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Day in the Life:
photo: © Robert Altman
The Sun Always Rises
Rain pouring down
like house arrest,
stumble with cane
looking out wet windows, trying
to remember the glowing sun
which made me believe in revolution
when it didn't go away in December --
during my first Berkeley winter.
__Stew Albert - 2006
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WHEREAS
Stew Albert died at 3:20 AM on Monday morning, January 30th in Portland, Oregon, and WHEREAS, Stew Albert was a leader of the Vietnam Day Committee, an organizer of peace marches through the streets of Oakland and through the streets of Washington D.C. and through the streets of Chicago and through the streets around the Pentagon and through the streets of Berkeley and through the streets around People's Park, and WHEREAS, Stew Albert was a prisoner at Santa Rita for his role in People's Park, was released and became a candidate for Sheriff of Alameda County in 1970, receiving 65,000 votes, carrying Berkeley by 10,000 votes, and WHEREAS, Stew Albert was a co-founder of the Yippies and a friend of Jerry Rubin and a friend of Abby Hoffman and a friend of Eldridge Cleaver and a friend of John Lennon and a friend of thousands who identified with the Movement, and WHEREAS, Stew Albert was a target of J. Edgar Hoover and a target of Richard Nixon and a target of the FBI and the victor in a lawsuit against their harassment and an irrepressible critic of the unjust and the idiotic to the moment he died, addressing the power that rules us now, and WHEREAS, Stew Albert kept faith with the Movement and kept its spirit alive in his soul every day and served as the Movement's living historian and the Movement's living history lesson and the Movement's connection to new generation after new generation, and WHEREAS, Stew Albert was a gentle man, a husband who loved his wife Judy, a father who loved his daughter Jessica, a friend who loved his friends, not just the old friends, but also the new friends and the friends he hadn't met yet, and WHEREAS, Stew Albert will be deeply missed; now THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED that the Oakland City Council proclaims Wednesday, February 1, 2006, the day of his memorial service, "Stew Albert Day" in the City of Oakland, in recognition of his contributions, his humor and his good sense, his decency and his faith in what can be, what must be and what will
___ Ignacio De La Fuente, President: Oakland City Council
de Stew --by Jomo
Stew Albert was one of these rare individuals who seemed able to survive, no matter what. For years, I thought that he'd go on living if not forever than at least until old age. After all, he'd beaten the Hepatitis C that threatened to destroy him, and he'd had many a bout with "Dr. Doom" as we called that unpredictable beast who seemed to spring in our lives from time to time.
I met Stew for the first time, in New York and though, like me, he'd been born in Brooklyn, I assumed California had given birth to him. He looked like a Californian to me - blond, curly haired and muscular.
In the fall of 1970, we flew to Rome as part of a Yippie delegation, and then to Algiers, where Eldridge Cleaver had persuaded the government to offer political sanctuary to Timothy Leary. On that occasion, Stew did not travel with a suitcase. He only had the clothes on his own back, and a toothbrush he carried in a back pocket. We stayed in a Moslem hotel - men on one floor and women on the other - and, since there weren't enough rooms for all of us, Stew and I shared a bed. He was perhaps the strangest bedfellow I have ever encountered, and perhaps I was the strangest he ever encountered, too, though he certainly encountered a great many strange bedfellows, and creatures of the night, and extremist of all different stripes. Leary and Cleaver were among them. The Algiers trip proved to be a fiasco; many of our subsequent expeditions turned out disastrously, too, or at least not the way we planned. I always looked for the deep, hidden reasons for the failure or the disaster. Stew assumed that that was just the way things were; chaos, chance and the accidental played a big part in his scheme of the universe. Once, in Hollywood at the home of movie producer, Paula Weinstein, I watched Robert Scheer rake Stew over the coals. You'd have thought, from Scheer's tirade, that Stew was responsible for every mistake that the American left - the Yippies, the Black Panthers, the Weathermen - had ever made in the 1960s and the 1970s. I wouldn't have been able to stand up to Scheer's attack; Stew did quite nicely and calm, too.
Every time we got together in Portland we talked and talked and talked, and what I liked most about talking with Stew was that I didn't have to explain anything to him; he'd been there, and done that and knew what I meant. Then, too, we could pick up the thread of a conversation after a month, or six months, or a year. I'd have to call Stew a friend. I think that I'd also call him a comrade, though I feel uncomfortable using that word that has fallen into disuse and that he and I often used ironically, Soviet communists having abused it, thorough. Still, there's something noble about comrades and comradeship - in the way that Jack London, one of Stew's favorite authors, envisioned.
