FROM IKE TO MAO AND BEYOND
by Bob Avakian
Revolutionary Worker Online, IL
April 17 2006
My Journey from Mainstream America to Revolutionary Communist
>>From “Chapter One: Mom and Dad” and “Chapter Two: One Nation Under
God-A ’50s Boyhood”
Revolution #044, April 23, 2006, posted at revcom.us
Revolution is publishing a series of excerpts from Bob Avakian’s
memoir – as audio recordings of Bob Avakian reading from the book
are made available online. (See announcement) This week we feature
sections from Chapter One and Chaper Two.
>>From Chapter One Mom and Dad Now, my parents weren’t just together
for over sixty years, they were extremely fond of each other the whole
time. This was something that I always recognized and appreciated,
and in particular with my mom I always recognized and appreciated her
compassion and generosity and self-sacrificing qualities. But growing
up as a boy in the ’40s and ’50s, in the more middle class stratum that
I was from, in a lot of ways I kind of took my mother for granted. You
know, she was always there, she was always supportive, she was always
helpful, she was always so compassionate and sympathetic, and she was
always sacrificing for other people in the family or for other people
beyond the family. But as an adult I actually learned a lot of things
about my mother, and learned to appreciate her much more fully, than
I did as a kid. For instance, when she was still pretty young, back
in the 1930s, she drove her family across the country at one point,
which was not that common for a woman to do then. Another time, when
she was teaching high school, there was one student there who needed to
get certain credits for college-in particular she needed to take Latin,
but there was no Latin class there. So, just for this girl’s benefit,
my mom arranged to teach Latin. But even more than those incidents,
I’ve come to see how I’ve taken many of her values and made them
my own.
Also, my mother had a great love of the outdoors that she’d gotten
from her family, in particular her father. She liked taking us to the
mountains and out into nature, to all these beautiful places that I
learned to love. One time, my younger sister Mary-Lou and myself and
my parents had gone up into the mountains and on our way back home,
we had to go through the little, dreary town of Merced, just a little
ways from Fresno. It was getting to be about lunchtime, and Merced
was about an hour away, and my mother was very determined that we
were going to eat in the beautiful setting of the mountains. But the
rest of us wanted to have ice cream or something, down in Merced.
Finally after a long discussion we decided to have a vote, and
my father ended up voting with us two kids to eat in Merced. This
infuriated my mom and, looking back on it, with good reason. Of course,
she had the right stand, yet she -didn’t win out. But in order to
try to win, at one point, when we said we were ready to vote on it,
she said: “Okay, let’s have a vote now-who wants to eat lunch up in
the mountains by a beautiful rippling stream”-she said this in a very
lilting and appealing voice-“and,” she continued, “who wants to eat
in hot old Merced!” She said the latter with such disdain that you
would’ve thought we were going to be eating in a garbage dump.
Unfortunately, even her way of stacking the argument didn’t lead to
her winning out in that case-although it did become a sort of family
metaphor for indicating a strong preference while posing as neutral.
She was completely right, of course, and now I would have no hesitation
to side with her if she were here. But, that was my mom.
It shows both her determination and her love for nature.
I took that in from her and it’s been with me ever since. My dad
grew up on a farm, and later on he very much loved a home that my
parents had in the Santa Cruz mountains, but as far as roughing it,
that wasn’t really his thing so much. As I said, my dad grew up
in very modest circumstances, so it wasn’t that he was spoiled. But
“roughing it in nature” wasn’t his idea of an ideal vacation the way it
was for my mom. She often prevailed in that, for which I was very glad.
My parents met in Berkeley. My mom was a student at Cal, which was
also somewhat unusual for a woman at that time, and then because
of the Depression and because my dad was still in law school, they
couldn’t afford to get married. So they were engaged for three years
before they got married. And during that time, after she graduated
from Cal and after a year of looking for work, my mom got a job
teaching school in a small town a couple of hours from Berkeley-she
taught high school there for two years. She could not say that she
was engaged while she was teaching, because then they would think
she would leave once she was married and would fire her. So she had
to hide the fact that she was engaged, and a number of the guys who
were teaching at the school were trying to ask her out. It was a very
awkward thing. But after a couple of years, when my dad finished law
school, my mom and dad got married.
