“When this happens, it’s usually because the owner only shared it with a small group of people, changed who can see it or it’s been deleted.”
After attending Howard University and UC Hastings, Kamala began her career in the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office, located on the edge of Lake Merritt in Downtown Oakland.
Yesterday I spent almost two hours talking to Christine Wandel about the places she and Peter Shapiro lived in Oakland and Berkley, because, where Presidential Candidate, Kamala Harris lived – is the hottest news item in the Bay Area! The New York Times got on the bandwagon! How about – THE WORLD? Many leaders of NATO Nations, want Kamala to TROUNCE TRUMP – and so does President Zelensky! However, is Kamala Harris – TOO RADICAL? Who can you ask to get a accurate and truthful assessment? How about putting it before The Belmont Historical Society and Secret Tribunal who JUDGED my posts were not – ACCEPTABLE – especially the ones on Kamala Harris? I just found a group photo of the BHS, who I dub
THE SANE CALIFORNIA CHILDREN OF THE CORN SOCIETY (SCCCS)
Even though they live in California, they are SET APPART from all that is undesirable, and strange. This is just the way Denny Lawhern – WANTED IT! He cleansed Belmont History and made suitable for The Lawhern Clan – and the children! When he read my first post, where I talk about bringing my newspaper-blog to Belmont, he squealed for joy, because I was his – ENEMY AT THE GATE! Did he sound an alarm and the Gang of Eleven manned the Facebook Filter System to rid them of my Right of Freedom of the Press? Instead of a warm greeting – I got cold silence for five days! McCarthy said they only just became aware of me. Bullshit! I see them rifling my blog looking for any excuse to BLOCK my posts, and BAN me, which they did. I clicked on them an hour ago, and got…..THIS
City of Belmont CA – Government
Just a few of the Belmont Historical Society family.
— at Twin Pines Park.
This content isn’t available right now
When this happens, it’s usually because the owner only shared it with a small group of people, changed who can see it or it’s been deleted.
https://www.facebook.com/belmontcahistory/
Above is the house the Marbles lived in located at 2143 Woosley. This home has to be declared a landmark. I will contact the City of Berkeley. I lived with Christine and Peter in a Victorian on 13th’ with The Loading Zone, that got torn down. I’m going to talks to the City of Springfield about the Kesey Mural. I took the photo of the Kesey family. I’m going o ask Stanford to investigate the Gang of Ten wo I suspect are Christians who are into – SHUNNING – for the sake of the children! I need a Civil Rights Attorney – for the sake of Democracy! If I had established Royal Rosamond Press in Belmont, than my credibility would be a stellar example of the value of a Small Town Press! I got – IT RIGHT!
Here’s A NEWSFLASH! It looks like the Future President of the United States lived in the same appartment that Huey Newton lived, overlooking Lake Merritt. Looks like I have been annointed to write THE HISTORY OF OAKLAND AND BELMONT….
‘The Tale of Two Cities’
In my series ‘The Marbles’ I will have them living in the Lake Merritt Shanty Town, floating homes built by the poor on Lake Merritt. There is a plan to motor barges across the bay to Belmont and moor them in the tidelands where there was a shanty town at the turn of the century,
John Presco
President: Royal Rosamond Press
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/2143-Woolsey-St-Berkeley-CA-94705/24828823_zpid/
If you walk to the outdoor garden terraces of the Oakland Museum of California and look out to the lake, you can’t miss the towering Lakeshore Apartments, once home to Black Panther Party co-founder Huey P. Newton in the 1970s. Newton took residence in the penthouse on the 25th floor, directly across the lake from the Alameda County Courthouse where he was tried for murder in 1967.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_the_press
The United Nations‘ 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights states: “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference, and to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas through any media regardless of frontiers.”[1]
https://www.redfin.com/CA/Berkeley/2143-Woolsey-St-94705/home/1651052
The Marbles
Posted on September 8, 2023 by Royal Rosamond Press
The Marbles
by
John Presco
Copyright 2023
A Cable Series based upon a band that played at the Tribute to Doctor Strange Love, and thus were the pioneer group that promoted the use of LSD all over the world. After double-crossing members of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, The Marbles move to England and become a famous British Gangster band that plays down in the docks.
Petie Tinselwitz falls in love with Bblond Dend who is the infamous singer, Fillononre – who is a closeted man-hater, and has offed about seven dudes. Ms. Dend is from the small country, Fritzlandia.
After attending Howard University and UC Hastings, Kamala began her career in the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office, located on the edge of Lake Merritt in Downtown Oakland.
In Oakland today: The very building in which Kamala began her career is a storied address whose steps have seen some of the most important civic demonstrations in modern history, from protests against the Vietnam War to peaceful demonstrations by the Black Panther Party. In the late 1960’s, the steps of the Alameda County Courthouse were featured in nationwide news stories – demonstrators protesting the trial of Party founder Huey P. Newton amassed on the steps. This historical, political meeting point is a notable marker for exploring into Oakland’s diverse, multicultural neighborhoods – Chinatown is immediately a few blocks north/northwest, and Oakland’s Latinx Fruitvale neighborhood is a short drive/train ride to the south.
Harris Claims Oakland, Berkeley Forgives
The vice president has virtually erased Berkeley, Calif., her hometown, from her campaign biography. The residents of “the People’s Republic” say they get it.
Kamala Harris spent much of her childhood living in a modest, yellow house in Berkeley, Calif. But as she campaigns for president, she calls herself a “daughter of Oakland.”Credit…Jim Wilson/The New York Times
Sculpture artist Dana King, creator of the Huey P. Newton bust with her creation at the unveiling ceremony. Dana was commissioned by the Huey P. Newton Foundation to create the artwork. Credit: Amir Aziz
https://www.zipcodeeastbay.com/real-estate/1830-lakeshore
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By Heather Knight and Alexandra Berzon
Heather Knight is the San Francisco bureau chief. Alexandra Berzon is an investigative reporter who was born and raised in Berkeley, Calif.
- Aug. 25, 2024
High above an arena packed with Democratic delegates in Chicago last week, a video introduced the life story of Kamala Harris to the world.
“Behind me is where it all began,” said her childhood friend, Stacey Johnson-Batiste, standing in front of a charming yellow, two-story home where Ms. Harris grew up in a small apartment above a nursery school.
But where was that exactly? The screen simply read “East Bay,” as in the eastern section of the San Francisco Bay Area that sprawls over 1,400 square miles and is home to nearly three million people. Ms. Harris called the area just “the bay” in her speech on Thursday night. Other speakers throughout the week referred to Ms. Harris as hailing from Oakland, the East Bay’s largest city.
The word almost never spoken was the name of Ms. Harris’s actual hometown: Berkeley, Calif.
That little yellow house sits on Bancroft Way in the university city known, fairly or not, for a hippy-dippy vibe where residents gamely embrace the nickname, “People’s Republic of Berkeley.” Ms. Harris’s old neighborhood is now called Poets Corner for its preponderance of streets named for writers such as Chaucer and Byron.
The neighbors, who tend a community garden and circulate a newsletter, have a theory about why Ms. Harris does not shout out her hometown much these days.
“Oh, people would definitely think Berserkeley!” said Anna Natille, who lives near Ms. Harris’s childhood home and was walking her pug, Figgy, past it last week. “We have such a reputation for being on the far left, that we’re all a bunch of communists and socialists.”
In other words, maybe not a great way to lure the country’s middle-of-the-road voters to the Democratic ticket.
Ms. Harris began downplaying her Berkeley roots years ago when she first prepared to run for statewide office in California. Today, she often describes herself with the somewhat vague label “daughter of Oakland,” a phrase that ties her to a working-class city with less stigma — and counters Donald J. Trump’s preferred branding, “San Francisco liberal.”
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A spokeswoman for the Harris campaign said the campaign had no comment.
Ms. Harris is hardly the first politician to be selective about her biography; leaning into key events or places to match a political message is a timeworn tradition. George H.W. Bush hyped his Texas background, though he had grown up in Connecticut, and Al Gore touted his roots in Tennessee and not his childhood home: the Fairfax hotel in Washington, D.C. For Ms. Harris, whose family moved frequently, the matter is less about inaccuracy than emphasis and omission.
She was indeed born in an Oakland hospital in 1964, but she did not settle in the city until she was in her 20s and working as a prosecutor in the county district attorney’s office.
Her birth certificate lists an apartment building near the University of California, Berkeley campus, where her parents were pursuing Ph.D.s. It sat just a half-block south of People’s Park, the campus land taken over by activists in 1969, just a few years after the Harris family moved out of the building.
When Ms. Harris was a toddler, her family moved to the Midwest where her father, Donald Harris, taught briefly at universities in Illinois and Wisconsin. After her parents split up, Ms. Harris returned to Berkeley when she was 5, with her mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, and her sister, Maya, and eventually settled into the little yellow house in the “flatlands,” then a working-class part of the city with a large population of Black families.
Ms. Harris’s mother was steeped in the social activism vibrant in both Berkeley and Oakland. Ms. Harris attended Berkeley public schools and was bused to Thousand Oaks Elementary School in a more upscale neighborhood in the hills of north Berkeley as part of a voluntary program to integrate schools.
Ms. Harris moved to Montreal when she was 12 and to Washington, D.C., to attend Howard University, returning to the Bay Area for a summer during college when she worked at a McDonald’s in Alameda, a city next to Oakland. She settled in the area as an adult.
(Montreal fared even worse than Berkeley at the convention. The city’s name was completely excised from Ms. Harris’s retelling of her childhood, while Berkeley was mentioned just once, by Oprah Winfrey.)
The vice president’s shifting descriptors of her hometown have been noticed by local people clued into associations with each place: Berkeley (radical lefty and weird), Oakland (working-class and a hub of Black politics) and the East Bay (could be anything, really).
Campaigning Gone Wrong
Posted on June 28, 2024 by Royal Rosamond Press
Here is the ex-president’s performance in the debate….
Here is Biden’s performance…
Both men have served as President for FOUR YEARS. Trump looks like he can do another four. Biden can’t even turn his head to glare at THE ENEMY OF HIS LIFE, and let him know he wants to kick his ass – right now! There is no fight in that old dog. He had Trump on the ropes when he came on stage and wouldn’t make eye contact. I would have jumped on that – and went off script! I would do all I can to give mean-ass looks – and give sharp insults! Forget about looking good – and better – on paper! I would have made him out to be A TRAITOR – with every question! Biden tried to give Trump A DIRTY LOOK, and it looked like an old man in the rest home, going poo-pooh in his pants!
Three days ago I found a great PANIC BUTTON! Millions of Democrats are pushing it. They want a NEW GUY in the ring!
John Presco
Swalwell – Emergency President!
Posted on June 24, 2024 by Royal Rosamond Press
President Biden has to declare a State of Political Emergency, and go on Television and announce Congressman Eric Swalwell land Libby Schaaf- are the Democratic ticket! I just watched 60 Minutes who showed the threat of China’s navy. We have to turn Oakland an Alameda into the largest ship building center – in the world! For the first time in history, the Democrats will have a
STANDBY CANDIDATE!
I suspect Putin dropped his masters spies in Cuba and they are making their way into a country!
ALARM!
John Presco
2024 Election: Live Updates
Updated
Aug. 26, 2024, 8:48 a.m. ET28 minutes ago
- Trump suggested he may skip the debate with Kamala Harris on ABC.
- The final sprint has begun. Here’s the latest on the presidential race.
