A TALE OF THREE CITIES: NEW YORK, L.A. AND SAN FRANCISCO IN OCTOBER OF ‘62 (14 page)

UCLA, who had caught up to and surpassed USC as a
football dynasty, was set back and would not regain their footing
until football coach Tommy Prothro and basketball coach John Wooden
led the Bruins into a period of sustained excellence in the 1960s.
USC was hit hard, going through a brutal one-victory football
season in 1957, while their baseball team was denied a National
Championship in 1959 because of NCAA penalties. When coach John
McKay was hired, they made a glorious comeback in 1962, going
unbeaten to capture their first National title since 1939.

But California took the biggest hit of all. This was
one of the greatest collegiate football programs in the nation. Its
“Wonder Teams” of the early 1920s are to this day considered one of
the greatest of all dynasties. When World War II broke out, Notre
Dame had won three National Championships (1924, 1929, 1930).
California had won four (1920, 1921, 1922, 1937). California
captured three consecutive PCC titles (1948-50), but a crucial test
of its national mettle, not to mention conference honor, was not
met when they were beaten in three straight Rose Bowls by Big 10
foes of varying degrees of greatness.

Until 1960, California’s all-around athletic program
was second only to USC’s, with a strong challenge from UCLA. The
Golden Bears beat George H.W. Bush’s Yale Bulldogs in the first
College World Series (1947) and repeated the act a decade later.
Legendary basketball coach Pete Newell led Cal to the 1959 National
Championship and a repeat Final Four performance in 1960. But an
incident in 1959, combined with changing socio-political dynamics
at the school, prophesied their demise.

USC featured twin brothers, Mike and Marlin McKeever,
on their defensive line. Known as the “Twin holy terrors of Mt.
Carmel High,” they were monsters of size, strength and intimidation
of the day. Hopes of restoring USC to the greatness known under
Howard Jones were pinned on them.

In a 1959 game at Berkeley, Mike McKeever tackled
Cal’s Steve Bates. Bates was injured on the play. There were
immediate accusations that it was a late hit and a dirty play.
California actually
sued USC
over the play.
Sports
Illustrated
made a big splash about it, using it as an example
of increased violence in college football.

During the course of pre-trial, a film was produced
which demonstrated that McKeever’s hit was clean, thus exonerating
USC and its star player. Instead of apologizing and admitting its
error, Cal simply began lying about the event in a shallow effort
to make USC look like thugs, much as they had done 25 years
earlier.

Frustrated over increasing domination by the Trojans
and Bruins, California chose not to try harder and compete with
greater intensity, but rather to de-emphasize sports; to try and
put forth the fiction that victory on the field of play was really
not important, in a vain effort to de-emphasize the greatness of
the L.A. schools (which under the likes of John McKay and John
Wooden were embarking on a period of total sports dominance never
equaled before or since).

Cal’s sports fortunes would sink and sink and sink
for decades. It can be argued that, while they have certainly
improved, they never recovered from athletic de-escalation. A
political dynamic began to play out as the 1960s began. USC was
seen as the conservative, patriotic, more Republican institution.
Cal and Stanford took on Left-wing tendencies, and found every
reason to despise Southern California – the school and the region –
for reasons that extended well beyond athletic competition.
Berkeley – the school and the city - became the home of the free
speech and anti-war movements. Stanford, a largely conservative,
private institution, took just as big a turn to the Left, and
expressed just as much hatred of USC as Cal. This was odd, since
its students came from at least as much wealth as those from the
dumbly derided University of
Spoiled Children
. Cal and
Stanford students inanely waved credit cards (which belonged to
them!) and did Nazi salutes when the Trojan band played “Conquest,”
which they did regularly as USC demolished its northern “opponents”
in the manner of Caesar defeating Gaul.

As Vietnam heated up, the social intensity became
more pronounced. Stanford went so far as to play a “tribute to
Chairman Mao,” the leader of Communist China who, at the time of
the “tribute,” was engaging in the Cultural Revolution, in which an
estimated 55 million human beings were slaughtered under his rule.
Berkeley’s performance was even more atrocious. There is little way
to describe its campus in the 1960s other than to say it was the
de facto
staging grounds of American Communism, giving aid
and comfort to Hanoi and all enemies of America. Varsity athletes
at Berkeley were disdained almost as much as uniformed soldiers.
Sports were viewed as
bourgeoisie capitalism
. When the
Oakland Raiders came into existence, they were forced to play first
at Kezar Stadium in San Francisco, and then a local high school
field until the Coliseum could be built. Cal denied them use of
Memorial Stadium because they felt that athletes
being paid to
perform
was an example of capitalist inequality somehow similar
to slave auctions.