While my parents were from different backgrounds, neither of their
families resisted their marriage. Despite a lot of insularity among
the Armenian relatives, my father’s parents felt the important thing
was what kind of person you marry, not whether they were an Armenian.
My mother was pretty readily accepted both because of the attitude of
my father’s parents, but also because she was a very likeable person.
And my mother learned how to cook some of the Armenian foods,
and picked up some of the other cultural things. Beyond that, my
father would not have put up with any crap! So the combination of
all that meant that she got accepted pretty quickly. I’m not aware
of friction from my mother’s parents toward my dad. They were nice
people generally, although they too were pretty conservative in a
lot of ways, and also, to be honest, my father, having graduated from
law school, was someone who had a certain amount of stature when my
parents got married.
Despite the fairly conservative atmosphere in which she was raised,
my mother was very far from being narrow and exclusive in how she
related to people. If she came in contact with you, unless you did
something to really turn her off or make her think that you were a
bad person, she would welcome and embrace you. And that would last
through a lifetime. Besides things like the Sunday “sacrifice night”
meal, my parents, mostly on my mother’s initiative, would do other
“Christian charity” things, like in that Jack Nicholson movie, About
Schmidt, where he “adopts” a kid from Africa and sends money. But
they not only paid a certain amount of money, they took an active
interest-they corresponded, they actually tried to go and visit some
of the kids or even the people as grown-ups with whom they had had
this kind of relationship. My mother had a very big heart and very big
arms, if you want to put it that way. She embraced a lot of people in
her lifetime. You really had to do something to get her not to like
you. She was not the kind of person who would reject people out of
hand or for superficial reasons.
I remember when I was about four or five years old and somehow from
the kids that I was playing with, I’d picked up this racist variation
on a nursery rhyme, so I was saying, “eeny, meeny, miny moe, catch a
nigger by the toe.” I didn’t even know what “nigger” meant, I’d just
heard other kids saying this. And she stopped me and said, “You know,
that’s not very nice, that’s not a nice word.” And she explained to
me further, the way you could to a four- or five-year-old, why that
wasn’t a good thing to say. That’s one of those things that stayed
with me. I’m not sure exactly what the influences on my mom were
in that way. But I do remember that very dramatically. It’s one of
those things that even as a kid makes you stop in your tracks. She
didn’t come down on me in a heavy way, she just calmly explained to
me that this was not a nice thing to say, and why it wasn’t a good
thing to say. That was very typical of my mother and it obviously
made a lasting impression on me.
One thing I learned from my mother is to look at people all-sidedly,
to see their different qualities and not just dismiss them because
of certain negative or superficial qualities. And I also learned from
my -mother what kind of person to be yourself-to try to be giving and
outgoing and compassionate and generous, and not narrow and petty. I
think that’s one of the main influences my mother had on me.
>>From Chapter Two One Nation Under God -A ’50s Boyhood I had a sort of
typical American boyhood for the 1950s-a lot of sports, a lot of good
times (and bad) with my sisters, and a lot of cutting up in school. But
that doesn’t mean it was idyllic or somehow cut off from the world:
there was the pervasive gender conditioning and there were ways in
which the big issues of the “grownup world”-segregation, McCarthyism
and conformism-were expressing themselves even in my boyhood.
We moved to Berkeley when I was three, and I have a few very sharp
memories and some impressions from those days. I remember when I was
told there was no Santa Claus, when I was five years old. We used to
have Christmas presents on Christmas eve, and my father or one of my
uncles would dress up as Santa Claus. After you get to be a little
bit more of a thinking person, you realize that there’s always someone
missing every Christmas eve when you’re passing out presents.
So this Christmas eve, after “Santa” came and we passed around and
opened up our presents, as I was going to bed my parents came into my
room and told me, “I guess you’ve already figured this out, but you
know there isn’t really a Santa Claus.” And I said, “yeah, I kind of
figured that out.” I remember that this led to some tension with some
of the other kids in kindergarten because, of course, when you’re a kid
that age, you may not have that much awareness of or respect for how
other kids’ families are handling this. So you just start saying, “oh
there’s no Santa Claus,” but some of the kids still believed there was.
