me on the floor, next to the mattress I was sitting on, took my guitar from my hands and began kissing and hugging me in a passionate, uninhibited way.

Feeling her firm young breasts pressed against me, her lips touching mine in an uninhibited stoned way and her long red hair in my hands as we embraced, quickly turned me on. But when she had finished making out with me for a few minutes and invited me to also sleep on the other mattress where she was going to sleep next to her hippie guy companion, I declined her invitation and indicated that I wasn’t into a threesome that night and would just sleep alone on another mattress on the floor.

After we all awoke late on Sunday morning, the two runaways went on their way to head back to the Village for the day and the beautiful red-haired 16-year-old runaway woman from Baltimore never returned to my apartment again. From the conversation I had with her in the morning, my impression was that she really had no job skills that would have enabled her to survive on the street on the Lower East Side or West Village in Manhattan for very long. And so I think I advised her and her hippie teenage traveling companion to take a bus back to Baltimore from the Port Authority that night, return to their parents and wait a few years before running away again. And I probably gave them a cash contribution for their return bus fare to Baltimore.

A folk love song, “When You Touched Me,” however, grew out of this encounter with the red-haired runaway, whose lyrics included the following:

“From Baltimore
You kissed me on the floor
Your hair so red…
“Cause when you touched me
It felt so good
And when you kissed me
I wished it would never end.”

Writers Guild Office Boy 1971 (xxiv)

In early 1971, the outside accountant who handled the annual financial statement filing and annual financial auditing for the Writers Guild, a guy with glasses and in his early to late 40s named Mike, started to appear daily in the Writers Guild office. Mike was a male chauvinist who, in the early 1970s, still referred to women as “broads.” But he was still hip enough to have developed a way of living, doing independent freelance accounting for liberal non-profit clients like the Writers Guild, that enabled him to avoid having to spend his Monday to Friday days chained to a desk from 9 to 5 in a conventional accounting firm or accounting department corporate office, dressed up in a suit and tie.

But by the time I met Mike he was cynical about everything and too cynical about people to believe that they were capable of ever changing society. In addition, Mike was too old to have spent his college years among people who had smoked pot instead of just drinking beer and booze. So he didn’t feel any kind of identification with people who were involved in the Beat Generation subculture, the 1960s hippie subculture or the early 1970s anti-war counter-culture. But when Mike wished to take a long break from his financial auditing work at the Guild office, he would, occasionally, spend time having some long conversations with me about the state of the world in early 1971.

Writers Guild Office Boy 1971 (xxiii)

In my spare time during the early months of 1971, I also continued to do more research about the Writers Guild’s hidden history and the early 1970s level of institutional racism and institutional sexism at CBS, NBC and ABC, in the same way I had done research in my spare time about Columbia University, both prior to the 1968 Columbia Student Revolt and until I left the Columbia SDS Steering Committee in late September 1968. Predictably, I discovered from an unpublicized Federal Communications Commission [FCC] report that in the early 1970s less than 3 percent of all CBS, NBC and ABC writers, producers and directors were African-American and less than 20 percent of CBS, NBC and ABC writers, producers and directors were women.

Besides sharing some of the statistical data which documented the level of institutional racism and institutional sexism at CBS, NBC and ABC in the early 1970s with the Newsreel alternative media group of then-revolutionary left anti-war filmmakers, I also passed on some photocopies of this statistical data to a frustrated African-American independent television program production company executive who lived in a high-rise apartment on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. This frustrated African-American independent media executive, who seemed to be in his 40s or early 50s in 1971, had complained in an early 1971 New York Times article about the level of institutional racism at CBS, NBC and ABC that still existed in the early 1970s.

During this same period, Village Voice columnist Nat Hentoff (who would later become somewhat of an anti-abortion rights neo-conservative) was apparently attempting to form some kind of anti-war group with people who worked in the mainstream media, to try to organize collectively against the mass media censorship of the early 1970s. And one day I even received a telephone call at the Writers Guild office from some woman journalist who worked for one of the mass media conglomerates, who suggested that Hentoff might be interested in looking into some of the mass media statistical data I had been gathering. But nothing much in the way of early 1970s mass media reform seemed to develop from Hentoff’s early 1970s initiative.

Sol Yurick, who had been active in the late 1960s in attempting to build a Movement for a Democratic Society [MDS] radical democratic left anti-war group within the New York City publishing industry among anti-war book and magazine publishing firm workers, also was involved in some attempt to democratically reform the U.S. mass media industry in the early 1970s. So after work at the Writers’ Guild one day, I met the full-bearded Yurick, who then seemed to be in his 40s, in a restaurant for about an hour. After we discussed what was most morally obnoxious about the mass media television networks’ set-up and programming in early 1971, I then gave him both a photocopy of my statistical data on institutional racism and institutional sexism in the mass media and a copy of a homemade basement tape I had made of my latest protest folk songs.

Writers Guild Office Boy 1971 (xxii)

About the only significant difference in opinion that emerged between Norris and me during our afternoon chat in her apartment in early 1971 was that she thought New York City’s Channel 13 non-commercial educational television station had a chance of providing a real political and cultural alternative to the early 1970s cultural wasteland, political censorship and patriarchal capitalist commercial propaganda of the ABC, CBS and NBC television networks in the 1970s. I, on the other hand, expressed strong doubts that the patriarchal U.S. corporate elite would ever allow hip left anti-war radicals like me, who then authentically reflected New Left counter-cultural values, to ever be given equal access to New York City’s Channel 13 public television station in more than a token way.

