“Yeah, Ellie took the heat for a lot of people,” Rick said.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, there was obviously someone who gave her the grenade that she threw into the building. She never named that person. And there were other women with Ellie that night, but none of them ever did jail time.”
“Were they arrested?”
“Yes, the police had all of them in custody within two days. In fact, some people speculated that there must have been an informant because it seemed like the cops knew exactly who was in the group.”
“But they never got charged?”
“Since Ellie was the one who actually threw the grenade into the building, the police decided to make an example of her.”
“Can you give me the names of the other women?” I asked.
Rick and Gus looked at each other.
“It was a long time ago.”
“I’m supposed to be writing a story on Ellie Foley,” I pointed out.
“Most of them moved out of the area,” Gus said, “except for Karen and….” He stopped abruptly.
“Except who?”
Gus cleared his throat. “Well your mom was part of that group.”
“No way!”
Gus and Rick looked at each other.
“There’s something more you’re not telling me,” I said.
Gus looked down at the table. Rick was the one who spoke up. “Well, everyone thought your mom was the informant.”
Chapter 7
Gus Holliday
Gus was attracted to Ellie Foley, of course. He didn’t know a man in their circles who wasn’t. But he knew she would never sleep with him.
He was a geeky kid, the head of the debate club at his Catholic high school, and the editor of his school newspaper. He went to the prom with his cousin and he had never had sex when he entered the University of Washington as a freshman in 1966. He was pretty sure he was the only virgin on campus and he was determined to change that as soon as possible. The problem was that women weren’t all that interested in him.
It didn’t help that he still lived at home with his parents, in a neat little brick Tudor house in Ballard. His mother didn’t want to let him go, her baby boy, the youngest of her five children. Once he was gone, she would have to face the emptiness of her life, with her husband working long hours at Boeing. She did Gus’s laundry and cooked him dinner, but she expected him to be home every day at five PM.
Gus gravitated towards the political science and philosophy classes in college, even though they were held in huge auditoriums. Always at the top of his class in high school, now he had to struggle to absorb some of the theories being proposed by his teachers, but he felt his mind come alive in a way he had not experienced before. The platform of assumptions he had built to understand the world was being dismantled underneath him. It was both a liberating feeling and a terrifying one. It was something he tried to explain to his mother but it scared her.
By sophomore year, he managed to find a room to rent in a house full of students in the nearby University District. His mother didn’t want him to leave—she cried the whole time he was loading up the car with his belongings—but he had earned enough money to pay the rent while working at Sears during the summer. He had a mattress on the floor which he inherited from the previous tenant and a bunch of milk crates to hold his stuff. A door on top of some file cabinets served as a desk and he scrounged a lamp from a dumpster. He began to layer the walls with posters he got from telephone poles.
His sense of design which had never been appreciated in high school, where the art teacher had insisted they copy Old Masters, began to wake up. He reveled in the colors, the lines, the wacky fonts. Pretty soon he was designing posters for the band that practiced in the basement of the house, and, as his work became well known, he was asked to design posters for other bands and contribute cartoons to the university paper.
Hanging out at concerts had its side benefits and he was finally bringing home long-haired chicks to share the mattress on the floor. He grew a beard and let his hair grow. He went home less and less often. His mother always cried and his father told him to cut his hair or he would never get a job. But he did get a job, working for a printer in the U District who let him use the equipment at night to print his posters.
He made posters for concerts at and he made posters advertising marches and demonstrations. One of his girl friends introduced him a political group called RAG, short for Revolutionary Action Group. They met at various houses: Marty Stern’s apartment in graduate student housing. Boo’s shabby house in Wallingford. The living room of the funky mansion where Rick lived with a bunch of other graduate students on Capitol Hill.
The girl friend moved on but Gus stayed involved. One of the many ideas they floated was the idea of starting an underground paper, a place where they could get across their views. The university maintained a tight control over the university paper. They spent hours sitting around smoking dope and coming up with ideas and tossing around names. Eventually they settled on the Freebie. They even scrounged together enough money to pay for it.
Once they had pasted up the first issue, Gus took it to his boss who threw the pages in his face. “This is trash! This is pornography! I won’t print this garbage!
Maybe it was the line drawing of a bare-breasted Amazon on the front cover or maybe it was the manifesto from RAG advocating violence as a way to end the war. It didn’t matter. Gus quit. He couldn’t continue to work for someone who would deny him his First Amendment right to express his opinion about the current government.
The other guys, recognizing his sacrifice for the cause, made him the editor and gave him the money they had raised. Gus used it to rent a small office on the second floor of a building on University Avenue, the site of all the action around the University. Then he set out to find a printer. To his surprise, it was his dad who provided the contact: one of his co-workers at Boeing had a printing press in his basement.
A few weeks later, the first edition of the Freebie hit the streets. Gus was suddenly at the center of a swirling nexus of information and instigation. Every time a demonstration was planned, he knew about it in advance. Writers circled around him like bees to a flower, begging for opportunities to turn in pieces and poems. The little office was always a hub of activity with people coming and going, gossip flowing, beer pouring, dope smoking and music playing.