And so, farewell, Comrade Stew, farewell. __Jomo
From Paul Krassner
Stew was on the front lines of the countercuIture, in every way.
We met in 1965 when I was invited to emcee the first Vietnam Teach-In on the UC-Berkeley campus. He was on the Vietnam Day Committee, and was the first to turn me on to marijuana, with Thai stick.
"Now I know why we're fighting in Southeast Asia," I observed. "To protect the crops."
During the antiwar demonstrations in the summer of 1968 at the Democrats national convention, Stew was the first to get smashed on the head with a police billy club. After his head was stitched and bandaged, we went to a Western Union office and sent a telegram (remember them?) to the UN, requesting them to send in a human rights unit to investigate violations in Chicago.
Stew, who had acted as a liaison between the Yippies and the Black Panthers, told me, "Malcolm X, and then the Black Panthers, had planned to take their case to the UN."
We were both unindicted co-conspirators for crossing state lines to foment rioting--later, an official investigation concluded what had occurred was "a police riot"--unindicted because they were afraid we would have a freedom-of-the-press defense; in addition to being there as protesters, Stew was covering the event for the Berkeley Barb, and I was covering it for The Realist.
What I will miss most about Stew is the empathetic way that he served as a peacemaker, whether it was creating a dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians, or mediating a disagreement between Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin.
Stew was like a wise old rabbi in the guise of an affable blond teddy bear. __ Paul Krassner
Stew Albert 1939-2006--by Louise Yellin:
For Judy, Jessica, Paula, and Hannah and in memory of Mark, Abbie, Jerry, Anita, and Stew.
Stew was ahead of his time. He knew, in 1972, that South Beach would be the next big thing. Along with hundreds of others, he went to Miami to organize around the Democratic Convention in July (piece of cake: remember McGovern?) and to coordinate protests against Richard Nixon and the war in Vietnam at the Republican Convention in August. Earlier that year, Stew had experienced chest pains; they must have been awful, since he had an amazing chest. Someone sent him to a fancy East Side cardiologist, who told him that he had arrhythmia and advised him to take it easy. (Not likely.) Never one to complain or languish, Stew turned his ailment into an organizing tool, using it to spearhead one of the most unusual coalitions in the New Left, the A-K [alte-kocke] / Yippie Alliance. When Stew arrived in Miami, he checked into the Albion Hotel, Youth International Party HQ, and checked out the Jewish seniors, exiles from Brooklyn like himself, denizens of the Albion and other shabby venues, whom he found hanging out in the local park. Stew soon discovered that the seniors hated Nixon as much as we did (?) well, almost as much. Schmoozing, kibbitzing, noshing, and, no doubt, kvetching about his cardiologist, Stew got the seniors to overcome their initial antipathy to longhairs and braless feminists, and he finally laid to rest the Yippie injunction not to trust anyone over 30, a milestone that he and Jerry and Abbie had long left behind. By the time that I got to Miami, Stew had a reserve army of grandparents ready to back up the demonstrators swarming all over not-yet-chic South Beach. Sitting on porches throughout the neighborhood, the old folks kept watch on us, paying special attention to a pair of organizers they called the two tall ones from New York, Robert Friedman and Lewis Cole, editors of University Review (UR). We had first met Stew when he fetched up there as the resident sage and chiropractor, and he continued to advise us and adjust our spines throughout the more than 30 years that we were friends. I wish he'd remained in Miami in August, 1972: perhaps he would have joined Allen Ginsberg in drawing thousands of demonstrators together by showing us how a chanted om can be put to many uses. As I recall, though, Stew had to return to NY to take care of his heart, leaving us to OM our way to the Convention where we hoped to stop the Nixon renomination but instead were busted for removing sand from the beach. My job in Miami was to serve as liaison between the Attica Brothers and the protest organizers. (I was assigned this job by Mark Rosenberg, who had been working as an unpaid advisor to the Attica Brothers and was now making $75 a week selling ad space in UR to movie studios. Mark had to stay in New York to keep the operation and the rest of us afloat.) The Brothers had been promised hotel rooms and spending money that never materialized; they were understandably angry, and I was mortified about letting them and Mark down.