To give you a sense of the kind of little kid I was, one time I
got the idea that instead of going to school it would be fun to
go off and do something else, and another kid and I just completely
disappeared and never showed up for school. My parents were panicking,
and in particular my mom was trying to find me, and eventually they
found us somewhere-we just thought it would be fun to go off and do
something else that day. Another time, some teenager in the area was
trying to get me to jump out of a second-story window, promising to
catch me. I was just about ready to do it, but my mother came along
and just caught it in the nick of time-she stopped me just as I was
swinging my legs over the window sill. She was furious. I remember
little things like that, crazy things that happen but you somehow
survive-or usually people survive them.
Sports Sports has been a big part of my life since I was very,
very young. I think I started playing football and basketball and
baseball when I was about five. True to his word when he had polio,
my dad took me out and taught me how to play all these things. It was
a very important part of his life: he loved sports, and he wanted me
in particular to take this up-there was a whole thing about being the
boy in the family at that time, frankly. It’s not like my sisters were
explicitly excluded from this, but this was more of a thing with me,
being the boy.
My dad started taking me to Cal football games and basketball games
from the time I was about four or five years old. I remember every
year there’d be a parade through downtown Berkeley before the start
of the football season, and this was one of the highlights of my
year. The parade made it almost tolerable to have to go back to
school. Our elementary school was small, but we did have organized
teams in baseball, basketball and football. We played other schools
and had city champion-ships; we even had a young kids’ team for first
and second graders, and I played on that when I was six and seven.
Whenever he could take off from work, my dad would always come to my
games from the time I was really little. You’d always see him with
his little eight-millimeter camera taking pictures on the sidelines.
When I got a little older and I’d throw a pass that was a pretty long
pass for a fifth or sixth grader, you’d see my dad pacing down the
sidelines trying to measure how many yards long the pass was. He’d
say, “33 yards, that was a 33 yard pass for a touchdown.” So he gave
me a lot of encouragement. My dad had this friend-I think he was
a lawyer who worked with him as a government lawyer when we were
back in D.C.-and my dad used to write to him all the time in these
deliberately exaggerated terms, bragging about my sports exploits.
He’d write about it as though it were professional teams playing,
sort of in a self-consciously exaggerated way, and then his friend
would write back.
In her own way, my mom also shared in my enthusiasm for sports, but my
dad in particular was just full of passion for it, and he had a lot of
pride in whatever I was doing. But it wasn’t that sort of disgusting
thing where you put pressure on your kid and you have no appreciation
for other kids. He wouldn’t yell at me when things didn’t go well,
and when we lost the city elementary school championship game in
football, my parents consoled me, they didn’t act like I’d let them
down. It was never that kind of thing.
I just loved sports, and whenever I got a chance I tried to play-I
didn’t care if the other kids playing were a lot older than me. So,
from a very early age, around five or so, I started hanging around
kids who were older, playing sports-even young teenagers, or ten- or
eleven-year-old guys. And, of course, one of the big things when you
get into sports, in this kind of society, is that there’s this whole
macho element to it, and one part of that is you swear a lot. So,
one day, we were just playing catch with the family, and I think I
dropped a ball or something, and I said “Oh, shit.” Now my parents came
from the kind of a background where you didn’t say things like that,
especially in public. They didn’t get too angry, but they told me that
what I had said wasn’t a very good thing to say and I shouldn’t do
that. So after a little while I looked up at them and said, “Well,
okay then, but is it all right to say ‘hubba hubba’?”-which was
another thing I’d heard hanging around the older kids playing sports.
So, as a young boy, I was just football, basketball, baseball all year
around: from September until the end of November it was football;
then from December until the spring it was basketball; then in the
spring and through the summer it was baseball. My life was kind of
seasonal in that way, and I loved all those sports in their turn,
in their season.
When I was six we moved into a new house and it was about equidistant
between two schools that were in the Berkeley hills. One of them was
called Cragmont and the other one was called Oxford. I remember my
parents telling me: “You can go to either school you want. We’ll let
you choose.” I said “Okay, but I want to look at them.” So, my dad
drove me around and we looked at both schools, and I picked Oxford
because, when we drove by it, I could see the basketball courts on
the playground.
I was lucky enough to have a good coach when I was coming up. He was
a student at Cal and took care of the playground in summer and on the
weekends and after school. But he was also the coach of our teams. I
remember him fairly fondly-he was a nice guy, not like a military
drill sergeant. To give you the contrast between him and some of what
you often see, we had an incident when I was in fourth grade where we
were behind by a couple of points in a football game, and on the last
play of the game, I threw a pass for a touchdown and we won the game.
