Do
you balk at the puerile pap of the propertied press? Join us in a
tub of Insurgent! Let it wash over you... -- David
Castro
Following
unprovoked police attacks on student demonstrators against the House
Committee on Un-American Activities in May 1960, the San Francisco
Bay Area – especially Berkeley – became a magnet for
young people fed up with Cold War fear and political intimidation. The
Silent Generation and the Beat Generation were giving way to a
new generation no longer willing to quietly accept a status quo that
included political repression, racial segregation and the
unrestrained use of military power both covert and overt. Indeed,
veterans of Black Friday the 13th who were
knocked down
the marble stairs of San Francisco’s City Hall by police with
clubs and high-pressure fire hoses claim, with pride, that “We
started the Sixties!”
A
not-so-young man attracted to the new and hopeful swirl of activity
was a San Quentin inmate who had been a heroin addict, thief, and
convicted criminal. His name was Dave Castro, and he was my friend.
While
Students for a Democratic Society had been founded in 1960, it was
several more years until the Port Huron Statement and visibility for
the emerging student movement. The anti-HUAC demonstrations, the
arrests, and the establishment of ongoing organizations like
BASCAHUAC (Bay Area Student Committee for Abolition of the House
Un-American Activities Committee -- whew!) – of which I, a
non-student high school dropout blue collar worker was elected
vice-president -- were sparks feeding movements that erupted locally
and nationally just a few years later in 1964: the Sheraton-Palace
Hotel and Auto Row sit-ins for hiring integration; the contingents of
Freedom Riders going south for integration, Freedom Summer
registering voters in the deep south; the Free Speech Movement at
Berkeley’s University of California; the massive peace marches
against the growing war in Vietnam; support for farm worker union
organizing; the rise of a New Left; and the breathing of life into a
moribund Old Left – decimated after 1956 by U.S. Government
imprisonment of its leaders, the Stalin revelations and the Red
Army’s smashing of the Hungarian workers’ revolt -- with
the founding of the W.E.B. DuBois Clubs as the Communist Party’s
(CP) attempt at a broad new youth arm.
2. Addict, Thief, Ex-Con, Poet,
Lover
We,
as artists responsible to the future as well as the past, wish to
exercise our art freely, to document the profound social changes that
form the very fabric of modern life, without sacrificing art and
honesty to the demands of the quick sale and volume turnover. --
David Castro
I
first met Dave Castro around the DuBois Club’s magazine,
Insurgent, in 1966 after he was released from San
Quentin –
not for the first time. He had been in “Q” and wrote to
the DuBois Club that he was up for probation and needed to be
“gainfully employed.” Insurgent named him
Editorial Assistant, at a $10 per week salary, but there were rarely
any funds available.
The
late Carl Bloice was the Editor and Celia Rosebury was the Managing
Editor when the magazine’s first issue appeared in March, 1965,
selling for a quarter. With stories about the Beatles, the Free
Speech Movement, African American legislators in Mississippi during
Reconstruction, present-day job discrimination in the Bay Area, plus
poetry and song, Insurgent mixed left-wing politics
with
popular culture hoping to reach a wide audience. Dave had two poems,
a letter, and a book review in that issue, along with ghost-written
text for a photo essay.
He
was arrested again later in 1965 and sent back to prison, writing to
Celia and her new husband, cinematographer Stephen Lighthill, that he
wished he could have put a lampshade on his head and danced at their
wedding. He returned to the Insurgent milieu when
he was
released, sometimes using a credit card to jimmy the lock on the
Lighthill’s apartment and be a surprise visitor when they
returned home. For a 32-year old former heroin addict and convicted
burglar and car thief – he described himself as a “professional
dirty guy” -- it was a new and exciting world. He had talents
that were welcomed by some of the young leftists he hung out with,
skills that brought him the attention and respect he craved.
Dave
was intelligent and attractive, with bushy black hair and a big
mustache, he talked softly, and he was a writer and poet. Always
gentle with people, Dave had no problem attracting girlfriends. While
he stayed off heroin at times, he ignored DuBois Club/CP
strictures against all drugs – made you vulnerable to the law
and therefore potentially a stoolpigeon -- and smoked his share of
marijuana, and drank red wine in copious quantities with me. I
recall that we got high together one evening and I received an urgent
call that meant I had to go somewhere; Dave taught me how to drive
while stoned, how to judge distances.
He
never talked to me about his youth, his family, his upbringing,
usually changing the subject by saying his family derived from
Spanish land grantees in the 1800s from the Monterey-Santa Cruz area.
Whether this was truth or fantasy I never knew, but he had clearly
done his homework. Dave grew up in San Francisco with his parents
and sister, near the Glen Park neighborhood’s Goat Hill. He
retained close ties to his neighborhood and friends over the years.
What
seems to be the case, although not completely verified, is that his
father was Raymond Henry Castro, of Spanish descent, who was an
infantry lieutenant in World War I. Raymond may have incurred
injuries there which left him blind. Home, he found work with other
sight-impaired people at a nearby broom factory run by Lighthouse
making corn brooms from straw. Gil Johnson, who supervised the
workshop’s activities, recalls that that despite spinning
machinery and stitching, there were no serious injuries and while
safety inspectors were concerned about blind people around moving
machinery, no action was ever taken by them. The broom workshop,
begun in the early 1920s, closed in 1981.
Raymond
Castro died in 1970 at age 75 and was interred at Golden Gate
National Cemetery in San Bruno. Dave’s Irish mother, Mary
Alice Cronin Castro, was unable to prevent her son’s beatings
by his father. Why Dave, probably a wise-ass kid, did not simply run
away from his sightless tormentor remains a mystery. I don’t
know when his addiction came, but I know that before I discovered
alcohol I found that if I could not win positive attention and
approval from my parents there were many ways to attract negative
attention, and to show them how tough I was. Mary Alice passed away
in 1959 at the age of 65. She is interred next to her husband.
Dave
freely acknowledged that he had been a heroin addict, and that he
stole to get the money to feed his addiction. His new addiction, he
said, was to The Revolution. His writing, he hoped, would further
that cause. He had, he said, an idea for a novel that would hasten
it. To my knowledge, he never wrote it, although he reportedly later
wrote a film script that was meant to accomplish the same
revolutionary result.