- Vance defends tariffs and claims Trump would veto a national abortion ban.
“I’d be willing to bet a lot the reason they’re not saying Berkeley is just because of the stereotype,” said Charles Wollenberg, a historian who has written a history of Berkeley. He added that he did not think the amorphous term “East Bay” was an ideal substitute. It could apply to dense, diverse cities or roomy suburbs.
“Even if you knew what the East Bay was,” he said, “it could be Oakland or Walnut Creek.”
Ms. Harris has, at times, done her part to puncture those stereotypes. In her 2019 memoir, she described Berkeley, now home to about 120,000 people, as far more complex and multilayered than its national reputation. Her neighborhood, she wrote, was filled with “working families who were focused on doing a good job, paying the bills and being there for one another.”
And she wrote about the Rainbow Sign, a Black arts and cultural center in Berkeley where she was exposed to a lively mix of poetry, art and oratory and learned that “artistic expression, ambition and intelligence were cool.” The city back then was about a quarter Black and had just elected its first Black mayor. More recently, housing in the city, including in the once-working-class neighborhood where Ms. Harris grew up, has become so expensive as to price out many of the types of working families she wrote about.
But Berkeley’s role in her public story shrunk as her ambitions grew. In 2008, just before she announced her run for California attorney general, the mention of Berkeley was taken out of her bio on her political website, which referred to her as a “California native” before turning to “born and raised in the East Bay” and, at points, “born in Oakland.” (She has mentioned Berkeley a few times in speeches over the years to allude to the civil rights movement or her experience in school busing programs.)
In the 2019 speech kicking off her first presidential run, Ms. Harris stood before a crowd of around 20,000 people in downtown Oakland. Her very first words were: “I am so proud to be a daughter of Oakland, California.”
Several former aides to Ms. Harris during her early career said they did not recall any discussion about the changes.
Not surprisingly, Berkeley and Oakland, both solidly Democratic cities, want to claim Ms. Harris as their own.
One of Ms. Harris’s longtime friends, the former Oakland mayor Libby Schaaf, is delighted to see the vice president hype up Oakland, using East Bay lingo to say she is “hella proud of this daughter of Oakland.”
“We love that she claims Oakland,” she said. “Unapologetic warriors for justice, that’s the Oakland brand.”
Even as the mayor of Berkeley, Jesse Arreguín, countered — “She’s a daughter of Berkeley!” — he was also self-aware.
“Berkeley is viewed as the most liberal city in the United States, and we’re proud of that,” he said. “But maybe for some people in the red states, that may freak them out.”
Still, residents of Berkeley know their Harris landmarks. When she and President Biden won in 2020, a spontaneous dance party erupted outside her childhood home on Bancroft Way, with children drawing messages on the pavement in chalk and a New Orleans-style jazz band parading up the street.
The town’s visitors’ bureau has even created a tour of sites associated with Ms. Harris, including the yellow house. (Oakland’s visitors’ bureau has one as well.)
Around the corner from the yellow house, on Browning Street, dozens of neighbors gathered in a side yard on Thursday night to watch the onetime resident of Poets Corner accept her party’s nomination on an outdoor movie screen.
They sprawled on picnic blankets and sat in folding chairs. They popped bottles of bubbly and sliced a cake that read “Kamala 47,” a reference to the fact that she would be the country’s 47th president if she won. Little girls sold homemade T-shirts reading, “Keep Calm and Vote for Kamala.”
Nobody seemed to care that she did not call out their town by name as they cheered her generic references to the East Bay. She stands for Berkeley values, they said, even if she does not name their city.
“What she stands for and what she says she’s going to do are such a part of this community, the hopes and dreams we all have,” said Mallorie Baron, a neighbor who taught at Thousand Oaks Elementary long after Ms. Harris left town.
“It just feels right.”
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/2143-Woolsey-St-Berkeley-CA-94705/24828823_zpid/
BERKELEY — The fog lifted early Friday over the flatlands of Berkeley where a diverse mix of homeowners and renters had gathered for a block party the night before to watch Kamala Harris on the big screen accepting the Democratic nomination for president and delivering a shout-out to her childhood neighborhood.
“We lived in the flats, a beautiful, working-class neighborhood of firefighters, nurses and construction workers — all who tended their lawns with pride,” Harris said from the convention stage in Chicago on Thursday night.
This is the kind of middle class neighborhood and people, she said, that she would fight for if she defeats former President Donald Trump in November.
Yet much has changed in this pocket of the Bay Area since the 1970s when Harris’s mother, a UC Berkeley grad student, raised her two daughters for eight years in an upstairs apartment on Bancroft Way.
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Vice President Kamala Harris’s childhood home is seen on Friday, Aug. 23, 2024, in Berkeley, Calif. (Dai Sugano/Bay Area News Group)
Nurses and firefighters, even those who earn more than $100,000 a year, would be unlikely to afford the average $1.2 million homes here, including the sizeable down payment, without financial help from family. A typical 2-bedroom apartment, like the one where Harris spent her elementary school years, would likely rent for upwards of $3,500 a month — a hefty cost even for an average tech worker living on one salary. For the average California construction worker, whose median wage was less than $62,000 in 2020, the rent would be impossible.
“I find it tragic that the high cost of living in Berkeley today makes it that much harder for someone like Kamala Harris’s mom to afford to live here,” said Abby Friedman, who helped organize the block party in her neighbor’s side yard on Browning Street, around the corner from Harris’s childhood home.
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Vernita McCray lives across the street. She was born here in 1956, a year after her father, a hod carrier who delivered bricks and lumber to construction sites, bought the modest corner house. He could afford the $134 monthly mortgage and raise his three daughters while his wife stayed home. They were some of the first Black residents to move into the mostly White neighborhood back then, she said, and kids across the street sometimes threw rocks at their house. In the 1970s, when Harris was school-age, the neighborhood was mostly Black.
The homes with long, narrow lots along Bancroft Way look much as they did in the 1970s, including the two-story yellow house that Harris grew up in. Instead of Regina Shelton’s day care beneath the Harris apartment where the sisters stayed after school, there is now a Montessori preschool.
But as housing prices skyrocketed and the neighborhood gentrified over the next decades, the ZIP code that includes about 17,600 people is mostly White again, making up nearly half the population, according to the 2020 Census. The Black population has fallen to about 15%, followed closely by Hispanics and Asians at about 14% each.
McCray, 68, who spent years working for Bank of America and now works in child care, says there’s no way she could afford to buy her own home now.
“Oh no,” she said, “not in my wildest dreams.”
Harris has made helping the middle class a central theme of her candidacy, a demographic that Trump largely appealed to in his successful 2016 presidential campaign. In a campaign video released Friday, Harris promised to create an “opportunity economy” for middle-class families “like the one I grew up in,” she said, “where everyone has a chance to get a car loan, buy a home, start a business.”
In her Thursday night speech, she also pledged to build 3 million new homes and “end America’s housing shortage.”
What she didn’t mention, however, is that Democratic policies and local “not-in-my-backyard” sentiments have often thwarted opportunities to build new housing, and Democratic-sponsored rent control programs that make some units affordable for the middle class also discourage development.
As Trump critically put it in a post on his Truth Social site, “She’s talking about the Middle Class, but she’s the one who broke the Middle Class, and made it UNSAFE AND UNAFFORDABLE!”
Still, Harris’s message resonates in this Berkeley neighborhood, a liberal bastion not far from the University of California campus where her parents met as civil rights activists, called “Poet’s Corner” for the street names of famous poets like Browning and Chaucer.
“Like all of Berkeley, Poet’s Corner has gotten radically more expensive,” said Marilyn Garcia, a real estate agent who’s worked in Berkeley for two decades. “It’s definitely affected who can afford to live there. … I don’t think that a teacher could afford to buy a house in that area these days.”
There are still educators, therapists and working-class retirees who live here, however, and attended the livestream of Harris’s speech as the sun set Thursday night. But many of them either bought their homes decades ago, have taken in renters or are renters themselves with roommates.
Celine Bonfils, a French immigrant who conducted postdoctoral research in climate science here, and her husband, also a scientist, rent a two-bedroom with their two children.
Like Harris, her children are the offspring of two scientists, and “we’re renting. So we are middle class,” said Bonfils, who helped set up chairs at the viewing party. “It’s not easy to buy a house.”
Pramish Thapa, a Nepal immigrant, and his wife, Annie Powers, purchased their two-bedroom house across from the old Harris home for more than $1 million. But even with low interest rates and their tech salaries — he’s an economist, and she works for an AI start-up — they still needed family help to buy it.
They’re happy to be here and take pride in living across from Harris’s childhood home. When Harris spoke about her days here — that Mrs. Shelton who lived below “became a second mother,” and that their neighbors taught them “how to make gumbo, how to play chess” and instilled the values of treating others with “kindness, respect and compassion” — Thapa believes that spirit still lives on.
He missed the block party where neighbors ate handfuls of popcorn and slices of cake with frosting that said “Kamala 47” and where Friedman’s 11-year-old daughter, Elia Schifrin, made hand-painted T-shirts that said “Keep calm and vote Kamala.”
Despite the challenges to afford living here — or maybe because of them — Thapa says he’s felt the same sense of community that Harris talked about.
“When we first came here, we received a cake from some of our neighbors and fruit,” he said, “and random acts of kindness.”
Originally Published: August 24, 2024 at 1:40 p.m.
Kamala Harris’ Berkeley: 3 homes that shaped her early childhood
Harris lived in Berkeley as an infant and again from ages 5 to 12.
by Steven FinacomAug. 19, 2024, 4:53 p.m.
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Editors’ note: The homes in this story are still occupied. Please be sensitive and respect the privacy of current residents.
The nation’s eyes are on Kamala Harris this week as the Democratic presidential nominee is celebrated at the party’s convention.
Born in an Oakland hospital, Harris lived in Berkeley from her first days to nearly age 1, before her family moved to the Midwest to live in three different college towns.
If you have more information about Harris’ life in Berkeley, please email editors@berkeleyside.org.
At about age 5 she came back to Berkeley with her mother and sister. When she was 12, her mother moved the family to Canada. While her father lived in Palo Alto and her mother in Oakland during her undergraduate years, there is no readily available record of Harris living in the Bay Area again until she returned after college to attend law school in San Francisco.
While in Berkeley, she and her family lived in at least three different locations, all rentals. All three buildings remain today. Two of these can be directly documented as connected to the Harris family, and the location of the third — reported here for the first time — is indicated by a family photo.
2531 Regent St.
Harris was born on Oct. 20, 1964, at the Kaiser Permanente Hospital in north Oakland. On the campaign trail, Harris describes herself as “a daughter of Oakland.”
Her parents, Shyamala Gopalan and Donald Harris, were immigrants. Her mother had come to the U.S. from India and her father from Jamaica, both as graduate students. They had married 15 months before Harris’ birth, while they both were still pursuing their studies at UC Berkeley.
The hospital building where Harris was born has been demolished, though there remains a Kaiser medical complex surrounding the now vacant lot.
Harris’ first residence in Berkeley was at 2531 Regent St. (between Dwight Way and Parker Street), listed on her birth certificate as the address of her mother. (The standard format for birth certificates from that era asked only for the mother’s address.)
There’s a family photo of Harris, being held by her father, apparently taken in spring 1965. He is standing in what looks like the entry court of 2531 Regent. Another family photo shows Harris with her mother on the steps of what appears to be the same building.
As UC Berkeley enrollment rapidly expanded after World War II, many of the older houses on the block were demolished and small- to mid-sized apartment buildings, often catering to student tenants, were constructed on the lots.