Or so we thought. Nobody had showed up to referee the game, so the
coach of the other team was refereeing, and his own team was offsides
on this play. He called offside on them, and then he came running up
to the kid who was the captain of our team for that day, and said,
“They were offside, you wanna take it? you wanna take it?” And the
poor kid got confused, not knowing what “it” was. He was thinking
this coach/ref was talking about the touchdown, so he said “Okay,
we’ll take it,” and then this coach/ref insisted that “it” meant the
offside penalty, so we were forced to run the play over again. We
ran the play again, I threw the pass again, but this time it was
incomplete and we lost the game. That coach/referee should not have
put that kind of pressure on an eleven-year-old kid, he should not
have tricked him in that way. There should not have been that kind
of atmosphere, where winning was that important.
Our coach was not like that-he was actually a fairly decent guy as I
remember, and he didn’t make us feel like we’d failed the universe,
or him, if we didn’t win a game, or even a championship game.
But from the time I was nine or ten I was pretty regularly playing
sports with teenage kids, and they inculcated in me the idea that
you had to win, you had to win, you had to win-and that losing was a
disgrace. They had had this drummed into them, and it’s not so much
that they sat me down and said, “this is the way it is,” but it just
kind of rubbed off on me, along with a lot of macho stuff and the
bullshit that boys in general absorb in this kind of culture. It was
generally very pronounced in the ’50s, but especially boys who were
deeply into sports got a heavy dose of this. Those are the kinds of
things that more came from hanging around with older kids playing
sports-that was kind of the negative side of it. There were a lot of
positive things that came out of it because of the particular times
and because of the opportunities that it presented to have a lot
of experience with kids from completely different backgrounds and
situations, particularly Black kids. That was very positive. At the
same time, there was the negative side-the sort of macho, militaristic,
win-at-any-cost kind of stuff. But I didn’t get that from my own
coach in grammar school, and I didn’t get it from my parents.
My Sisters Overall I got along well with both of my sisters. But, it
was kind of a classical situation where my sisters had to do things
like iron clothes-they even had to iron my clothes. When I got into
high school I had friends who were from poorer backgrounds who ironed
their own clothes. But my sisters had to do all the stuff like ironing
the clothes, even my clothes-there were all those “domestic” things
they had to do, while I didn’t have to do much of that-and generally
I didn’t have to do as many “chores” as they did.
I can even remember-at one time I had forgotten this, but my younger
sister reminded me of it-that when I got to be driving age and got
my license, my parents would let me use one of their two cars, and I
would drive all over, but when Mary-Lou came along later and wanted
to use the car, my attitude at that time was: “What do you need
the car for? You’re a girl, I need the car.” So there was tension
that resulted not just from being siblings, but also from the sort
of gender socialization and male domination which I just grew up
with-even though I loved my sister, I just assumed that driving the
car is what a guy does. A girl gets a guy to drive her around in a car,
girls don’t drive cars. That’s how I saw it then.
But even earlier, there was tension just because I was always kind of a
prankster. For example, my father would quite often at dinnertime say,
“okay gang” and then start telling us about the latest case he was
involved in as a lawyer. And so we got a lot of that training.
All of us got it, but one of the ways in which I used it-because,
again, I was always sort of a prankster-was, just for the nasty fun
of it, I’d get Mary-Lou, who had her favorite toys, to sign contracts
that would turn over these toys and the ownership of these toys to
me. Not because I wanted them, but just to trick her. She would naively
sign these contracts, trusting me, and then I would say, “okay now,
give me this toy or that toy.” She’d say, “no, that’s my toy”; and
I’d reply, “yeah, but you just signed it over to me.” Then she’d go
running, crying to my dad who would then come down and look at the
contract and invalidate it as having been achieved under fraudulent
circumstances! Now Mary-Lou and I were very close in a lot of ways,
so I don’t want to give a one-sided impression, but these were pranks
I liked to play, and then my dad would have to come down and invalidate
them. And all my hard-earned trickery would be undone.