Dave,
however, was a newly free spirit unable and unwilling to kowtow to
the Party Line of the day, to bureaucratic decision-making that
excluded those being decided for – he had enough of that in
prison. He also continued using his drug of choice, heroin, on and
off at least recreationally, and he knew that would never sit well
with the apparatchiks. Dave had an extraordinary
ability to
compartmentalize the many facets of his life, rarely letting one
overlap, or even peek into, the other.
On
March 6, 1966, at 2:45 in the morning, the DuBois Club national
headquarters on McAllister Street in San Francisco was dynamited and
destroyed. The CP’s youth arm had gotten some publicity for
refusing to register as a “communist-front” organization,
and “ultra-rightists” and “racists” were
immediately blamed. The 1966 May-June issue of Insurgent
announced that the magazine was moving to Chicago along with the
national office of the DuBois Club. The organization dissolved in
1970 as the parent CP imploded once again following Soviet tanks
rolling into Prague to suppress Czech efforts to create “socialism
with a human face.”
3. Sons and Daughters
(This
contemporary historical drama is) frankly partisan, full of their
laughter and music, their noisy humanity, their deep concern, it is
the story of people, mostly young people, struggling to breathe life
into the ideals of democracy and justice they have been taught as
Americans. They see these ideas suffocating in the atmosphere of
hypocrisy and conformity generated by the impact of the war machine
upon all our social institutions...it reflects their efforts to
rescue democracy and justice.... -- David Castro
In
October, 1965, a two-dozen-city coordinated protest against the
Vietnam War was organized at the University of California in Berkeley
by a new Vietnam Day Committee (VDC) coalition whose leadership
included Jerry Rubin and Abby Hoffman. Well-known Bay Area
photographer Jerry Stoll, with cameraman Stephen Lighthill –
soon to marry Celia Rosebury -- worked with the VDC to cover the
events on film. Stoll set up American Documentary Films (ADF),
enlisting Dave Castro and others to assist. Jerry had the ability to
attract talent willing to work for virtually nothing, or for free.
Although the VDC had commissioned him to make a short film for use in
organizing, Stoll set out to make a full-length movie about the Bay
Area demonstrations and the war.
After
an all-day teach-in at UC-Berkeley on October 15, over fifteen
thousand people marched peacefully against the war. Their
destination was the Oakland Army Terminal, but they were met at the
Berkeley-Oakland border by hundreds of police in riot gear creating a
solid wall to stop them. They marched back to Berkeley Civic
Center Park, where the teach-in continued, along with music from
Country Joe and the Fish and other local musicians. The marchers
pledged to return the next day.
Some
five thousand showed up, and at the border the police asked them to
sit down to avoid any violent confrontations. A small group of Hells
Angels motorcyclists were also at the border and attacked
demonstrators while poet Allen Ginsburg led a chanting of “Hare
Krishna.”. The police stopped the gang, and Ginsberg, along
with Merry Prankster Ken Kesey, arranged to meet with the motorcycle
gang’s head, Sonny Barger. They reportedly met that night,
dropped acid together, and defused threatened attacks on future
marches.
Jerry
Stoll, who died in 2004, gathered an impressive group of supporters
to make the film, including local jazz icon Virgil Gonsalves to write
and perform original music, and jazz singer/songwriter Jon Hendricks
to do a pair of songs for the film, with the Grateful Dead backing
him. A 45 record, with Sons and Daughters
on one side
and Fire in the City, a song
written by Peter Krug
about urban black uprisings, on the other, was produced. Grateful
Dead management soon sought to have the band’s name removed; it
was “too political.” Dave Castro, brought into ADF by
Stephen Lighthill, wrote much of the film’s narration and text
for the publicity brochure, and sometimes slept at the ADF office
when no one else could take him in.
Sally
Pugh, Associate Editor and Music Editor for the film, remembers that
Dave wrote draft after draft of the film’s narration, only to
have it rejected by Jerry Stoll. Writing a film was much different
than writing a story or poem, and Stoll had his own vision. One day
Dave came in with a big smile and said, “Okay, Stoll, I’ve
been up all night working on this; I finally got it!” They ran
the film-in-progress without sound while Dave read his narration
aloud.
Before
the film had finished Jerry Stoll turned off the projector and said,
“No, you didn’t get it!” Dave took each sheet of
paper, one-by-one, crumpled it into a ball and threw it away. If he
was angry he didn’t let it show, and laughed at himself. It
took awhile longer, but he did finally “get it,” even if
Stephen Lighthill thought the final result, fitting Stoll’s
“grandiose vision” and read in the film by Sally Pugh’s
sister Janet, was “overwrought, simplistic and written for the
already-committed.”
Nelson
Stoll – working as sound recordist/editor for his father at ADF
-- remembers that Dave often hung out with a fellow inmate from San
Quentin, Al Perez, who partnered with Jerry Stoll’s daughter
for awhile, and there were rumors of the two of them participating in
less-than-legal activities, including burglarizing Stoll’s
apartment for a single item of interest. Perez had earlier
demonstrated his lock-picking abilities to Stoll, and knew that he
had obtained a gun for home protection in the increasingly violent
Haight-Ashbury. Stoll recalls: “Both Dave and Al were the
friendly, straight-faced surprised cons when I relayed the event to
them. They told me it’s best to not have a gun and
suggested I not get another.” Dave Castro was really good at
keeping the personal, political and criminal aspects of his
complicated life from mixing – except when he chose otherwise.
The
movie was called Sons and Daughters, and
was released
in 1967, winning an international film festival prize. While working
on the film, Dave and his ADF allies developed a Mobile Street
Cinema, learned from Cuba, to show film on the side of a truck,
projecting from the inside. Clips of the war, and of demonstrations
opposing the war, were shown wherever an audience could be found. Dave
and the truck would drive up to a crowd, such as the early
morning longshore pay line on San Francisco’s Embarcadero, and
start the films. The sounds of gunfire and explosions from the war
grabbed instant attention.
ADF
opened an office in New York City, and was always on the verge of
running out of money. Cameraman Stephen Lighthill doubled as
bookkeeper/accountant/clockwatcher and knew that the film was
“deficit financed” and couldn’t pay its bills. At
one point Dave Castro and Jerry Stoll invented “revolutionary
currency,” fake money with cartoon characters on the bills
instead of dead presidents. When funds were short staff was paid
with the fake currency and told it could be redeemed “after The
Revolution.”