Harris’ first home at 2531 Regent was one of those earlier apartment buildings, built around 1946 on a block located just east of the Telegraph Avenue commercial district. It’s a narrow, two-story, L-shaped, wood-frame building, with a stucco exterior and two floors of apartments above street-facing garage parking.
Harris’ early life was “happy and carefree,” she wrote in her memoir — her home filled with conversations about South African apartheid and the U.S. civil rights movement and the sounds of her mother singing along to Aretha Franklin and the Edwin Hawkins Singers and her father playing albums from his “extensive jazz collection.”
“I have young memories of a sea of legs moving about, of the energy and shouts and chants,” she wrote.
1945 Milvia St.
Read more
- A story about how Harris’ parents met in a Black Berkeley study group
- An interview with Harris about living in Madison, Wisconsin
- An essay by Harris honoring Regina Shelton, a Berkeley neighbor whose day care she attended
- A story about the Berkeley doctor who delivered Harris
- A story about Brown’s Town, Jamaica, Harris’ father’s hometown
Harris’ mother, Shyamala, received her doctorate in physiology from UC Berkeley in January 1964, the year Harris was born, and then began postgraduate work at the university. Her father, Donald, received his doctorate in economics in 1966.
In 1965, the family made a big move, heading to the Midwest, where Donald Harris began climbing the “tenure ladder” towards a full professorship. He would hold, successively, academic positions at three different universities — University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Northwestern University and the University of Wisconsin–Madison — with Shyamala securing research jobs at each of those universities as well.
This began an often overlooked, non-Bay Area, interlude in the early life of the future vice president. Overall, about four of the first five years of her life were spent in the Midwest. Her younger sister, Maya, was born in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois.
Harris’ parents separated around 1969 and her father stayed for a time at the University of Wisconsin, while her mother brought her and her sister back to Berkeley. Her father later moved back to the Bay Area for a job at Stanford and her parents’ divorce was finalized in August 1973.
Kamala and Maya Harris lived mostly with their mother but would spend some weekends and two months during the summer with their father, usually in Palo Alto. Their father also took them on trips abroad, including to his hometown of Brown’s Town, Jamaica.
During the rest of the year, Harris lived with her mother and sister in Berkeley from 1969 until early 1977, with her mother working as a researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Berkeleyside hasn’t been able to reach anyone in the Harris family or campaign to confirm where the Harrises first lived upon their return, but Harris included in her memoir a photo of her standing with her mother and sister on a Berkeley sidewalk, and a caption in the book describes the picture as taken outside their apartment on Milvia Street.
The apartment building — a small corner of which is visible in the photograph — can be identified as 1945 Milvia St., at the southeast corner of Milvia and Berkeley Way on the edge of downtown. It’s the only apartment on the block with a Milvia Street address.
It’s a four-story-high stucco box, with a rooftop penthouse and a ground-level parking garage, of a mid-century design typical of apartments built in Berkeley from the 1950s to the early ‘70s.
The archival photo shows a small tree sapling, a magnolia, on the street. The same tree appears to still stand on that corner, grown much larger today.
The Harris family likely lived at this apartment building until the beginning or middle of 1971.
1227 Bancroft Way
Harris’ mother then moved the family to a new rental home in West Berkeley, on Bancroft Way, between Browning and Bonar streets.
This neighborhood, later dubbed Poet’s Corner because of several streets named for literary figures, is now regarded as a gentrifying residential district, with single-family homes, small apartment buildings and bungalow courts lining the relatively quiet blocks around Strawberry Creek Park.
In the 1960s it was much more of a working to middle class neighborhood. Santa Fe Railroad freight trains still rumbled past on tracks that crossed Bancroft Way a block east of the Harris apartment. Strawberry Creek Park, built along the old railroad right of way, did not yet exist.
In 2019, while Harris was first running for president, I located the exact address of the Bancroft Way home — 1227 Bancroft— based on a photograph of the family in front of the house and archival records, and the Harris campaign confirmed the location for Berkeleyside.
“It was a close-knit neighborhood of working families who were focused on doing a good job, paying the bills and being there for one another,” Harris wrote in her memoir, describing how her mother would make her and Maya a cup of Carnation Instant Breakfast in the morning before work.
Most accounts — including Harris’ in her autobiography — refer to the 1227 Bancroft building as a duplex. That’s understandable. It’s a small, two-story building with separate upstairs and downstairs spaces, both accessed by their own exterior entrances. The Harris family lived upstairs, entering via an outdoor staircase.
But it doesn’t appear the building ever had more than one apartment unit.
The building looks today like a relatively recent structure, but it’s actually the oldest building on its block and one of the earliest in its immediate neighborhood. It was built around 1910 as a modest “raised basement” Victorian-era wooden cottage. There were scores if not hundreds of similar homes built in Berkeley and many of them survive today, some of them quite substantially altered.
Through the mid-20th century, the small house was home to a succession of immigrant families, some of them owners, some renters. In the 1930s a single-car garage was inserted at ground level under the residence, a typical modification for many older houses in that era when cars could not be parked overnight on Berkeley’s public streets.
In the late 1960s, the house was bought by two families, and members of one of those families still own the 1227 Bancroft building today.
The house underwent an extensive remodel in late 1970 and early 1971, shortly before the Harris family moved in. Most of the Victorian details and architecture were removed from the exterior, which was stuccoed over. The building was apparently also raised about two feet to accommodate a full-height ground floor.
During the remodel and just before the Harris family’s time in the home, the ground-level garage was eliminated and converted into space that would accommodate the day care business of Regina and Arthur Shelton. Harris remembered the day care as “small but welcoming, with posters of leaders like Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and Harriet Tubman on the wall.”
“When Maya and I finished school, our mother would often still be at work, so we would head two houses down to the Sheltons’ … with whom we shared a long-standing relationship of love, care, and connection,” frequently visiting their home two doors down the block, Harris wrote in her memoir. “Regina Shelton, originally from Louisiana, … and her husband, Arthur, an Arkansas transplant, owned and ran a nursery school — first located in the basement of their own home, and later underneath our apartment.”
Today, the Sheltons’ former day care space houses the Berkeley International Montessori School.
From the Bancroft Way house, Harris went to church in Oakland with the Sheltons; took piano lessons from another nearby neighbor; learned ballet from Madame Bovie, a world-famous ballerina; frequented the Rainbow Sign, a Black cultural center that would help shape her political imagination; and, after attending kindergarten at the private Berkwood Hedge School, caught the school bus to first grade at Thousand Oaks Elementary School during the second year of Berkeley’s integration program.
“I only learned later that we were part of a national experiment in desegregation with working-class black children from the flatlands being bused in one direction and wealthier white children from the Berkeley hills bused in the other,” she wrote in her memoir.
She attended Thousand Oaks in north central Berkeley for at least three years.
The Berkeley school district confirmed that she then went to Franklin School on San Pablo Avenue — later, the site of the Berkeley Adult School. In that era the Berkeley Unified School District often split the six elementary school years between Grade 1-3 and Grade 4-6 campuses. (This year, the old Franklin campus is accommodating Longfellow Middle School students after their building was declared unsafe.)
hHarris is second row from bottom, one from the right, in this photo, according to a Berkeley Unified spokesperson.
Through the years, Harris stayed in touch with her first-grade teacher, Frances Wilson.
“Mrs. Wilson had a profound effect on all of us and was deeply committed to her students, a diverse group — ranging from kids growing up in housing projects to the children of people working at the university,” Harris told Berkeleyside in an email in 2019.
The end of Harris’ Berkeley years came when her mother took a research job in Montreal, Canada. The family moved there in early 1977.
In the 1980s, her mother, Shyamala, would move back to the East Bay and once again take a job at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Kamala Harris would also return to the Bay Area after high school in Montreal and college in Washington, D.C. She attended and graduated from law school in San Francisco (Mrs. Wilson was in the audience at her graduation) and later lived in an Oakland condo while working as an Alameda County prosecutor and a San Francisco condo when she was elected district attorney there. Her sister, Maya, would graduate from UC Berkeley.
Steven Finacom is a community historian who writes a weekly newspaper column about Berkeley’s past for the East Bay Times. He is a member of Berkeley’s Landmarks Preservation Commission and in 2021 did research for a possible landmark application for the Bancroft Way residence but paused that proposal after learning the property owners felt public attention from landmarking would be too disruptive to the neighborhood. He thanks Jill Johnson, as well as the staff at the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association, for their research assistance.
Haunting Tales From A Village Bench
Posted on April 2, 2024 by Royal Rosamond Press
I bought Christine Wandel new earphones for her new – flip open phone – that has no computer on board. Three days ago we talked for four hours on the phone. I told her she was Monica in my unfinished novel ‘The Gideon Computer’ – that has come all the way true!
For two years Peter Shapiro and I have been texting a live-chat story-musical, called ‘The Roof Job’. Peter suggested we bring our friend Tim O’Connor in as a co-author. I kept bringing up The Face Shove that Anthony Guest witnessed, and told Peter and Christine I will contact him. Perhaps he will help me publish an article about The Last Hippies Standing? This morning, I invited Mr. Guest to do a story about us – and publish it in my my Bohemian Magazine for Music and the Arts in order to give this publisher – a leg up!
Above is a pic of Peter (left) having a psychic dual in front of my house in Alameda. I was going to buy Christine some kitty litter, but her friend, Stephen King, buys it for and has it delivered because her hands hurt. She has trouble holding her phone – and understanding she is MY ART PIECE!
Before she kicks the bucket, I want to apply for funding to set up a Telegraph ticker and Crystal radio in the Bleeker Street Park that will send me messages via the Woodstock Hotel where Stefan Eins lives. He will foreword Christine’s message his computer in the lobby!
OMG! I just noticed the grey cat in the pic of The Muffles Art Cry. Christine and I agree her cat, Whisper, is communicating with my cat, Classy – somehow! eins gets messages from cracks in sidewalk. This is the underbelly world of art that Guest dare not write about lest it soil his mind and reputation – forever! Welcome to the Primative Art Litter Box – Mr. Guest! The Roach Art Motel?
‘The last quarter century has been an extraordinary and turbulent period in the art world.” says Guest! But, he just got a taste, a glimpse of….Art Hotel Hell!
John Presco
President: Royal Rosamond Press
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/08/22/kamala-harris-sex-crimes-prosecutor-00175347
Stop 2: Oakland’s 23rd Avenue Church of God
1940 23rd Ave, Oakland CA
Growing up, Kamala and her family, including younger sister Maya, lived on Milvia Street and Bancroft Way in the neighboring city of Berkeley. Both girls and their mother frequently visited a nearby cultural center, known as ‘The Rainbow Sign’, described as a vibrant black cultural arts center. It was here that Kamala was exposed to inspiring women like “Shirley Chisholm, Alice Walker, Nina Simone, and Maya Angelou”— all “extraordinary people…who showed us what we could become.”
Even though Kamala and her family lived in Berkeley, both young girls also spent time in Oakland during their childhood. Their downstairs neighbor, Regina Shelton, often took Kamala and Maya, to the 23rd Avenue Church of God in Oakland, east of Lake Merritt. It was here they sang in the children’s choir and discovered Social Gospel.
https://www.zipcodeeastbay.com/real-estate/1830-lakeshore
Libby Schaff For President
Posted on July 12, 2024 by Royal Rosamond Press
She’s aching to escort Trump to prison!