It was hard keeping up with his school work and eventually he quit going to class. Real life seemed much more important. His girlfriend got pregnant and they had to go through the pain of an abortion, followed by a break-up when she claimed he wasn’t paying attention to her feelings. It was shortly afterwards that he made a play for Ellie. She just laughed at him. At the time she was living with a guy who looked like a biker. He assumed he was just not her type. She seemed to like them rough.
After the ROTC bombing, he was glad she had turned him down. Reporting on that story was difficult enough. He had to walk a careful line, expressing sympathy for the victim, a truly likeable guy it seemed, this Kirby Jackson, a black man who had grown up in Seattle, a hard-working bachelor who was providing a home for his brother’s ex-wife and children, who were now homeless. At the same time, the situation had been horribly mishandled by the administration. No one was supposed to be in the building. A warning had been delivered but failed to get to the custodial staff. The Amazons apologized but were unrepentant. According to them, the death of Kirby Jackson was “collateral damage.”
The story got picked up by the mainstream media and the Freebie was suddenly at the center of a controversy. What right did the paper have to shield its sources? Obviously someone knew who had thrown the grenade. The local police invaded the Freebie’s tiny office and trashed it, smashing typewriters, dumping file cabinet drawers on the floor, carrying off armloads of paper. He and his staff took to sleeping in the office. They met their sources at taverns like the Blue Moon where information was passed in a whisper or a sogg
y napkin later burned. The printing press was moved, in a top secret operation, to the basement of the RAG house.
It was no surprise to anyone in the know when Ellie was arrested. What was surprising was the division it caused in the political scene. Some people wanted nothing to do with her and tried to distance themselves. On the other hand, membership in RAG tripled. Ellie became a kind of heroine. Posters of her in her miniskirt and fringed brown leather jacket, her fist thrust into the air, appeared on telephone poles and were sold across the country.
Since Gus had created and printed the poster, he began to make a little more money than he was making from selling the Freebie, though they were now printing 11,000 copies every issue. He fell in love with the woman he would later marry. Anne was one of the staff photographers. In fact, she was the one who had taken the photo of Ellie. They donated one third of their take to Ellie’s legal fees, the rest they split.
They moved in together to an apartment in an old brick building in the U District. They bought a sofa (at a thrift shop, Anne reupholstered it in plum velvet) and they had a real bed to sleep on, a queen size mattress up on a box springs off the floor and covered with an Indian print bedspread. Anne filled the house with indoor plants and framed photographs. Gus learned to cook, because she hated cooking. His spaghetti became famous. He got the recipe from Silvia Stern.
Under Anne’s steadying influence and her constant encouragement, Gus began to ponder other ways to make a difference in the community. Eventually he would step down as editor and start a community council to address some of the issues of the U District.
But it was important for him to keep the Freebie going during Ellie’s trial. The misinformation in the mainstream media was appalling. They raked through all the unsavory details of Ellie’s life, including her dancing nude and her use of drugs and her famous statement about smashing monogamy. She was made out to be some sort of she-devil with a violent streak, a hatred of authority, and a careless disregard towards human life.
Gus spent hours in the courtroom and hours going over the legal strategy with his old friend, Marty Stern. He began to suspect there was something between Marty and Ellie. He noticed the way they always oriented to each other in any room, the spark in their eyes when they looked at each other, how they always found a way to touch each other.
But he would never say anything to Marty’s wife, Silvia. Everyone knew she had quite a temper. And Silvia had just given birth to a baby she named Rachel.
Chapter 8
It was one thing to read about a place; it was another to be there, to stand at the site, to smell the scents, to hear the sounds, to grasp the geography, to see the shadows cast by the sun. I am still hoping for the day when a case will require a research trip to Italy but for now a trip to the University of Washington seemed in order. Most of the early events of Ellie’s life had played out there: demonstrations, marches and the defining moment when a grenade smashed through the window of the ROTC building, killing a janitor and sending a young woman to federal prison for ten years.
I parked in the huge underground parking lot which was virtually empty and echoed with my footsteps. I was still shaken by the possibility that my mother had been an informant. Despite her faults, my mother is deeply loyal. After all, she stayed married to my father for twenty years, despite his frequent affairs. It’s true, she has become more and more conservative over time but why would she betray the woman who my father later defended? It didn’t make sense. I hoped to find answers on the UW campus.
I emerged, via a staircase, into the expanse of Red Square, the central gathering place on campus, named after the red of its brick surface rather than for any political philosophy. On this sleepy summer afternoon, Red Square contained more pigeons than people. I passed a trio of young women in skimpy skirts chattering in a language I assumed was Japanese; they were seated on the benches near a geometric sculpture that looked like a huge pencil balanced on its tip.
The Suzzallo library sits at one end of the Square. It’s my favorite building on campus. Not just because it’s a library. I love its Gothic look with pointed arches and broad slate steps that lead under pointed arches into vast rooms with vaulted ceilings. I love the stone stairway, its broad treads that twist up past leaded windows into a long room criss-crossed with elaborately carved timbers. I love the rows of old magazines, each one a time capsule of years past with ads for obsolete products, fading black and white photographs, and archaic language.
