Freewheelin' In The Bronx 1971 (ix)

Walking north and northwest from my East 189th Street apartment in the Bronx for a long time one afternoon in April 1971 eventually brought me into the southeastern area of Yonkers and the eastern side of McClean Avenue. Walking west on McClean Avenue, the neighborhood began to look familiar, since, when I was a child in the 1950s, my parents had often driven through the same neighborhood whenever we visited one of my uncles and his family, who owned a house whose backyard was adjacent to the New York Central (later owned by Penn Central, ConRail and then MetroNorth and Amtrack) railroad tracks. In the early 1970s, all the streets and houses looked a lot smaller to me than I had remembered them being during the 1950s. The circular drive on which the front of my uncle's house was located, for example, seemed to now have a much smaller circumference than it had had when I was a little kid.

Although I walked by my uncle's house where I had played around in as a child on numerous weekend visits, whenever my father chose to drag his wife and two kids to spend the afternoon with his older brother and sister-in-law, I did not ring the bell or knock on the door of my uncle and aunt to say "hello." By early 1971, my uncle and aunt in Yonkers realized that I had rejected nearly all of their culturally straight, materialistic, lower-middle-class values and, despite having gotten good marks in the public school system, I did not now look like I was going to become a lawyer, medical doctor or an accountant and become very rich in monetary terms. And by early 1971, I, in turn, felt very distant from them on a political, philosophical, cultural and personal level. On issues like white racism, they seemed very backward politically and morally; and they seemed like they would be very much opposed to the kind of revolutionary change in the United States that I was hoping to try to help create in the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and 21st century.

So despite the fond childhood memories from the 1950s that I had of my uncle and aunt who lived in Yonkers, I quickly walked by the 1920s-built house where they still lived that they had purchased and moved into from the South Bronx in 1949. And I only saw and spoke to them on two more occasions in the early 1970s when they were both still alive: once, when they visited my parents' apartment in Queens when I also happened to be visiting there; and on the day and evening of my mother's funeral. 

Aside from seeming smaller to me than it had seemed when I was a kid, Yonkers in the early 1970s still looked pretty much the same, on the surface, as it did in the 1950s. It did not seem to have been affected very much by any of the 1960s social, cultural, and political turbulence; and it still seemed culturally straight, although it's possible that there had been some kind of urban rebellion incidents and some kind of local Civil Rights Movement protests in the African-American section of the town at some point during the 1960s or summer of 1970.

Freewheelin' In The Bronx 1971 (viii)

Around the Grand Concourse and Fordham Road there were at least three movie houses in the Spring of 1971. And it was in a movie house on the Grand Concourse in April or May of 1971 that I first saw the movie Catch 22. Around the same time, on a Saturday night, I also saw Costa Gavras’ Z movie and the movie about a police cover-up and police corruption in Italy during the late 1960s, Investigation Of A Citizen Above Suspicion. Since the Bronx movie house was filled to capacity on the Saturday night I saw Z and Investigation Of A Citizen Above Suspicion, and most of the audience consisted of culturally straight white working-class residents from the Bronx neighborhood who were over 50 years old, I mistakenly assumed that even the Hollywood film distributors were now going to be willing to market politically radical films in the 1970s; and that this was an indication that, if even Hollywood was recognizing how politically corrupt the System was, Revolution was still going to happen in the 1970s, as quickly as Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin had indicated it was going to happen.

Yet when I heard Jerry Rubin speak at Fordham University one afternoon before an anti-war student group in the student union building on Fordham’s Bronx campus in early May of 1971, Rubin seemed less upbeat about the prospect of Revolution happening quickly in the USA than he had been during the previous academic year—despite the fact that his follow-up book to Do It!—the book We Are Everywhere—had just recently been published.

Observing that, for the first time in four years, there had not been a “spring anti-war offensive” by U.S. anti-war students on U.S. campuses in the Spring of 1971, Rubin attributed the relative U.S. campus calm during the 1970-1971 academic year to “the four deadly bullets at Kent State.” In Rubin’s view, although anti-war yippies were “everywhere” in 1971, the realization that Pig Amerika was willing to kill its own white children rather than end its war in Indochina had scared large numbers of the rebellious white students of the 1969-1970 academic year from continuing their rebellious anti-war activism on campus during the 1970-1971 academic year, in the aftermath of the Kent State and Jackson State Massacres.

