One
of my father’s favorite quotations was this one from Oliver Wendell
Holmes Jr.: "... as life is action and passion, it is required of a man
that he should share the passion and action of his time at peril of
being judged not to have lived." Bud Reynolds certainly shared the
passion and action of his time. At the age of 75, he had this letter
published in the Chron:
San Francisco Chronicle Tuesday April 22, 1969
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
The Reality of Sex
Editor—Watching
and listening to those “defenders of decency” before the Board of
Education meeting in Sacramento recently aroused in me a great
retroactive concern for America. I wonder we ever survived.
I
was born on the frontier in 1894 when this country was mostly rural. We
did not come by the reality of sex through lectures or books. Long
before I was ten, I had witnessed sexual intercourse and the process of
birth of all the farm animals. No teacher had to tell us of the birds
and the bees.
Although
many puritanical mothers gave their daughters some hellishly
destructive ideas of human sex, sex au naturel was all around us, and
taken almost as casually as the changing colors of the fields and the
spell of the seasons. But even then there were guardians of decency who
wanted to protect the upcoming generation from reality. Happily they
couldn’t appear via the idiot box in every household, so their audience
and influence was minimal.
Contrasting
my environment then with that of the youngsters growing up in a housing
development of the sterile suburbs, underscores the emptiness of life
for the young today. It also explains why a Rafferty can make a career
of railing at teachers who bring reality into the classroom.
A
child has no inborn idea of good and bad. He takes reality as he is
exposed to it quite as a matter of course. The inescapable processes of
life are just reality if presented casually. Children kept in ignorance
are the victims of thwarted curiosity of themselves and their
contemporaries.
Nothing
in nature is alien to human curiosity. when we put a taboo on any
subject, we increase and distort curiosity about it. And since curiosity
fed with knowledge is the process of growth and the path to maturity,
it is a priceless attribute of youth we should cherish and nourish.
WILLIAM REYNOLDS
Berkeley
This was before AIDS, before it was discovered that HPV infection
increases the likelihood of cervical cancer. What fiery letter would my
father have written about ineffectual “abstinence only” AIDS prevention
programs, or the fight to keep children from being inoculated against
HPV?
I
just turned up my dad’s letter in one of the two unopened boxes from
Ellen’s that I discovered in the business office while looking for
something else—the way I usually discover anything.
SAM HINTON AND FRIENDS
I went to folksinger and instrumentalist Sam Hinton’s ninety-first
birthday party the other day. He’s in a wheelchair now, and way slowed
down, but I was heartened to hear that at the age of eighty, he was
still doing two and three assemblies a day, 200 days a year, around
Southern California. Good party. He can’t play anymore, but there were
at least four players there, and he can still sing some. His friend Adam Miller
was there, singing some of my favorite Sam Hinton numbers, including
“Whoever Shall Have Some Good Peanuts” which you can catch on Sam’s
Folkways album of the same name.
A few days later, I got this email from Adam:
Dear Nancy,
I
have just observed, in "Marijuana Grower's Handbook" by Ed Rosenthal
(1998, Quick American Archives, Oakland, CA), page III, it says:
This book is dedicated to Pete Seeger
"God bless the grass that grows through the cracks..."
-Adam Miller
©2008 by Nancy Schimmel
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
ACTION AND PASSION