Cal’s decision to de-emphasize sports came at an
inopportune time in that its East Bay surroundings were going
through a period of sports glory that may never have seen its
equal. Incredible athletes came from the nearby fields and gyms of
Oakland, Alameda, and Berkeley itself. Within a relatively short
time, this area had produced the likes of Jackie Jensen, Billy
Martin, Frank Robinson, Bill Russell, Paul Silas, Vada Pinson, Curt
Flood, Len Gabrielson, Joe Morgan, Joe Caldwell, and Willie
Stargell. San Francisco would mirror Cal, in that this once-great
sports paradise became a “dead zone” of prep athletic talent, but
in the 1950s they had their “last hurrah.” Basketball star K.C.
Jones of Commerce High School teamed with Bill Russell to lead the
University of San Francisco to two straight NCAA titles and 60
consecutive victories before they both embarked on Hall of Fame
careers in Boston. Bob St. Clair, Gino Marchetti and Ollie Matson
played high school and college football in San Francisco before
becoming pro Hall of Famers. 49ers Hall of Famer John Henry Johnson
played St. Mary's College in Moraga. Jim Gentile was a
power-hitting San Franciscan who had a fine career with the
Baltimore Orioles. Doug Camilli and Gino Cimoli both played for the
Dodgers.

But despite the tremendous sports talent growing up
in their very neighborhood, few found there way to Cal after
Oakland’s Jackie Jensen, an All-American halfback who later was the
American League’s Most Valuable Player with the 1958 Boston Red
Sox.

Both Cal and Stanford had been imbued with every
gift that God can bestow upon His children; beautiful environments
set in marvelous mountain and canyon settings; great weather; prime
locations that combined close proximity to an important city while
maintaining suburban trappings of safety and convenience; large
populations to feed it in an atmosphere of intellectual curiosity;
and great high school sports programs naturally prepping future
All-Americans for Golden Bear and Indian glory! These colleges both
wasted its gifts, resulting in sports defeats and much scorn.

UCLA was not immune to Vietnam War protests, but
remained relatively moderate in comparison with the over the top
anti-Americanism at Cal and Stanford. The social rivalries of the
colleges were mirrored by the populations as a whole. There was
certainly unrest in the Southland. Latinos chafed under white rule
despite making up a huge portion of the populace. Blacks were
routinely roughed up by the almost all white L.A.P.D., and in 1965
would explode in the Watts riots. But Southern California remained
a city with a white, Christian, Republican base. Its Mayor, Sam
Yorty, was a reactionary Right-winger, at least by California
standards. Like Reagan, he saw fit to switch to the Republicans.
Television shows like
Dragnet
portrayed cops as “do good”
straight arrows keeping the city safe from unrighteous
elements.

Even Hollywood, despite years of Communist
infiltration, was still ruled by the last of the studio bosses;
patriarchal, conservative patriots like Darryl Zanuck and Jack
Warner. In 1962, Zanuck produced his
magnum opus
,
The
Longest Day
starring John Wayne leading a cast of stars. It
portrayed America’s messianic role in the “salvation” of Europe via
the monumental D-Day invasion of June 6, 1944, when U.S. forces
began the liberation of France and Europe from the clutches of Nazi
evil.

The social rivalry between Northern and Southern
California, which was becoming evident among college football
crowds, was starting to make itself apparent at Giants-Dodgers
games; not at Dodger Stadium, where fans just enjoyed baseball, but
at Candlestick Park. It was as if the inferiority of Candlestick
Park, so glaring and obvious, demonstrated a like inferiority among
the Bar Area citizenry. The result was intense hatred of the Los
Angeles Dodgers, regardless of the fact that much of its roster
consisted of players from outside the state.