Freewheelin' In The Bronx 1971 (vii)

When I wished to mingle more with people in April and May of 1971, I would walk west along Fordham Road, past Webster Avenue and then to the Grand Concourse and towards Jerome Avenue. Sometimes I would take a left and walk south on University Avenue towards the NYU Uptown campus in the Bronx, which still hadn’t yet been sold to CUNY and renamed Bronx Community College, and stop at a local branch of the New York Public Library around there. A few times I walked around the NYU Uptown campus, but I can’t recall talking with anybody there or noticing any political activity going on there in the Spring of 1971.

Near West 184th or West 183rd St. and the Grand Concourse, however, there was still some kind of a Movement storefront run by a collective of a few ex-New Left student radicals who had joined either SDS’s Weatherman faction for a short time, before it disappeared into the underground, or PL’s SDS Worker-Student Alliance faction. I stopped in there once and spoke with a white Movement woman in her mid-20s who was staffing the storefront that day.

She seemed to be anti-war and socialist in her politics and someone who would be considered physically appealing by most men. But by June of 1971 she seemed to have gotten discouraged about the possibility that ex-New Left student radicals like her were going to be able to have much success interesting anybody in the Bronx neighborhood surrounding her collective’s storefront in getting involved in the Movement. And she seemed to be on the verge of burning-out herself as an activist.

Not feeling any personal warmth or enthusiasm radiating from her in the storefront, I wasn’t tempted to volunteer to work politically with her collective in the Bronx in June of 1971. In addition, by June of 1971, I was starting to worry again about where I would get some more money to survive economically during the Summer of 1971, and I did not feel the gradualist approach to building a Movement, that her collective still seemed to be into, would provide any kind of relief to my developing personal economic survival problems, as the Summer of 1971 approached.

Freewheelin' In The Bronx 1971 (vi)

Sometimes I would continue walking eastward on Pelham Parkway, a few blocks east of White Plains Road. But if I wanted to explore the neighborhood much further east on Pelham Parkway, I would usually wait till the weekend and just hop on the bus that took you to Pelham Bay Park, and look out the bus window at the culturally straight people, walking out of the culturally straight-looking Pelham Parkway apartment buildings and houses to get into their cars, go shopping or enjoy the springtime weather on the weekends. On a few occasions, both during the week and on weekends, I would spend some time walking north on White Plains Road, under the elevated IRT line tracks, to explore the Allerton neighborhood—which I later learned was apparently not far from where Stokely Carmichael a/k/a Kwame Ture lived when he attended the Bronx High School of Science in the late 1950s as a teenager, before later enrolling at Howard University during the early 1960s. But I can’t recall ever talking with anyone during my walks along White Plains Road, north of Pelham Parkway, during the spring and summer of 1971.

When I returned to my apartment from walking eastward, I would often take a return route that led me through the Bronx Park forest area that surrounded the Botanical Garden area which was both north of my apartment and adjacent to the back of Fordham University’s campus. By 2:30 in the afternoon during the week and all day on Saturday and Sunday in the spring and summer of 1971, Bronx Park would be filled with enough people sitting on blankets with their children or with their friends, walking around and enjoying the green park space, making out with their boyfriend or womanfriend, enjoying the sun, picnicking, reading (or studying if they were Fordham students), so that you usually never felt there was much risk of being ripped off there.

If I had a small paperback book in my pants pocket (or was carrying a small knapsack with a hard-cover library book in it) during the spring of 1971, and the spring weather and air was giving me spring fever and making me feel I just wanted to sit outside in a lazy way and spend a few hours reading on the park grass, I would sometimes pretend that the Bronx Park and the Bronx Botanical Garden was my estate, while stretching out on the lawn and reading book. Feeling lucky that I wasn’t wasting the nice spring day during the weekday afternoon having to be stuck in a 9 to 5 wage-enslavement cage.

I can recall spending a few hours reading one of the volumes of Simone De Beauvoir’s autobiography stretched out on the lawn of the Bronx Park in April or May of 1971 on one of these beautiful spring days. Around the same time I also was reading her The Second Sex book, so my political and intellectual consciousness became even more feminized in a more deeper way than previously by the spring of 1971—many years before most of the male chauvinist, middle-class academics at the various patriarchal elite U.S. corporate universities finally learned in the late 1970s which politically correct words needed to be used, in order to shield themselves from being criticized by the middle-class feminist liberal academics for not having enough of a feminist intellectual consciousness.