By the time Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf arrives at Jack London Square for one of her regular community visits, a crowd of her constituents has already gathered. They’re here for Mobile Mayor, a series of pop-up events where residents can speak directly with the city leader about everything from the housing crisis, to parking tickets, to her bold decision that infuriated the Trump administration.
Biden stands and runs on his merits, but can not swing at his opponent. Twice he used his BIG GUN on Trump by insulting the crap out of him about how he uses a golf cart when he golfs!
THAT’S IT!?? Trump is a convicted felon that ran around with a porn star – behind his wife’s back – who winced when he griped abut Libby as he admired the mural of Apollo on his ceiling.
Libby and Kamala are Oaklanders, which may not be a good thing. But, will Trump make my hometown a better place to live?
Have these women hold news conferences -TOGETHER! Have Eric Swalwell come on stage and talk about Jan. 6th. Be – A TEAM! I want to be her Fight Manager!
Libby: “You wanted to arrest me? (pulls out handcuffs) Come over here and slap the cuffs on me – Fat Man! Where’s your wimpy weeny fink, Jeff Sessions? Did you run over him with your golf cart?
New Conference: “Are you going to debate Trump, some more?”
Libby: “Why would I do that. Our prisons are full of Innocent Men bellyaching they didn’t do it. Instead, I’m going to instruct you one how to use handcuffs – for those who want to be on the side of
“JUSTICE!”
“Get your ass over here, twinkle toes, I got some bling I want to lay on you!”
John Presco
(Please! Save me from The Crazy Bling-Bling Man!)
Kamala slept here: A tour of Bay Area addresses Harris has called home
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By Kevin TruongPublished Jul. 24, 2024 • 6:00am
Kamala Harris’ close ties to the Bay Area are a key part of her story. Born in Oakland and raised in Berkeley, Harris returned to the area for law school in San Francisco before starting her career as a prosecutor in Alameda County. As the presumptive Democratic Party presidential nominee kicks off her bid for the White House, The Standard took a trip down memory lane and revisited some of her previous homes in the region.
Berkeley
Harris spent most of her early childhood in Berkeley, where her mother attended graduate school at UC. For around six years, Harris lived above a daycare facility on Bancroft Way in West Berkeley, an area known as “the flatlands” that was a center for the city’s Black population. The home is about 2.5 miles away from Thousand Oaks Elementary School, where she was bused as part of the city’s desegregation program. The school now boasts a mural featuring Harris alongside other women leaders. In typical Berkeley fashion, an effort to landmark Harris’ childhood home petered out after neighbors expressed concerns about disruption.
Oakland
Harris was working as a prosecutor for Alameda County in 1993 when she purchased a one-bedroom condo that overlooked Oakland’s Lake Merritt for $116,000, according to public records. A former listing advertises the unit’s floor-to-ceiling windows and rear courtyard. Harris owned the 1,125-square-foot property when she was appointed by Willie Brown, then Assembly speaker, to the state Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board and, later, the California Medical Assistance Commission. The appointment by Brown, a former romantic partner, helped jump-start Harris’ political career but also led to allegations of nepotism that have continued to plague her. She sold the property in 1998 for $152,000, a few months after being recruited to join the office of then-San Francisco District Attorney Terrence Hallinan.
San Francisco
After moving across the Bay to San Francisco, Harris purchased a two-level condo in SoMa for $299,000. She owned the property when she was elected in 2003 as district attorney over her former boss Hallinan. She held onto the condo until 2021, when she sold it for $860,000. A VRBO listing for the unit said it offers “an amazing opportunity to live inside the home previously owned by Vice President Kamala Harris” and touts its full-size washer and dryer and proximity to the Moscone Center.
Elsewhere
When she became vice president, Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, moved into the position’s official residence at Number One Observatory Circle in Washington, D.C. The couple also own a four-bedroom, four-bathroom house in the tony Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles. Zillow values the home at $5 million.
Bay Area Bohemians
Posted on November 14, 2018 by Royal Rosamond Press
The attack of the Kimites and Allyites is fueled by their jealousy of me. They sense a certain light around me, a aura of importance that they must – DESTROY! I did not aspire to be a Hippie. I was there, in the beginning! I am found in The Genesis. They sense this, and thus I am a choice target. They want a feather in their cap. I am a trophy. There has to be something WRONG about me. I must be a deviant, a, perverter of the common good. I have altered my mind. I am a lunatic who needs to be – locked up!
“Lock him up! Lock him up!”
Donald Dump is the ambassador of the Kmites and Alleyites. He is a Shit-disturber without a cause. He owns no class. The self-righteous ones – adore him!
John
Nancy Hamren Van Brasch
Posted on January 26, 2015by Royal Rosamond Press
Two days ago I got a call from someone who knew Nancy when she lived on Belvedere near Haight St. We talked about other mutual friends.
In 1959, I met Nancy at McKenzie Junior High in Oakland. We were twelve. At thirteen, with the encouragement of our friend, Bill Arnold, we kissed. It was my first kiss. With her back to the wall of the boy’s bedroom on San Sebastian, and while Bill turned his head, we pressed out lips together. Bill and Nancy became lovers when they were thirteen, thus, this may constitute the idea of Free Love that us Atlanteans made famous five years later.
Above is a photograph of Nancy’s house on Stowe Avenue. It is the one on the left that had an edition built on the front porch. Next door lived the Souza family. Sherry Souza was nicknamed, Angel. She dressed like a Beat (leotards and black barret) and took dance and ballet lessons in San Francisco. At thirteen she knew the Beats that hung in the Gaslight Bookstore. She was very exotic and mysterious. She too was Bill’s Lover who lost his virginity to his French maid when he was eleven while living in a Chateau with his military father who was stationed in France.
I am not sure if Bill encouraged Angel to take away my virginity, but she made an offer to do me this big favor. At fourteen I went into the backyard at Stowe where she would let me in, but, her boyfriend, Tony Costa showed up. I listened to them argue for almost an hour, and went home. I had save Angel after we got drunk, and our friends Bob Pratt and Greg King piled on top of her on my bother’s bed. When Angel cried for help, I threw my school chums off of her, and kept them at bay.
Bill and considered ourselves Beats. We were the school artists. Bill did this watercolor of San Francisco and put all our names on the billboards. We had our coffee shop where we went to philosophize. We smoked our pipes there. We went to art movies at the Parkway Theatre. On our way to Nancy’s with a bunch of candle we found, Bill suggested we light them and put them in a circle in the middle of the road, and, we sit around them. We forced the traffic to go around us. This was a preview of things to come.
Stowe Avenue was a Teen Scene, with Bod Boys and their hotrods. If there had not been a hippie/Atlantean cultural revolution, then Stowe was the Acme of western blue color culture. Rebel enclaves were found all of the San Francisco Bay Area. There were gangs at High School called the Esquires and Cavaliers. Sometimes they got drunk and fought one another. Sometimes the gang-raped a female annetiate into the female branch of their club. This was the Hoodlum Empire. Some of our friends would grow up to ride with the Hell’s Angels.
Bill and I emulated Jack Kerouac and John Steinbeck. We camped on Mount Tamalpias. When we were fifteen we hitchhiked to Nevada to camp. We did everything, but drugs. Nancy was at the core of the Teen Crime Scene. When she moved to Belvedere in the Height she was looking for The Hood of Hoods Then, she moved to Pine and Broderick Street with her friend, Carrol. Bob Pratt told me where she lived, and I went to visit her with my fiend Keith Purvis, who had lived with me in the Village in 1964.
When Bill was killed by a train that year, Christine and I went to Oakland for the funeral. Keith got us stoned for the first time. He had fallen in love with my sister a year earlier. He knew she was in love with Bill, as was Nancy. Keith became Nancy’s lover and we moved into Pine street when I and Carrol became a pair. Later, Christine, Keith, Nancy, Carrol, the Zorthian Sisters, and myself, lived together in the ‘Idle Hands’.
Going forward without Bill, was not easy. His death marked the end of a magical scene – without equal! At nineteen we were brave survivors, mature beyond our years, looking for the meaning of life. Our Beat Hero Hoodlum was moved aside by a whole generation of Brave Seekers. Us hippies, and our drug-taking, is blamed for the Youth Rebellion. But it was going full steam in Junior High.
“We will never pass this way again.”
Humanity has done two things right, that I am aware of……The price of the Staten Island Ferry, and the timed lights on Pine street. Crossing the Bay Bridge at night on the way to Nancy’s was the most magical moments of my life. The freeway took your right onto Pine street. If you made the first light, you could go all the way. You could get up that long hill. Once past Gough, you were home free.
Jon Presco
Copyright 2015
Shortly after high school, in 1966, Nancy moved to Haight Ashbury in San Francisco to attend college. “It was a wonderful, exciting time,” she says. “The civil rights movement and Vietnam protests, and free speech movements were happening, and a big part of this consciousness-raising was a discussion of natural foods.”
By 1969 she was living in Mill Valley with her sweetheart Gordon Adams. Gordon was a friend of Ken Kesey, counterculture leader and author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Ken owned a farm outside of Eugene, Ore., where many of his band of Merry Pranksters occasionally stayed. He asked Gordon and Nancy to come to Oregon to help take care of the farm while he was in London recording stories with the Beatles.
Post Woodstock, when Ken Kesey decided to close his farm to guests, Nancy needed a new home and a new job. “I heard Ken’s brother, Chuck, had a little creamery in Springfield, Ore., and was looking for a bookkeeper,” she says. At the creamery, Nancy soon found herself sharing her knowledge of making yogurt. “It was a time when we all were focused on taking our destiny into our own hands; the Whole Earth Catalogue was our beacon.” she says. “We shared all kinds of things: how to build a cabin; how to make your own bread; how to get rid of ants the natural way. In San Francisco, I had had access to lots of good yogurts,” she says. “But in Oregon, the majority of commercial yogurt was the over-sweetened variety.”
I wrote a poem for Carol Schurter titled `The Fawn’. I do not recall the words,
but the theme. Carol was extremely delicate. She was six-foot one inch tall and
as thin as a fashion model. She had curly bond hair that poured down from her
head on to her long frame. She had a very full lips, and when she spoke she had to get her words past these lips that made her look and sound
very sexy.
We used to party with two members of the Jefferson Airplane who made love to
their two Swedish Airline Stewardess who rented an apartment down the hall. They
made this their home base, they wanting to be part of the greatest party ever
thrown. They were in town for a day or two, and were gone. We used to trade
drugs. Nancy dated Augustus Owsley after Keith, and thus we had the best.
I took my first acid trip on Pine street. I don’t think it was very potent. I
ended up in front of the mirror for hours weighing an apple and a shotgun shell.
I am a Libra. I had on the flight jacket Bill’s lover gave me after he died, and
had on aviation goggles with hat, a symbol of the Jefferson Airplane. Our
friends were getting drafted, and thus there was a real decision to be made,
whether or not to run to Canada, or serve. I was weighing some heavy shit in
that mirror. I was very young and handsome.
No matter what trouble I found in my mind, when I went to bed, Carol would be
there waiting for me. We were extremely loyal to each other
In 1984 I made a trip to Eugene Oregon and stopped in to see me childhood friend Nancy Hamren at the Springfield Creamery owned by the Kesey family. Nancy had been a Merry Prankster, a hippie clown, a Fool lead by a Fool. After reminiscing about our hipped days, she suggested I write a history of the hippies because I recalled so
much. A year later I began my first, and un-finished novel `The
Gideon Computer’. Instead of looking backwards at the hippie
movement, that was all but dead, I looked into the future and
conjured up Berkley Bill Bolagard, the Last Hippie who had become a
fool after losing the Love of his life, Monica Gideon, who married
his arch rival, Thomas Gideon. Thomas was a pioneer in the field of
computers, but, rather than seeing it as a tool to benefit mankind,
he used it to enslave the imperfect human beings. He spliced together
all those snippets of guilt and shame that went un-noticed.
