Forty Years Ago Today in Brooklyn: May 15, 1970: Brooklyn College reacts to Kent State

From our diary:

Friday, May 15, 1970

It remained cool and cloudy. I woke up early and while Mom was in the beauty parlor, I drove around and took Steven to Tilden [High School] - there's been race friction there. I went to the camera store and I got back the BC photos from last week, which were uninteresting.

I finished writing Mark [in National Guard basic training at Fort Polk]. It's funny communicating with him like this.

When I arrived at school, Paul was working on the second special edition, which may come out Monday. I went to SUBO and with Leonard attended a meeting of the Brookyn chapter of the Movement for a New Congress. The main campaign in the area is Peter Eikenberry's fight to unseat Rep. [John] Rooney.

I had a quick bite and found that the Spigot office had been turned into Strike Central. They even repaired the telephone. I went into the next office and sat around with Alan Ullman and the others for awhile.

Dr. Bonchek [psychology professor] is standing up for his principles, however idiotic they may be, and is giving us a final and two quizzes next Friday. He got so exercised about the whole thing, I thought he'd have a stroke. . .

Two black students were killed by police at Jackson State College in Mississippi. Everyone is saying we're in the gravest crisis since the Civil War.

We'll end our May 1970 diary entries here. Although we were around campus all summer taking summer school courses (see our book Summer in Brooklyn for some entries), people started drifting off to the beach, jobs in the city or beach resorts or as counselors at sleepaway camps, or lured by cheap flights to Europe like those on the Icelandic "vomit comet."

A New York Times article, "19 students Seized in occupation of the New School," by Linda Charlton on Tuesday, May 26, 1970, began

Most of the country's college campuses were quiet yesterday, although National Guardsmen still patrolled Ohio State University and 19 students were arrested for occupying a graduate school building of the New School for Social Research in New York City.

Also in New York City, the governing board of the 18-college City University system adopted a resolution calling for a two-week recess immediately before the election next November 3, to allow its 180,000 students to take part in the election campaign. (Here's Basil Paterson, 1970 Democratic candidate for Lieutenant Governor, campaigning that summer at the Junction.)

The resolution was submitted by Chancellor Albert H. Bowker, who had said at the Brooklyn College exercises Friday that the frequent closing of colleges in response to such events as the United States troop move into Cambodia might be well-motivated but "are pointless in terms of their impact." The action by the City's Board of Higher Education follows similar action at a number of other colleges and universities.

We worked in several campaigns in the 1970 election, mostly right away for Pete Eikenberry in Brooklyn Heights and Williamsburg, but he lost the June primary to hawkish Rep. John Rooney. During the two-week pre-election recess, we worked with our friend Mark in the campaign of Westchester Rep. Richard (Dick) Ottinger, the Democratic (and Conservation Party) candidate for the U.S. Senate seat held by Republican-Liberal Senator Charles Goodell. Here's a pic of Ottinger campaigning by the BMT station at Kings Highway between East 16th and East 17th Streets. For more of our 1970 political photos, go here.

Although Democrats and peace candidates made gains in the 1970 elections, in New York State, Rep. Ottinger and Sen. Goodell split the liberal and antiwar vote and the Senate election was run by a Vietnam hawk and war supporter, Conservative Party candidate James Buckley.

At Brooklyn College, we tried to mobilize a strike and other actions the following spring in response to CUNY budget cuts (below is a leaflet we designed that we found a few years ago displayed in an exhibit at the Brooklyn College Library)

and the widening of the war in Southeast Asia with the incursion into Laos, but the May 1970 shutting down of colleges in response to Cambodia and Kent State was the high point of campus peace activism.

But we don't want to fall prey to nostalgia. Student activism at Brooklyn College is alive and well forty spring semesters later. Here, in a photo taken just a few weeks ago by John Salmone for the Brooklyn College Excelsior, are students marching on campus through the Campus Road gate protesting Gov. David Paterson's proposed CUNY tuition hike and budget cuts.