Freewheelin' In The Bronx 1971 (v)

Before you reached the main intersection of White Plains Road and Pelham Parkway, where the local elevated station for the IRT train that took you into Manhattan was located, you passed a small movie theatre on your right that seemed to mainly show films like Russ Meyer’s Vixen in the early 1970s. I forget whether or not the neighborhood had another movie theatre around the corner on White Plains Road that showed all the mainstream movies that the Hollywood studios distributed. But since the Grand Concourse and Fordham Road area of the Bronx, which contained four movie theatres within a few blocks of each other that all showed mainstream movies as well as some foreign films, was only a 15 minute bus ride away from Pelham Parkway and White Plains Road, if you wanted to see a new movie, you didn’t have to travel very far from the neighborhood to get to a movie theatre.

On White Plains Road near Pelham Parkway in early 1971, there were still a lot of small businesses and restaurants that weren’t part of chains and there always seemed to be a lot of street life and people walking in and out of stores and up or down the elevated IRT subway station, at all times of days. Sometimes I would grab myself something to eat at one of the delicatessens around Pelham Parkway and White Plains Road, but I can’t recall ever speaking to anybody in the neighborhood for any length of time. There seemed to be a total absence of hippies or freaks walking around this neighborhood on weekday afternoons, or even on weekends, in the early 1970s. And it seemed to be a culturally straight, family-oriented neighborhood that had been pretty much untouched by the political and cultural turmoil of the 1960s, on the surface. (Although, I suspect that by this time some of the high school students living with their parents, even in this neighborhood, were probably finding ways to covertly smoke joints at home, when their culturally straight parents weren’t around the apartment.)

Freewheelin' In The Bronx 1971 (iv)

One advantage of limiting my afternoon outdoor activity to just what was within walking distance in all directions of my cheap Bronx apartment in the Belmont neighborhood was that I didn’t spend much money anymore on paying subway fares or bus fares between late March 1971 and early August 1971, when I rarely took a subway down into Manhattan anymore. Since the Bronx--unlike Queens, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Staten Island, Nassau County and Suffolk County—is located on the mainland of the USA, not on an island, if you walked north towards Yonkers and Westchester County you never were forced to end your walk by bumping into a body of water. No matter how many miles north of the Bronx you walked, you never could come to a dead end. And if you wanted to keep walking in that direction, you could actually get up to Albany by foot, if you were willing to spend day-after-day just walking.

Most of my long walking and wandering in the afternoon during the week would be either towards the east, towards the west or towards the north. Going east, I would walk along Fordham Road, past a Howard Johnson’s motel-restaurant on my right--where young couples who didn’t yet live together in their own apartments would stay for the night, surrounded by out-of-town tourists who were staying at the motel because it was next to the Bronx Zoo—and straight forward towards where Fordham Road turned into Pelham Parkway, with the Bronx Zoo gates to your right and the Bronx Botanical Gardens to your left.

Once Pelham Parkway reached the east side of the Bronx Zoo/Bronx Park and the Botanical Gardens, you entered a neighborhood that—unlike the primarily white Italian-American working-class community of the Belmont neighborhood in which I lived—seemed to be, in the early 1970s, a neighborhood of mostly white working-class people of Jewish background. Mainly office workers and their families who lived in rent-controlled apartments built in the 1920s and who seemed less affluent than the white working-class people of Jewish background who had left the Bronx for Queens in the 1950s and 1960s.

Freewheelin' In The Bronx 1971 (iii)

Now that I didn’t have to get up early and be in a skyscraper office by 9 o’clock during the week anymore in late March and April 1971, I found myself sleeping until after 9 o’clock each morning. Then, after quickly washing up, getting dressed, eating a bowl of dry cereal and drinking some orange juice for breakfast, I would usually spend the rest of the morning during the week writing a new protest folk song or folk love song, listening to vinyl records on my cheap portable phonograph or to the WNEW-FM radio station that then played cuts from the most current rock albums, or reading some library book or underground newspaper. One morning around this time, for example, I wrote the “Give It All Up” protest folk song , which included the following lyrics:

Give it all up
For the good of all
Give it all up
To hasten the fall.

Maybe you got a job
A nine-to-five coffin
Fuck their mindless jobs
We’re after our freedom.

I’m sick of imperialism
As well as of sexism
I’m glad you’re here Kathy
You can lie on top of me.”

After spending my weekday mornings writing songs, playing guitar, listening to music or reading, when noontime came around I would usually spend the afternoon, if it wasn’t raining outside, walking around the Bronx, exploring different Bronx neighborhoods, wandering through various Bronx parks, checking out the scene at local college campuses, walking in and out of stores around the Grand Concourse near Fordham Road without buying anything, and visiting local branches of the New York Public Library in the Bronx.