Foul language, thrown garbage, and anti-social
behavior was just beginning to mark the action of the Giants’ fans
in 1962, although it would intensify and become much worse over
ensuing decades. The unique differences between San Francisco and
Los Angeles now gave the ancient Giants-Dodgers rivalry something
entirely unique and different from its New York days. In the Big
Apple, both teams chafed under Yankee dominance. Neither the
Dodgers’ Brooklyn neighborhood or the Giants’ Harlem slum had
substantially greater or worse attributes than the other; both were
inferior. The underdog role was filled by both teams and their
supporters in a city where winning, power and success were valued
above all other traits.

In many ways, the move to California had intensified
things despite adding some 337 miles to the team’s physical
separation from each other. The distance created a larger chasm
that now demonstrated itself in the weather; the cityscape
characteristics of L.A. and San Francisco; the general attitude
towards each area’s surrounding physical environment; and numerous
other factors.

By 1962, there were few areas of common interest.
Everything seemed to be different, and therefore to be compared
with one or the other claiming superiority: the newspapers, the
uniforms, the announcers, the stadiums . . .

California was in boom times, but even this caused
angst. The fuel, armaments, aerospace, and shipbuilding industries,
which were an economic juggernaut, had come to be known as the
Military Industrial Complex. Despite its benefits - strength
against Communism, its tax base, and employment for thousands -
Northern Californians looked askance at it. President Dwight
Eisenhower, in his closing address of 1961, had warned that
Americans not allow it to be the dominant political
ethos
of
the modern era. The increasing anti-war activism of the Bay Area
would, over the course of the decade, deride it and, of course, its
Los Angeles environs, as evil.

The automotive industry also had a political element
attached to it. Los Angelenos loved their cars. San Franciscans
loved their cable cars. People in the Bay Area chastised the
Southland for their smog. L.A. was virtually the only major
metropolis with no rapid transit system and smog was rampant there.
Automakers, despite employing thousands at factories in the state,
were excoriated.

"It was an old conceit, this belief in the
automobile as haven in a heartless world, and of the freeway as an
untrammeled frontier," wrote author David Rieff. "Cowboys don't
ride buses. The act feels like a demotion from one's
Americanness."

Northern Californians and Berkeley Leftists had a
difficult time coming to grips with their own contributions to
atomic and nuclear arms research. Cutting edge technological
breakthroughs took place at the Lawrence Laboratories in Berkeley
and Livermore.

Northern Californians found the musical tastes of
Los Angelenos frivolous. The "surf craze" stylings of Dick Dale and
the Deltones, The Surfaris, Ventures, Jan and Dean, and of course
The Beach Boys, were optimistic refrains of American culture.
Writer Michael Stern called it a "carefree cosmology of twanging
guitars, hot-rod cars, the smells of suntan lotion and sizzling
cheeseburgers at an oceanside drive-in, and girls in bikinis and
guys in tight white Levi's . . . a fountain of eternal youth,
represented by the ocean's waves and a sun that always shone."

Los Angelenos looked at the Bohemianism of San
Francisco's North Beach and derided it as "weird . . . queer . . .
un-American." This was the beatnik culture of Allen Ginsburg, the
promotion of the gay lifestyle, the advocation for abortion as a
"liberating" force for women "enslaved" by Christianity and
marriage vows. Writers, poets, and musicians descended upon North
Beach and the Sausalito houseboat community that would produce The
Grateful Dead, Jefferson Starship and other offbeat rock bands.
Strip clubs on Broadway flaunted vice laws. Jazz stylings were
performed at the Purple Onion and hungry i. Comedians Lenny Bruce
and Mort Sahl aired all manner of grievance against society. The
Kingston Trio made music a folk/political statement. Literary
voices of California had traditionally been liberal, slanted
towards Northern or Central California: William Saroyan. Jack
Kerouac, John Steinbeck. Filmmaker George Lucas would make the
seminal movie about 1962.
American Graffiti
portrayed the
Central California enclave of Modesto.

At Cal-Berkeley, the Free Speech Movement was
underway, petitioning against anything and everything. The Left,
emboldened by Senator Joseph McCarthy's fall and not yet disabused
of their notions by the Venona Project, protested the "Blacklist"
of Hollywood's Communist screenwriters and the House Un-American
Activities Committee, which held hearings at San Francisco City
Hall. Young Democrat President John F. Kennedy was picketed at
Berkeley's Greek Theatre in 1962 because of the Bay of Pigs and the
growing military presence in Vietnam. He was also too moderate for
their tastes when it came to civil rights.