LITMIR.BIZ

      In psychedelic style, the poster for the Naked Noisy Vigil for Peace, 1968. Designers: N. Pettitt and Marty Schiffenbauer. Courtesy of Marty Schiffenbauer.

      The tour was capped off with a visit to the straight people’s retirement community, Leisure World. Needless to say, our buses were refused entry to its clipped green lawns and croquet courts, so we hurled our bodies upon the forty-foot erector-set sculpture of planet Earth outside the gate and, freaks hanging from Somoza’s Nicaragua and Franco’s Spain, flew around and around as the giant globe spun.

      Sign of the times: I was at Marty’s on Haste Street when the Symbionese Liberation Army crashed and burned in the biggest police shootout in U.S. history. The SLA had first hit the news in 1973; they took down Oakland’s popular African American school superintendent Marcus Foster with cyanide-packed bullets for what they misunderstood to be his “support” of compulsory ID cards. (He was, in fact, against them.) They rose up into the public eye again in 1974 when they kidnapped publishing heiress Patty Hearst and her betrothed, Steven Weed, in Berkeley. Now, via the new compact cameras and mobile units, all three TV stations were live-casting the defense of their L.A. “safe house.”

      The SLA appeared to be part of our movement—anti-war, anti-racist, calling the nation’s jails “concentration camps” for Blacks. Yet they were different from us for their tactics. This ill-prepared army fancied itself as a self-styled, left-wing revolutionary band and the vanguard of urban guerrilla warfare à la Regis Debray and the Uruguayan Tupamaros. But, as Marty put it, they were nothing but “a violent cult with an egomaniacal leader.”

      Now, on May 17, 1974—better known to us as the day after Marty’s thirty-sixth birthday—the Los Angeles police and fire departments, FBI, and California Highway Patrol were closing in on them. And now, instead of merrily toasting the birthday boy and chowing down on organic carrot cake, we were fixed like the stelae of Stonehenge around the tube. I was too dumbfounded to speak. The men’s voices rose and fell in gasps of revulsion as each round was shot and returned, as some inside attempted to break away from the house and were met with law-enforcement gunfire, as the place burst into devouring flames.

      For Marty the symbolic protest of street theater gave way to direct action in 1971 when he founded the Berkeley chapter of War Tax Resistance and, applying his expertise in financial matters garnered from playing the stock market, counseled people in federal tax refusal. As the raucous ‘60s faded from view, he continued to ride this new arc of political action, taking on an issue that would affect all of Berkeley: rent control.

      As a long-time tenant, he joined with the city’s varied housing organizations as well as its outraged renters—and gave the effort his all. He helped write the bill that in 1972 would make Berkeley the first U.S. city to impose restrictions on unrestrained rent increases and landlord evictions for actions not considered “just cause,” while requiring landlord payment of interest on security deposits. In 1976 the California Supreme Court under Chief Justice Wright handed down a landmark decision: he granted victory to the basic principles of rent control, including the right of municipalities to enact their own legislation. At the same time, though, the judge invalidated the Berkeley initiative for its procedural favoring of renters at the expense of the rights of landlords. Ergo, in 1978 Marty and others drafted a new rent roll-back ordinance mandating that eighty percent of landlord property-tax savings be rebated back to tenants as rent reduction. It was approved by the voters. Emboldened, Marty and his allies wrote a comprehensive ordinance in 1980. It too passed. Marty was elected to serve on the first Berkeley Rent Board, and thirty-plus years later the legislation is still in place. Marty is sometimes called the Father of Rent Control, although he likes to clarify by saying: “Well, maybe … but I was not a single parent.”

      Rent control easily morphed in his mind into a proposal for limits on house-sale prices. This new wrinkle was formulated in 1989 during a morning run with a friend; the two were kibitzing about skyrocketing prices that divided citizens into the landed class and the forever-renting peon class, thus driving minorities and senior citizens from the community. To Marty, an increase in sale price calculated at the national average of six percent of original cost would be more reasonable and just than the typical increase in chic Berkeley that, in one year, had shot up by thirty-five percent—making a $150,000 home sellable overnight at $202,500. Marty’s jogging partner revealed the idea in his weekly East Bay Express column and from there it went viral, appearing in the San Francisco Chronicle, Wall Street Journal, and various venues of the national press. Alarm also went viral, with Marty’s progressive friends pronouncing it too radical, and one Berkeley politician withdrawing for fear that her career would go belly-up for association with its “Father.” A co-author of the rent-control bill, attorney Myron Moscovitz, proclaimed in a 1989 San Francisco Chronicle article, “I don’t think the proposal has a snowball’s chance in hell.” Marty also began to receive hate mail, death threats, and answering-machine messages like “You are scum” and “Schweinhund.” His response: “We’re living in a democracy, and this can be voted on. They don’t have to kill me, sue me, or leave hate messages.” Just the same, he pulled back.

      Walking his talk as a housing activist, Marty lives now in a one-bedroom apartment in the Parker Street Co-op that a collective of twenty-four households formed in 1991. A splendid side effect of going on TV to hype the house-sale proposal was that an old acquaintance, a woman he had once dated, saw the show and called him up. They began what has been, so far, a thirty-plus-year love affair culminating in their 2011 wedding, although—true to form of the inventiveness Marty is known for—they still live in their separate pads. In his, over the kitchen sink, he boasts an R. Crumb cartoon of the infamous 1960s bearded sage Mr. Natural proudly washing dishes. And, indeed, the man “Keep(s) on Truckin’”—as of this writing, launching another controversial campaign, this one to raise Berkeley’s minimum wage.

      Among those Bohemians, rebels, and deep heads who pursued higher education, the magnifying glass that renders focus to their lives might reveal a vision gone wildly askew in regards to the field in which they majored and what they ended up doing. But as you will see in coming chapters,

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