Many years later, I learned that a FOIA search had identified whoever was in charge of the money for the demonstrations as a Cointelpro agent: Brilliant, I thought, set a group of black ex-prisoners recently released from Attica against the white radicals who brought them to Miami and, the Brothers believed, left them high and dry. Stew, of course, could have predicted this; nothing that the government did in those days -- or was doing in the weeks before he died surprised him. I didn't get around to asking him what he thought about what happened to South Beach in the years after we evacuated, but I'm sure he would have had as much to say to the margarita-swilling swells as he did to the 'oy-voy-voyers' they displaced. Stew never succumbed to paranoia or to false hopes, and he faced the world with a sly and delicious humor that sustained the rest of us. Earlier today, I found on his blog this quintessentially Albertian wisdom, dated only a few days earlier when he was clearly suffering as intensely from chemo as from cancer: "I wouldn't stick around, but I need options. I'll try to keep you posted." I wish I believed that he'd continue blogging from the beyond. I guess we'll have to keep each other posted now.__Louise Yelin
From Robert Greenwald
Producer of Steal This Movie and the Wal*Mart documentary.
Hero is an overused word, and yet with the death of Stew Albert yesterday, it is the only word that comes to mind. As a key organizer of the movement against Vietnam, he helped spearhead one of the most famous anti-war protests, where thousands surrounded the Pentagon and chanted in an effort to levitate the building. Along with Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin he was one of the leading figures of the Yippies! - a life long activist - most recently with his own blog --Stew worked for justice with rare passion.
I first met Stew when I decided to make a film about Abbie Hoffman. Stew became an inspiration, a model, a guide and a constant thorn in the side of self-seriousness throughout the process of developing and shooting Steal This Movie.
I will always remember his arrival on the set with his partner Judy and the cast's initial nervous excitement about meeting Stew and Judy. Donal Logue, who was playing Stew was very concerned about portraying him accurately. Within an hour, Stew and Judy were embraced by the cast and pushed for details of what the `60s were really like. Everyone from Vincent D'Onofrio who played Abbie, to Janeane Garofalo who played Anita Hoffman, surrounded them and spent hours in intense and ultimately completely inspiring conversation.
Stew walked the walk, not just talked the talk. His warmth, passion and great prankster nature were with him until the end. He has inspired me, he has taught me and he will be missed dearly.
We need all our heroes.
__Robert Greenwald
Judy & Stew - Catskills 2005
Stew's obituary has appeared in so many places across the country including the Oregonian, New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Times, AP, Counterpunch, the Huffington Post, on the radio and reportedly even on local tv. Their universal theme is that Stew kept his commitment to his ideals and will to act on them to the day he died. Stew would have loved to know that this is the way he's being remembered. I am moved & very grateful for the hundreds and hundreds of e-mails and cards Jessica and I are receiving -- from close, dear and long time friends to people we haven't heard from for years & years to folks who begin: "You don't know me but..." and then go on to tell a story about how Stew or the Yippies influenced their lives.
If you have a "dead tree" copy of his obituary that appeared in your local paper, please e-mail me via my website. Thank you again for all your kind thoughts and words.__ Judy 'Gumbo' and Jessica Albert
Judy in Disguise
Memory
There she stood,
outside the Capitol Building
recently bombed and blasted
by the Weather Underground.
Old news footage in a documentary
at a 1972 press conference proclaiming
we didn't do it! - but we dug it.
Falsely accused of a crime -
a crime we didn't commit
yet were committed too.
She looked so cute in her painted face,
the essential hippie chick of yesteryear
with flashing eyes looking into the future -
which is today.
And now with silver hair and echoing eyes
always walking next to the history of herself
twice as good for the cost of time.
2003 - Stew Albert
FROM TOM HAYDEN:
Dear Judy, Jessica and Friends of Stew wherever we all are:
I am sorry not to be there but I share my love with all who are trying to hold on to Stew even as, in the words of my father in law Jack Williams, Stew "caught the box car." That is an IWW metaphor for the last ride in a long life of catching a ride to the newest place where hope rises from the grave where it is meant to be buried.
Stew was a Wobbly lost in time. So he became a Yippie. He was a whole person in a time of broken lives. An anti-Renaissance Renaissance man. A lover. An intellectual. A Jew. A curly blond Greek God. A dope fiend. A warrior. A story-teller. A devoted dependent husband, an adoring father, a mystic, a Marxist, a madman, a moral man, a communist whose only party was compassion. He would have freaked out Karl Marx, but not Commandante Marcos.