Nelson
Stoll left ADF to pursue his own career, later winning an Emmy award
and two Academy Award nominations for sound recording. Sons
and Daughters was a good learning experience for
Stephen
Lighthill’s early film-making career, but -- no longer willing
to bear the pressure of “deficit financing”-- he left
ADF in late 1966 to free-lance as a cameraperson for CBS News. He
was honored in 2018 with the American Society of Cinematographers’
President’s Award.
Dave
Castro got married in 1967. Susan was a “red diaper baby”
born into the Old Left. Dave was thrilled to be the object of this
feisty young woman’s attention, and they were married in Celia
and Stephen Lighthill’s living room by radio announcer Scott
Beach. This kind of relationship was brand new to Dave and he was
the first to admit that he was a neophyte at real romance. He was
not very good at it and the relationship soon ran into problems.
According
to several women who partnered with him, Dave’s relationships
showed no meanness towards women, never trying to degrade them. Unlike
many men of the New and Old Left who could not practice what
they preached about gender equality, Dave Castro preferred the
company and intellect of women over men, and was always complimentary
to them. Women liked his flowery speech and ability to talk
intelligently about almost anything, to have real conversations
without traditional gender roles getting in the way. Dave’s
continuing heroin use and other less-than-legal activities were the
issues that generally hastened their end. He was, as one ex-lover
said, “unable to be a partner.” Yet he rarely lacked
female companionship.
Dave
also respected and could be friends with women who rejected his
advances. While Sally Pugh made it clear she was not interested in a
sexual relationship, they became close friends during the ADF days.
Dave talked to her about his love of heroin, but it was “pretty
sad and sobering” when she walked in one day to find him and
his pal Al Perez passed out with hypodermic needles sticking out of
their arms. Sally’s focus shifted away from ADF in 1972 with
the birth of her first son and she gradually lost touch with Dave..
I
worked as a warehouseman and was an active shop steward in Local 6 of
the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU). Somewhere
along the way, probably in 1966 after he was released from prison,
Dave told me he needed a job. While most of the warehouse jobs came
through the union hiring hall, there were a few places where the
union only had the “right to refer” applicants. I made
inquiries of the Local 6 officials, and Dave was referred to a small
sundries warehouse in Brisbane, and he got the job.
Since
I worked at a Distribution Center a few miles further south, I drove
him to work, and sometimes Dave would chuckle, pointing to a building
we were passing. “I went in through the skylight on the roof
there,” he said, referring to his burglar days. Dave
“liberated” a silver-filigreed ebony pipe to give to me. I accepted it
with gratitude. And told him to be careful!
4. Kicking Back in Santa Cruz
Democracy
is the triumph of the idea that each individual has the right to
participate in the decisions that affect his life. To do this he
must have access to information and open dialogue; he must have the
right to dissent. We are determined to fight for these rights, to
preserve this triumph. -- David Castro
In
early 1968, after a brief stint as a Bay Area organizer, the ILWU
asked me to be their one-person Washington, DC, office. With my
first wife, Elaine Millán, and our two young children we moved
cross-country, leaving the Bay Area and Dave Castro behind. It soon
became clear to me that in the nation’s capitol, one either
became like everyone else working The Hill, or got out. After three
and a-half years I chose to get out, and took advantage of an
opportunity to work for Local 6 that would have me based in Salinas. We
bought a ramshackle house in Prunedale in the hills north of town
and I went to work negotiating, grievance handling and organizing.
Dave
Castro was already in Canada, hiding out, when the Montreal Western
Hemisphere Anti-War Conference
took
place in November, 1968. Over one thousand people showed up, with
not-yet-president of Chile Salvador Allende as keynote speaker. Dave
had hooked up with a local journalist, living with him for awhile and
sharing drugs, and conference delegates close to them whispered of
the two of them being involved in mysterious and
“nefarious”activities.
Speculation
included running guns to the Black Panthers – Dave was friendly
with fellow prison veteran Eldridge Cleaver who was among the
conference speakers – or helping the Quebec Liberation Front,
whose tactics included murders, kidnappings and bombings –
“propaganda of the deed”— or the more benign task
of assisting American draft resisters. Cleaver, who had visited with
Dave in San Francisco, jumped bail after leading an armed Black
Panther attack on Oakland police in angry retaliation for the murder
of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and soon took refuge in Cuba. .
A
lover from California, who thought she had a nearly year-long
exclusive relationship with Dave, visited him in Canada. He had dyed
his thick black hair, part of a disguise to avoid arrest for those
rumored “nefarious activities.” He also had another
girlfriend, and the California relationship bit the dust. Dave’s
skill at compartmentalizing the different parts of his life failed
him this time.
I
don’t remember corresponding with Dave during the DC time, but
I must have, since when I returned to California in autumn of 1971 I
knew that he was living in Santa Cruz. My union organizing tasks
included trying to bring the Lipton Tea factory back into the union.
Lipton had closed down in San Francisco years before, terminating
hundreds of union members, and then opened a full-blown non-union
facility in Santa Cruz. I had the name of one union-friendly
contact, and from her developed a list for me to visit when they were
off-shift. I spent several days a week in Santa Cruz, and used the
time between shifts to visit with Dave and his latest partner, Sara. .
Sara
was working in American Documentary Films’ New York office when
she met, and fell in love with, the charming poet. Dave, in turn,
was “crazy about Sara.” The marriage with Susan was
long-broken along with several less-formal romances. Dave and Sara
settled in Santa Cruz, where I found him settled and calm, simply
enjoying each day with his new love. Sara was smart and robust
coming from a mid-west farm to become a political activist and
finding a home with ADF. In Santa Cruz they used FCC rules for
community TV access to produce a radical news show on local cable
television.
One
day Dave told me that the TV studio had been raided by right-wingers
who ripped off $20,000 in equipment and spray painted anti-communist
slogans on the walls. I blinked, and asked Dave how much he would
get back from the insurance and if there was any chance they could
trace it back to him. He blinked, and said that I was the only
person who could have asked him that. I doubted that. He asked me
please not to mention it to Sara; she believed his vigilantes story.
Later he told me that some of the money went for guns for the Black
Panthers, and that he had been caught with a trunk full of weapons –
the Canadian rumors had a basis in fact. He got off on a
technicality, he claimed, and split to Canada for awhile. He didn’t
mention that he went in disguise and with an assumed name.