I Was a Trophy Drinker
Posted on August 19, 2011 by Royal Rosamond Press
The top photo of me was taken in 1972 when I was living in Alameda. While living in Boston I made a rule, make the bar closest to you in walking distance, your bar, so you can avoid getting a DUI. I got into alcohol at the Father’s Three bar that was down the street from my apartment on Beacon Hill. After a hard day in court, where I conducted a legal battle with the Mafia, I would go the Father’s and peel away a young college girl, enroll her in my high drama. I had become a Trophy Drunk. I would drink with anyone, anyplace. When I returned to Oakland I lived in a hotel in downtown Oakland and drank at the Golden West where real hobos wandered in off the rail at 6:00 A.M. in the morning. Some of the characters in this bar inspired me to write my first novel ‘The Gideon Computer’.
I drank in dangerous black after-hours clubs in West Oakland until sunrise. I and my friends took over two bars on Piedmont that became the wildest bars in the Bay Area. My father drank in two bars on this street, that never closed to him and his son, because my father was connected. My grandfather was a professional gambler in the Barbary Coast and Crockett. When he died, 5,000 folks came to his funeral, including the Mayor of San Francisco.
My favorite bar was The Hut. I used to drink with Steve Kupka of the Tower of Power who was a roadie for the Loading Zone, whom I lived with for nine months in 1968. Peter was the lead guitarist for the Zone and took the picture of me for a album cover. Peter was my roommate, as was Tim O’Connor, the poet-singer who has been a friend of the family since he was fourteen. Tim invited me to stay on his boat when I go to Holland – with twenty four years of sobriety! I partied hardy for eighteen years, and have seen some gun play. I understood if I took another drink, I would soon be dead.
In my head, there is a barroom full of trophies, to go with some incredible stories. But, I’m into genealogies, these days, I wondering whose blood is running through my veins. 80 Proof don’t cut it with me anymore – or getting 86’de out the door.
On a bridge in Venice California we find the Four Amegos; Keith Purvis, Tim O’Connor, Peter Shapiro, and myself – Trophy Drugger-Drinkers – all. I forget the name of Tim’s girlfriend. Her father was a Hollywood agent who best freinds were Lee Marvin and Marlon Brando who were at her home all the time. This young woman was in the Big Party, and may not be on the planet anymore.
Jon Presco
The Marbles had the following members: Peter Shapiro on lead guitar, Steve Dowler on rhythm guitar, David Dugdale on bass and Ray Greenleaf on drums. They were a psychedelic group whose most notable performances were at the Tribute to Dr. Strange at the Longshoremen’s Hall in San Francisco on October 15, 1965, and again at the same venue for The Trips Festival on January 21, 22 and 23 along with Jefferson Airplane, The Charlatans and The Great Society. Both Shapiro and Dowler went on to become members of Paul Fauerso’s The Loading Zone.[1][2]
They were formed in Oakland, California in 1966 by singer-keyboardist Paul Fauerso, following the dissolution of his jazz group The Tom Paul Trio. The original lineup was Fauerso, bassist Bob Kridle, drummer Ted Kozlowski (replaced by George Newcom), and guitarists Peter Shapiro and Steve Dowler,[2] both formerly of Berkeley psychedelic rock band The Marbles, who had supported Jefferson Airplane at the historic “Tribute to Dr. Strange”, the inaugural Family Dog promotion concert held at San Francisco’s Longshoreman’s Hall in October 1965.
The Loading Zone’s first major concert was the Trips Festival at the Longshoreman’s Hall in January 1966.[3]. Although primarily an R&B band, The Loading Zone added contemporary psychedelic influences and soon became a popular attraction on the burgeoning Bay Area music scene. The Loading Zone was based at the Berkeley venue The New Orleans House, but performed numerous times at major venues including the Fillmore West.
Although The Loading Zone occasionally headlined, the group is better known for supporting some of the biggest acts of the period including Cream, The Who, The Byrds, Big Brother & the Holding Company, The Grateful Dead, Country Joe & The Fish, Howlin’ Wolf, Sam & Dave, Chuck Berry and Buddy Miles.[4][5]
In 1968 Fauerso placed an advertisement in the San Francisco Chronicle seeking a new lead vocalist, which led to the recruitment of Linda Tillery, who joined just prior to the band’s signing with RCA Records. Despite their live popularity, the group lacked a strong base of original material; their self-titled debut album was poorly received, and was criticised for its excessive production and its reliance on cover versions. The Loading Zone was unable to garner support from radio, and eventually split in 1969.
This from Discerning the World
“The devil seems to be winning new ground while the Church of Christ retreats even further into its sanctuaries hoping the Lord will come and take us to Heaven out of here! But that is not going to happen, because the ‘Dominion Mandate’ does not include the option to hunker down fearfully in our religious cocoons hoping the bogey man will go away and leave us alone.”
http://www.towerofpower.com/doc_bio/
Oakland DA and Concord Mutineers
Posted on July 21, 2024 by Royal Rosamond Press
San Sebastian Avenue
by John Presco
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
In the January 15, 1969 edition of the Black Panther Party newspaper, it reads;
“The Black Panther Party is launching a campaign against the oppressive action of the Alameda County Court and J.Frank Coakley!”
Click to access 02n020-Jan%2015%201969.pdf
Coakley prosecuted the Port Chicago Mutineers, The seven, and Mario Savio. Yesterday the Mutineers were posthumously pardoned. Kamala Harris worked in the same DA office as Coakley who says he descent from Fair Rosamond Clifford. His daughter befriended the four descendants of Carl Janke -The Founder of Belmont. I posted about the Black Panthers on the BHS, and shared the Panther show at the Oakland Museum. Coakley worked near where I docked my boat at the end of Adeline Street. I declare his, Ed’s, and my story – AN ART PIECE! Ed and I talked about doing an interview. Above is pic of me taken by Michael Harkins a good friend of Michael McClure and Jim Morrison. I just took Michael on a tour of West Oakland in my Cadillac. He gave me the moniker ‘Oakand Johnny’.
Oakland Johnny Tours. See the shady side of Oakland out the window of a Cadillac.
I beseech Ken Burns, Oliver Stone, and Steven Spielberg, collaborate on making Our Oakland an Art Movie Masterpiece!
John Presco ‘Oakland Johnny’
Click to access 02n020-Jan%2015%201969.pdf
The University of California in those days used to start August 15.
All classes started August 15. I was too late to go to law school,
either there or Hastings. But Stanford had the quarter system, and
the autumn quarter started October 1, so I went down to Stanford and
started to study law there. My first year of law I took at Stanford.
In the summer of 1920 I worked in the Moore Shipyards on the estuary
at the foot of Adeline Street in west Oakland. They were still
building ships, and I got a job as a machinists’ helper.
Descent from Charlemagne by way of Henry II, though improbable, is a
possibility if one dismisses the legend of the family’s exile in the
Midland forests at the time of the Norman Conquest. The Colcloughs
certainly did not share the Norman dread of the forests and of their
inhabitants, rationalised in the savage Norman code of forest laws,
and when in trouble were quite happy to take to the forests and to
associate on terms of cordiality with such forest denizens as Adam
Bell, Clym of the Clough, William of Cloudesley and “Robin Hood’s”
predecessors. One is reluctant, though, to dismiss the theory that
Shakespeare’s Duke in “As You Like It” was a Colclough.
The Port Chicago 50, a group of Black sailors charged and convicted in the largest U.S. Navy mutiny in history, were exonerated by the U.S. Navy on Wednesday, which called the case “fundamentally unfair.”
The decision culminates a mission for Carol Cherry of Sycamore, Ill., who fought to have her father, Cyril Sheppard, and his fellow sailors cleared.
The Secretary of the Navy, Carlos Del Toro, said the sailors’ court martial contained “significant legal errors that rendered them fundamentally unfair.”
“Yet, for 80 years, the unjust decisions endured. Now, I am righting a tremendous wrong that has haunted so many for so long.”
New about pardon. Play both videos at same time.
Kay Coakly and the Cops
Posted on April 28, 2017 by Royal Rosamond Press
Whenever Kay Coakley needed to go to the store, she called her father and he sent a squad car. Kay was the old crone up the street who had a bad car accident when she was young. Her father was the District Attorney. We were impressed.
Frank Coakley Convicts Oakland 7
Posted on January 1, 2012by Royal Rosamond Press
The District Attorney of Alameda and Oakland brought charges against anti-war demonstrators, and went after Mario Savio and the Free Speech Movement – as well as the Black Panther!In 1967 while taking a bus from L.A. to Oakland I was detained for being a professional Demonstarer and held in a cop room inside the greyhound Station. I was aksed if I was going to the demonstration in Oakland. I told the plain-clothes officer I knew nothing about a demonstration, I live there. This cop took out his truncheon and was going to work me over, when his superior walked in and told him to “Knock it off!”
Coakley was close with Ed Meese and Erl Warren, thus this appears to be a conspiracy headed by the U.S. Government. It is my intent to put all radical and liberal agendas under the umbrella of organized religion due to the holy Jihad being directed from Israel at our Freedoms – and backed by Republican Senators and Congressman who are guilty of Treason!
Call for an investigation of Israeli agents who call for Americans to go to war, whle at the same time they dmeonize the Peace and Freedom Movement. If these religious zealots had been watching the Bankers of the World, then millions of people would not have lost trillions of dollars. What damage to America did those who want Peace and Freedom of Speech, do? Bras were burned. How immodest! A trillion dollars went up in smoke! How obscene!
Jon the Nazarite
War On The City Of Roses
Posted on September 3, 2020 by Royal Rosamond Press
Yesterday I began to compose today’s post employing the title above. This morning I am reading about Trump&Barr declaring war on Portland, and other cities. Federal funds may be withheld due to “anarchy”. My neighbors employed the tactics of anarchists, Belle Burch and Alley Valkyrie, to make my life miserable, and, terrorize Clark, who was friends with many tenants. Now, the President of the United States and his Goon Priest, and going to try to make life miserable from millions of people – who have nothing to do with anarchists. In her zeal to punish me, Kim Haffner said she would disappear Clark, the beautiful cat the children loved. For weeks they asked where she was. She was thought to be a male cat. Our quality of life has been degraded. Millions of evangelicals that voted for Trump, prey for a Terrible Tribulation.
In the article about The Attack of The Trumpire, the devastated City of Vanport is mentioned. It was built especially for black people who were lured up from the South to work in Naval shipyards, to help build Liberty Ships, like the one that exploded in Port Chicago. Combine the disasters of the Two Black Northern Cities, and you got what looks like a Tribulation. Black sailors were put on trial for mutiny. If convicted, they would be put to death.
Frank Coakley led the attack. I suspect he had political ambitions that were dashed on the rocks when he spouted racist theories that the Defense tore apart. I believe Frank held a grudge when he became the District Attorney of Alameda that includes Oakland where Huey Newton formed the Black Panther Party who policed the police. Oakland made a point to hire cops from the Red States that Trump&Barr cater to. I will now post on the fake reasons why the Confederacy was founded, that involves economic attacks.