Looks a lot like 1970 to us.

Forty Years Ago Today in Brooklyn: May 12, 1970: Brooklyn College reacts to Kent State

From our diary:

Tuesday, May 12, 1970

A hot, humid day. I spent the morning in the back yard and I'm as red as a lobster.

They served an injunction on the strike steering committee last night and they fled Kneller's office. I walked into the Spigot office and Paul asked me to go around and estimate the percentage of attendance. I figured 20% at most.

I met with most of my teachers, although I couldn't find Miss Glikin. Dr. Bonchek sent a letter saying the class will meet on Friday at Hillel. Dr. D'Avanzo's giving me an A, Benezra and Wachsberger will give A's, B's and P's - I'll probably get the latter.

This afternoon I renewed my friendship with Stan by staying at his house for a couple of hours. Mrs. Wanglund is very nice, like Stan. Two of his friends came over and I recognized one of them, Peter, from junior high. When I drove Stan to the store where he works, he told me he's joining the Reserves.

In the news, the Senate confirmed Blackmun and may cut off funds for the war. The Liberals [New York State Liberal Party] nominated Goldberg and Goodell [Democratic gubernatorial candidate Arthur Goldberg for Governor, Republican U.S. Senator Charles Goodell for Senate].

Sens. Church, Goodell, Hughes, McGovern and Hatfield made a good case fo their bill to cut off war funds in a TV special.

The rest of our diary entry is about our crush on a guy (also gay) we met at our friend's house.

The day's New York Times had a front-page story by Paul L. Montgomery, "ATTENDANCE IS OFF AT COLLEGES HERE; Students Engage in Antiwar Activities--Classes Are Suspended at Hunter," which began

Most colleges and universities in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut officially resumed classes yesterday after a week of protest, but attendance on a number of campuses was marginal as students continued strikes and antiwar activities.

Brooklyn-related excerpts from the article:

Students and faculty members at the Brooklyn center of Long Island University voted to suspend classes for the rest of the semester . . .

Three city high schools were closed early yesterday because of student protests. They were Erasmus Hall in Brooklyn, John Bowne in Queens and Samuel J. Tilden in Brooklyn . . .

At Brooklyn College most students remained on strike yesterday. Abbie Hoffman, one of the defendants in the Chicaqo Seven conspiracy trial, told a crowd of 1,500 at a rally that colleges must remain closed in the fall "and the way to keep them closed in the fall is action during the summer."

Congratulations, January 1949 Graduates of Brooklyn's Samuel J. Tilden High School!

We would like to congratulate the January 1949 graduates of Samuel J. Tilden High School who got their diplomas sixty years ago today.

Pages from the yearbook . . .


Poem by Flora Cohen . . .

The theme, by Bernard Schacter . . .


Principal Abraham Lefkowitz's message to the grads . . .


Staff of yearbook The Classic . . .

"What a Life" . . .


Senior Diary (features final semester events like Dewey's election as President). . .


Class celebrities . . .


Looking back . . .


Special congratulations to our mom, Marilyn Sarrett . . .

Klezmer Memories of Uncle Dave Tarras

This was posted to Richard Grayson's MySpace blog on Friday, September 21, 2007:

I have a post up at Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn:

KLEZMER MEMORIES FROM RICHARD GRAYSON
Here's another terrific story from frequent OTBKB contributor, Richard Grayson. Read a great interview with him here.

Tonight (September 20) at Barbes, you can catch Andy Statman at the 10 p.m. show. The promo for his appearance says:

A truly extraordinary artist, Andy Statman began his career in the 70's as a virtuoso Mandolinist who studied and performed David Grisman, went on to study clarinet the legendary Dave Tarras and became one of the main architect of a Klezmer revival which started out 30 years ago and has since informed and influenced folk, Jazz and improvised music forms. Andy draws equally from hassidic melodies, folk tunes from new and old worlds alike and Albert Ayler-influenced free-improv. The result reads like a very personal search for the sacred based both on traditions and introspection.