With
the benefit of hindsight, I should have taken a step back, but I
didn’t. I never believed, now or then, that it was all right
to get somebody else into a fight you, yourself, were not willing to
make. At a 1967 Hall of Flowers conference in Golden Gate Park on the
white response to Black Power, Panther founder Bobby Seale and
Revolutionary Communist Party founder Bob Avakian were handing out
flyers. I don’t recall what Seale’s said, but Avakian’s
said, quoting as best I remember, The time is not right for
us to
join our Black Brothers on the rooftops with rifles, but we can raise
money to help them get the guns they need. I told Bobby
Seale,
“That’s some program – let’s you and him
fight! You guys kill each other and we’ll watch!”
Later, after their
breakup, Sara was involved in efforts to expose the drugs-for-money
scandals known as Iran-Contra. Iran-Contra was a CIA operation
during the Reagan Administration to secretly sell weapons to Iran
despite an arms embargo, using the money to secretly fund Contra
military operations against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua.
Large-scale drug smuggling to the Bay Area was involved, with money
going back to the Contras. Eventually fourteen government officials,
including Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger, were indicted and
eleven convicted. Some won appeals, and the rest were later pardoned
by President George H.W. Bush. According to a deeply-researched
story in the San Jose Mercury-News published on
August 18,
1996:
For the
better part of a decade, a San Francisco Bay Area drug ring sold tons
of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles and
funneled millions in drug profits to a Latin American guerrilla army
run by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, a Mercury
News investigation has
found. This drug network
opened the first pipeline between Colombia's cocaine cartels and the
black neighborhoods of Los Angeles, a city now known as the "crack"
capital of the world. The cocaine that flooded in helped spark a
crack explosion in urban America . . . .
But that was all in
the future, after Dave and Sara went their separate ways. For now,
it was about enjoying the sun peeking through the fog along the
coast, enjoying domesticity, solving the world’s problems with
me over glasses of red wine, and thinking about writing that great
novel he still believed he had in him, the one that would spark The
Revolution.
5. Looking for
The Lost Dutchman
Umpteenth of
Remember, 1965
Dear
Creditor:
For
thirty years I wandered, not knowing who I was: a sleazy, mind-bare
amnesiac. But now I know: a poet, red, rare, flaming, to take back
your Cadillac, your chains of dreams that I no longer trip to –
and your lousy pink slip, too. Unscrew
you, and that other frightful excrescence, your Madison Avenue
planned obsolescence I did duly crave.
Yours
truly,
Dave
P.S.
I have entered as a partner in the firm of Daredmuch and Didmore. --
David Castro
In 1967 union
colleague Bruce Benner invited me on a backpacking trip to Arizona’s
Superstition Mountains, some 50 miles east of Phoenix. Bruce thought
he had figured out where gold from the legendary Lost Dutchman Mine
could be found. We did everything wrong that trip and found no gold
or mine, but we survived – painfully -- our own lack of
preparedness, and I came out hooked on the legend of the Lost
Dutchman, and of putting together the clues in the hundred-year-old
puzzle. I returned to the Superstitions over a dozen times during
the next thirty-three years, the last in 2000 when I got, for the
first and only time, an attack of gold fever. I usually went alone,
fasting and detoxing from the alcohol that had become the center of
my life. In the Spring of 1972 I invited Dave Castro to accompany
me.
Dave had never been
backpacking in his life, so it was a brand-new adventure for him. We
borrowed equipment and headed to Arizona, armed with several old
books on the Lost Dutchman, one of which described a mule trail up
Bluff Mountain. Our goal was to find that trail and climb it, and to
quit smoking. Both of us were heavy cigarette smokers with coughs,
and, we thought, five abstinent days in the wilderness ought to break
the habit. Despite that, we both were strong enough to hike the hard
trails with water, food, and gear on our backs.
As luck would have
it, though, shortly after hoisting our backpacks and setting out on
the Dutchman’s Trail, we came across an almost-full pack of
Lucky Strikes someone had dropped. So much for abstinence – we
would ration those cigarettes out until we returned to civilization
and bought more. We ran into a group of young hikers with a .22
rifle who said they were out to hunt the Easter Bunny. We set up
camp at Bluff Spring and began exploring, learning quickly that
jumping cholla cactus really does attack passers-by! While I
followed the spring slowly up towards the base of the mountain, Dave
wandered further out, covering a wide swath of potential trailheads,
and came back sweating and breathless to tell me, “I think I
found it, man!”
The Lost Dutchman
Mine legend was related to a group of Mexican prospectors, the
Peraltas, who probably worked a mine near Wickenburg and used the
Superstitions as a resting place to water their mules in a defensible
location against the local Apaches, for whom the mountains were
sacred territory. Dave had found it, a clear trail
up Bluff
Mountain, the rocks worn white from the Peralta’s mules. We
followed it to the top to find more evidence, a broken-down dam
across an intermittent stream to catch winter and summer rainfall. The
gold that the Dutchman and others had found, as Bruce Benner had
deduced, had to be partially-milled gold ore from a distant mine that
the Apaches dumped on the ground when they attacked and slaughtered
the Peralta’s last expedition. The Apaches took the mules, and
the leather sacks the ore was carried in, but not the gold ore.
When we returned to
our camp we discovered that some of our food had been taken, with a
scrawled note saying, “Sorry we were hungry.” The
thieves had left us several little white pills. We had no idea what
they were, but Dave told me, “Man, I can’t believe I’m
passing those up. The old me never would have.” We buried
them deep in the sand under rocks.
From all reports,
Dave’s clean periods off heroin never lasted. I am reasonably
sure he wasn’t using that week we went looking for the Lost
Dutchman. Perhaps, like myself with red wine, he could by force of
will hold his addiction at bay for awhile, but then it made its
claims. I don’t know that he ever considered a recovery
program; probably, as with me and alcohol, he thought he was too
smart to need help -- he could do it alone. Years later, in 1983 and
after a thousand false starts, I stopped drinking with sheer will
power. And my addiction went crazy. I saw my marriage and my career
collapsing and I was helpless to do anything about it. All my energy
went into just not picking up that drink. And when it all fell apart
in 1988 I did what I knew how to do for the pain – I got drunk,
and then I got help. I couldn’t do it alone.
Back
at our Bluff Spring campsite we were thrilled with our discoveries
even as we picked cholla spines out of our boots. Dave was even more
excited than me, slapping me on the back saying, “We did it,
man, we really did it!” He couldn’t wait to tell Sara;
he had earned his backpacking chops, he had made a real contribution
to my quest for the Lost Dutchman. He was an honest-to-God explorer,
a real Desert Rat! Ever the romantic, on the hard hike back Dave
lagged behind fashioning a bouquet of cactus and spring blossoms to
bring home to Sara.