I am considering Treasure Island being the home port of the Marin Shipmates an all back civilian navy that will oversea and respect the interests of black men and women who are engaged in the defense of our Nation. The MS will be a civilian review and investigative unit that will work closely with the District Attorneys Office of Alameda. Candidate, Kamala Harris worked for this office.
There is no proof black people do not want to do their Patriotic Duty. Many black soldiers died in Vietnam. We need the MS because two tons of explosive nitrate was found today in Beirut. Trump&Barr are terrorizing U.S. Citizens so they will not demonstrate, or, inform people in charge something is wrong.
As it turns out, the United States Navy gifted the City of San Francisco a treasure that is proving to be a killer. Treasure Island is home to many poor people who are housed in subsidized housing who have been exposed to toxic waste. The Navy is killing people. I am going to contact Richard Rosenberg and ask him to help form the Marin Shipmates.
John Presco
President: Royal Rosamond Press
The mere utterance of Vanport was known to send shivers down the spines of “well-bred” Portlanders. Not because of any ghost story, or any calamitous disaster—that would come later—but because of raw, unabashed racism. Built in 110 days in 1942, Vanport was always meant to be a temporary housing project, a superficial solution to Portland’s wartime housing shortage. At its height, Vanport housed 40,000 residents, making it the second largest city in Oregon, a home to the workers in Portland’s shipyards and their families.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Tribulation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_Chicago_disaster
The effects of this exposure aren’t known. Scores of people who lived on the island have banded together on Facebook complaining of mysterious maladies. Public records obtained by Reuters show residents for years have complained to state authorities of asthma, rashes, lumps, children’s hair loss and cancers. But there have been no epidemiological studies that demonstrate a link between these complaints and the pollutants on Treasure Island.
The contamination has had clear social and economic consequences, though: It has delayed a city blueprint to provide quality housing. On Treasure Island, San Francisco plans up to 8,000 new residences, hotels, shops and offices. Transfer of the property to San Francisco, nearly 20 years behind schedule, won’t finish until the end of 2021.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Station_Treasure_Island
PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) — A memo from President Donald Trump has ordered the review of funding to Democratic cities that have seen protests against racial injustice this summer, including Portland.
The Wednesday memo was directed to U.S. Attorney Barr and Acting Director of the Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought and names the cities of Portland, Seattle and New York: cities that have seen protests turn violent.
“Unfortunately, anarchy has has recently beset some of our States and cities,” the memo read.
It went on to describe some of the nightly protests in Portland, which are nearing 100 days as of Wednesday, focusing on the tension in July between demonstrators and federal officers who had been sent there as a result of a separate executive order from June regarding the protection of federal monuments.
“These rioters have repeatedly tried to destroy property in the city, including the Federal courthouse,” the memo stated, adding that state and city leaders “have taken insufficient steps to protect the Federal courthouse, and initially rejected offers of Federal law enforcement assistance.”
Most federal officers have since left Portland following a reported deal struck in late July between Oregon Gov. Kate Brown and Vice President Mike Pence; however, protesters have since clashed with federal officers at the ICE facility in Portland.
Black Panther Party Gallery and Museum
Posted on September 2, 2020 by Royal Rosamond Press
This morning I discovered Frank Coakley prosecuted the Black Mutineers at Port Chicago when he was Judge Advocate Commander for the Navy. He would later prosecute Black Panthers – and Mario Savio! I and my family were very good friends with his daughter, Kay Coakley. Kay wanted to adopt my youngest sister. This goes with my discovery that Richard Rosenberg was a founder of Naval societies and interests. I am going to contact him about The Marin Shipmates. I would like him and the Marin-Buck Foundation to fund this museum and gallery.
I discovered this museum after posting.
https://www.oaklandlibrary.org/locations/african-american-museum-library-oakland
The radical dynamics created back in the seventies is back for an encore, and is having a great affect on our American society and culture – and thus the World’s. I am sure more black radical art is being rendered as I type. I would like to see a college dedicated to this art. The Oakland Museum had a show on Black Power. This history can no longer be marginalized. It can be shown that Coakley launched a crusade against black people. The paranoia the Newton’s experienced was very deserved.
Kamala Harris was a District Attorney of Oakland before she went to San Francisco. If she is elected Vice President, then there will be a great interest n Oakland Culture and political history. Trump is going – The Law and Order approach to being elected. Black Lives Matter, and rioting in several cities, may bring about the defeat of Biden and Harris. This too will deserve a study. Art and Literature has always played a huge role in how we record history. The BPMG will gather all pertinent images so they can be viewed on-line, or at the BP Gallery that will have a home in Marin County.
I am investigating who owns the Black Panther trademark. Any information will be appreciated. It looks like Fredricka Newton does.
Whenever Kay Coakley needed to go to the store, she called her father and he sent a squad car. Kay was the old crone up the street who had a bad car accident when she was young. Her father was the District Attorney. We were impressed.
John Presco
President: Royal Rosamond Press
Huey Newton – Alcoholic Author
Posted on September 4, 2020 by Royal Rosamond Press
I can tell by the later photographs of Huey Newton he had PTSD which I suffer from, and is being aggravated by talking about the Criminality surrounding the lives of two Oakland men. I am freezing up. I am trying to take numerous naps, but to no avail.
https://www.thriftbooks.com/a/huey-p-newton/296162/
Let me start by saying I used to go to a black afterhours club in a black neighborhood in Oakland. It was right on the Berkeley line. When my favorite bars closed, I would head there. I walked through a dangerous neighborhood for whites. One time a young black man was blown away to find me there. We started talking. I had to lay down on the grass in this park. He lay next to me and we talked about everything…art, politics, poetry, being a hippie. He tells me I am the first white person he has talked to in depth. We look up at the stars and understand we are on a strange planet, that is earthlike, but is not earth. Apartheid is real in America.
DA Frank Coakley and The Blue Angel
Posted on July 6, 2024 by Royal Rosamond Press
Frank Coakley’s daughter saw the Blue Angel my sister’s saw, that I believe is Angel Moroni. When Kamala ran for office, she had worked as a DA in Oakland. It was this history I was sharing with my friends, Ed Howard, and tried to share with the Belmont Historical Society. Kay Coakley was going to adopt Vicki Presco, and make her her heir. Vicki’s great, great, great grandfather, is Carl Janke. She disrobed the Blue Angel standing at the foot of her, and Christine Rosamond Benton’s bed.
Win or lose, or even become the Presidential Candidate, or, President if Biden, passes away, Kamala’s History is my families history, and the History of Belmont California.
John Presco
Copyright 2024
As DA, Coakley returned to the trial courts in 1955 to prosecute Burton Abbott in one of the most highly-publicized cases in the history of California. Abbott was charged with abducting and murdering 14-year old Stephanie Bryan as she was walking home from school in Berkeley. Abbott was convicted and sentenced to death. He was executed in San Quentin’s gas chamber in 1957. For Coakley and the DA’s Office, the 1960’s were a particularly difficult time because of civil unrest and criminal acts associated with the free speech movement, Vietnam War demonstrations, and the emergence of the Black Panther Party in Oakland.
Kamala Harris and the Noble Path of the Prosecutor
November 20, 2020
In the opening of her memoir, “The Truths We Hold,” from 2019, Vice-President-elect Kamala Harris writes that, as a law student, she found her “calling” while interning at the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office, in Oakland, California, in 1988. Harris then spent nearly three decades in law enforcement, referring to herself as “top cop,” rising from local prosecutor to district attorney of San Francisco and then attorney general of California—the first woman and the first Black person in these jobs—until she joined the U.S. Senate, in 2017.
“The Alameda County Mafia”
Posted on July 20, 2022 by Royal Rosamond Press
When Big Bones Remmer and his wife came to our home on San Sebastian, that was in the Glenview district of Oakland, he got ‘The Look’ from Rosemary’s two sons that you see in the photo above. No one fucked with the Presco Brothers. Mark and I had famous fist-fights. My brother played tackle on the Oakland High football team – that won the championship. I believe Remmer was going to make us an offer – we couldn’t refuse!
I am a newspaperman – who has been tagged to author the most Bad Ass Story – off all time! I suspect when Trump was elected President, he was introduced to The Meesites. He and Cohen thought they were the Baddest Asses in the Big Apple, and they would move their gang into the White House! But, this was Ed Messes’ turf, the home of The Meesites who had whooped the Black Panthers, and Hippies of People’s Park. When I read they were titled ‘The Alameda County Mafia’ alas I got the BIG PICTURE. It is suggested the ACM looked the other way, as organized crime moved into the Bay Area and Cal-Nevada. It is said The Meesites defeated the Soviet Union by playing Oakland Hardball with the Red Menace.
Mimi Farina In Concord
Posted on December 9, 2020 by Royal Rosamond Press
I awoke from my Old Man Nap and exclaimed;
“This is my life? Holy shit! I took on Scientology – and lost?”
According to Leah Remini the disappearance of your child by Scientologist is designed to shut your ass up – but good! It surely throws you off balance – and puts you on the defensive. They knew I had a blog. If I wrote anything NEGATIVE about them, then I may never see my MINOR CHILD….again!
Scientology Wants Celebrities | Rosamond Press
For some reason, Tim O’Connor popped into my mind. I am still trying to figure out why he didn’t want me to put any of his poems on my blog. His famous father died two years ago, and I wondered if he was writing a biography – and my famous sister would be in it. Christine and Tim were lovers for a short while. Was this more grabbing from THE PILE full of narcissistic nutrients? Infant Melba has been – hauled off by a total stranger. This could be a case of stalking because when she finally made contact she started ragging on Rena Easton – my muse!
What the fuck!
“What’s your mother’s name? I want to see if she is related to Royal Rosamond.
“I’m not going to tell you!”
WTF!
Anyway…Tim is the reason I was detained by a LA Cop in a Hawaii shirt and cut-offs as I came down the escalator in the Greyhound bus depot. I was put in this little room and accused of being a professional demonstrator on my way to Oakland to be with Phony Joanie at her protests at the Oakland Induction Center. Joan and her sister, Mimi, were arrested and put in Santa Rita. My cop took out a truncheon and was going to work me over – while I was in handcuffs. He was stopped. I was taken to jail where after two days I am taken to a detective room and shown pics of Tim O’Connor;
“Do you know this guy?”
“No!”
“How did he get your driver’s liscence.”
“I dont know!”
“You’re lying!”
This was true. I had gone to visit my family and Tim was living with Vicki and Rosemary. His father threw him out – again. He wanted to go see a band on the Strip and borrowed my license to get in. He did not tell me the next morning he got arrested for Marijuana procession. The LA cops are trying to pin that bust on me. I told them to do a match of the fingerprints – which I believe they already did. They wanted A NAME for The Phantom of the Strip. This is the dude that doses Mafia Max. He went to the same school as my sister and knew all the actor’s children. Did he know River Phoenix? I never confronted our family friend who looks like Doc in Inherent Vice. and lived in Venice and played on the boardwalk. Tim played at my wedding reception. How did Mary Ann get involved in all these Hollywood types.
Actor Tim O’Connor Leaves The Planet | Rosamond Press
Two days ago I discovered my facebook friend lived in Concord around the time the Prescos did. He tells me he had a 50 Caliber machine gun pointed at him when he and a friend sent rockets soaring into the air. He said he had just read the story Mutiny about the black navy men that were tried for treason after the huge explosion at Port Chicago. Mimi was in Concord protesting, and tying to stop munitions trains from eventually delivering white phosphorous to Vietnam. Mimi lived in Marin where I founded MARIN SHIPMATES that I want to see funded by the Buck Foundation as part of BLM. Two days ago I posted on General Loyd Austin being made head of our armed forces. Is he going to be a Uncle Tom for Uncle Buck – who is also the money Uncle Sam gives the military every year and is being held by Big King Buck. WTF!