Others did not survive the divide between the youth revolution and the muddle of middle age as well as Stew, because he discovered that he could find love in the cracks of the very life he hated. I suspect he knew that love and learning were the only human responses to a universe that is the utterly incredible, incomprehensible, and infinite home to which we all return. He was my roommate long ago, in Berkeley. If there is a counter-universe, Stew will be there, and he'll remember to leave us all a key.
See you all on the boxcar. __ Tom Hayden
The Quiet Genius -- Remembering Stew Albert
by Jim Retherford
I am greatly saddened by the news of Stew Albert's death. The last of the Yippies' unholy trinity of Abbie, Jerry, and Stew, noted "theoretician" of the Youth International Party, the "quiet one" -- Stew was a very decent man as well as an indefatigable True Believer. My heart goes out to Judy Gumbo and their daughter Jessica Pearl.
I am especially moved by Stew's dignified dialogue with death during his last days as he continued to post thoughts and feelings on his blog every day until the day before his passing. You will find no remorse, no regrets, no backing down in the face of his own mortality: "Dreaming of sleep / in a nice warm hole / forever." I am pleased to say that he died with his passion fully focused on the business at hand.
Stew Albert will always live in my memory because of two extraordinary events in late-Sixties NYC:
The first was a group visit to the Palestine Liberation Organization observer team at the United Nations (probably in 1969). I don't remember
who planned it or who attended, other than Stew and Gumbo and (I think) Daria Price. Maybe Dennis Dalrymple /aka/ Crunchy Granola. Maybe Robin Palmer and Sharon Krebs. A small contingent of NYC leftist crazies. We met with a passionate young Palestinian (late 20s) and had an extraordinarily candid discussion about the Palestinian "question." At one point Stew announced that he was Jewish and was very concerned about the public perception that the PLO hated Jews.
Our host replied: "Hate Jews!?! I cannot hate Jews. I am Jewish. That would be like hating myself. My mother is Jewish, my father Arab. By Jewish law, I am therefore Jewish."
"In my village in Palestine," he continued, "Jews and Arabs, for many many generations, lived together peacefully as one people, Palestinian people. We laughed and played and sang songs and ate at the same table for supper. Many, like my parents, intermarried. This ended when the Zionists came and drove us from our homes at gunpoint. Our Jewish neighbors, Sephardic Jews, dark Jews, were driven away also.
"We do not hate Jews. We hate Zionism."
The second event was the nationwide Guy Goodwin "witchhunt" grand juries of 1970. After Leslie Bacon had been "abducted" by FBI agents in D.C. and driven incommunicado across the country to appear before a Portland grand jury without counsel, special prosecutor Guy Goodwin convened grand juries in several U.S. cities, including NYC, ostensibly to investigate the United States Capitol bombing by the Weather Underground. Six of us were subpoenaed to appear before the NYC panel -- myself, Stew, Judy, Sandra Wardwell from Isla Vista, Ellen Stone, and Walter Teague.
We all -- except Walter -- decided to play dress-up for our grand jury appearances. I rented a gorilla costume (since I didn't want to disappoint the feds in their search for guerrillas). Judy and Sandra dressed appropriately as broomstick-carrying witches (Ellen Stone would have been the third witch from Macbeth but was never served with a subpoena). Walter portrayed himself as, well, vintage Walter: picture your everyday working class commie in blue flannel work shirt festooned with National Liberation Front support buttons, blue jeans, work boots.
Stew, however, stole the show! He appeared as a cross-dressing female terrorist bombshell, glamming to the nines in an utterly fabuuuulous
rainbow-striped minidress with the name "Bernadine" stitched in sequins across the bodice. All the trannies of Lower Manhattan dropped their
mascara pencils at the sight of this burly 6-2 bearded beauty with a tall blonde 'fro. Meanwhile, the ever-present undercover cops could be seen nervously shifting from one foot to the other, trying to hide the billyclubs bulging in their pants pockets, and special persecutor Goodwin blinked, freaked, and called off the entire proceeding when he realized that Stew wasn't wearing panties.
Fond farewell to a courageous comrade, freedom fighter, revolutionary prankster, and defender of a real Palestine of Jews and Arabs alike. __ James Retherford
FROM JEFF JONES:
Stew Albert had one of his smart, funny ideas when he was thinking about a name for his memoir. "My Sixties," he said was going to call it. He was in his late fifties when we kicked this one around and I thought the irony was sublime: He knew the book wouldn't be out until he had turned the numerical corner.
Stew didn't call his book 'My Sixties' –the title is still out there, if someone with a lifetime of movement cred wants to grab it. Instead, he called it Who The Hell is Stew Albert?