In
the glowing aftermath of our successful ordeal, we decided to become
businessmen. I think the idea was Dave’s, who had been okay
with his first time eating the dried foods we brought and cooked. We
would create one-day supplies of freeze-dried organic food for
backpackers and call it Day Tripper Food Packs. Instant oatmeal and
dried fruit for breakfast, a protein bar and dried fruit for lunch, a
stew mix of protein bar, dried veggies and noodles for dinner. We
named ourselves Owl and Butterfly and Dave had labels made up with
that design for the brown paper bags we would put them in.
We
went to the local Santa Cruz natural foods market to pitch our
product and get supplies and the owner agreed to try it out. I think
we made about a dozen Owl and Butterfly Day Tripper Food Packs and
set them out on display. One of us would check back every couple of
days, but they seemed to move very slowly. One day the owner told us
a customer had come in complaining they were “inedible.” He asked us to
remove the remaining bags and paid us the few bucks he
owed us. Here we were, a union pie-card and an anarchist
revolutionary, failures as capitalist plutocrats!
6. Death of a Junkie
Topsy
--
Sing
a song of sixth sense Catcher
in the Rye Four
and twenty Muslims Ravens
on the fly
Miles
go Bye Bye Blackbird Take
a hike Jim Crow The
seeds of topsy-turvy Are
blossoming you know... -- David Castro
Spurred
by Elaine’s decision to enroll at San Francisco State
University to become a nurse,we moved back to San
Francisco
in early 1974. The Lipton Tea organizing having fizzled out, I now
drove to Salinas for two days a week to take care of union business.
With Santa Cruz no longer on my agenda, and with drinking taking up
more and more of my non-working life, I lost touch with Dave. I
worked mainly out of the San Francisco headquarters of ILWU Local 6,
and organized throughout Northern California. Later that year I ran
for business agent in the Local 6 elections, and won.
In
late 1976, Dave Castro showed up at the Local 6 offices with a young
woman in tow, Paula Castro (her name from a defunct marriage), who
said she was on methadone maintenance for heroin addiction. Dave and
Paula met years before in San Francisco’s Bernal Heights
neighborhood when Dave, visiting a man he often shot up with, was
told that the noise next door was a druggie beating the crap out of
his girlfriend, Paula Castro. Instantly furious, Dave kicked in the
neighbor’s door and shouted, “No one hurts a Castro!”
I
took them to our corner bar/restaurant hangout for lunch. Dave
wanted to know if I could get them jobs. He nodded off several times
while we were talking, and it was clear that he was back shooting
junk. Paula looked embarrassed for him. I told Dave he was not
welcome in my house while he was using, that I didn’t want my
kids exposed to him, and that I didn’t want him around me or
the union. I gave them $20 and said goodbye. That was the last time
I saw Dave Castro.
Perhaps
it was seeing my own alcohol demons reflected back from him, an
ego-driven false superiority, that caused me to end our friendship. I
had cast a fair number of people out of my life over 30 years of
drinking and my sobriety was still a dozen years away. But in doing
so I missed a chapter that I know from my own experience is well
worth knowing. In 1978 Paula gave birth to Dave’s child, a
daughter they named Stephanie. Her second child, Dave’s first
and only.
Trying
to be a responsible father, Dave cleaned up and went to the Local 6
hiring hall looking for work. There are certain companies that
called where the work was well-known to be hard and the hiring hall
regulars often passed those up. One of those was B.R. Funsten. a
flooring company in the city located, ironically, near the Hall of
Justice, and Dave went to work there. He did well and passed the
90-day probationary period, earning needed health care benefits for
his family along with decent wages.
Dionne
Castro, Paula’s daughter from an earlier relationship, was
seven years old when Dave and Paula lived together. She remembers
Dave taking her for a ride in his old sports car, sitting her on his
lap, and letting her steer all the way across the Bay Bridge. She
also remembers when Stephanie was born, that they went to a liquor
store and Dave came out with two bottles that proclaimed, It’s
A Girl! Dave dug out an old Royal typewriter that his
grandmother had used to write a book and designated it as his
inheritance for his daughter.
He
broke his leg in a motorcycle accident and Charles McClain was sent
by Local 6 to replace him. When Dave returned to work Charley was
kept on; they became friends and would meet after work from
time-to-time to have drinks at local bars. Charley suspected Dave
might have been chipping, using heroin recreationally, but he showed
up for work, did his job and stayed out of trouble.
At
home, however, there was increasing trouble. Fights, perhaps
instigated by Paula’s short temper, became commonplace and
sometimes got physical. It was ironic that Dave, who had rescued
Paula from male violence, was now committing that same violence. It
finally reached the point where Dave wrote Paula a letter saying, “I
love you, but I can’t live like this.” Yet he stayed for the sake of his daughter.
I
continued my annual backpacking detoxes and in Spring of 1979 I
headed to Arizona yet again; on returning home Elaine had some
newspaper clippings for me. The April 11 San Francisco
Chronicle’s front page story was headed Bloody S.F.
Ambush—Drug Agents Shot. The S.F. Examiner’s
page 4 article began: Drug shootout: a hunt for middle-level
dealers.
In
a drug sting gone bad, the stories read, David Castro, 46, had been
shot “at least three times” at the corner of 25th
Street and Orange Alley. Drug Enforcement Administration undercover
agents Salvador Dijamco and Wallace Tanaka, and suspected drug dealer
Bernard Altamirano, were wounded. Unarmed and handcuffed, Dave
Castro bled out and died in the Mission District alley. Another dead
junkie. His daughter was ten months old.
7. Self-Defense or Execution?
--Turvy
...Sing
a song of sixth sense Kiddin’
on the square Sense
the swirly Movement Dancing
in the air
Hark!
the scraggly scrum-bums Marching
as they sing The
seeds of topsy-turvy Will
bear Strange Fruit in Spring. -- David Castro
The
official version, according to the two DEA agents who survived their
woundings, as did the alleged drug dealer, Bernard Altamirano, was
that they were making a fourth heroin buy from Altamirano, with
$22,500 in their car. Dave Castro was seen “lurking in the
shadows.” The agents activated a hidden signal to contact four
more DEA agents and four San Francisco Police officers staked out a
half-block away. Altamirano got into the back seat of the agents’
Pontiac Trans-Am, pulled a gun and ordered them to put their hands on
the dashboard. He shot Tanaka in the head, then shot him twice more
and shot Dijamco under the arm. Despite three gunshot wounds Tanaka
managed to tangle with Altamirano and Dijamco got out his gun and
shot Altamirano in the head. Dave Castro, the agents said, then came
over to the car and reached through a window to try to choke Dijamco.