Mutiny (1999 film) – Wikipedia
Write your new VP, Kamala Harris, who was a District Attorney for Oakland and San Francisco, and bid her to look into these matters where the military took on U.S. Citizens who were legally protesting. One man got run over by a train in……CONCORD…..by
UNCLE SAM BUCK
John Presco
The Marin Shipmates | Rosamond Press
Black Panther Party Gallery and Museum | Rosamond Press
Bread and Roses of Marin
The Coakleys and the Angels
Posted on October 28, 2011 by Royal Rosamond Press
My Godfather, Sargeant Skip Sutter, led fifty Oakland Cops against the Hell’s Angels, raided their clubhouse with gloves on, and ended up in the hospital for a week. Skip and Vic went to Oakland High School, and were pals of Tom McKinny the ex-president of TransAmerica Title, who was dismissed for Loan Scams in the late seventies – along with Skip – who wanted my fahter to come sit atop the pryamid building in SF, too.
Above is a photo of me with my siblings, Mark and Christine taken in 1950. According to Stacey Pierrot, and Julie Lynch, I am looking at Christine in a suspicious manner, because I suspect she is hiding in a closet with a flashlight, competing with me to become a world famous artist! I mean, look at her. How old is she, and where is she? Can Julie tell us? How about, Showtime?
While real villians are bringing down the world, the Gallery Gargoyles go after a four year old boy – and demonize him! Are you kidding me!
Above is a photo of Andrew Cuomo of HUD who went after Lawrence Chazen, the No.1 creditor in Rosamond’s probate for Loan Sharking. He hauled off Christine’s antique furniture. Show time is not interested in Larry, a partner of the Getty and Pelosi family- just that evil little boy trying to get his share of the milk for his cereal. No wonder my nieces have mental problems, don’t have a very good grasp of reality! Guess who is to blame for that!!!!!!
Jon Presco
Copyright 2011
Coakley the Cailleach and the Oakland Cops
Having read all the Grimm¡¯s Fairytales when I was eleven, I can say
the best stories begin with the appearance of an Old Hag. Most
children of my generation expected to be approached, or beckoned by
an Old Hag, or Witch, at some time in their life, thanks to Walt
Disney, the darling of Rightwing Conservatives who had the hots for
Davey Crockett, who would give the Republicans ‘Frontier America’
back after disappearing most of the other folks, somehow. So when
Dear Old Kay called to me from across the street, I must admit I was
startled, for she looked every bit like the classic Witch. Was she a
good witch? She had course black hair, a large nose, and perhaps my
youthful imagination and memory put a wart on that nose?
¡°Young boy!¡± she called to me in a garbled voice. ¡°Cumb bere!¡±
Being the only young boy on the street at the time (I was eleven) I
surmised it was me she beckoned to, and curious I came across the
street so I could hear her better.
Kay was slumped over and had a rather large hump on her back. Her
face was very pale, and wore bright red lipstick that was not applied
properly. It was hard to tell her age, for up close she did not look
as old as I first surmised. Having my full attention, she now spoke.
¡°I brandt yoob tos take deez bobbas to da store andb cabsh dem forb
me, den brug da muzzy brack and guv it ta me.¡±
¡°What?¡± I said, cocking my head to one side.
She gave me a look, having encountered dummies like me before, and
with disgust, turned and beckoned me in the house.
¡°Fallub me.¡± She said, and my heart began to race. Do I dare cross
her threshold?
¡°Fallub me!¡± She said a little louder, and I could not resist.
Kay walked with a stutter-step that propelled her forward. Some said
she had Cerebral Palsy, but she told us kids she was in a terrible
automobile accident when she was young and beautiful that had
obviously caused some brain damage, as well as crippling her.
Turning into the kitchen, she opened the door to the garage, and
pointed to several bags of pop-bottles and repeated her instructions
that I did not follow correctly, for I was distracted by the sight of
the most beautiful car I have ever seen. It was a 1930¡¯s Super Stutz
Bear Cat as I would later learn from a friend at schools whose uncle
purchased it. Jay Johansson was the son and grandson of famous
explorers who helped found Oakland¡¯s Snow Museum. He told me Kay¡¯s
Bearcat had hardly been driven.
I would hear from my mother, after all the Prescos got to know Kay,
that her father gave her the Bearcat on her coming out party, when
she turned twenty one. Kay¡¯s father was the famous Oakland District
Attorney J.Frank Coakley, an associate and friend of Ed Meese and
Earl Warren. Kay had gone driving with a boy, or another couple, and
if there was some drinking going on, it got covered up. No one got
the full story of what happened when the beautiful daughter of
Oakland¡¯s Top Cop got turned into a witch, a very young witch, who
was the only witness to the visitation of the Blue Angel that came
into Kay¡¯s room and my two sister¡¯s bedroom, and stood gazing down at
Christine at the foot of her bed. Seeing Angels, Pixies, and Fairies
was the Disney Dream that Leftwing Democrats adopted and adored, they
wishing that the Capitalists, the Conservatives, and the Cops would
disappear somehow, or, just the Fairy Folk whisked away to Never Pay
Your Duesville where the eternally young live off the rich ¨C forever!
¡°Tabe de boddas to da storb, and ged sum mummy for dem. For doobing
dis I wool gib yu ten cents.¡±
Being a Democrat and lover of the Brothers Grimm, I alas understood
Kay was my benefactor, a Good Witch who wanted to rain good fortune
down upon me, a poor Presco child.
¡°Hey thanks!¡± I said, and bent down to pick up the bags. And off to
the store I skipped.
Walking home, I woofed down my Hershey bar, and soda. Passing Kay¡¯s
house, I glanced her way, my pocked jingling with heavy coins. Life
was good to me that day. If Kay was looking out the window as I
passed, she might have been wearing a puzzled look as she wondered;
“Bear da hell is dat lil brascal goink wid my sooda-pop munny?”
Later that evening, the phone in the Presco home rang, and Rosemary
answered. Being an executive secretary, my mother had a professional
voice, a calming reassuring manner. Now she let out her famous laugh,
and hung up. With a smile she approached me and asked me if someone
had given me some pop bottles to take to the store. I told her I had.
Rosemary then told me I had absconded with the money I got from these
bottles, and had been tracked down ¨C somehow!
Giving me the money to make up for what I spent, my mother sent me on
my way to revisit the Old Crone, our beloved Irish Cailleach who
would give all the children around San Sebastian Street a taste of
Pathos. From our dear Crone we learned life was a tradgedy, even
unfair. Standing in Kay¡¯s tennis court in her over grown backyard, we
studied the weeds that broke through the playing surface. Touching
the decaying net, it crumbled like a spiders web. On this court Kay
served and vollied in her pure white tennis outfit, she the child of
Oakland socialites who lived on the very border of the wealthy
Piedmont district.
No one is certain if she ever drove her Stutz Bearcat, but it became
a hereditary job, a good source of incame when we Prescos came to
clean the dog shit Kay¡¯s black Cockerspanial dropped all around the
Stuz when she let it out in the garage to do her business.
Whenever Kay had to grocery shopping, or go to the Doctor of Dentist,
she would call her father downtown. In minutes an Oakland Cop Car
would pull up in front of Kay¡¯s house on Hollywood Street, as if it
were a Taxi. In Kay¡¯s dining room was a very large painting, a
panorama of Lake Merrit. It was rumored the Coakley family owned half
the property around this lake, and Kay was a millionaire.
The Coakleys came from Ireland, and one legend claims they descend
from Fair Rosamond. When I began to do a genealogical research of my
Rosamond ancestors, I wondered if Fair Rosamond was the angel that
appeared before my sisters, and Kay. If so, was she the entity who
was guiding me in my study of the Holy Grail?
The Black Panthers thought Kay¡¯s father was a ¡°racist dog¡±. My
Godfather was a sergeant on the Oakland police force, and he would
sometimes pull up in his squad car to pay a visit. Some of the
Oakland Cops who took Kay to the doctor would come down San Sebastian
street, stop in front of Ms. Smith¡¯s house, and pretend to be
answering her complaint that we kids were disturbing this other Old
Hag with our ball-play in the street. The truth was, Ms. Smith was an
Old Madam who was run out of San Francisco. Finding sanctuary in
Oakland, she kept a very young and very beautiful prostitute shut up
in her home, whose interior was filled with Chinese d¨¦cor, her walls
painted a deep cadmium red. The Oakland cops were there for two
hours or more, while we young boys waited for them to hear Ms. Smiths
tiresome complaint – yet again -and leave!
¡°What in the hell is taking him so long.¡± We would exclaim, tossing
the football in the air and catching it.
One raining evening I got off the bus, and found myself walking
behind the young prostitute through a walkway. She was wearing a
trenchcoat. The sound of her high heals and rain hitting the
sidewalk, put me in Paris, I a young artist from America, wondering
if I should purchase the pleasure of her company, or buy an empty
canvas. She felt my presence. We were all alone and lost in the
world. She and the world beckoned to me.
“Make me a man, for I have many things to do, places to go, and
wondersous thngs to see. To be a Man. Would this be a crime.”
Kay was one of us, a child who had no money of her own, and depended
upon a higher authority for a ride in automobile. Like us, she senced
there was a force that dealt out a dark attribute to the good and the
bad, the black and the white, the young and the old, with equal
indifference.
Lady Liberty is an Old Crone, a Rose of the World. How about Justice,
who beckons us to taste her tarts she maketh in her oven….and we
come away in chains?
Jon Presco
http://rougeknights.blogspot.com/
“That in fact, brother Huey P. Newton, who is now being confined
downtown, chained in the same jail, with the same anti-demonstrators,
anti-draft demonstrators, that in fact this draws something very
significant that we¡¯re going to try and work together on.”
¡°I am saying that J. Frank Coakley is a racist dog. I am saying that
this same racist dog is out to do the same thing to the anti-draft
demonstrators. I am saying that it¡¯s necessary for us to realize that
this is a real situation.¡±
http://www.hellooakland.com/Photos_Panoramic.Cfm
http://www.newsreel.us/panthers/index.htm
Cailleach, the Irish crone, known under many names and thought to
have been a goddess who married a series of husbands and passed from
youth to old age more than once. She still survives today as a lively
figure in modern Irish folklore. A symbol of the great mother in
continuous cycles of life, death and rebirth. She walks over the land
of the winter. As the days shorten she gives us the wisdom to let go
of what is not longer needed but keeps the seeds of rebirth tightly
clasped in her fist ready to fling into the spring. The Cailleach
lives in all of us. We are constantly changing, and readjusting our
lives from one life season to the next
Countless Irish myths tell how the Cailleach constructed huge mounds,
megaliths, and towers in a single night. Some of them are known by
names like ¡°one-night’s-work.¡± [Wood-Martin, 134] Scottish myths
often cast the Cailleach as a shaper of the landscape. She carried
earth and stones on her back to make the hills of Ross-shire.
Sometimes the basket or its strap broke, spilling the contents out to
form mounts like Ben Vaichaird and rock piles like Carn na Caillich.