We used to play around the house together a lot. From the time I was
about nine until into high school, I had this recurring “Sunday-night
sickness.” That is, when Sunday nights came around, I would not want
to go to school the next day, so I would start calculatingly coughing
about eight o’clock at night on Sunday; and after I went to bed, I’d
wake myself up and have these “coughing spells” in the middle of the
night. Then I’d wake up again at five or six in the morning and really
start coughing, and after a little while my mother or my father would
come and say, “Oh, you’ve been coughing all night,” and I’d answer,
“Yeah, I really don’t feel well, I think I’m sick.” Then there would
be this little dialogue: “Well, do you think you’re well enough to go
to school?” “All you care about is whether I go to school or not-you
don’t care about whether I’m sick.” So then I would get to stay home.
When my younger sister got a little older, I’d try to get her to
do the same thing, and sometimes she would, and we had all kinds of
games. We had a rollaway bed on wheels, and I used to tie a rope to
the rollaway bed and tie the other end to a door handle, and we could
pull ourselves around, and get rides on it and things like that. Or
we’d make a fort, using blankets, bed covers. I also remember when
I was about six, I guess, the big star football player at Cal was a
guy named Jackie Jensen, so my dad and I were always playing catch
and talking about Jackie Jensen. I remember Mary-Lou, she was just
three, picked up a football and ran around the backyard saying “me
Jackie Jensen, me Jackie Jensen,” because she was trying to get in
on things too, she didn’t want to be left out.
My older sister Marjorie would be in charge of us when my parents
would go out sometimes. So then there would be conflict between my
older sister and the two others of us, and we’d get into a lot of
fracases. But, while I’m talking about a lot of the conflicts we had,
we were also really good friends. We would confide in each other a lot,
the way kids do, and conspire against our parents, or complain about
our parents, about what they wouldn’t let us do, or what they made us
do. I remember one time my parents went on a trip for a week and they
left us in the charge of this college student who was a friend of the
family’s. He, of course, didn’t know anything about how to raise kids
anyway, and he particularly didn’t know how to deal with us. And so we
had all these grievances that had accumulated against this guy, who
we thought was a tyrant. We would get together and conspire against
him, and try to give him a hard time because we thought he was just
absolutely unbearable. Of course, he was actually in an impossible
position. But I remember we’d do a lot of conspiring together like
that, or just getting together and talking about things, the way
kids do.
So I was actually very close to my sisters. There was the usual tension
between siblings, and then there was the tension that came from the
larger societal roles that expressed themselves within our family. But
within all that, we were still very good friends and very close.
Still, the gender conditioning went on from an early age and was
pervasive. I would interact with girls in school-sometimes maybe we’d
work on projects together-but as far as things you would do outside
of school, at recess, or during your “own time,” the girls pretty
much played with the girls and the boys with the boys. There were
the usual grammar school flirtations that went on, but friendships
were not really developed that much across gender lines.
With my sisters, it was again a contradictory thing-I really loved my
sisters a lot, we were very close in a lot of ways, and I did some
things with them. In some ways, I was the good big brother, and in
some ways I was the jerk big brother-or little brother, depending on
which sister it was. But they would go to dance rather than sports, or
they were Girl Scouts, or Campfire Girls, when I was in the Cub Scouts
(I didn’t go on to join the Boy Scouts-because it took too much time
away from sports!). We were in different worlds a lot. When we got
older, when we started really getting interested in the opposite sex,
we’d talk about that with each other and get advice. So it was kind
of contradictory like that. Our worlds overlapped, especially in the
family context, but they were also very different.
And, again, this took place in a whole societal context. For instance,
there were all kinds of ads on TV at that point and, in retrospect,
you see that in addition to the products, they were selling ideology,
too. You had Lorraine Day, for instance, who was a spokesperson for
Amana, which is a religious group that financed themselves through
making household appliances. Lorraine Day was like an institution
herself. She’d demonstrate a refrigerator and show you what a great
freezer compartment it had, and so on. The Lorraine Day thing was
directed toward women as housewives, all the latest appliances that
they needed to have.
Although my mother was cast somewhat in the role of the classical
wife and mother at that time, there was a lot more to her than that.
She went back to teaching when we kids got a little older. She did a
lot of substitute teaching, and sometimes her assignments turned into
long term substitute teaching. A lot of the dinner table conversation
was dominated by my father talking about his legal cases, but she
would join in that and she would also talk about other things, and
not just “waxy build-up on the floor.”
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