Dijamco shot Castro four times in the head and chest, and then shot
Altamirano again.
According
to the press a passerby, Charles McClain, saw Dave handcuffed and
dead on the ground and said, “I know that guy. That’s
Dave Castro.” Charles has told me since that Dave, a co-worker
at B.R. Funsten, had invited him to meet for after-work drinks at
Clooney’s Pub on the corner of 25th and Valencia
Streets, less than a half-block from the scene of the killing.
Charley and Dave had met after work from time-to-time and gotten
friendly, if not close. Dave never mentioned his family. Charley
told me that Dave didn’t show up that evening. He waited, had
a drink, then left to see flashing police car lights and a commotion
just down the block. He went to investigate, recognized Dave and was
asked inside the yellow tape line to make the identification. The
police inspector told Charley, “I hope you have a strong
stomach.”
The
DEA said it was an “out-and-out ripoff” attempt during
the federal agency’s effort to “crack a major heroin
trafficking network.” Bernard Altamirano was quickly
convicted on multiple counts of heroin distribution, assault on a
federal officer with a deadly weapon, and being an ex-felon in
possession of a firearm. He was sentenced to thirty years in prison
and a $15,000 fine. His appeal the following summer was turned down
by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
Altamirano’s
version of the fatal event, according to the Appeals Court, differed
markedly from the DEA’s:
Appellant's
version of the events which he presented through his own testimony is
that the 1978 sales were in fact made by (Gerald) Spendler, the
informer, and that his apartment was loaned to Spendler in exchange
for small amounts of heroin for appellant's own use. He explained
that Spendler was afraid of Tanaka and had cautioned appellant always
to placate him...Appellant also utilized his alleged fear of Tanaka
in explaining his agreement to sell $22,500 worth of heroin on April
10, 1979. His version was that when he heard that Spendler had died
in early April, 1979, he became even more afraid of Tanaka because he
suspected Tanaka was responsible for Spendler's death.
With
respect to the alley shooting, appellant contended he had no heroin
with him when he got into the agents' car, a fact not disputed by the
government, and also no .38 revolver, an assertion vigorously
contested by the government. As appellant told it, Dijamco saw Castro
approaching the car and shot him, at which point appellant attempted
to take Dijamco's gun. During the struggle there were additional
shots that wounded both Tanaka and appellant. Castro was merely an
innocent bystander killed by an officer with too quick a trigger
finger according to the appellant.
The
following week, in the Local 6 hiring hall where the three West Bay
business agents rotated weekly as job dispatcher, I was approached by
Billy S. Billy – not his real name – kept his dues
current and worked out of the hall just enough to support other
activities. I knew that Billy and Dave were acquainted, and I let
him into the “cage” where dispatchers answering phones
and writing job orders could be observed by members waiting for work.
Billy
told me, “That stuff in the papers about Dave, man, it didn’t
go down like they said. They snuffed him, man, pure and simple. I
knew Dave, man, we used to chip together.” He went
on to
weave an elaborate tale: Dave Castro had been busted for possession
of heroin. He was let go after agreeing to sell confiscated cocaine
for the arresting agents. Billy thought that was Salvador Dijamco,
whose street name was Jimmy Rios, and his partner, Wallace Tanaka.
Dave, he said, thought he was smarter than the agents and began
skimming from the proceeds. Dijamco and Tanaka figured it out and
set up the April 10 drug deal to blow Dave away. “Look, man,”
Billy said, “Dave didn’t even have a gun. They
handcuffed him before they shot him, man, they executed him!”
That
sent me on a mission to try and find the truth. I owed Dave Castro’s
memory at least that.
While
I read a lot of private eye novels,I had no idea
how to
actually investigate something like this. I enlisted the help of the
late Paul Shinoff, a San Francisco Examiner
reporter
sympathetic to labor, and we set out to find the truth about the
death of Dave Castro. Paul dug into available records and went after
those that were not made public.
I
found myself talking to people I hadn’t even known existed, the
hidden underclass of drug addicts and dealers. I waited in a Bernal
Heights shooting gallery to talk to one woman while she fixed; she
had lived with Dave for awhile. She thought that Dave was dealing on
the streets for crooked cops, but had no first-hand knowledge. There
were reports of gifts from Dave of grams of cocaine.
Ultimately
we gave up. It seemed like Billy’s version was substantially
correct, but it was all He said, She said; we had no way to prove it,
no hard evidence.
8. Connections...?
(There
is) a wealth of evidence that indicts the entire power structure for
criminal conspiracy that isof vital importance; it
demonstrates the urgency, the terrible and immediate need for change
in the United States today, if there is ever to be a tomorrow for
mankind.
There’s
still time, Brother. --
David Castro
While
both Salvador Dijamco and Wallace Tanaka were awarded “purple
hearts” by the Drug Enforcement Administration, investigative
reporters have, since Iran-Contra, linked the DEA to CIA drug dealing
and assassinations. According to Douglas Valentine’s lengthy
article in the September 11, 2015, online muckraking journal
Counterpunch, the DEA’s Special Operations Group
(DEASOG) carried out assassinations of alleged drug dealers in Latin
America in the 1970s. In 2012 DEA agents shot and killed alleged
drug traffickers in Honduras, including two pregnant women. The DEA
later lied to Congress about being fired on first. Valentine
described the work of DEASOG:
The
job was tracking down, kidnapping, and, if they resisted, killing
drug traffickers. Kidnapped targets were incapacitated by drugs and
dumped in the U.S. As DEA Agent Gerry Carey recalled, “We’d
get a call that there was ‘a present’ waiting for us on
the corner of 116th Street and Sixth Avenue. We’d go there and
find some guy, who’d been indicted in the Eastern District of
New York, handcuffed to a telephone pole. We’d take him to a
safe house for questioning and, if possible, turn him into an
informer. Sometimes we’d have him in custody for months....”