Faeries called glaistigean are credited with similar land-building
feats. [MacKenzie, 164, 144] The Cailleach created the Hag’s Furrow
while ploughing. She turned up huge piles of stones while ploughing
on mount Schiehallion, the Caledonian faery hill. (Its Gaelic name,
S¨ªdh Chaillean, means ¡°Crone’s Mound.¡± Many other places are named
Beinne na Cailleach (her mount) and Sgr¨ªob na Cailleach (her
writing). Folklore says that the Crone turned into a boulder atop
Beinn na Callich, where a prehistoric cairn also stands. [MacKenzie,
144]
http://www.suppressedhistories.net/secrethistory/crones.html
dianavandenberg.no.sapo.pt/cronespage.htm
Oakland Cops Under U.N.’s Watchful Eye
by Brenda Payton
THERE’S NOTHING like making the list of the world’s worst government
violence against activists. The Oakland Police Department earned that
distinction for its assault on peaceful anti-war demonstrators at the
port last year. The action, in which police fired wooden dowels and
shot-filled bean bags at protesters, was noted in the recent report
of an investigator for the United Nations Commission on Human
Rights. “This alleged incident was the subject of a letter of
allegation by the Special Rapporteur on the question of torture and
the Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right
to freedom of opinion and expression …” reads the report. The
question of torture, that’s pretty scary. For the protesters who were
hit, the unprovoked attack was a form of torture. The more seriously
injured went to the hospital.
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0406-13.htm
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/object/article?
o=0&f=/c/a/2003/04/08/PROTEST.TMP
http://www.uslaboragainstwar.org/gallery.php?gal=17
http://www.sfgate.com/…/detail?blogid=3&entry_id=221
http://members.fortunecity.com/chtii/colclough/Cap1.htm
Speaking from the Black Panthers the Chairman and 2nd in command to
Huey Newton, Bobby Scheer. Applause. The seven indicted ummm..anti-
war, anti-draft demonstrators are downtown at 12th & Fallon in the
same jail with our Minister of Defense, Huey P. Newton. Now, we are
going to appeal because of the same Grand Jury that indicted Huey
within a matter of 22 minutes without even covering the evidence, the
so called evidence, that¡¯s supposedly been placed against Huey, the
ice mad dog grand jury that we¡¯re referring to. We¡¯re appealing to
you to support the fact that we don¡¯t need ice dog mad jurors we¡¯re
appealing to you to support the fact that we don¡¯t need racist
policeman who shot Huey, and we don¡¯t need racist policeman who
brutalized the heads of you. We¡¯re in fact putting this position that
we¡¯ve taken against the racist policeman who brutalized us in our
black, in our communities and bringing it to the level where it is.
That what Huey P. Newton said there were only three kinds of power. A
level where a group of people that control the economic situation or
a level of power where a group of people have a ownership of land.
That the third level of power commonly referred to as military power,
and we refer to as self-defense power, with a gun, is coming to
reality. We¡¯re saying that black people that protested police
brutality, and many of you that thought we were jivin¡¯, who thought
we didn¡¯t know what we were talking about because many black people
in the community probably couldn¡¯t answer your questions
articulately, that you are experiencing the same thing, that when you
go down in front of the anti-draft, and when you go over and you
demonstrate against Dean Russ that those ¡°P¡± cops will come down and
brutalize your heads just like they brutalized the heads of black
people in the black communities. We¡¯re sayin¡¯ now, that you can show
a direct relationship that¡¯s for real, and that¡¯s not abstract any
more. That you don¡¯t have to abstract what police brutality is like
when a club is there to crush your skull. That you don¡¯t have to
abstract what police brutality is like when there¡¯s a vicious service
revolver there to tear your flesh. That you can see, in fact, that
the real power, the power structure, and maintaining its racist
regime is manifested and it¡¯s occupying troops has manifested in it¡¯s
police department with guns and force. That in fact, black people,
the Black Panther Party for self-defense are educating black people
to the position continually that we will use arms to defend
ourselves.
That in fact, brother Huey P. Newton, who is now being confined
downtown, chained in the same jail, with the same anti-demonstrators,
anti-draft demonstrators, that in fact this draws something very
significant that we¡¯re going to try and work together on. Now some
people are probably wonderin¡¯ how in the hell is it that what they
would call the most militant group in the Country, can come along and
tell white people, that you, and I, are gonna go down to the court
house today at 2:00 at 12th & Fallon in Oakland. And we¡¯re goin¡¯ to
march around the courthouse and demonstrate the fact that we want
Huey P. Newton set free and that you want the anti-draft
demonstrators also set free. The mass, the masses of people who stand
against the power structure of Oakland. J. Frank Coakley, who first
started his career as a Naval attorney, in the Navy he was an
attorney, a ship blew up where 50 black men were working on the ship.
There were some more goods to be loaded off the ship but the 50 black
men said we don¡¯t wanna go back on the ship because we think that
it¡¯s very dangerous. And these 50 black men and Merchant Marines were
charged with mutiny. And J. Frank Coakley started his career by
prosecuting these black men and getting as much as 50 years in prison
for these black men. I am saying that J. Frank Coakley is a racist
dog. I am saying that this same racist dog is out to do the same
thing to the anti-draft demonstrators. I am saying that it¡¯s
necessary for us to realize that this is a real situation. I¡¯m not
going to argue black or white. I don¡¯t do that no more. In other
words, I stopped bein¡¯ a racist a long time ago. You haven¡¯t stopped
being racist though. But I¡¯m going to show you something. There¡¯s a
lot of people running around, and I can¡¯t blame ¡®em, and my culture,
I feel my culture¡¯s beautiful. But a lot of us have taken our culture
a little too far. Because when Huey and I decided we were gonna get
down to the real nitty-gritty we decided also we weren¡¯t going to
stoop to the level of a Klu Klux Klansman and hate a person just
because of the color of their skin. This is important, because this
is where racism starts.
http://bakhabaru.blogspot.com/2007/03/archeologists-find-undeniable-
proof-of.html
Descent from Charlemagne by way of Henry II, though improbable, is a
possibility if one dismisses the legend of the family’s exile in the
Midland forests at the time of the Norman Conquest. The Colcloughs
certainly did not share the Norman dread of the forests and of their
inhabitants, rationalised in the savage Norman code of forest laws,
and when in trouble were quite happy to take to the forests and to
associate on terms of cordiality with such forest denizens as Adam
Bell, Clym of the Clough, William of Cloudesley and “Robin Hood’s”
predecessors. One is reluctant, though, to dismiss the theory that
Shakespeare’s Duke in “As You Like It” was a Colclough.
“Fair Rosamond” Clifford had two sons by Henry II and to protect
these from kidnapping or murder by the minions of Queen Eleanor they
were brought up in concealment in the forest. Writers in later
centuries have identified them with Sir William Longsword and
Geoffrey, Archbishop of York, but the Dictionary of National
Biography points out that both these were born before their supposed
mother. Fair Rosamond died in 1177 but the Colclough family was
firmly established in Suffolk long before she or Henry II was born
and there is no record of any unaccounted additions to its numbers at
the end of the 12th century. However American genealogical
researchers have determinedly traced the Colclough origins to her.
Other fanciful origins include a William Cokely who was purportedly
married to a Danish princess and accompanied William of Normandy to
Hastings. His grandfather is given as Eliston Kokey, a German
chieftain. It has also been suggested that the origin of the name
referred to the cold ridge – the 700 foot high half mile long ridge
in Great Chell on the Western face of which stands the Westcliffe
Hospital which was originally the Stoke Union Workhouse, built in
1843. However as a patronymic it only appears in Staffordshire in the
middle of the 13th century and it seems certain that Selwyn and
Thomas are descended from an earlier family
Krassner, Paul, editor The realist no. 86 [featuring] The Oakland 7
by Frank Bardacke. the monthly, New York. Nov.-Dec., 1969, 32p.,
browned, faint signs of handling. The Frank Bardacke essay runs eight
full double-column pages. The Oakland 7 was the most important anti-
draft demo of the period. His account “contains,” he starts, “some
hitherto unrevealed dirt, a few laughs, a smattering of politics, and
a confession or two. I have been an Oakland 7 for some time now, and
as you read on, you will learn a lot about me. But this is not a
story of my life.. Alameda County District Attorney J. Frank Coakley
created the Oakland 7 a year and a half ago. He indicted seven
leaders of October 1967’s Stop the Draft Week for conspiracy to
commit three misdemeanors..”
In the modern era, the best-known DA was Earl Warren who joined the
office in 1920 as a deputy district attorney and was appointed DA in
1925. In 1939, he was elected Attorney General of California, and in
1946 he was elected Governor. Warren served as governor until 1953
when President Dwight Eisenhower appointed him Chief Justice of the
United States Supreme Court. As Chief Justice, Earl Warren is
probably best remembered as the author of the landmark case of
Miranda v. Arizona.
Warren’s successor as DA was his Chief Assistant, Ralph E. Hoyt. Hoyt
was DA until 1947 when he was appointed to the Superior Court by
Governor Warren. Hoyt was succeeded as DA by J. Frank Coakley who
served as District Attorney until 1969.
As DA, Coakley returned to the trial courts in 1955 to prosecute
Burton Abbott in one of the most highly-publicized cases in the
history of California. Abbott was charged with abducting and
murdering 14-year old Stephanie Bryan as she was walking home from
school in Berkeley. Abbott was convicted and sentenced to death. He
was executed in San Quentin’s gas chamber in 1957. For Coakley and
the DA’s Office, the 1960’s were a particularly difficult time
because of civil unrest and criminal acts associated with the free
speech movement, Vietnam War demonstrations, and the emergence of the
Black Panther Party in Oakland.
http://www.acgov.org/da/history.htm
http://online.ceb.com/CalCases/C2/45C2d697.htm
THE PEOPLE, Respondent, v. SMITH EDWARD JORDAN et al., Appellants.
COUNSEL
Edmund G. Brown, Attorney General, Clarence A. Linn, Assistant
Attorney General, Raymond M. Momboisse, Deputy Attorney General, J.
Frank Coakley, District Attorney (Alameda), Robert S. Anderson and
Richard C. Lynch, Deputy District Attorneys, for Respondent.
Vince Monroe Townsend, Jr., and Enrico Dell’Osso for Appellants.
OPINION
SHENK, J.
The defendants were convicted of first degree murder and sentenced to
suffer the penalty of death. Their motions for a new trial were
denied. They appeal from the judgments and from the orders denying
their motions for a new trial.
On Saturday evening, March 28, 1953, Charles Rose, a driver for the
Yellow Cab Company, was found slumped in a semiconscious condition
behind the wheel of his cab in front of a house located at 3428 Haven
Street, Oakland. The left rear door window was broken. There was
blood on the front seat. The radio microphone was off its bracket on
the dashboard. The ignition and lights were on, the brake was off,
the gear was in high, and the meter flag was still in the “running”
position. The driver was bleeding from four wounds on the back of his
head, one of which proved to be fatal, and there were abrasions and a
laceration on his right hand. He died several hours later.
http://online.ceb.com/CalCases/C2/45C2d697.htm
¨D [Date of Interview: November 24, 1970] ¨D
I Family Background
Feingold
Could we begin by your telling me something about your background?
Coakley
I was born in Oakland, California, just a few blocks from here at
Seventeenth and Grove.
Although my name is James Francis, it was abbreviated to Frank
Coakley because of the fact that my father’s name was James and my
mother, I guess, rather than be calling two James around the house,
decided to call me Francis. She had a brother whose name was Thomas
Francis.
Rosamond Press 
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