What choices?

[Monty/Judith Herr]

[mailto:austin-ghetto-list-admin@pairlist.net]On Behalf Of Stephen
Porterfield
> I think that when several of us arrived at the Army induction center in
San
Antonio (1965) wearing women's lingerie under our street clothes... I
remember
that being a fairly definitive "choice".
--------------------------------------
Good point - Monty did some serious choice making as  well.....including
dropping out of Antioch College, finagling his way out  of the draft,
hitchhiking around the country and to Mexico, etc, and getting married..
His journey from his mid west, blue-collar world to beatnik, activist,
guitar-playing folksinger was further.  For me, once I decided to leave
Texas  and go to what was then considered the extremely far-out, left-wing,
free-love Antioch College with all those east coast radicals, I was where I
belonged - no choice on my part, just fate.

It became clear to me during my first quarter at Antioch  why I hadn't fit
all that well  in Bellaire High School in 1958 - before the integration of
Texas schools with kids of oil patch-opulent parents when mine were
relatively poor intellectuals - a retired philosopher and a psychiatric
social worker.   Yet even at Bellaire  I figured out that by editing the
high school newspaper, I was more independent than most of my classmates
(some of whom I envied then).  My counterpart on the yearbook (Glenn
Whitehead) came to the same conclusion, I believe.  Yet, we weren't making
conscious choices - just perhaps being more observant in this picaresque,
Don Quixote world.

At Antioch Peter Seger and Guy Carawan led me in song, Dr. Ollie Loud taught
me about science and politics, and others made sure I was thoroughly imbued
with the spirit of their ethnicities.  I loved Oz which certainly was not
like Kansas (or white Texas).  Candid indeed.