Lou
Conein, who reported directly to CIA head William Colby, created
DEASOG specifically to do Phoenix program-style jobs overseas: the
type where a paramilitary officer breaks into a trafficker’s
house, takes his drugs, and slits his throat. (They) were to operate
overseas where they would target traffickers the police couldn’t
reach, like a prime minister’s son or the police chief in
Acapulco if he was the local drug boss. If they couldn’t
assassinate the target, they would bomb his labs or use psychological
warfare to make him look like he was a DEA informant, so his own
people would kill him.
It
is clear that the DEA culture was to operate outside the law with
impunity, and murder was a part of their job. That unarmed Dave
Castro was shot four times by Salvador Dijamco while co-agent Wallace
Tanaka never drew his weapon leaves questions in the air. That a
street-wise drug dealer, Bernard Altamirano, would get into a car
alone with two buyers he had to presume were also armed, leaving his
unarmed backup “lurking in the shadows,” defies logic. That Dave Castro
was handcuffed, and whether it was before or after
his shooting is disputed, compounds those questions. That eight
other armed officers were just a half-block away and had been
signaled but missed all the action is pushing the limits of
credibility. And since heroin was always Dave’s drug of
choice, how was it he giving people free cocaine?
And
would an unarmed junkie backup not be more likely to save his own
skin once the shooting started rather than join the fray? If Dave
knew who the buyers were or recognized the DEA agents, wouldn’t
he have been even more likely to run away? Drug addicts jonesing for
their next fix are not known for loyalty, especially to people being
shot at by law enforcement. If Dave was part of a high-risk plan to
rip-off the DEA agents, why had he invited co-worker Charles McClain
for after-work drinks that same Tuesday evening?
Is
it just possible that the drug deal, which the Chronicle
termed “an attempt to crack a major heroin trafficking network
and to reach the group’s major supplier,” links the DEA
agents to what became the “drugs for guns” scandals made
public a few short years later? A DEA report dated February 6, 1984,
showed U.S. law enforcement in 1976 tracking a large-scale cocaine
trafficker, Norwin Meneses, an associate of Nicaraguan dictator
Somoza who was ousted by the Sandinistas in 1979. Meneses left
Managua for California in 1979.
And
how much of a stretch is it to connect Manila-born Salvador Dijamco
to Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte’s War on Drugs that
has murdered thousands of people? The U.S. Drug Enforcement
Administration (DEA) maintains an office in Manila and liaisons with
the Philippines Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). The U.S. Government
gives Philippines law enforcement millions of dollars each year. The
U.S. DEA has been training foreign law enforcement drug agents since
1969, with over 14,000 participants from 94 countries in 2013 alone.
Several
plausible scenarios suggest themselves: In exchange for staying out
of jail, which might be a federal prison far from home, Dave Castro
was dealing coke for crooked DEA agents and skimming to support
himself and his family, but he had nothing to do with the Altamirano
drug sting and was simply on his way to meet his co-worker for
drinks. Walking up 25th Street Dave recognized
the
agents’ car, or them, and went “lurking in the shadows”
to avoid being seen. When the shooting started inside the car, and
that’s assuming it was before Dave was shot, he approached the
car, was recognized by the DEA agents, and shot. That he was the
“innocent bystander” Bernard Altamirano testified to.
Or,
the drug deal was set up specifically to kill Dave, who was just a
lookout for Altamirano while a supposedly simple exchange was being
made in the car, figuring he could help his fellow druggie and then
meet his co-worker for drinks. That both DEA agents and Altamirano
said there was no heroin present does not make it so. But why would
Dave, a smart and street-wise guy, knowingly participate in a rip-off
of federal agents who knew who he was?
Salvador
Dijamco retired from a 26-year career in the DEA in 1999, and died in
Florida 18 years later at age 73. He had numerous awards on his wall,
including one from the International Narcotic Officers Association.
Wallace Tanaka’s legacy seems to be having had to repay the
government $269 for unauthorized expenses he wrongfully claimed
reimbursement for in 1977. DEA Records Management Chief Katherine
Myrick declared my FOIA request “complex (with) unusual
circumstances” and could not say how long it would be for a
response. The San Francisco Police Dept. said their records from
that period may have been destroyed.
In
the 1990s, sober and in a second marriage, I lived in a San Francisco
Mission District flat whose back door opened onto Orange Alley, just
in from 24th Street, less than a block from
where Dave
Castro was gunned down. For the ten years I lived there, each year
on April 10 I posted flyers telling what I knew of Dave’s story
to any who cared to read it. Perhaps it was, on some unconscious
level, my recovery program kicking in, making amends for having
banished him from my life.
Dave
Castro’s ashes were interred at San Bruno’s Golden Gate
National Cemetery, next to his parents’ graves. Only three
people came to say goodbye. But for all his addiction, his romantic
ideas of revolution, his crimes, and his inability to maintain a
relationship with women, Dave Castro was as worthy of his story, or
his multiple stories, being told as any of us. He was my friend, and
while it was a surprise that the Dave Castro I knew was not the same
Dave Castro that others knew, that does not devalue the friendship we
had.
9. R.I.P.
We
resent the credibility gap that divides the acts of those in power
from the citizens affected by those acts. Unless understanding,
dignity and purpose are restored to the many millions whose lives and
work constitute the real society, one of the triumphs of history will
be turned into defeat. -- David Castro
“There
are no truths, only stories.” So wrote the Native Canadian
author Thomas King, “We know who we are through our stories.” I learned
the validity of that when writing a scholarly biography of
my communist father. My younger sister, Karen, read a draft and told
me, “You missed Dad’s sense of humor.” I thought
about that: the only memory that came up was of my father telling me,
“Junior, I defended you today. So and so said you weren’t
fit to sleep with the pigs, but I defended you. I told him you were
fit to sleep with the pigs!” Ha ha, Dad.
So
what we have are many different stories, and they are all true, all
worth hearing. No one’s version is more right or wrong than
anyone else’s, just different. Balance is the closest to
objectivity we can really come. Balance can give us the subject as a
complex human being in a complicated world, and not a one-dimensional
stereotype fitting our preconceptions or prejudices. And we never
get it all.
Stories
require context. People do not arrive on the scene full-blown, out
of the blue. We are all products of our genetics, our environment,
our times; they shape us and point us in the directions we take. To
understand Dave Castro it is necessary to look at the Sixties and
Seventies, at addiction and prison culture, at larger and seemingly
unrelated events, and at connections that may not be obvious. So
stories, as here, must sometimes digress to embrace a larger scope in
order to comprehend the events and actions of one individual.
