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In the Company of Rebels. Chellis Glendinning
Читать онлайн.Название In the Company of Rebels
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isbn 9781613320976
Автор произведения Chellis Glendinning
Издательство Ingram
How true that Cody’s was “more than a bookstore”! New owner Andy Ross with Fred Cody. Photo credit: James Pease. Gratitude to the now-defunct Berkeley Gazette, July 10, 1981. Courtesy of Andy Ross.
In 1977 Pat and Fred sold Cody’s Books to fellow book vendor Andy Ross, who kept the store thriving for another thirty-plus years. Pat returned to her writing desk, where she penned a marvelously soulful history called Cody’s Books: The Life and Times of a Berkeley Bookstore. She also wrote DES Voices: From Anger to Action about the political power of effective research, education, and informed action. When Fred died in 1983, her anguish was excruciating—and unbearable. Support for such sorrow and disorientation was hard to find, so she launched the Grief Support Project. It developed a model where groups of the bereaved were led by a trained professional and a lay person who had coped with similar loss.
Her own memorial at Berkeley’s First Congregational Church in October of 2010 drew a grief-stricken throng of family members, including her four children, Martha, Anthony, Nora, and Celia; former Cody’s workers; authors; literature enthusiasts; professors; colleagues from the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association; political allies; Telegraph Avenue denizens; and other admirers from all over the world. Nora spoke, saying that in approaching death, the dignity and courage her mother had demonstrated matched that which she had mustered in life.
II. EYES ON THE PRIZE IN CLEVELAND
The rest of the country is perversely wont to misunderstand Cleveland.
—MARK WINEGARDNER, CROOKED RIVER BURNING, 2001
BUT DEAR READER: BEFORE we jump headlong into the notorious political uprisings of the 1960s anti-war movement, let’s back up in time a couple of decades and focus on my place of origin … Cleveland, Ohio.
Some people call it the “Mistake on the Lake,” a term that dates back to 1969 when the chemically polluted Cuyahoga River that slices the city into east and west sides burst into flame. I would guess too that the observation that Cleveland is not worth mentioning on the national news springs from superiority complexes beleaguering both East and West Coasts. As an industrial city situated on the shores of Lake Erie, though, it grew to be a vital port for shipping along the Great Lakes passageway to the Atlantic, as well as becoming the Midwestern residence of J.D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and others of their ilk—thus making it home to a world-class art museum, symphony, and park system.
Such aspects of Cleveland’s economic ascent led to its vibrant radical history. After the freeing of African slaves following the Civil War, Blacks left the South to escape the barefaced racism there, and to find work in the industrializing North—for many, in the steel mills along Lake Erie. Then, concurrent with the arrival of thousands of immigrants through Ellis Island came the move west by those who could not make a living along the eastern seaboard. By the 1910s Cleveland featured neighborhoods of Italians, Poles, Russians, Irish, and Welsh, plus a vigorous Jewish community and the Glenville and Hough neighborhoods where African Americans lived. No surprise then: when in the 1930s uprisings of workers were erupting all over the United States, in Cleveland the workforce marched under Communist banners bearing slogans like “Fight, Don’t Starve,” 2000 hungry men stormed City Hall, and the first national meeting of the Unemployed Leagues took place in nearby Columbus.
March of the Young Communist League, March 7, 1930. Courtesy of Cleveland Press Collection, Cleveland Memory Project.
Protest against Cleveland Sesquicentennial, July 22, 1971. “Settlers” had hoped to celebrate until the American Indian Movement showed up. Russell Means is on the left. Photo credit: Tom Prusha. Courtesy of Cleveland Press Collection/Cleveland Memory Project.
The ‘50s and ‘60s saw the emergence of the civil rights movement—with Clevelanders, both Black and white, joining Freedom Rides in the South; eruptions of riots; and the formation of the United Freedom Movement to desegregate schools. In 1957 the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs established the Employment Assistance Program to relocate Native Americans from the West to northern cities. When they were scheduled to begin their migration, the Cleveland Press ran an article, in racist reference to the Cleveland Indians baseball team, “Real Indians Soon to Call Cleveland Home.” Members of Pueblos and of Plains tribes streamed in, and in 1970 militant activist Russell Means (Dakota/Pine Ridge) founded the American Indian Movement in the city.
It was in this crucible that my first and most formative remarkable meeting took place—with my mother. It was from her that, starting in the second grade, I was given an education in love of beauty and the fight for social justice.
HOOKER GLENDINNING: DOING WHAT THERE IS TO DO
(1920–1985)
This is history!
—H.G., IN CONVERSATION WITH CHELLIS GLENDINNING, 1964
Mary Hooker Daoust Glendinning had to defend her name just about every day of her life. “The name ‘Hooker,’” she would glowingly reiterate with a chuckle, “has its roots in England and came over in 1633 with the Reverend Thomas Hooker who—after an argument over rights to land and voting with Massachusetts Governor Bradford (Hooker being the more equalitarian)—traveled south to become the founder of the Colony of Connecticut.” Continuing her introduction to the name Hooker, she would say, “Thomas Hooker’s descendant, General ‘Fightin’ Joe’ Hooker, of Civil War fame, was a raving drunk, so his commanders sent him west where he couldn’t mess things up for the Union. His troops got bored, and he requested that the army send them ‘some women.’” Here my mother would crook her eyebrows and lend a tilt to her head for the sake of suggestion. “Stage coaches of women arrived,” she would continue, “and they were dubbed ‘Hooker’s Girls,’ then just ‘hookers.’”
Through chance or astrological inevitability, the quirk of ova or karma, this character became my mother. My brothers were Thomas Hooker Glendinning and, taken from our blood line flowing back to the inventor of the telephone, Alexander Bell Glendinning. And so the house on the corner of Edgehill and Kenilworth in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, became the Petri dish for all manner of comedy, calamity, insurgence, and quandary, and the forum for my political education.
Hooker had been the first woman in her family to graduate from college. Connecticut College, of course—where she distinguished herself as a champion fencer and as the art major who painted a picture of a girl boasting tresses blown by the wind in an easterly direction, while a tree above her head displayed branches thrust by the same currents toward the west. She worked as a draftswoman in downtown Cleveland during World War II, and she persuaded the family that she should marry one Paul Glendinning, a fellow Clevelander and Harvard graduate. The popular displays of all those shiny post-war refrigerators convinced husband Paul that she should be an in-the-kitchen wife. She was sorry to leave her job, never did like to cook, but like so many of her cohort, she gave in.