The "legendary Dave Tarras" was my Uncle Dave, called by Wikipedia "possibly the most famous 20th century klezmer musician. . .known for his long career and his very skilled clarinet playing."

Uncle Dave and his klezmer band played at my bar mitzvah reception at the Deauville Beach Club in Sheepshead Bay back in 1964. Many years before that, he played the clarinet at the wedding of my great-grandparents back in Ukraine.

Although he was my great-great-uncle, he was only 53 when I was born (in my family, we marry young or not at all) and was around till I was almost 40. A couple of weeks after The Village Voice gave a nice notice to my first book in 1979, Uncle Dave trumped that with a Voice cover story that called him "King Klezmer."

Married to my grandmother's Aunt Shifra, Uncle Dave came to America with my grandmother and his in-laws, my great-great-grandparents, who'd later own a candy store on Stone Avenue in Brownsville.

At Ellis Island, they fumigated his clarinet and he was forced to work for his brother-in-law, my great-grandfather, a prominent furrier who'd been in America for years, until he could pay for a new one.

When I was a kid, Uncle Dave lived on Tilden Avenue in East Flatbush, just across the street from Tilden High School (closed last June and broken up into smaller schools). At one point my mother decided I should have clarinet lessons and Uncle Dave came over and gamely tried to instruct me.

But I have no musical ability whatsoever and I hated the taste of the reed in my mouth. Although I loved Uncle Dave and wanted to please him, whatever came out of my clarinet must have sounded like a catfight.

After just a few weeks, he said, "You don't like this, do you?"

I shook my head.

"What do you like to do?"

"I don't know. . . writing?"

"Then you should write." He went downstairs and told my mother the clarinet was not for me.

Uncle Dave had come from a musical family, and his son-in-law Sammy Musiker, married to my grandmother's cousin Brauny, was an ace on both the sax and clarinet. A friend of Gene Krupa who played in Krupa's band, Sammy brought jazz and swing influences into klezmer before his untimely death.

My friend Bert Stratton, a clarinetist with the Cleveland band Yiddishe Cup, once did research at the YIVO Institute and sent me a composition of Uncle Dave's entitled "Richard's Ba Mitzva," though I'm pretty sure it was done not for me but for his grandson Richard Tarras or his grandnephew Richard Shapiro. All of us were students at Meyer Levin JHS in the early 1960s, so the title could do triple-duty.

Although Uncle Dave was well-known in musical circles – he had a weekly show on a Brooklyn-based radio station when I was a kid – mainstream recognition came with the klezmer revival late in his life. In 1984, the National Endowment for the Arts gave him a Heritage Fellowship in recognition of his contribution to traditional music.

After Aunt Shifra's death, Uncle Dave lived with a widow whose family he'd known for many years. To avoid losing social security benefits, they had only a religious marriage ceremony, not a civil one. We celebrated their "wedding" at the Shang-Chai kosher Chinese restaurant on Flatbush Avenue.

The last time I saw Uncle Dave, he gave me a gift: a signed copy of an LP by Enrico Caruso. I still treasure it.

Uncle Dave died at 95 and is buried next to Aunt Shifra in the family plot at Old Montefiore Cemetery in Springfield Gardens. A musical staff adorns their headstone.

Andy Statman is carrying on and extending the traditions of klezmer music. Catch him if you can.

UPDATE: The Internet Archive capture of the page is here. I also discovered that I apparently imagined that Richard Tarras was Dave and Shifra's grandson; apparently no such relative existed, and that Richard Shapiro, whom I did to to junior high with, is not our relative, so "Richard Bar Mitzvah Dance," found on YouTube and Spotify, was on an album in 1965, a year after my bar mitzvah, so I guess that I am the Richard in the title after all.