The
revulsion I feel today towards those playing at violent revolution
and at police shooting unarmed African Americans felt somewhat
different in those turbulent times when cops and radicals were
killing each other; when Chicago police broke heads at the 1968
Democratic Convention; when reformers like Martin Luther King and
Bobby Kennedy, and perceived Establishment threats like Malcolm X,
were cut down by assassin’s bullets; when urban ghettoes
exploded in justified rage; when the Weather Underground tried to
manufacture rage with window-smashing and bombs; when American
National Guardsmen shot and killed American students at Kent State
University, when even pop music was polarized between Ballad
of
the Green Berets and Eve of Destruction –
all set
against the backdrop of a deadly war in Vietnam, and the corrupt
presidencies of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon.
In
researching Dave Castro’s story there was a lot I didn’t
get, couldn’t get, and it often took me in unexpected
directions. That is one of the joys and frustrations of research.
Trying to get prison records and police reports, aging memories, the
unwillingness of important sources to share memories, the passing of
others, the continuing secrecy about CIA-DEA drug dealing and
assassinations – all of these put serious limits on my
research. I could only go with what I had, and even then, there had
to be some selectivity to avoid embarrassing innocent people.
One
of the difficulties was in trying to get DEA and SFPD records. History,
it is often said, is written by the victors. I am not a
person who sees conspiracy behind every wrongdoing, but as in
Colombian writer Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s remarkable
novel, The Shape of Ruins,
control, collusion and
cover-up – words in current American headlines – have
always come easily to those with power. In assembling Dave Castro’s
story, I tried to connect the dots, using educated guessing where
some of the blanks were.
Some
remember Dave Castro with anger, others with affection. Celia Rosebury Lighthill says: “He had a
fine mind and a quick
wit, and he was indispensible to me in the early days of Insurgent.”
Elaine Millán recalls Dave as a “brilliant-minded
recovering addict who was progressive, was a talented writer and
attracted fabulous, dynamic women as partners.” Maria Perez
remembers Dave as a child-loving man who played happily with her when
she was a child. Dionne Castro Joyeux remembers from her childhood
that Dave was “a good guy, always nice to me.” Others
said he had “no patience” for being a father and was
“never around.”
Stephen
Lighthill appreciated Dave’s understanding of the financial
pressures on him at ADF, and that he was always “respectful.” Mike
Myerson, a political activist who is not easily conned, worked
at ADF for awhile and recalls Dave Castro as “:idealistic and
romantic, charming, funny, bright...and a hustler.” While it
was sometimes hard to tell fact from fiction with Dave, “he was
an honest guy and always straight with me.” Deanne Burke said
Dave was “narcissistic and complicated...an explosion of
personality, of darkness and light.” But, she adds, “he
had life-long neighborhood friends who loved him.” Several
people who closely shared some of Dave’s life during the years
we were friends chose to remain silent. Dave called himself a
“professional dirty guy.” They are all right.
Re-reading
this, there are a number of possible takeaways I see: 1) Who cares? 2)
Castro was a bad guy and got what he deserved. 3) Hey, play with
fire and you get burned. 4) Cautionary tale about addictions and
their delusions. 4) Dave was a wounded soul with an addict’s
insistent but fragile ego looking for love and attention and not
knowing how to really love back. 5) Dave was a poet and a lover,
dreaming the Romance of The Revolution. 6) A rebel against
injustice and power, from his father to prisons, capitalism and The
System, misguided perhaps, but idealistic. 7) Sociopath. 8) All of
these, and more – complex and contradictory, and all too human.
For
me, he was smart but made some dumb decisions; street-wise but full
of romantic visions; he was gentle and fierce, idealistic and
cynical, hardened and vulnerable, narcissistic and charismatic. He
was a junkie, criminal, and con artist, an outlaw at heart, but also
a poet, a lover, a pal, a rebel with a cause. At different times of
my life I was some of those myself. Low self-esteem is often a
hallmark of addiction that leads people like Dave, and me, to
over-achieve, to get attention, to win approval, knowing inside that
we were really frauds, unworthy of the approval we demanded, the love
we craved but were unable to accept or to give back.
When
I first got sober I heard people saying that alcoholism and addiction
were a fatal disease. I thought that was hyperbole to scare us
newcomers straight. The longer I am sober, though, the more I see
the truth of it. It may not go on death certificates as drug
overdose, or liver failure while lying in the gutter, but as auto
accidents, suicide, cancer, heart attack, or foolishly doing
dangerous things as a way of shouting, Look At Me, I Matter! Or
getting shot down in an alley.
But
I was a lucky one. I have my scars, but lived on to change and
become who I am today, to leave Al behind and become Albert, a whole
person. Dave Castro was denied that opportunity.
Whichever
Dave Castro those who knew him might remember, and whatever opinion
you, the reader, may form after reading this, I hope we can all agree
that he should not have died the way he did. And that, if the
still-secret facts show a deliberate murder, those responsible,
living or dead, should be held accountable. My friend in recovery
Ellen S. adds from her father: “Take the wheat with the chaff
in the palm of your hand; and with the gentle breath of friendship,
blow the chaff away."
The
night Jerry Stoll called Sally Pugh to tell her that Dave Castro was
dead, she had a dream: Dave appeared and said to her, “I just
want you to know I’m okay.” R.I.P. David, Rest in
Peace. Maybe I’ll see you soon.
Silent
Generation
Silently
the silent generation waits abandoning
hypocrisy and slick suburban ways conning
the futility of passion the
lurking lie within great truth the
chains of universal salvation fall
rusted from their uncommitted feet.
Sing
them not the glory of old glory nor
the Alger bliss of western enterprise; they
see disillusion fading pensioned eyes and
smell degradation.
Waywardly
the wayside generation waits for
gutted hulks to smash on rocks of greed with
involuted power gone mad with fear that
chews and grinds and spews itself: the
fate of rotting ships of state. Silently
the silent generation waits.
Sing
them not the glory of old glory nor
the Alger bliss of western enterprise; the
greed that feeds on truth and spits out lies starves
in their silence. -- David Castro
San Francisco, 1967 Santa Cruz, 1971
A
FinalNote:Thanks to all who
dug into their memories and shared stories with me. I could not have
done this without you. Those who chose to stay silent: I respect
that, and will always be grateful to have known you at a time when
Dave was alive and happy.