Unfortunately, the newspapers I wanted were located in the Special Collections department which is down in the basement in the new addition to the library. I exited the old section of the library under a sculpture of crows flying through a vast foyer, crossed under a glass-enclosed pedestrian bridge that linked the two buildings, and went down the stairway to the Special Collections desk.
I had to register and learn the rules. I must leave all my belongings in a locker. I must take only single sheets of paper and a pencil with me into the reference area. I must fill out a card with my personal information. I must request the material I wanted—old copies of the student newspaper, the Daily, and the Freebie—on another form. When I was done, the librarian buzzed me into the reference area, a big but empty room, filled with tables and chairs, surrounded by metal shelves containing books, for instance, a complete set of yearbooks.
The yearbook for 1969 had an Op Art cover design and opened with a fantastic spread of atmospheric and artistic photographs. As I waited, I flipped through the pages, amused and amazed by the hairdos (teased bouffants for some of the women) and pages devoted to sorority royalty: all those sweethearts and queens. Where were they now, I wondered. Married and raising children? Working as heads of corporations? There was no index by name, so it was hard to find any of the people I was tracking.
The librarian rang a bell to alert me to the arrival of the material I had requested.
“This is all we have available right now,” she said, handing me a box that contained copies of the student paper, The Daily. “The copies of the Freebie are in deep storage. We could get them for you tomorrow.”
“That’s fine,” I said.
“I notice that you’re interested in the late Sixties,” she said. “We also have a collection of ephemera related to the Vietnam War.”
“I would love to see that.”
“Great. I’ll send for that as well. However, you can only look through one box at a time….” Her tone was apologetic.
“I’ll move through this quickly,” I said. But it was hard. I love reading old newspapers and I always get sucked in by the stories that have nothing to do with my current line of research. Why was that student athlete suspended? I wondered what happened to him.
I convinced myself to focus on the period around the bombing, but I did not learn anything new, certainly nothing that would tell me if my mother had been involved, either as a participant or as an informant.
I did find a short history of RAG in one issue. A splinter group of SDS the group had constellated around a charismatic sociology professor, Richard Feldman, who had been offered a position at the UW after being fired from a small Midwestern college because of his radical views. I realized with a shock that I had just met Rick. In his youth, he had a cherubic face surrounded by a frizzy halo of curls.
Most of the participants lived in communal households scattered throughout Seattle where they apparently practiced “free love.” “We believe in smashing monogamy,” said Ellie Foley who was mentioned as the most articulate female spokesperson for the group.
A picture showed a group of shaggy-haired young men with beards and long-haired young women. They looked so young; I realized they were probably all in their early twenties, not old enough to drink or vote. My father was in the front row. He wore his hair in a Jewish fro: all dark curls. Unlike many of the other men, he was clean-shaven. His dark eyes were on the woman who stood in the foreground.
Ellie stood in a defiant posture, legs planted, wearing knee-high l
eather boots, a leather mini-skirt and a tight black top, her long hair, parted in the middle, spilling over her shoulders. She looked vaguely familiar to me. In the back row, barely visible, I caught a glimpse of my mother. She wore her dark hair in two long braids. Her expression was drawn, even timid. She looked so vulnerable and a bit lost.
The next issue featured an anti-war rally in Red Square. The main speaker was Boo Riley, who had started a chapter of Vietnam Vets Against the War on the UW campus. He was a big guy, with long blond hair and a Fu Manchu moustache. The name Riley seemed familiar and I flipped back through my notes. At first, I didn’t see it. Then as I flipped past the page where I had written the names of Matt’s platoon members a name jumped off the page. Riley. Of course. On the personnel roster, he was listed as William Riley.
When I left the library the sun was still shining down warming the bricks. I decided to head over to the Eastlake Marina and let Matt know I had found another one of his platoon members.
Most people have a romantic picture of houseboats in Seattle thanks to the movie, Sleepless in Seattle, but Matt’s houseboat is anything but romantic. It’s one of the older houseboats, just a shack really, set on top of a raft on top of some rusting barrels. But the view is romantic. It’s out at the end of the dock, past all the fancy modern houseboats with their leaded windows and skylights and built-in window boxes, out where the wake from any passing boat can make the whole thing start rocking gently and where you can sit on the deck on a warm summer night with a gin and tonic in your hand and gaze across the dark waters of Lake Union at the glowing lights of the skyscrapers in downtown Seattle.
That view and the drinks lured me into a relationship with Matt, but it ended almost as quickly as it began when I realized that his views on pretty much everything were diametrically opposed to mine. I studied to be a counselor and Matt thinks counseling is a form of brainwashing which turns people into conformists. He believes that violence is justified in the pursuit of good and I’m a pacifist who thinks violence is never justified. He’s a steak and potatoes guy while I’m a vegetarian.
Hard Rain Page 5