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...town of San Lorenzo, California, in the East Bay, across from San Francisco. And the
place that I grew up in is what they called the vet village. In other words, it was a
lot of prefabricated homes that were built, basically in order to provide places to live
for returning vets from World War Two, so they called it a vet village. They also called
San Lorenzo "Levittown West", and I know you all know what Levittown was, but it was a
place where houses were essentially built on an assembly line, and at the peak of production
they were producing one home every 45 minutes. To put that a little deeper, you might also
see that in that moment it was sort of the last spasm of urban industrial concentration,
of workers in particular, that had begun, really at the beginning of the 19th century.
A hundred years later in the 1950's, the economy is still gathering people from the farms and
clustering them around urban centers, and I'm... Y'know, you think about the urbanization
and the creation of city centers in the early 19th century, and you think, well that happened
a long time ago, had nothing to do with me, but I at least have been a direct, even though
I didn't know it, a direct part of that history. I was part, probably part of the last generation
that would be brought in from the forms before they were completely industrialized. So both
of my parents were basically farm kids, one in Kansas, one in Oregon, and they, my mother
in particular, her father was simply a subsistence farmer. They grew food, food to eat, they
sold some of it, and that was basically it. If things had stayed as they had in the past,
I would have been essentially a peasant, I should have been a peasant. I am, in certain
ways, still a peasant. I don't want this to turn into a "John Bainer moment", where, you
know, I start weeping about how difficult I had it growing up, so I'm just going to
stop there. At any rate, this suburb, and this is a very, I couldn't find, they didn't
have my house online, but this is very typical. Can you see that at all, or do we need some
lights different? Good enough? Yeah. They're these little 900 square foot houses. Each
house was sort of the mirror image of the previous one. So you had two designs, you
had sort of "left" design and "right" design, and they were just spread over dozens of square
miles, you know that story. So especially in the early 50's, these places were really
unnatural places, although we didn't know. To us it seemed inevitable, doesn't everybody
live in a place like this? There were no old people, there was no history, there were no
old buildings at all, everyone was more or less the same age, every household seemed
to have three kids, there were no rich people, there were no poor people, everybody was white,
there was no real connection to anything outside of the immediate 'burb, other than going to
a San Francisco Giants game, which always seem to me like a completely surreal experience.
When I was a kid I used to cycle to the end of Hysperion Boulevard, and I would get to
the end of it and I would would stop in fear, because what happened was there was just this,
you know blockade-type thing, and on the other side of the blockade were these open fields
and, in the distance, an orchard or two. But to me it felt like, Renaissance discovers
going out to the end of the map and thinking that surely, you know, the monsters and the
dragons are are just over there. The idea of anything beyond my little 'burb was terrifying
to me. Ok, so that's one thing. The second thing was of course, The Cold War. In other
words, Sputnik, this is how I experienced The Cold War. I didn't know anything more
about it than that. It's funny how you only remember one or two things about, y'know my
entire first-grade for example. I don't remember anything about first-grade except for two
things. One thing was when I went to class, and we'd sit down on our little carpets there
while the teacher read to us or whatever, and there was this kid in the class who would,
I'm sitting back here and he's sitting up there, he would always turn around and look
at me like this, he would go [throat-slashing gesture], like that. So he did that a lot,
and it kind of caught my attention. The other thing that I remember is one day, I came to
class, the teachers were so excited. And that, in itself, was strange, but overhead was this
big satellite thing with this dog hanging out of it. And the teachers were so excited,
they said "Sputnik! America's going to space!" And suddenly they threw up these, vast, sort
of cardboard mural spaces and said, "let's paint the moon!", and so all the kids said,
"yeah!", and they all went over and they painted the moon, and I just kind of stood there,
like this going, "what the hell? What the hell is going on?" I have another picture
of, that kind of captures that moment. This is actually a picture of, this is a picture
of, a photograph of me that I loaned to Larry McCaffery when he wanted to do this anthology,he
said, "Curt, do you have any photographs of yourself with a satellite that we could use
for this book?" And I said, "Yeah, sure Larry, I've got a lot of those actually" and so I
let him use this one. It's a very good anthology by the way. The other side, the more, you
know, the other part that I didn't understand until it was all well done, was that what
she was saying to me that day, and pointing up to this, Sputnik dog, and painting the
moon, she was saying, "you're going to college", and you know, yeah the assumption that I was
going to college was not something anybody from my social class had ever assumed before
that moment, I don't think. The third thing, and Patrick alluded to this a bit too, the
third thing that was a part of this story was the counter-culture. Growing up in the
San Francisco Bay area, that was a really big deal. I've often said when people talk
to me about my upbringing, I've often said, in a way that made no sense to them, I say
I was raised by hippies, and here's the ocular proof, that's my mother and me, sitting on
her lap, I was raised by hippies. So the counterculture, as far as I was concerned, was very personal.
It was walking into a record store for the first time and having this album by The Beatles,
Sergeant Pepper's jump out at you from among the Mel Torme, and the Nat King Cole, and
Perry Como albums, right? And I had an experience, it was probably 1965 or so, and some classmates
of mine and I went to San Francisco to go to the de Young museum, and so we were probably
freshman in college, freshman in high school, and were walking up the street, we were walking
up Haight street towards the park, and suddenly there was this guy walking towards us with
long blond hair and bell bottoms. And he was singing at the top of his lungs. And we froze,
in terror, I mean basically we were paralyzed with anxiety about what this guy was doing
and what he might do to us. But he paid no attention to us at all, he just walked right
by, and in some ways, you know, that was a moment where I might have seen my own future,
in that guy, but I didn't. But I've done, you know, like a lot of other people in the
area at that time, I've listened to Big Brother and the Holding Company, actually I saw Big
Brother and Janis at a college dance in Hayward where they were, I promise you, bored stiff.
I lived in the Haight, I went to the Fillmore, I did all of those things, but what I got
out of that was the idea that the world was ours to reinvent or to invent in any way that
we liked, which was an important kind of thing to learn, although I don't know that it ever
occurred to me that the world wasn't ours to reinvent.