In retrospect, I think my estimation of how non-commercial public television stations in the U.S.A. , like New York City’s Channel 13, would eventually become the victims of “creeping commercialism” and become corporatized media institutions, that pretty much excluded most grassroots counter-cultural left-wing activists like me, during the rest of the 20th century and early 21st-century proved to be a more accurate prediction than Norris’s prediction of what kind of difference establishing non-commercial public television stations in the U.S. would actually make.

Not surprisingly—given both how much I then despised the corporate media television network world of ABC, CBS and NBC, and given how much of my daily 9-to-5 slavery time was then being spent delivering scripts in and out of various network TV and radio offices—in early 1971 I also actually ended up writing a protest folk song titled “Paley, Sarnoff and Goldenson.” The “Paley, Sarnoff and Goldenson” folk song protested against their corporate television networks’ complicity with the crimes of U.S. imperialism in the early 1970s, in a way similar to how my 1967 “Bloody Minds” protest folk song had protested against Columbia University’s complicity with the Pentagon’s Institute for Defense Analyses [IDA] weapons research think-tank in the 1960s, during the early Viet Nam Era of U.S. history.

I no longer recall the exact lyrics to the “Paley, Sarnoff and Goldenson” protest folk song, since I never memorized it; and, after I recorded it on some homemade cassette “basement tape” in 1971, I pretty much forgot about the song and didn’t bother saving the page of lyrics. But my general recollection is that the “Paley, Sarnoff and Goldenson” protest folk song combined a denunciation of then-CBS board chairman/owner and then-Columbia University Trustee William Paley, then-RCA/NBC board chairman Robert Sarnoff and then-ABC board chairman Leonard Goldenson for their abuse of U.S. mass media power with a prediction that the people of the United States would eventually liberate CBS, NBC and ABC by non-violently occupying their television network studios—until the grassroots counter-cultural voices of the New Left anti-war, Black liberation and women’s liberation Movement were given daily full free speech rights on the CBS, NBC and ABC television networks.

Writers Guild Office Boy 1971 (xxi))

Norris proved to be the most interesting Writers Guild member I spoke with in early 1971. She seemed to be in her late 40s or early 50s and lived alone with her early teen-age daughter in a middle-class Upper West-Side Manhattan residential hotel on West 72nd Street, east of Broadway, on the north side of the street. Her residential hotel apartment was cluttered with a lot of books and it looked like Norris and her daughter could have used a larger apartment for all the stuff they had accumulated, had they been able to afford the Manhattan rent for a larger apartment.

As an alternative to being crowded in with her teenage daughter in her Manhattan apartment, Norris probably could have afforded a much larger apartment in Brooklyn. But she seemed to be the type of writer who felt that to have to live in Brooklyn in the early 1970s (unless you could afford to live in Brooklyn Heights), instead of residing in Manhattan, meant having to live in a cultural wasteland that would isolate her too much from the recreational and work world of her mass media colleagues and her literary friends, who mostly lived in Manhattan.

Norris was both more intellectual and more interested in talking about literary and mass media culture, current events and social justice issues, women’s liberation movement-related issues and the early 1970s hippie anti-war counter-culture than the other Writers Guild Members I met. Like Pat of the Writers Guild office staff, Norris seemed to be the type of woman who still usually just wore a dress or a skirt and not pants, and still always used lipstick and make-up in the early 1970s. But being at least 10 years older than Pat and probably seen as less physically appealing to the men of her own generation than was Pat, Norris seemed to have a deeper appreciation of the anti-war social critique of patriarchal capitalist society that the radical feminists of the early 1970s were raising—and which I was then reflecting—than did Pat.

Norris and I chatted with each other in her apartment for a few hours before I finally had to head back to the Guild office before it closed at 5 o’clock. What seemed to intrigue her most about our conversation was the emotionally open way I was able to talk with her about my personal feelings, my negative feelings about the 9-to-5 world, and my idealistic views of how counter-culture, new age values--which would use technology to free people from 9-to-5 slavery--would also both enable everyone to be writers and artists equally and substitute artistic values for lowest-common denominator commercial appeal values, in determining which television scripts get produced on U.S. television.

Writers Guild Office Boy 1971 (xx)

While delivering and picking up Writers Guild Script Awards contest scripts from Writers Guild members’ apartments and offices during the time when I was coordinating the script award judgment process, the longest conversation I had was with Marianna Norris, one of the writers whose script about Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway’s life in Paris eventually received an award for the category in which it had been entered.

Having spent some of my spare time in the Writers Guild office in early 1971 reading each script that was entered in the contest by Guild members, I had the feeling that Norris’s script about Gertrude Stein and Hemingway was going to win an award that year, since, from an artistic point of view, it was much better written, intellectually deeper, more interesting and more socially significant than the other scripts that had been entered in the same contest category. Norris’s script seemed more like the teleplays of the 1950s that were written during the “Golden Age of Television” than the other scripts, which resembled post-1960 Hollywood MCA or Warner Brothers syndicated television film scripts that reflected less literary craftsmanship and intellectual depth than did Norris’s script.

So when I delivered some scripts that had been entered in a category which was different than the category in which Norris’s script had been entered to Norris’s apartment for Norris to evaluate, I was curious to see how the writer of such a great script about Gertrude Stein and Hemingway would turn out to be when you met her in person.