Who indeed?
The title is a quote from Howard Stern, who once responded with that question when one of his on-air gang started talking about Stew as if everyone in the world knew who he was. Stern didn't, but that was his loss: It always seemed to me that Stew knew everyone and everyone knew Stew.
Nobody was more devoted to the idea of the Sixties. If you want to see what I mean, visit his website. Stew worked hard to translate Sixties values to a new generation of political activists. He kept in touch with a wide array of movement veterans, loyal and engaged, blogging his thoughts and poems every day –right up until his penultimate day.
Younger activists adored him.
He died January 30th, 2006.
Stew was big and barrel-chested, with curly blond hair and piercing blue eyes. Losing Stew –he was 66 when he fell to liver cancer –creates a huge personal, political and emotional hole for me, as I know it does for so many others, especially his wife, Judy "Gumbo" Clavir Albert, and his daughter, Jessica Pearl. The Albert's post-1960s peregrinations –Bay Area, Hudson Valley, back to the West Coast –finally landed them in Portland, Oregon. Years of fighting various ailments kept Stew close to home, and close to his computer where he became the most successful sixties radical I know at moving to online activism. Whenever we met, we spent hours catching up on the latest gossip about the doings of various old Panthers, Yippies and Weathermen. And then we would plot and scheme, mostly about how to support those emerging young activists devoted to resistance to racism, environmental catastrophe and Bush's oil wars.
How I met Stew says something about who he was. That is, I don't remember how I met him. I remember the first time I met the other Yippie founders: Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and Paul Krassner. But Stew just appeared in my life one day, and he never left.
To one degree or another, the founding Yippies were all nuts. It was their strength, their weakness, their charisma and their charm (for Abbie, in particular, it was also his doom).
Stew was different. He always had a strategy and a plan. He managed the campaign of Pigasus the Pig for president in 1968 and ran for sheriff of Alameda County in 1970 (He lost, but carried the city of Berkeley). More than anyone, he helped Abbie and Jerry give definition to the Yippie movement. Without his ability to broker their competitive egos and channel their ideas into strategy, what is passing into history as the Yippie story would have been different, definitely diminished and possibly disregarded.
The Sixties were filled with political tendencies: anarchism, communism, socialism, the working class, armed revolution, Panthers, Weathermen, Maoism. It wasn't easy to find one's way and keep one's head. (The lineup may be different today, but it's not any easier.) In this political stew, Stew Albert was a cultural radical with a political ideology. We bonded because I was a political radical struggling to blend New Left ideology with the cultural power of young people. We found ourselves speaking the same language, and stayed friends to the end.
Along the way we had some adventures. When the Weathermen helped Timothy Leary escape from a California prison and make his way to an uncertain reception at Eldridge Cleaver's expatriot compound in Algeria, Stew went over to help with the introduction.
Long before today's wiretaps, Stew and Judy were being watched and tailed by the FBI. After the Weather Underground bombed the U.S. Capitol in 1971 to protest the Vietnam War, they famously declared: "We didn't do it, but we dug it."
We last spoke on New Year's day. That was just after his email arrived letting his many friends know that doctors had just found the cancer and that it was bad. His daily blog told the unfolding story of his fading hopes for a cure, his joyful, if tiring, visits with friends. Daughter Jessica came home from law school to be with him, and his happiness grew having her near. Two days before the end, he blogged to the world that "my politics have not changed." No death- bed conversions or regrets for a life lived radically and well, in constant resistance to a government and political system he abhorred. As Stew slipped away, he posted his final words: "It's still me. It's still me."__ Jeff Jones
[ Jeff Jones was a leader of Students for a Democratic Society and the Weather Underground. He is currently a political consultant and environmental activist based in Albany, New York. ]
FROM MARK RUDD:
For Stew: Unfortunately our paths didn't cross too much, except for one critical moment, probably much more critical for me than for Stew. It was September, 1977; I had just turned myself in after 7+ years as a fugitive. It was a scarey time on many levels, and I was feeling bereft and defeated. Stew and Judy appeared out of I-don't-know-where, offering their laughter and friendship to my wife and me. I think it's something called the heart of compassion. It was a powerful healing and an equally powerful lesson. __ Mark Rudd
[ Mark Rudd was a leader of the 1968 Columbia University strike against the Vietnam War and racism, the last National Secretary of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and a founder of the Weather Underground. He is currently an activist and teacher in Albuquerque, New Mexico. ]